From Columbia to Career to Fiction

Oct 15, 2026. Columbia graduates interested in writing fiction come to CFF from varied careers. They enrich our workshops with diverse perspectives as readers and writers. Many come to our workshops with long histories as writers in other fields. CFF helps them make the turn to fiction writing. We asked two of our members to discuss their journey: Penda Aiken, business owner; and Geoffrey Dutton, technologist and journalist.

Penda Aiken

I’ve been a business owner since 1976. As a single mother running a staffing firm, I learned early the dedication required to sustain a business and the perseverance needed to grow it into a successful enterprise. My analytical side guided my work, while my love of travel and support for the arts helped balance the long workdays.

In 1996, I became interested in creative writing and enrolled in classes at Gotham Writers Workshop. About a year later, in a fiction writing class at the Frederick Douglass Writers Workshop, I met Arthur Flowers, my instructor and future mentor. Arthur told those of us who aspired to become writers that if we were really serious about the craft, we should enroll in an MFA program.

In 2001, I graduated from Columbia University School of the Arts with an MFA in Fiction Writing, while continuing to run my business and remain connected to the arts. My thesis manuscript, Faye’s Embrace—a literary novel rooted in grief, myth, community function, and Black diasporic spirituality—still nourishes my creative side. Old and new characters whisper their stories in my ear and inside my head; sometimes I write them down and sometimes I don’t.
 
Arthur remains my mentor, and I attend his Flowers Hoodoo Conjure Writing Workshop. Every year I declare this will be the year I’m going to retire, finish the final draft of Faye’s Embrace, and shop it around.

Meeting Ken Schept at a Columbia agent mixer and joining the CFF has brought me full circle, back to Columbia, where my serious writing journey began. Immersed in a supportive community of writers, publishers, and agents, I can’t help but believe this is the year the novel will finally be finished.

Geoffrey Dutton

After graduating from Columbia College in 1966 with a degree in government, I enrolled at Harvard to study urban planning and dodge the Vietnam War draft. I became a researcher and coder in the school’s computer lab that was pioneering digital mapping, continuing for fourteen years before becoming a geospatial data consultant and then a high-tech journalist and software documentarian.

Save for a still-unfinished novel in the mid-nineties, I mostly wrote technical reports and manuals until retiring a decade ago, when the articles, stories, and memoirs I’d been writing part-time became my day job. I had already joined a wonderful online writers community called Cowbird, eventually posting hundreds of fiction and creative nonfiction stories. Cowbird’s members were very supportive in comments and conversations. I gladly reciprocated, becoming a core contributor until Cowbird bit the dust in 2017. 

The impetus for my first novel, a conspiracy thriller titled Turkey Shoot, came in 2015, when the Arab Spring uprisings brought thousands of refugees streaming into Europe and Western politicians bloviated about purported jihadists sneaking in to form sleeper cells. Their Islamophobic rhetoric so offended me that I wrote a Cowbird story profiling a young Sunni Muslim who fled Mosul, Iraq after Daesh (also known as ISIS) slaughtered his parents and abducted his little brother. He was out for revenge against both Daesh and the Western instigators of the mayhem. I’d posted a dozen episodes of his tortuous odyssey before realizing I was writing a novel.

After striking out with dozens of agents, I went with a hybrid publisher, Gatekeeper Press, under my own imprint, Perfidy Press.

But the nasty things I had done to my characters and my regrets over the tragic ending gnawed at me, and I vowed to rehabilitate them in a sequel. As one of them was dead, that was a challenge. CFF novelist Jeff Schnader urged me to workshop it at the Columbia Fiction Foundry, which I patiently did for almost two years, to its benefit. The finished work was published in 2024 as Her Own Devices: A novel or two by Guernica Editions. This one was not a tragedy, however, as things worked out better for my characters. I call it crime fiction with magical and metafictional elements. Magical because one voice is the ghost from Turkey Shoot. Metafictional because my other protagonist got to write the Foreword and Afterword. It felt right to give them their due.