Sinclair alum Mackenzie Tastan graduated with a Professional Writing Certificate in the spring of 2020. She also recently won the League for Innovation Student Literary Contest, a national writing contest for community college students, in the playwriting category for her play entitled “Trespassing.”
“The whole thing is just ten minutes long,” she said. “I really like ghost stories and I read a lot of horror, so I wanted to write a play that was a little spooky.”
The play is about two archaeologists, George and Paul, who are digging in an old graveyard in Ireland. Paul, the older and more jaded of the two, finds a gold bracelet still attached to the arm of a human skeleton. Perhaps motivated by the meager earnings and hard life of an archaeologist, he pockets it without telling anyone.
The next scene takes place at a pub. Paul is approached by Fiona, a beautiful Irish woman. She tells him their digging site is haunted and none of the locals will go near the place, but Paul is skeptical. They agree to go to the graveyard and make a bet: Fiona will make a wish and if it comes true, she wins, if it doesn’t, Paul wins. Paul agrees and they go to the graveyard, but Fiona is not what she appears to be. The archaeologist never comes back.
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“I had never done playwriging before at all,” Tastan said, until she took a class with the Ohio Playwright’s Circle where she and her classmates workshopped each other’s plays. For her next project, she would like to write a full-length play.
Tastan decided to go back to school after she was laid off due to the Pandemic. She worked as a reporter for the Clarion from January to May of this year.
Tastan is now a freelance writer for the Urbana Daily Citizen and doing two internships; one with Cincinnati Magazine and the other with the Sandusky Register. She hopes to find full time work as a journalist while continuing to write fiction on the side.
Another Sinclair student, Katie Sayeedi, recently won third place in the short story category for the League for Innovation Student Literary Contest.
Rachel Rosen
Reporter/Social Media Coordinator