Introducing Jayna Bosse

As an emerging author, I’m always looking for unique ways to get my work out there and connect with new readers, so when author John Fox, a good friend of mine, mentioned that he had worked with student interns to help him with his popular writing website, Bookfox, the gears started spinning in my head. After contemplating the idea for a while, I decided to bring on an intern of my own to work with me as a writing assistant.

Intern extraordinaire, Jayna Bosse 

As luck would have it, Jayna Bosse, the applicant who ended up being the most qualified and enthusiastic, is a student at the Orange County School of Arts (OCSA) Creative Writing Conservatory, a high school writing program that was founded by author James P. Blaylock and brags Tim Powers as a master teacher. And oh yeah, and I used to teach there, too (although I left before Jayna became a student there).

In speaking to her during the interview process, I could tell right away that Jayna and I were on the same page. She’s already a strong writer, has great ideas, and is enthusiastic to learn more. In addition to helping me with the business end of my writing, she’ll also be writing here on this blog. With that in mind, she was kind enough to share some thoughts about herself in the way of an introduction to readers.


GC: So Jayna, when I was there teaching at OCSA, students in the Creative Writing Conservatory really embraced sci-fi, fantasy, and geek culture in general. Have things changed much, or is there still a healthy love for SF/F among students?

Goodbye to Teaching

I'm used to saying goodbye to students come late May every year, but last week was different. I wasn't just saying goodbye to students for the summer, but to teaching altogether. The decision didn't come easily.

My first year teaching, 2002. Songwriting
students and me in the lower right hand corner.

I love teaching, and teaching writing itself forced me to grow into a better writer, a better reader, and an all around better person. On top of that, the colleagues and students I've had over the years are some of my favorite people ever. "Why leave then?" you're probably wondering. Partly, it's because my wife and I are moving, but, sadly, the answer has mostly to do with money. Simply put, I can't afford to be a writing teacher anymore. There are a lot of reasons for this, many of them having to do with systematic problems in the administration of higher education, but I don't have any solutions to offer, so I'm not going to complain. What it came down to for me was that after twelve years in the classroom, I've reached my zenith career-wise in academia. I have no PhD and my professional writing credits are in the speculative fiction field, which adds up to being permanently stuck as an adjunct (part-time) instructor, particularly with the trend in higher education of relying even more heavily on adjuncts in recent years.

A going away gift from the Creative Writing
Conservatory at OCSA, 2015.

At times I've felt like a mercenary writing instructor, teaching up to seven classes a term at three different institutions, each considered a part-time job with no benefits, but combined adding up to ludicrous hours not only in the classroom, but also prepping for lectures and grading. Mostly, though, I've enjoyed my time teaching and helping young people find their voices as writers, and if I could keep doing it and create a secure future for my wife and I, I would. Teaching for the Creative Writing Conservatory at the Orange County School of Arts (OCSA), particularly, has been a great experience. Jim Blaylock brought me on in 2002 to teach a songwriting course, which then expanded into teaching a slew of other creative writing courses, including classes on spec-fiction, novel writing, zombies, and comic-book writing. And it was at OCSA that I got to know Tim Powers and met lifelong friends, both in the faculty and among the students. Similarly, although to a lesser extent, teaching at Chapman University has been highly rewarding. The students have always been respectful to me and receptive to my techniques, despite whatever misgivings they might have had about writing coming in. The faculty within the English Department have been great as well.

So what does this mean for me moving forward? It means taking on a full-time day job as a copywriter, which, believe it or not, will be less work than what I've been doing. Granted, it won't be as personally rewarding, but it will open up a lot of time for reading and writing, which I am very excited about. I haven't had much time for pleasure reading the last ten years, so I'm looking forward to getting caught up on current work in the spec-fiction field. Most importantly, with the change I'll be writing like a fiend from now on.

Souldrifter is slated to come out this summer from Diversion Books, and then I'll be working on the third installment in the Dreamwielder Chronicles as well as my standalone cli-fi novel, Remember the Future. After that, who can say? I have a lot of crazy ideas percolating in my brain—it's time to start getting them out!

-Garrett Calcaterra

(Addendum: 5/28/15 5:55PM PST - Several people have asked me offline to comment more on the problems I've experienced as an adjunct. I don't want to single out any of the schools I've worked for, but here are a couple of recent articles from the NY Times that I've found to be pretty spot on: 1) The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much, 2), What's the Point of a Professor.)

The Story Behind Page Fault

I am very excited to announce the release of my novella, Page Fault, a high-concept mash-up of cyberpunk, fantasy, post-apocalyptic, and noir fiction. I can't take sole credit for the high-concept idea, though.

Two years ago, I taught a George R.R. Martin author study course at the Orange County School of Arts. As you might expect, the class was great fun. We read Martin's early horror and sci-fi, read one of his Dunk and Egg novellas, watched a few episodes of Beauty and the Beast from his television writing days, and even got a visit from the man himself for a private lecture.

Seeing as how the class was for the Creative Writing conservatory, though, I also wanted to include a writing component to the course. So one day the students and I round-tabled to come up with a shared world in which we could all write stories, a shared world inspired by Martin's writing across the genre spectrum. The result of our collective imaginations was Soteria—a computer generated world that harbored the majority of Earth's population in a post-pandemic future. The students were great, and by the end of the day we had an entire codex written for our shared world.

Page Fault was my contribution to the subsequent short story collection the class wrote; it started off as an introductory vignette for the collection, but there was something about the vignette that called for more, so I revisited it and expanded it once the course was over. The resultant story is the three part novella you have before you now. It's a story I'm very proud of, and one I couldn't have written without the rich imaginations of all my students. So here's a big shout-out and thank you to all the students from that author study course. Cheers!

-Garrett Calcaterra