Meet the Mentees: Issue Nine
Introducing Suad Kamardeen and Katie Driscoll!
Here at Extra Teeth, we are intensely proud of our mentorship programme. Our co-founder, Heather, got her first start in her writing career thanks to free mentoring from Scottish novelist and short story writer Kirsty Logan, back in 2015. The Womentoring Project was started by another Scot, novelist and memoirist Kerry Hudson, when she identified a need for no-cost, peer-to-peer mentoring for women writers, and Heather was one of many who benefitted from it.
The Womentoring Project was wound down after several years supporting emerging writers, but not before it had offered a hand up to so many people who might not have otherwise had access to that assistance. We see the Extra Teeth Mentorship Programme as part of the legacy of peer-to-peer support that makes our writing community stronger, more diverse and more welcoming to new voices.
Each of our mentees is offered a six-month period of support to include three hour-long mentoring sessions, to be used as the mentee sees fit. Some will choose to workshop three short stories over this period, with the mentor offering detailed developmental and line edits on each story, to be discussed and dissected in each of the meetings. For others, all the whole mentorship period will be dedicate to a longer project, perhaps a novel or a memoir, while some will choose to spend some of the time building up a strategy with which to approach agents, submit to publishers or otherwise progress their career. Each mentorship is tailored to whatever the writer needs, and how they can best use our time.
Mentees are chosen from applicants who respond to an open call, and there are never any fees to apply. Previous mentees include Catherine Wilson Garry, Hannah Lee, Gabrielle Johnson and Ayla Douglas, all incredibly talented writers who were brilliant to work with.
For this, our return issue, we wanted to expand our mentorship into nonfiction as well as fiction; there are very few nonfiction mentorships available, and we are lucky to have an incredible nonfiction editor, Katie Goh, on our team. We opened the call for two concurrent mentorships, one nonfiction with Katie and one, fiction with Heather Parry. We received hundreds of applications for these positions from many talented writers, which we believe speaks to the growing need for these kinds of opportunities. We were able to offer feedback and support calls for a handful of the unsuccessful applicants, and we were thrilled to select two hugely exciting writers to work with Katie and Heather.
Let us introduce them to you!
Suad Kamardeen
Suad Kamardeen is an award-winning writer and editor. A graduate of the MSt Creative Writing program at the University of Oxford, her work bears witness to the lives, histories and cultures of Black Muslim women. Her young adult novel won the SI Leeds Literary Prize 2022 and her adult novel was shortlisted for Stylist Prize for Feminist Fiction 2021. Her writing has appeared in Rowayat, Sapelo Square, Bad Form Review and The Unheard Stories Anthology. Suad runs Qalb Writers Collective, a hands-on network and community helping Muslim writers complete their manuscripts and navigate the publishing world. She is currently revising her YA novel and working on a short story collection.
Connect with her @suadkamardeen across social media.
Katie Driscoll
Katie Driscoll is a Welsh writer and copywriter. She writes about film, art and culture for places like BBC Culture, the FT, the Independent, A Rabbit's Foot, the BFI and more. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.
Katie and Suad will be working with their mentors over the new several months, and we can’t wait to see how these partnerships pan out.
Our next open call for both submissions to the magazine (print and online) and our mentorship programme will be in June, and if you would benefit from mentoring we urge you to be prepared! When we open for applications, you can submit yours here. I
