Take two
Samah (GC22) and Salwa Meghjee (GC23) don’t necessarily set out to tackle big life moves in lockstep, but it’s no surprise when they do. Graduates of the MFA program in writing for the screen and stage, the 27-year-old twin sisters from Longwood, Florida, embrace the narrative arc that sticking together often produces a more compelling story than going it alone.
Samah graduated from Emory University knowing that she wanted to pursue an MFA, and Northwestern’s program was definitely on her radar screen. Fellow Emory graduate Farhan Arshad (GC10), an up-and-coming Hollywood writer who had completed the program, encouraged her to apply. Thrilled when she was accepted, Samah committed to enroll just as the pandemic sank its teeth into the world—less than ideal timing, but she made the most of it and attended remotely from Atlanta.
On the other side of the country, Salwa had graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and planned to stay nearby, but the Covid crisis prompted her to move in with her sister. Watching Samah attending the online writing classes, Salwa started thinking.
“The job prospects felt pretty bleak for somebody with an English degree in the middle of a pandemic,” she chuckles. “It just seemed to make sense to go back to school. And Samah seemed to be having fun writing all the time. I wasn’t planning on going to Northwestern—it was just a lucky coincidence.”
Salwa was accepted, the timing and funding aligned, and the sisters overlapped for one year—the only twins who have ever attended the MFA program simultaneously.
“I am a much better writer now than I was at the beginning,” Salwa says. “I grew so much; the coursework was pushing me to write all the time.”
The program’s structure does just that: students churn out three original scripts per quarter, one for each class, leaving little down time—and little doubt in the minds of would-be playwrights and screenwriters about what the profession would be like. If you can hack it here, you can hack it out there.
Samah, who was more interested in screenwriting, appreciated learning the craft from playwrights; Salwa, who loved playwriting, flourished under the challenge of writing screenplays. And then there’s the support system. “I loved my classmates and my cohort so much,” Samah says. “They made my writing better.”
So much so that she promptly wound up in Los Angeles after graduating and now works as a writers assistant for the Apple TV+ series Sunny, starring Rashida Jones. “My goal is to live a creative life,” she says. “A lot of people have nailed that, and a lot of the playwrights and screenwriters I know and know of went to Northwestern.”
Salwa is back on the opposite coast, writing plays and working in development and special events for Playwrights Realm, an Off-Broadway theatre company. As of this fall, she is a Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program fellow at New York City’s Juilliard School.
(KINGSLEY – GETTING CLARITY ON WHETHER OR NOT TO INCLUDE THIS.)
Their careers will keep them at either end of the country for the foreseeable future, “but it’s never what we want,” Samah says. She and Salwa are plotting their next chapter, hoping it puts them in the same city—perhaps even collaborating on a project. The Bay Area is in the mix, as is the exploding creative hotspot of Atlanta.
“In the dreamiest world,” says Salwa, “it would be cool to be bicoastal and jump between film and theatre in LA and New York.”
Double or nothing, watch them make it happen.