by Writing Workshops Staff
A week ago
From Filmmaker to Fiction: Anne Makepeace's Twin Appearances in Dorothy Parker's Ashes
After a four-decade career writing, producing, and directing award-winning documentary films — work supported by fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies — Anne Makepeace did something most established artists would never dream of doing in their later years: she made herself a beginner again.
In late 2019, Anne stepped away from the filmmaking life she had built — chronicled at Makepeace Productions — and turned her attention to fiction. She spent 2020 reworking an unproduced screenplay into a novel. Then in 2021, a workshop on translating memory into fiction cracked something open, and she began drafting the linked short stories that have since become the heart of her current project, a collection she now calls Coming to Light.
We're delighted to celebrate two of those stories, both newly featured in Dorothy Parker's Ashes, the literary magazine launched in homage to one of American letters' most acerbic voices.
In "Joy Ride," published in the magazine's "Cops" issue, a sixteen-year-old Anne and her best friend Carol set off in a 1961 lime-green Chevy wagon on a half-secret midnight drive to Philadelphia, chasing a French boy named Thierry. They find, instead, Sergeant Pinky Boyd of the Philadelphia Police Department, who delivers the kind of earned moral clarity only good fiction grounded in life can deliver. The story is by turns funny, mortifying, tender, and finely tuned to the texture of teenage longing — and Pinky's parting wisdom about the three things that drive girls to do stupid things will stay with you for a long time.
"Breaking the Ice," an excerpt from Anne's story "The Ice Pool" featured in the magazine's recent "Body" issue, opens with a four-year-old narrator perched at the edge of her aunt's pool, watching ice chunks bob and jingle on the surface like crystal bells. What follows is one of those rare scenes in fiction where physical danger — a child sliding into freezing water, a brother who can't quite reach her — becomes inseparable from the family's larger grief over a younger sibling's death. It's gorgeous, terrifying, and disciplined. Dorothy Parker's Ashes plans to publish another excerpt from "The Ice Pool" in their forthcoming "Mysteries" issue, making this the third story of Anne's they will have featured.
Anne's path most recently wound briefly through our community in April 2026, when she joined the Mining Your Obsessions seminar with Elizabeth Austin — a workshop built around the idea that the images, memories, and questions a writer keeps returning to are not distractions from the work but the very vein to mine. For a fiction writer building a collection rooted in memory, the timing was apt. Elizabeth, whose own essays and reported pieces have appeared in TIME, Harper's Bazaar, The New York Times, Narratively, and Ms. Magazine, is a fitting guide for any writer learning to listen carefully to what their own obsessions are trying to say.
What's next for Anne is just as exciting as what's already on the page. She's revising the title story of Coming to Light now and will workshop it in Emily Nemens' upcoming class. This summer, she'll attend the New York State Summer Writers Institute for a fourth time. After that, she plans to turn her full attention to publishing the collection — the next phase of a literary life that is still, remarkably, just getting started.
What makes Anne's story resonate isn't only the late-career pivot, though that alone is bracing. It's the model she offers any writer who has wondered whether it's too late to begin again, to take a new idea seriously, or to learn a hard form from scratch. Forty years of filmmaking didn't make Anne a fiction writer — but it taught her how to look, how to listen, and how to commit to a vision over the long haul. The fiction she's writing now is luminous, and the collection it belongs to feels inevitable. We can't wait to read Coming to Light in full.
Ready to start your own writing journey? Explore our online creative writing workshops and join a community of dedicated writers learning from acclaimed instructors. Whether you're drafting your first short story or arriving at fiction after a long career in another art form, our courses offer the expert instruction, supportive community, and proven results that help writers like Anne bring their work to light.
