In this interview, we feature Itto and Mekiya Outini, whose remarkable journeys through these fellowships have profoundly influenced their careers and creative endeavors. Itto, raised in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, found solace in storytelling amidst adversity, leading her to become a Fulbright Scholar and later a Steinbeck Fellow. Mekiya, homeschooled in isolation, turned to books for connection and eventually pursued a career in creative writing. Their paths converged thanks to the Fulbright Program, sparking a partnership culminating in co-founding The DateKeepers, an organization dedicated to supporting authors.
Of these fellowships, the Fulbright Program, one of the world’s most prestigious academic exchange programs, promotes mutual understanding between nations by offering worldwide research, study, and teaching opportunities. The Steinbeck Fellowship, named after the esteemed author John Steinbeck, supports emerging writers in completing significant literary works. Similarly, the MacDowell Fellowship offers residencies to artists of all disciplines, providing them with time, space, and a secluded environment conducive to creativity.
As we delve into Itto and Mekiya’s story, you’ll discover how their fellowship experiences have shaped their lives and work together, offering support, guidance, and motivation for aspiring writers and creatives.
What inspired the two of you to pursue journalism and creative writing?
Itto: I was raised in the rural Atlas Mountains of Morocco, where storytelling offered my only escape from daily life. My mother died when I was very young, and my father abandoned me to the care of my relatives, which wasn’t really care at all. For years, I was shuffled from household to household, abused, beaten, and made to do chores all day. This was in the middle of nowhere, mind you. We had no electricity, running water, televisions, radios, podcasts, or magazines. We had to make up our own stories as we went along.
That’s exactly what I did all day, every day, to keep myself going. Stories came to represent everything for me: therapy, entertainment, news, relationships, comfort, refuge, diversion, and medicine. When I was lonely and hurting, I would tell stories to animals, to rocks, to trees…basically to anyone and anything that would put up with me!
Later, when I went to school and discovered that there are actually professional storytellers in the world and that some of them make their livings by telling true stories in real time, I decided I wanted to become one of them. I fell in love with journalism because I recognized it as an extension of the oral tradition into which I was born.
Mekiya: I grew up with pretty limited access to the world, too, not because my family lived in a rural area, like Itto’s, but because my parents chose to raise me in isolation. They more or less dropped out of mainstream society before I was born and managed to convince themselves, in spite of their traumas, mental health issues, and substance abuse, that they could do a better job at educating me than the public school system. They homeschooled me for 16 years in a city where we knew no one, with no peer group and no community to speak of. Before the age of seven, I did not meet anyone my age. I had no friends.
What I did have were books. I spent hours playing and replaying the same audiobooks, over and over, memorizing words and phrases, internalizing the nuances, getting to know the characters intimately. Books became the only connection I had to the outside world, to minds and voices not my own. I suppose that after all that, becoming a writer was the only thing I could’ve done.
To their credit, my parents supported this. They even went so far as to help me find, tour, and apply for creative writing programs. I doubt they ever imagined that I’d use what I learned to write a book about my childhood. If they had, I’m sure they wouldn’t have been so supportive. But they both valued creativity, probably because they’d both experienced pretty abysmal childhood traumas themselves, which had brought them to appreciate art’s value as an escape from psychological suffering. I’m not sure they ever understood art as a vehicle for processing and overcoming that suffering, though. For them, that was uncharted territory. For me, the exploration of that territory has become one of my creative practice’s essential exigencies.
Itto, how did you become a Fulbright grantee? Can you tell us about that process and how you became a Fulbright scholar?
Itto: I first heard about the Fulbright Program from a taxi driver, who was not very educated and didn’t know much about it. All he could tell me was that he’d seen foreigners going in and out of a certain building, and if I went there, I might find opportunities.
My story is complicated. I missed a lot of opportunities that others had and didn’t even start school until I was 17. I spent the next several years fighting just to catch up and survive. Eventually, I did catch up, but it took everything I had. I didn’t have any time or energy left over to do research and find international scholarships. Literally, when I applied for the Fulbright, I didn’t realize how prestigious it was. I thought I might be competing with a few dozen fellow Moroccans. Little did I know that I was competing with thousands of accomplished scholars from all over the world!
I guess it’s true what they say: sometimes, ignorance really is bliss. If I’d known what I was up against, I might not have had the courage to apply. As it was, I felt invincible. I’d gotten to the top of my class in every educational institution I’d attended despite having come from nothing, and I felt like nothing could stop me. It wasn’t until I actually got the scholarship that I realized just what I’d accomplished.
Becoming a Fulbright scholar truly changed my life. The Fulbright enabled me to earn my MA in journalism, the field that I love. It brought me to the US, where I met Mekiya, my partner in life, work, and love. I never had a family back in Morocco, but now the Fulbright has become my global family. I’m incredibly grateful to the Fulbright Program. Even with all my languages, I can’t adequately put that feeling of gratitude into words.
Can you tell us how you two met and what role the Fulbright played in your meeting?
Itto: The funny thing is that I don’t actually remember the first time I met Mekiya! I know it was Tuesday, July 11th, 2017, around 7:00 o’clock in the evening, but I’d barely been in the US for 48 hours by then and was completely exhausted, excited, overstimulated, overwhelmed…all the feelings and emotions you can name. I met a bunch of people that night, and I didn’t remember anyone.
Later, Mekiya and I reconnected after one of our mutual friends, also a Fulbright scholar, recommended that I hire him as an editor. So, the Fulbright played a double role in bringing us together: first, it brought me here to study in the same country, city, and university where he was studying, and then it brought our friend to the same place so that she could connect us.
Mekiya was one of the only people I met in the US willing and able to meet me at the same intellectual level. We built our relationship on that foundation. We took our time and didn’t jump straight into a romantic relationship. Instead, we would spend hours in coffee shops or on the phone, discussing books, debating issues, and getting to know each other. That foundation has enabled us to grow together while keeping our relationship strong.
Mekiya: There’s a scene in Shakespeare’s Othello that comes to mind whenever I recall our first meeting. It’s the passage in Act I, Scene III in which Othello recounts how he and Desdemona fell in love, how he wooed her with stories of all the battles that he’d fought and all the journeys that he’d made to far-off lands, at first inadvertently, to entertain her father, and later deliberately, aware of the effect that he was having on her.
I think of this passage because that’s how Itto first made an impression on me.
In the summer of 2017, to make ends meet while studying for my MFA in creative writing, I took a part-time job as a driver and cultural ambassador for a company that ran programs for international students and scholars. In July of that year, the director hosted a dinner at her home to welcome a cohort of incoming Fulbright scholars. At that dinner, I found myself sitting next to a woman who told me, in the time it took me to masticate a green bean, that she was totally blind, spoke more than seven languages, had started school for the first time at the age of 17, survived six years of homelessness, and loved Jean-Paul Sartre. She’d also just arrived in the United States on one of the most prestigious academic scholarships offered anywhere in the world.
Needless to say, I was intrigued.
I did not pursue Itto then, but her story stuck in my mind, and eventually, as she said, a mutual friend brought us back together. As clearly as I remember our first conversation, I remember our second. This time, we talked about Sartre. We talked about literature, French and American. We talked about social expectations, how gender mediates them, and how they manifest in different cultures. We spoke about subjectivity and overcoming it. We talked for a long time. We did some work together, too, but our first conversations are what I remember.
Itto, you then became a Steinbeck Fellow! Can you tell us about the application and your responsibilities during the fellowship?
Itto: In 2023, the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University awarded me the Steinbeck Fellowship to support my memoir’s completion. This book, the first of many that Mekiya and I are co-authoring, details my journey of surviving domestic abuse, overcoming homelessness, pursuing my education, learning to love myself, and becoming the successful woman I am today.
We both worked on the manuscript during the fellowship. It was another milestone for us and my first opportunity to join a community of writers from all over the US. Everyone who ran the program was supportive and encouraging the whole time I was on the fellowship. As for the application process, it was clear and straightforward. I just followed the guidelines on the Steinbeck Fellowship website and was selected as one of the strongest candidates based on the quality of our work.
Then, you both went on to become MacDowell Fellows! Can you share details about this opportunity? How was it applying as a couple?
Itto: We heard about the MacDowell Foundation through one of our professors, who’d been a fellow many years ago, and decided to apply so that we could get some time away from our everyday lives to finish my memoir and write Mekiya’s. The year we applied, they had around 2,400 applicants. Only 155 of us were selected. I feel incredibly privileged to have been a member of that cohort.
Neither of us had ever done a residency before, and at first, I wasn’t sure how things would go. MacDowell is located in a rural part of New Hampshire, with limited access to the internet, and initially, I thought it might be like going back to the Atlas Mountains! However, I soon felt welcomed and supported in every conceivable way, even before we arrived in New Hampshire. Our time there has become the highlight of our year.
While there, we lived in a studio, working every day, having breakfast and dinner with our fellow artists and writers in the dining hall, and enjoying nature—by which I mean surviving two snowstorms that knocked out the power! Thanks to the unwavering diligence and care of the staff, we stayed safe and warm the entire time.
Thanks to MacDowell, my memoir is now finished and ready for publication. That’s a huge milestone. It took ten years because life kept throwing one challenge after another at me, delaying this project’s completion, but in New Hampshire, I finally got the time, space, support, and freedom to focus exclusively on my work and bring the memoir to fruition.
Mekiya: I’ll always remember our time at MacDowell as a formative period in our lives together, both as artists and as a couple. We went there planning to write as much as possible, but neither of us dared to hope that we would walk away with two full manuscripts in hand—until we did. In addition to our putting the finishing touches on Itto’s book, I drafted a memoir in essays, which, after a few months of polishing, is now ready for publication, too.
I don’t think I could have written this book, which involved a deep dive into long-repressed childhood trauma, if not for MacDowell. Nor could I have written it if I had been in residence alone. I’d like to thank everyone whose contributions make MacDowell what it is, from the administrators to the maintenance crew and kitchen staff, and I’d also like to thank Itto for sharing this experience with me—for her patience, for her wisdom, for her keen reading, for her feedback, and for her love.
This residency even gave us a chance to fine-tune our working relationship. Now that we’ve drafted our memoirs, we’re moving forward with several other book projects, all guaranteed to be less traumatizing and more fun! We’re also building our business, leveraging the knowledge and skills we’ve gained from navigating the writing world to provide our fellow artists and writers with the support that, before meeting each other, we ourselves never had.
And now, currently you both are co-founders of The DateKeepers. Can you tell us about your organization and how your previous experiences led to its inception?
Itto & Mekiya: They say it takes a village to raise a child. Writing a book and making it successful also takes a village—or at least a village’s worth of skills. You need people with expertise in everything from storytelling to graphic design to copyright law, and it’s almost impossible to find all that under one roof. As a result, most authors who are truly committed to their craft, and to making a living with it, find themselves bouncing from one platform to another, hiring one freelancer after another, chasing one agent after another, explaining their work to one publicist after another…eventually that gets very draining, financially as well as emotionally.
That’s where we come in.
At The DateKeepers, we offer a full suite of services for authors—all the things we’ve had to teach ourselves. We provide brainstorming, book coaching, developmental editing, structural editing, copyediting, and proofreading. We help our clients build their platforms and personal brands, identify their target audiences, choose their comp titles, and develop their marketing, publicity, outreach, and promotion strategies. Also, we help them find and apply for grants and fellowships to support their work, choose optimal paths to publication, craft effective book proposals, identify bad actors in the publishing space, recognize predatory language in book deals, and negotiate with agents, publishers, collaborators, and all the other gatekeepers they’ll encounter along the way.
In short, we empower our clients with knowledge—and we do so, first and foremost, as working writers ourselves. We’ve witnessed too many of our peers fall prey to self-styled editors, book coaches, marketers, publicists, publishers, etc. who, in fact, understand very little about the craft of writing and the business of publishing and make their livings in this field only by exploiting artists’ insecurities. We do not operate this way. We offer the support that we wish we’d had ourselves.
Sometimes clients come to us for more localized services—proofreading a single article, for example, or help developing a marketing strategy—and we’re happy to work with them as long as their work and work ethic are sound. That said, the niche we’re striving to fill is that of a one-stop shop for dedicated writers who need long-term support with their book projects and want working relationships founded on integrity rather than fear.
Finally, what advice can you share with our readers? Have you faced any challenges when applying for grants and fellowships as a couple?
Itto & Mekiya: We’re lucky to be working together. If we weren’t, we’d be facing more challenges than we do. We might have to spend a lot of time apart, for example, because one of us would get to go to a residency while the other would stay behind. As it is, instead of separating us, our work brings us together.
Likewise, if we weren’t collaborating, we wouldn’t be able to pool our skills. Writing is a tough business. The best writers in the world need collaborators. Even if you know how to write, edit, and do research on your own—even if you can do all three things well—you can’t do all three at the same time. You’ll get burnt out, and when you’re burnt out, it’s very difficult to produce your best work. Working together has made those challenges much easier to navigate and overcome.
We advise every practicing writer, artist, and researcher to seek collaborators, regardless of medium, field, or discipline. Seek support from your friends, colleagues, mentors, and senior professionals—anyone who can give you access to perspectives and/or expertise that you wouldn’t otherwise have.
Finally, we advise you to take your time. Don’t rush. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Some people will tell you that the best way to advance in a field is to apply for every grant and fellowship and residency you can find. Respectfully, we disagree. Pick a few opportunities each year, the ones you’re best positioned to compete for, and put everything you have into making those applications as strong as they can be. That way, even if you don’t get the award, you can at least be sure that you’ll have made a good impression on some of the reviewers. And you never know where those people will end up next. Reputation is everything, and the world can be very small.
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Itto and Mekiya Outini are an internationally recognized wife-and-husband team: writers, storytellers, MacDowell Fellows, and co-founders of The DateKeepers, a one-stop shop for authors striving to navigate a draconian publishing ecosystem and make their books succeed. Itto is an author, book coach, public speaker, Fulbright Scholar, and Steinbeck Fellow with an MA in journalism and strategic media from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Mekiya is an author and editor with an MFA in creative writing, also from the University of Arkansas.
The Outinis’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in The North American Review, The Fulbright Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Chautauqua, and elsewhere. For resources, information, and updates about their forthcoming books, visit The DateKeepers and follow the Outinis on LinkedIn.
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