by Writing Workshops Staff
A day ago
Some short stories take a weekend. Some take a season. Jerry Portwood’s “Jamila and the Mummy” took the better part of two decades, and for most of those years, he knew exactly what was wrong with it. “I knew that the structure and basic plot points were good,” he told us, “but something was not quite working overall.” That nagging something is familiar to every writer who has ever loved a piece too much to abandon it and not quite enough to finish it.
Jerry came to WritingWorkshops.com already deep into a working life on the page. After 25 years as a journalist in editorial roles at Rolling Stone, Out, and New York Press, he launched The Queer Love Project, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Narratively, The Advocate, and Huffington Post, among others. He also teaches in the creative writing program at The New School. In other words, he is a writer who teaches writers.
But he almost didn't take the next step. “I had never taken an asynchronous course and was a little dubious about how effective it could be,” he said. He enrolled in the Short Story Submission 1-on-1 Boot Camp with Kelly Luce anyway, bringing along the story he’d been circling for nearly twenty years. What he found surprised him: “Kelly was so helpful and gave some of the best feedback/critiques on my work that I’ve ever received.”
The breakthrough wasn’t a plot fix or a clever new ending. It was a shift in how Jerry saw his own “finished” pages. Kelly, he said, helped him “pressure test” the story “with gentle encouragement and inquisitive interrogation”, the kind of questioning that doesn’t dismantle a draft but dares it to be braver.
The lesson that stuck: “When you think you’re ‘finished’ there may still be moments to excavate and expand and improve.” After two decades, the story finally clicked into place. “Now I feel like I had a breakthrough and it’s a complete story at last,” he said, and he’s begun sending it out into the world.
That instinct to dig deeper into a single moment runs all through Jerry’s published work, too. In his recent personal essay Why I Made Myself Shoot a Gun, written to mark the tenth anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting, he layers memory on memory, a refused favor at a Walmart counter, his father’s fearful first handgun, a childhood afternoon with a bb gun, and lets it all build to one quietly devastating image: a barefoot toddler reaching up to touch his father’s AR-15 “as if it were a teddy bear.” It’s a master class in exactly what Kelly named: the small, excavated moment that carries the weight of the whole.
For Jerry, the gains went beyond the page. A longtime teacher himself, he came away with “a new level of insight into how to improve not only my writing but the way I share criticism and edits with others.” And while the workshop was only a brief stop on a long and accomplished road, it was, in his words, the thing that took a writing life that was already “strong and fulfilling” and left it “supercharged and revitalized.”
His advice for the writer hesitating at the edge of the same decision he once made? “It’s always a difficult decision to spend money on something you feel like you should be able to do solo,” he said, “but you’re worth the investment.” And when the work itself gets hard, he has a ritual: “I listen to books with great writing, and hearing the words in my ears can often compel me to start writing.”
You can follow Jerry’s work on Substack, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and keep an eye out for “Jamila and the Mummy” as it makes its way to the literary magazines lucky enough to read it. Twenty years in the making, it was always going to be worth the wait.
