Mona Gazala's Editorial Mentorship Letter
It was a sweet and pleasant surprise to be the recipient of a Gordon Square Review mentorship with Nardine Taleb, it makes me feel embraced creatively by the city where I was born and raised. While I've had a pretty strong public career as a visual artist over the past 15 years, writing has more or less been a personal and cathartic practice. "Fish Story" is one of a suite of stories I wrote a while back, and I decided to take a chance on walking it out into the light and seeing what would happen. Nardine was a great sounding board, letting me know what areas of the story, such as the cryptic last paragraph, were very strong, and how the narrator's observations sort of filled in some insights about the characters for her where the dialogue was absent. She suggested some alterations to clarify the relationship between the main characters, and other changes to remove weaker sentences, and gave me the liberty of deciding whether to make those changes or keep the story the same. I enjoyed having another writer's viewpoint of the story so I could decide whether to accommodate or push back against that perception. I came away feeling very supported in my work.
Read Nardine's letter here.
