American Short Story Contest winner 2006-2007

Jennifer Seco completed her A.A. degree at FCCJ in the summer of 2006, and she will attend UNF in the fall to pursue a bachelor’s in exceptional education and a master’s in mental health counseling.  Her desire to help others started when she worked as an admissions counselor at the University of Phoenix before attending FCCJ.   

Though she admits she doesn’t always use the many writing journals she receives as gifts, Jennifer has a history of successful writing since childhood.  In the sixth grade, she won an extra credit contest by submitting an unfinished short story, and she won another contest the next year.  By her junior year, her talent had developed enough to earn entry into Douglas Anderson School of the Arts based on her writing portfolio: “During my year at Douglas Anderson I took three writing classes including a basic creative writing class and a playwriting class that later developed a passion of mine.”   She has won two other short story contests and had two stories—“First Breath Last” and “Last Breath First”—published in D.A.’s literary magazine, Elan.

Jennifer was especially interested in the playwright Arthur Miller’s statement that he acted as a “stenographer” for the characters in Death of a Salesman, and her own writing style has been influenced by that idea as well as by the writing style of Flannery O’Connor.  Jennifer primarily writes plays, one of which is entitled Pirandello, inspired by the Italian playwright’s studies and theories.    

Jennifer’s own comments demonstrate a scholarly familiarity with the world of writing, but her advice to developing writers is more personal and emotional.  First, she confirms the old saying, “write what you know.”  Her winning story is based on her own feelings as a mother and her scrap-booking hobby.  The story started with a title using her two-year-old son’s name, “Elijah,” before developing into the finished product, “Adam’s Alibi.”  She also encourages writers to “dream, let your mind wander, imagine where the person next to you in a traffic jam is heading; what will he or she be late for; do they really want to get there? . . . People think realistically, but in writing fiction you must throw all that out the window. Think about the what-ifs in life and live them out through your writing.”

Jennifer wrote “Adam’s Alibi” last spring when she saw the contest on the FCCJ website.