MENTORSHIP RECIPIENT

Mentor Commentary:
Isaiah Hunt

Recipient Reflection: 
​Lucy Rees

On the Revision Process for "Mama Made the Rain"

by Lucy Rees

All we can hope for is for our writing to reach someone, even one person, and resonate. So when
Isaiah offered me a mentorship, I was mainly overjoyed and also so relieved to have a sounding
board. Writing can be so solitary, swirling around in your own head. The thoughts Isaiah brought
to the page not only organized my chaos, but acted as thousands of tiny lightbulb moments, the
way he could see something I was trying to do and expand it in a way that I hadn’t found a way
to do on my own.

​This story came from watching everyone’s parents fixate on the weather. I have lived in both
Chicago and Minnesota which provide a lot of material in that department: blizzards, subzero
windchills, crazy bouts of thunder. I thought, what if worrying about the weather actually created
the weather? And so Mama Made The Rain was born. I am also fascinated by generational
trauma, the passing down of anxieties, and where we can recognize patterns. The claustrophobia
of impending weather was a fascinating avenue to explore that through, and Phoebe’s recognition of what was actually happening here was a journey I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Meeting with Isaiah was like meeting with an old friend. He is so kind, warm, and open, and
we’d often trail off into the happy lands of book recommendations, craft and what it means to be
a writer. And Cleveland, of which I need to visit! I struggled so much with this story’s pacing, its
arc and core often slipping away in favor of my rambling tangents, and Isaiah’s constant
guidance to keep me on the train tracks I had built was so grounding to me.

Not only did Isaiah make this story make sense in the world outside of my own head, but he
made it so much better. I am so grateful to him for our mentorship and friendship, and his
willingness to help an emerging writer like me was enough to bring me to tears. I hope readers
resonate with any part of the story, and I hope they laugh the next time their parents obsess about the weather.

Lucy Rees

Lucy Rees is a writer living in Chicago. Her work appears in The Chicago Review of Books, HAD, and Flash Fiction Magazine. She was a 2024 Semi Finalist in American Short Fiction's Halifax Ranch Short Fiction Prize, and she is on the Associate Board of Story Studio Chicago. Find her at lucymrees.com.