The morning sun cast long shadows across the mahogany conference table as I sat in the law offices of Patterson & Associates, my hands folded tightly in my lap to stop them from trembling. At twenty-nine years old, I had never made a decision this momentous without first consulting my parents, seeking their approval, their guidance, their permission to live my own life. But today was different. Today, I was about to sign papers that would finally set me free.
My name is Catherine Delacroix, though everyone has always called me Cathy—a diminutive that somehow made me feel smaller, more manageable, easier to control. For as long as I can remember, I had been the perfect daughter: straight A’s that were never quite good enough, accomplishments that paled beside my brother’s mediocrity, a life lived in service to expectations I could never quite meet no matter how hard I tried.
The lawyer, Mr. Patterson, slid the documents across the polished wood surface with practiced precision. He was in his sixties, silver-haired and distinguished, with kind eyes that had seen too many family dramas play out in this very office.
“These are the final papers for your trust fund access, Catherine,” he said, his voice gentle but businesslike. “Once you sign, you’ll have full control over the inheritance your grandmother left you. Three million dollars, managed according to her wishes, protected from external influence.”
I stared at the papers, my grandmother’s name printed at the top in elegant script, and remembered the conversation with my parents three days earlier that had led me to this moment. It had started innocently enough—a family dinner at their sprawling estate in Westchester, the kind of house that appeared in magazines dedicated to architectural excellence and old money.
My mother, Vivienne Delacroix, had orchestrated the evening with her usual attention to detail. The dining room gleamed under the chandelier that had belonged to my great-grandmother, the table set with china that cost more than most people’s monthly rent, the meal prepared by their private chef because my mother considered cooking beneath her station.
“Honestly, Catherine,” she’d said while cutting her filet mignon with surgical precision, every movement calculated for maximum effect, “when are you going to stop playing with these charity cases and do something meaningful with your life? You’re twenty-nine, darling. The clock is ticking.”
The words stung with their practiced cruelty, a skill my mother had honed over decades of high society passive-aggression. I had dedicated the last five years to working with at-risk youth in the Bronx, helping teenagers who reminded me of the lost, voiceless child I had once been. My work provided more satisfaction than any of the prestigious careers my parents had mapped out for me—law school at Yale, medical school at Johns Hopkins, a position at my father’s investment firm—paths designed to keep me firmly under their control while adding to the family’s social capital.
“My work is meaningful, Mother,” I’d replied, keeping my voice steady though my hands shook slightly under the table. “These kids need advocates. They need someone who sees them as people, not problems.”
“What they need,” my father interjected, setting down his wine glass with the kind of authority that came from forty years of making pronouncements that people were expected to accept without question, “is for people like us to make the system work better from the inside. Your grandmother’s trust fund finally becomes accessible next week. It’s time we discussed your real future.”
The trust fund. My grandmother’s final gift and, unknowingly, my path to independence. When Grand-mère Marie had died two years earlier after a brief but brutal fight with pancreatic cancer, she had left me three million dollars with specific instructions that I couldn’t access it until my twenty-ninth birthday. My parents had been furious about being excluded from the bequest, but the terms were ironclad, drafted by lawyers who understood exactly what my grandmother was trying to protect me from.
“We’ve been thinking,” my mother continued, her voice taking on that planning tone I recognized from childhood birthday parties that were more about her social status than my happiness, “that this windfall presents an excellent opportunity for some strategic investments. Family investments.”
My stomach clenched with instinctive dread. “What kind of investments?”
“Your brother’s pharmaceutical startup needs additional capital,” my father explained, gesturing with his fork as if discussing stock portfolios rather than my inheritance. “Vincent has identified some promising ventures, but he needs backing from family members to attract serious outside investors. First-round funding, they call it. Your contribution would demonstrate family confidence in the enterprise.”
Vincent. My older brother, the golden child who had somehow managed to fail upward his entire life while I exceeded every expectation only to be told I should have done better. His “pharmaceutical startup” was actually his third failed business venture in five years, each one funded by increasingly desperate loans from our parents who couldn’t accept that their son might simply be incompetent at entrepreneurship.
“I’m not sure I want to invest in Vincent’s company,” I said carefully, choosing each word like stepping stones across a river. “His track record isn’t particularly encouraging.”
The temperature in the dining room seemed to drop ten degrees. My parents exchanged one of their loaded glances—thirty years of marriage had taught them to communicate volumes with a single look.
“Catherine,” my mother’s voice carried that warning tone I remembered from childhood, the one that preceded punishments disguised as concern, “family loyalty isn’t optional. We’ve supported you through everything—your education, your housing, your little social work phase. Now it’s time for you to support the family.”
My little social work phase. As if helping traumatized children was a hobby I’d outgrow, like collecting stamps or learning to play piano.
“Besides,” my father added, leaning back in his chair with the confidence of someone who had never been seriously challenged, “you’re hardly qualified to manage that kind of money on your own. Vincent has an MBA from Wharton. He understands finance, markets, risk assessment. You majored in psychology and work with delinquents.”
At-risk youth, I corrected silently, but didn’t bother saying aloud. They’d never understood the distinction between kids who were at risk and kids who were risks, never grasped that the teenagers I worked with were victims of circumstances rather than architects of their own suffering.
The familiar weight of their expectations settled on my shoulders like a lead blanket, that suffocating sensation I’d learned to associate with family dinners and holiday gatherings and every interaction that reminded me I would never be quite enough, never quite right, never quite what they needed me to be.
But something had changed in me over the past five years. Working with kids who had fought for every scrap of independence they could claim, who had learned to protect themselves from adults who claimed to love them while systematically destroying their self-worth, had shown me patterns I recognized too well in my own life.
“I need to think about it,” I said, the words feeling dangerous in my mouth.
“Think about what?” My mother’s laugh had sharp edges, like broken glass wrapped in silk. “It’s a simple decision, Catherine. Do you want to help your family, or do you want to be selfish?”
Selfish. The word hit me like a physical blow, perfectly aimed at the vulnerability they’d spent twenty-nine years cultivating. It had been their weapon of choice my entire life, deployed whenever I showed the slightest resistance to their plans, their expectations, their vision of who I should be.
That night, I lay awake in my childhood bedroom—now preserved as a shrine to the daughter they wished I still was, complete with high school trophies and framed college acceptance letters and photographs of a smiling girl who had learned to perform gratitude for gifts she never wanted—and finally understood what my teenage clients meant when they talked about feeling trapped in families that claimed to love them while systematically controlling every aspect of their existence.
The next morning, while my parents attended their country club’s board meeting where they made decisions about other people’s memberships with the same casual cruelty they applied to family matters, I did something I’d never done before: I searched Vincent’s room.
I told myself I was just trying to understand his business better, to see if their faith in his entrepreneurial skills had any basis in reality. But what I found in his desk drawer made my blood run cold and my hands shake so violently I had to set down the manila folder before I dropped it.
The folder was labeled “Catherine—Trust Fund Strategy” in my mother’s precise handwriting, and it contained documents that revealed the true scope of my family’s financial expectations. There were spreadsheets showing how my three million would be allocated—not just to Vincent’s startup, but to cover my parents’ mounting debts, my mother’s shopping addiction that had maxed out four credit cards, and my father’s gambling losses at the country club that had reached six figures.
But the most devastating discovery was a series of printed emails between Vincent and my parents, dating back six months, discussing “Catherine’s trust fund situation” and strategies for “ensuring compliance.” One email from my mother, sent late at night after several glasses of wine judging by the typos, made my hands shake as I read it:
“We need to present this as a family investment opportunity, not a bailout. Catherine has always been manageable when we frame things properly. Her bleeding heart makes her vulnerable to family loyalty arguments. She’s constitutionally incapable of disappointing us—we’ve made sure of that. Vincent, make sure your business plan sounds legitimate. She’ll probably do some research, but she won’t understand the technical details well enough to see the holes.”
Manageable. Vulnerable. Constitutionally incapable. The clinical coldness of their assessment was breathtaking, like reading a zoologist’s notes on a particularly predictable species of prey.
A follow-up email from my father was even worse, typed in his characteristically terse style:
“If she resists initially, we can always threaten to cut off the relationship. Catherine has never been able to handle family rejection. Remember her senior year when we didn’t speak to her for two weeks after she refused to break up with that boy? She capitulated within days. She’ll do it again rather than lose us. It’s a reliable pattern.”
They were right, and they knew it. My entire identity was built around being the good daughter, the one who sacrificed for family harmony, who absorbed their disappointments and transformed them into motivation to be better, to do more, to prove worthy of the love that always seemed just out of reach like a carrot dangled before a donkey.
But reading their cold calculation of my psychological weaknesses, seeing my vulnerabilities laid out like battle plans, felt like watching someone plot to murder a version of myself I had never consciously chosen to become.
I photographed every page with shaking hands, sent the images to my personal email account, and carefully returned everything to its original position. Then I walked out of that house and didn’t return for three days.
I spent those days in my small apartment in the Bronx, the one my parents had never visited because they considered the neighborhood too dangerous despite crime statistics that proved otherwise. I read and re-read the emails until I had memorized every casual cruelty, every calculated manipulation, every cold assessment of my character weaknesses.
On the third day, I called Grand-mère Marie’s lawyer.
Mr. Patterson had handled my grandmother’s estate with the kind of meticulous care that suggested he’d genuinely respected her. When I explained my situation over the phone, my voice barely above a whisper because I was still half-terrified my parents might somehow overhear despite being miles away, he listened without interruption.
“Catherine, I’m not surprised by what you’re telling me,” he said when I finished. “Your grandmother was very specific about the trust fund conditions because she was concerned about exactly this scenario. She and I had several conversations about your family dynamics.”
“She knew?” The revelation hit me like cold water. “She knew they would do this?”
“She suspected based on forty years of observing how your parents operated. Marie was a remarkably perceptive woman. The trust fund was designed to give you financial independence, not to provide your family with additional capital. That’s why the terms are so strict, why your parents can’t access it, why you have to wait until twenty-nine. She wanted you to be old enough to make your own choices but young enough to build a life on your own terms.”
We scheduled a meeting for the week of my birthday. Mr. Patterson agreed to help me establish complete financial independence while maintaining all the legal protections my grandmother had built into the trust.
But first, I had to survive the days leading up to my twenty-ninth birthday, and my parents had launched a campaign of emotional manipulation that was both sophisticated and relentless.
My mother scheduled a series of “casual” lunches with family friends who happened to mention how proud they were of Vincent’s business acumen and how fortunate he was to have such a supportive sister. My father arranged for Vincent to give me a detailed presentation about his startup, complete with projections and testimonials from “potential investors” who were clearly coached on what to say, their enthusiasm as artificial as sweetener.
The pressure was constant but subtle, like water slowly wearing away stone. They never directly demanded the money, instead creating an atmosphere where refusing to invest would mark me as selfish, ungrateful, and disloyal to everything the family represented.
My twenty-ninth birthday arrived with all the ceremony my mother could orchestrate. She had planned a family dinner at the country club, complete with a custom cake and a guest list that read like a catalog of everyone whose opinion might influence my decision. I sat through three courses of food I couldn’t taste while relatives and family friends offered increasingly transparent hints about the wisdom of family investment strategies and the importance of supporting entrepreneurial family members.
My birthday gift from my parents was a leather portfolio, Italian leather that probably cost more than I made in a month, containing investment documents already prepared for my signature. Vincent’s business plan was professionally bound with a graphic designer’s touch, complete with projected returns that seemed optimistic to the point of fantasy.
“We wanted to make this as easy as possible,” my mother explained with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, as if convenience was the issue rather than consent, as if reducing my inheritance to a signature line was a kindness rather than an insult.
But I had spent the morning with Mr. Patterson, signing different documents. Documents that gave me full control over my inheritance with no strings attached. Documents establishing the Catherine Marie Foundation for Youth Independence, named for both myself and the grandmother who had made it possible. Documents that allocated half my inheritance to helping teenagers aging out of foster care, kids who needed someone to believe in them the way my grandmother had believed in me.
That evening, I returned to my parents’ house where they waited in the living room with champagne chilling and smug certainty radiating from their carefully composed faces.
“We’re so proud of you, Catherine,” my mother said, already reaching for the portfolio she assumed contained signed papers. “This is the kind of mature decision-making we’ve always known you were capable of.”
I remained standing while they settled expectantly on the sofa, their body language screaming entitlement and confidence.
“I didn’t sign the investment papers,” I said, my voice steady despite my racing heart.
The silence that followed was so complete I could hear the grandfather clock ticking in the hallway, counting out seconds that felt like small eternities.
“What do you mean?” My father’s voice was carefully controlled, but I could see the anger beginning to color his neck above his collar.
“I mean I’ve decided not to invest in Vincent’s business. I’m using the money for other purposes. Purposes my grandmother would have approved of.”
My mother’s face cycled through emotions—confusion, disbelief, anger—before settling on wounded disappointment, the expression she’d used throughout my childhood to make me feel like a monster for causing her pain.
“Catherine, we discussed this. Family comes first. We’ve always taught you that.”
“You taught me that my needs come last,” I corrected. “There’s a difference.”
Vincent, who had been lounging in an armchair with the confidence of someone expecting a windfall, sat forward. “This is about that social work nonsense. You’ve been around those people so long you’ve forgotten how normal families operate.”
Those people. The casual contempt in his voice for kids who had survived more trauma than he could imagine made my jaw clench.
“Maybe I’ve learned to recognize manipulation when I see it,” I replied, pulling the folder of printed emails from my bag. “Maybe I’ve learned that love shouldn’t come with conditions and financial obligations.”
I placed the folder on the coffee table between us like evidence at a trial.
“I found your emails. All of them. The ones where you discussed my ‘psychological vulnerabilities’ and calculated exactly how to manipulate me into giving you my inheritance. The ones where you treated me like a business problem rather than a person.”
The color drained from my mother’s face. My father’s expression went carefully blank in that way men do when they’re calculating their next move.
“Those emails were taken out of context,” my father said, but his voice lacked conviction, the words ringing hollow in the expensive room.
“What context makes it acceptable to refer to your daughter as ‘manageable’ and ‘constitutionally incapable of disappointing us’? What context justifies planning to emotionally blackmail me by threatening to cut off contact if I didn’t hand over my inheritance?”
The questions hung in the air like accusations at a trial. No one answered because no answer could justify the calculating coldness I’d discovered.
Vincent tried a different approach, his voice taking on the entitled edge I remembered from every childhood dispute where he’d expected our parents to take his side regardless of facts.
“Fine. Keep your money. But don’t expect us to keep supporting you. Your apartment, your car insurance, the credit cards we gave you—all of that ends today if you’re going to be selfish about this.”
I had anticipated this, had in fact discussed it with Mr. Patterson. “I’ll pay you back for every penny you’ve contributed to my living expenses for the past five years. With interest. Mr. Patterson is preparing the calculation.”
“With what money?” Vincent laughed, a cruel sound. “Your social worker salary barely covers groceries. Without family support, you’ll be eating ramen in some studio apartment, struggling to pay rent.”
His description was meant to terrify me, but instead it sounded like freedom. A studio apartment that was entirely mine. Food purchased with money I had earned. Choices made without weighing them against my family’s approval.
“That sounds fine to me,” I said, meaning it.
My father stood up, his face flushed with anger that made him look older, smaller somehow. “Catherine, you’re making the biggest mistake of your life. We’re your family. We’ve loved you, supported you, guided you through every important decision. If you walk away from us now, over money, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”
Love. Support. Guidance. Words that had once made me feel protected now sounded like chains rattling.
“You’ve controlled me,” I corrected quietly. “There’s a difference between loving someone and owning them.”
My mother began crying—not the genuine tears of grief, but the calculated weeping she had deployed throughout my childhood to make me feel guilty for causing her distress, for being the source of her disappointment.
“How can you say that? We’ve given you everything! We sacrificed so much for you!”
“You’ve given me everything except the right to make my own decisions,” I said, my voice steady despite the ache in my chest. “Everything except the freedom to fail or succeed on my own terms. Everything except the chance to discover who I might be if I weren’t constantly trying to earn love that should have been unconditional.”
“Your grandmother was a bitter old woman who poisoned your mind against us,” my mother said through her tears, abandoning the guilt approach for direct attack. “She never understood what it means to be a family.”
“She understood that family shouldn’t be a prison,” I replied. “That’s why she gave me the key to walk out.”
“If you choose that inheritance over your family,” my father said, his voice deadly quiet with the kind of rage that preceded ultimatums, “then you’re choosing to be alone. We won’t be part of your life anymore. You’ll be dead to us. Is that what you want, Catherine? To be completely alone?”
The threat was designed to terrify me into submission, to trigger that fear of abandonment they had carefully cultivated since childhood. They were betting that my desperate need for their approval would override my desire for independence, that I would sacrifice my future to maintain their presence in my life.
But they had miscalculated. Working with kids who had survived family rejection had taught me that sometimes being alone was better than being controlled, that isolation was preferable to exploitation disguised as love.
“If loving me requires controlling my money and my choices,” I said, my voice shaking slightly but my conviction absolute, “then yes. I choose to be alone.”
I walked out of their house that night and never went back. The silence that followed was immediate and absolute—no phone calls, no emails, no birthday cards, no acknowledgment that I continued to exist. They had made good on their threat to excise me from the family as cleanly as a surgeon removing diseased tissue.
The first few months were harder than I’d anticipated. I discovered how many of my daily routines had been shaped by their expectations, how many friendships had been filtered through their social connections, how much of my identity had been defined in relation to their approval. I had to learn who I was when no one was watching, when no one was grading my performance, when failure was mine alone to own rather than theirs to weaponize.
But I also discovered things about myself I’d never had the freedom to explore. I was funnier than I’d realized, more adventurous, capable of making decisions without second-guessing myself into paralysis. I had opinions that didn’t echo theirs, preferences that hadn’t been approved by committee, dreams that existed independently of their vision for my life.
The Catherine Marie Foundation grew beyond my initial expectations. We helped over fifty teenagers transition successfully out of foster care in the first year, providing them with financial support, mentoring, housing assistance, and most importantly, the knowledge that someone believed in their ability to create lives worth living. Each success felt like a small redemption, proof that my grandmother’s gift was creating ripples of positive change far beyond what I could have achieved alone.
My work brought me into contact with other people who had escaped controlling families, who had chosen independence over approval, who understood that love without freedom wasn’t really love at all but rather a more insidious form of possession.
I learned that I was not alone, that my experience was not unique, that families all over the world were replicating these same patterns of control disguised as care, of manipulation wrapped in the language of love.
Vincent’s business failed within eighteen months, exactly as the statistics had predicted for startups with his funding model and market approach. I learned about it through social media posts from distant relatives expressing sympathy for my parents’ financial losses. They had mortgaged their house to cover the investment they had expected me to fund, and now faced potential foreclosure.
Part of me felt sorry for them—a small, trained part that still responded to their suffering with automatic guilt. But a larger, healthier part recognized that their situation was the natural consequence of their choices, just as my freedom was the natural consequence of mine. They had gambled on my compliance and lost. That wasn’t my responsibility to fix.
Three years after that final conversation, I was sitting in my office—a real office with my name on the door and windows overlooking the Bronx streets where I’d found my purpose—when my assistant buzzed with an unexpected call.
“Catherine? Your mother is on line one.”
I hadn’t heard her voice in three years, and when I picked up the phone, it sounded smaller, older, less certain than I remembered. The commanding authority had been replaced by something that approached humility, though I suspected it was more strategic than sincere.
“Catherine. Thank you for taking my call.”
“What do you want, Mother?”
“I… we wanted to talk to you. About what happened. About the possibility of repairing our relationship. Perhaps we could have lunch?”
The olive branch was offered tentatively, wrapped in careful politeness that felt rehearsed. I could hear the desperation underneath, the need that drove her to reach out despite the ultimatum they had issued years earlier.
“Why now?” I asked, keeping my voice neutral.
“We’ve had time to think about things. To realize that perhaps we were too hasty, too rigid in our expectations. Family is important, Catherine. We’ve missed you.”
The words were right, but the melody was wrong. This wasn’t genuine remorse—it was strategic repositioning, another approach to the same goal.
“Are you asking because you genuinely want a relationship with me, or because you need something?”
The long pause before her answer confirmed my suspicions. When she finally spoke, her voice carried that familiar blend of manipulation and entitlement I remembered so well.
“Catherine, we’re family. Can’t it be both? We do miss you, genuinely, but we’re also facing some financial difficulties. The house, your father’s investments… things have been challenging. We thought perhaps you might want to help.”
There it was. Not “we were wrong to treat you as a financial instrument rather than a daughter.” Not “we’re sorry for the emails, the manipulation, the conditional love.” Just “we need money, and we thought you might provide it” dressed up in the language of reconciliation.
“I don’t think so, Mother.”
“Catherine, please. We made mistakes, but we’re still your parents. We still love you. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“It would if it were true,” I said quietly. “But love that requires me to sacrifice my wellbeing for your benefit isn’t love. It’s just another form of control.”
“So you’re going to let us lose everything? Let your father lose the house he’s lived in for forty years? Let us become destitute while you sit on millions of dollars?”
The emotional escalation was predictable, almost comforting in its familiarity. They hadn’t changed—they’d just run out of other options.
“You created your situation through your own choices,” I replied. “Just as I’ve created mine. The difference is that I’m not asking you to rescue me from the consequences of my decisions.”
“We’re your parents, Catherine. We raised you, sacrificed for you—”
“You invested in me,” I interrupted, “and you expected a return on that investment. When I refused to provide it, you cut me off completely. You made the terms very clear: comply or be abandoned. I chose abandonment, and you made good on your threat. There’s nothing left to discuss.”
I could hear her crying now, and part of me wondered if the tears were real or just another tool in her manipulation arsenal. It didn’t matter either way. I had spent too many years responding to those tears, trying to fix whatever had made her cry, accepting blame for pain I hadn’t caused.
“Goodbye, Mother. I hope you and Father find a way through your difficulties, but I won’t be funding your recovery. That’s not my responsibility, and you lost the right to ask when you treated my inheritance as if it belonged to you.”
I hung up before she could respond, my hand steady on the phone, my heart rate barely elevated. No regret, no guilt, no second thoughts. Some doors needed to stay closed to preserve the new life you’d built on the other side.
Five years after signing those papers in Mr. Patterson’s office, I can say with absolute certainty that choosing independence over approval was the best decision of my life. The foundation has helped over three hundred young people transition successfully to independence, many going on to college, starting careers, creating families based on choice rather than obligation. We’ve become a model for similar organizations across the country.
I have a partner now—someone who loves me for who I am rather than who I might become if properly managed. Someone who celebrates my independence rather than trying to constrain it. We met at a fundraiser for the foundation, and she understood my story because she had lived a version of it herself.
I have friendships based on mutual respect rather than social convenience or family obligation. I have work that feeds my soul rather than just padding a resume. I have peace that comes from knowing I’m living authentically rather than performing a role written by someone else.
Most importantly, I have myself—not the version my parents created to serve their needs, but the person I was always meant to be if given the freedom to discover her.
Grand-mère Marie’s gift wasn’t just financial independence, though that was certainly the tool she provided. The real gift was permission—permission to value myself enough to refuse exploitation, permission to recognize that love without freedom is just another word for control, permission to understand that sometimes the most loving thing you can do for people who claim to care about you is refuse to enable their worst impulses.
I keep a photo of her on my desk, taken shortly before she died, where she’s smiling with the satisfaction of someone who had lived exactly as she chose despite family pressure to conform. Beside it is a quote I copied from one of her letters: “The measure of love is not what you’re willing to sacrifice, but what you’re willing to become.”
She became herself. She gave me the tools to do the same. And that inheritance—the permission to be authentically, unapologetically myself—was worth far more than any dollar amount.
Sometimes the greatest act of love is setting someone free, even when they’re too afraid to free themselves. And sometimes the greatest act of courage is accepting that freedom, walking through the door even when you don’t know what’s on the other side, trusting yourself enough to build a life that’s entirely your own.
My name is Catherine Delacroix, and this is my story of choosing life over loyalty, independence over approval, freedom over family obligation. It wasn’t the easy choice—easy would have been signing those papers, maintaining the peace, playing my assigned role until it consumed everything I might have been.
But it was the right choice. The only choice I could live with.
And I would make it again tomorrow, and every day after, for the rest of my life.
Because freedom, once tasted, becomes impossible to forget. And love, when it’s real, never requires you to make yourself smaller to make someone else feel larger.
That’s the lesson Grand-mère Marie taught me. That’s the legacy I’m building. That’s the truth I carry forward into every day of this life I’ve claimed as my own.
And it’s enough. More than enough.
It’s everything.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.