Beth Dzhiganyan | Writer

Today, we have a Spark Rewind featuring Beth Dzhiganyan. Since her interview, Beth has started her MFA in Creative Writing at Cedar Crest College with a two-week residency at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and will have a short story published in August. 

So, Beth, to start with, why not tell us a bit about who you are and how you first got involved with Epiphany Space?

Sure! I am a mother, writer, and wife, doing property management as my full-time side hustle. I’m sort of a stay-at-work mom, work from home, live at work, kids everywhere all of the time. It’s madness. There is this great quote by Norah Roberts when she was asked about how she balances writing and kids, and she said, “the key to juggling is to know that some of the balls you have in the air are made of plastic & some are made of glass. And if you drop a plastic ball, it bounces, no harm done. If you drop a glass ball, it shatters, so you have to know which balls are glass and which are plastic and prioritize catching the glass ones.” I have had to learn that my creativity is a glass ball, even if what I want to do with it on a given day may not be. This has been crucial to my mental health.

I started attending an Artist’s Way group at Epiphany Space back in 2015. My oldest daughter Aria was a few months old at the time and I was really struggling to come out of a fog of exhaustion and stress. I didn’t feel creative at all. I barely felt human. The Artist’s Way was amazing! Those creative tools are phenomenal, as well as the community and support system our group built. All cliches aside, it quite literally changed my life. It was my path back to writing again, and really, back to myself. That was seven years ago, and a core of us still meet regularly! 

Now, you’re a writer... What is it you write? How did you first get started writing?

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing. Even before I knew how to write, I would dictate stories to my mom, and she would write them down for me. We have home recordings of me saying I want to be an “awthow” when I grow up. ( That’s “author” for those who don’t speak Child Speech Impediment). Writing has truly been a singular focus of my life. I started with short stories, fell in love with screenwriting and studied that in college, wrote plenty of angsty poetry in my day, a little blogging here and there, etc. Currently, I am working on a book series.

What are some of your favorite things you’ve written? What are you most proud of, and why?

This is a hard question for me! Hmm. I’m not sure. I guess I can say, the most formative thing I have written, and probably the most precious to me, is a one-act play I wrote in college about two young friends dealing with the death of a peer for the first time. A friend of mine had just died in a water rafting accident, and writing the play became the way I processed and grieved that loss alongside my characters. I can’t say that the play was all that great, but it has always stuck with me and I keep coming back to it. I wrote a feature-length screenplay inspired by it, and even now, though the characters have evolved substantially and the plot is entirely different, those two characters from that play are the inspiration for two of the characters in the book series I am currently working on.

What’s your writing process like? Where do you get inspiration from, and how does that inspiration evolve into an idea and eventually a finished product?

I am a pantser to a fault. Pantsers, as opposed to plotters, fly/write by the seat of their pants. (I just got curious about that term and googled it. It’s an aviation term referring to the people who first flew aircraft without navigation tools or the ability to communicate with people on the ground. That is terrifying. Anyway.) I nearly always have to start by putting the pen to paper before the ideas come. I can’t think my way into anything, which means I am often terrified to write in the first place. It is one of the great paradoxes of my life. I have to write, or I'll have nothing to write. When I’m really really in a story, then I will have moments where I have to pull over to jot something down, or text myself a voice memo as I push a cart with three kids in it through a grocery store. But 99% of the time, it comes after I decide I have forgotten how to write and will never have an interesting idea ever again, but write anyway. Therefore, I desperately need accountability and deadlines. Epiphany’s writer's group has been a great source of this for me! Also having a writing partner who I send pages to regularly, whether they are any good or not, helps a lot. Strength in peer pressure.