Fan Casting Mara Weaver in Quiet Desks

Mara is intelligent, composed, and quietly dissatisfied with the life she imagined for herself. After abandoning a doctoral program in Chicago, she moves back to California with mounting debt and a fractured sense of direction. She works as a teaching assistant while finishing a credential program and renting a small apartment alone. She becomes known among students as approachable and unusually attentive - the kind of educator who remembers small details and asks questions nobody else does. Underneath her calm professionalism is profound loneliness. She struggles with intimacy, avoids people her own age, and increasingly becomes emotionally dependent on the attention she receives from one student in particular.