At our first 2024 #HFGather, we asked Shuba Moran to share her experience with using her scholarship to take her first online class with us. You can see the full recording of her comments here (start at timestamp 20:50) but we’re sharing some of them here. Thank you, Shuba!
Shuba said she hadn’t thought of herself as a writer, but wrote a children’s book and “got bit by the writing bug and I thought, I really enjoyed this whole process and I want to learn a little bit more about it.” She began researching to find ways to learn more, found the Highlights Foundation website, and decided to apply for a scholarship despite being a little bit afraid of the process.
“I thought to myself, well, here’s the thing. If I don’t get a scholarship, I haven’t lost anything. And if I do get the scholarship, I’ll actually have a path forward on how to learn more. And so one of the hardest things I found was how to decide what kind of scholarships to apply for.” She loved the idea of attending an in-person workshop but “just knew I couldn’t make that happen, and so I figured out that I would apply for an online course.”
When she was awarded a scholarship, she chose to attend Shape Your Story: A Six-Week Novel Intensive with Linda Epstein. Shuba said that even before the class began, “it was a fabulous experience because. Everyone that I worked with at Highlights was so professional and responsive…everyone there answered every one of my questions.” During the course, class manager Delia would send weekly reminders “that would say: this is what you’re supposed to do this week…her reminders on a regular basis just… made my life so much easier and so not only did I benefit from the class and the coursework and the information, but also because everything was pretty much handed to me on a silver platter.”
She also appreciated that an online critique with Linda was included with her scholarship. “I cannot even tell you, to receive actual feedback from a professional in the field is truly amazing. It will alter your writing tremendously. I do have a long-term critique group that I’ve joined about a year ago and our feedback is wonderful. But to hear it from someone who’s in the trenches, who is looking at queries, who is a writer herself, really allows you to magnify where you can improve or what you need to improve on.”
Shuba would like to encourage others to apply for a scholarship: “For those folks who are considering it, do it! It does take some time and some thoughts. But it is so well worth it…the process of answering those questions really allows you to dig deeper into why you’re writing and what you have to offer in terms of your writing. And it it reinforces that belief that your words need to be heard just as much as anyone else’s.”
