When I was hired to write for Wellesley College last spring, one of the first stories I pitched was this one in honor of WZLY’s 80th birthday and now it is finally up! Read the story here. Thank you to all the radio alums and current DJs who spoke with me for it! love you all.

The post From WBS to WZLY, 80 Years of Wellesley Radio appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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My girl Wanda the betta fish (RIP) finally gets the obituary she deserves in the winter 2020 issue of Wellesley Magazine. Writing this piece for the Endnotes section was really fun. Well, as fun as writing about murdering your fish can be.

Thank you to Alice M. Hummer, Lisa Scanlon Mogolov, and Catherine Grace for publishing my essay!

Thank you to my first-year roommate and BFF Lee Hanae Ung for living through the experience and still being my friend!

The post “Three First-Years and a Fish” in Wellesley Magazine! appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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Ali Barthwell is a writer, comedian, teacher, Chicagoland native, and an alumna of Wellesley College. She was a recipient of the Puma/LOL Second City Diversity Scholarships in 2010. Barthwell also participated in The Bob Curry Fellowship at The Second City, and she was a member of The Second City touring company from February 2015 to August 2016. Barthwell is an instructor at The Second City, and she performs with the improv group Sweet Tease. She writes recaps for Vulture, and her other written work can be seen in New York Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, The A.V. Club, and Second City Network. Ali is a former staff writer at Cards Against Humanity. She tweets about lipstick and Black Panther at @wtflanksteak.

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Ali Barthwell appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

Post originally appeared on Wellesley Underground on August 8, 2015.

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It is an honor to converse with E.B. Bartels whose work appears extensively in close to two dozen publications. Most recently, she graduated with an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from Columbia University, where she founded Catch & Release, the literary blog and online magazine of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. At Wellesley, she won the Jacqueline Award in English Composition for her essay “Russian Face,” which you can now read in the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35. In addition to being a prolific writer, E.B. is a teacher, a photographer, and was also an alumna editor for our very own Wellesley Underground.

Image credit: Janna Herman

WU: You were a Russian Language and Literature major and Studio Art minor at Wellesley, though you also wrote extensively for the college’s student life magazine, Counterpoint.  What were your biggest influences from Wellesley on your writing? Did you know you wanted a career as a writer back at Wellesley?  How did you find yourself in your major and minor?

EB: My falling-in-love-with-writing story is pretty boring––it’s the same old thing that so many writers tell: I loved books as a kid, I started reading at a super young age, I wrote extensively in journals throughout my adolescence, I did independent writing projects in high school, blah, blah, blah, you know how it goes. I was so smitten with writing that I actually enrolled in a class at Wellesley in summer 2005––the summer after my junior year of high school. It was Writing 225 with Marilyn Sides, and it took place in a very warm room in the back of Clapp Library with a mix of students ranging from current Wellesley students to adults from the town to other precocious high schoolers such as myself. I loved that class and Professor Sides, and when I got into Wellesley, there was no question in my mind that I was going to be an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing, with maybe a Studio Art minor because I’d always loved photography too. I was even all set to ask Professor Sides to be my advisor. Done and done.

But then, at the end of my senior year of high school, I went to hear one of my favorite writers ever––the playwright Tony Kushner––speak at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square. Afterwards there was a book-signing, and I went up to Tony Kushner and gushed all over him about how much I love his plays and how much I also love writing and I just wrote a play that my friend directed at our school and I was starting college in the fall and I was definitely going to study creative writing––and he interrupted me. Don’t major in creative writing, he said. I thought I heard him wrong. He went on to tell me to study anything else, to study everything besides writing, or I would be mechanically good at writing with nothing interesting to say. I took this advice very seriously, and when I arrived at Wellesley, I enrolled in Russian 101 to fulfill my language requirement. I immediately fell in love with the language––puzzling out Cyrillic, fantasizing that one day I would be able to read Anna Karenina in the original (LOL)––and I realized that majoring in Russian would give me the excuse to travel abroad and travel abroad far away, which was something I desperately wanted to do since I grew up in a town not even twenty minutes away from Wellesley. I thought that studying Russian would give me plenty of material to write about, which it did.

I started writing for Counterpoint while I was living in St. Petersburg my junior year. Some of my good friends from ‘09 were on the Counterpoint editorial staff and gave me a monthly column which basically was “E.B. Rambles On About Something Relating To Russian Culture For A Couple Hundred Words” and I loved it. I enjoyed feeling that I was still part of the Wellesley community while so far away, but I also loved the deadlines and trying to come up with a new, exciting topic each month, and I enjoyed getting to develop my own voice and sense of style. When I came back to Wellesley my senior year, I took the only creative writing class I ever took in college––Travel Writing with Professor Sides, in the same hot room at the back of Clapp as that summer class––and it blew my brain. Before that I had thought oh, I’ll do the Russian Literature PhD route which most Russian majors seem to pursue, or I thought I would go into translation, or maybe get an MFA in photography, but Professor Sides’s travel writing class made me remember how badly I had wanted to be a writer before I got to Wellesley. So as I panicked about what to do next, I applied to be an AmeriCorps Teaching Fellow at a school in Dorchester. I worked at Mother Caroline Academy for two years, teaching fifth and sixth grade girls English, Literature, Social Studies, and Art, and that sealed the deal. Seeing eleven-year-olds freak out with excitement about writing spoken word poems or coming up with their first-ever short story made me remember my own love of writing, and so that was that. I applied to get an MFA.

WU: Did you notice a difference in the community between Wellesley and Columbia?  What was it like being in a co-ed writing environment as opposed to a women’s college?

EB: Columbia is known for having one of the largest MFA writing programs, which is part of why I chose it. I knew that if I ended up at a place like Brown, where you have all your workshops with the same four other people for the two or three years of your MFA, I thought I would lose my mind. And, though I didn’t realize it going into getting my MFA––I thought I was getting the degree just to become a better writer––the whole point of going to graduate school for art is to develop an artistic community. An MFA degree is no guarantee of employment, and a lot of artists out there are very anti-MFA––feeling it’s a waste of money and time and that you can be a perfectly successful artist without one, which is true––but in getting my MFA I met a whole lot of amazingly wonderful fellow writer friends, and it was as if this big hole I had in my heart that I hadn’t realized existed was suddenly full. Suddenly having this gang of friends who just got it when I didn’t want to go out for drinks because I was finishing an essay, or who would want to sit at a bar all night and talk about their favorite memoirists or how they were having a moral dilemma writing about their family or ex-boyfriend or whatever, it was incredible. I say get an MFA just to find those people. They’ll let you bounce ideas off of them, they’ll listen to you cry about getting rejected from McSweeney’s again, and they’ll edit your writing forever.

At Columbia, the writing program is divided into three genres––Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction––and while some people complained that such a large MFA program gets very competitive, I found that seemed to apply to some genres more than others (cough, Fiction). Nonfiction was this big, emotional family––maybe because right away in workshop we were sharing some of our darkest secrets and feelings in our pieces and it was like Group Therapy Lite––and there were thirty-five of us, so there were enough people to mix up who was in your workshop and classes each semester, but few enough that we knew each other all pretty well by the end. Also Nonfiction felt a lot like Wellesley, because, more so than the other genres, Nonfiction was mostly women––I think it was something like thirty women and five guys in my year. My thesis workshop with Lis Harris was all women, and it was awesome.

Though something I did notice about being in a co-ed environment––and I’m talking about all the genres here, not just Nonfiction––was a divide in the confidence between the men and women writers. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all of the men or all of the women, but I noticed that often the men were much more confident about their writing, with no doubt they were on their way to being the next Jack Kerouac or David Foster Wallace, while many more of the women seemed to suffer from Impostor Syndrome––feeling they didn’t deserve to be in the program, not sure how they got in, totally unsure if they would ever make a career of this whole writing thing. I definitely fell in the latter category. I have my MFA, and I still feel like a total fake. I feel like a fraud being featured in this series on Wellesley Underground––I have been forcing myself to say “I’m a writer” when people ask what I do, as opposed to defaulting to whatever my paying day job is at the time: “I’m a babysitter” or “I’m a teacher” or “I’m an intern at a literary agency.” But fake it ‘til you make it, right?

WU: Your focus at Columbia was creative nonfiction.  Can you explain a little what this is and what inspired you to pursue this track?

EB: I chose nonfiction because I realized I needed to stop lying to myself. In high school I would sometimes write “short stories” which were stories inspired by my own family’s lore, and then I wrote this play about a grandmother, mother, and daughter who have coffee together once a week and talk a lot and occasionally get into big blow out fights, weirdly just like me and my mother and grandmother, and I realized that fiction isn’t my thing. I think every writer starts off thinking that to be a Real Writer you have to write The Next Great American Novel, but then as you get older, you start to notice all these other amazing types of books out there, and you start to think, hey, maybe I can write The Next Great American Biography or The Next Great American Collection of Essays. All the writing I did at Wellesley for Counterpoint was all in the personal essay and travel writing camp, so when it came time to apply for my MFA, I only looked at programs that offered nonfiction, and Columbia has one of the oldest and established creative nonfiction programs, which is another reason why I chose to go to school there.

Now, to clarify creative nonfiction: no, I did not go to Columbia Journalism School. (The number of times I have to tell people this over and over blows my mind.) And, no, I am not working on a “novel.” But I understand why it’s confusing, because what I do falls somewhere in between––not that I make things up, no, none of that James Frey garbage, but that I take real information, real stories, real people, real things from the real world, and write about them in a way that reads much like a short story or a novel. You find a way to take the events of an ordinary life and order them and structure them in a way so they build on each other to make a plot that is exciting to read––just like in a novel. I like to think about it like this: fiction writers are composing music in a room that is silent––making up everything as they go, while nonfiction writers are composing music on a very noisy, crowded, loud street––filtering the din to hear only the sounds they want for their piece. A way I like to try to explain the difference between journalism and creative nonfiction is that journalism is like the video footage they show on the local news to get the information across, while creative nonfiction is like a Ken Burns documentary. Though I think a lot of journalists would have beef with that statement, and, to be truthful, there is a lot of overlap––I’ve read articles in The New York Times, which would probably be called journalism just because they’re in a newspaper, that are as gorgeous and artful as any memoir or personal essay.

WU: You write a column Non-Fiction by Non-Men for The Fiction Advocate.  Can you tell us a little about the writers you have interviewed and this experience?

EB: Why, yes! Thank you for asking about my Non-Fiction by Non-Men column. Ahem. (Yes, that’s a link. Click it. Thanks.) I began the column because a personal mission of mine is trying to read more books by underrepresented groups of writers––women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. I am continually horrified by the statistics that VIDA puts together each year––in so many major publications, male writers continue to outnumber women by vast proportions, not to mention how many more books by men get reviewed than books by women, let alone books by white people than books by people of color, let alone books by straight people than books by LGBTQ people. It’s depressing. And at one point in grad school someone asked me to name my favorite writers, and I realized that the group I had quickly rattled off (Nabokov, Bulgakov, Tolstoy, Chekhov) were all white men. So I thought to try to do my own little part by showcasing some really incredible women writers of nonfiction in this column. So far I’ve interviewed biographer Patricia O’Toole, historian Andie Tucher, former New Yorker staff writer Lis Harris, and Cris Beam, who has written about queer/trans issues and also the American foster care system. Upcoming I have an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson whose book Negroland: A Memoir comes out in September, and also one with Jennifer Finney Boylan, whose memoir She’s Not There was the first bestselling book by a transgender American. I’m constantly in awe by these women––by the work they’ve created, the junk they’ve had to put up with as women in a male-dominated field––and I love that this column gives me an excuse to ask them a million questions about their lives and careers. It’s very comforting for me, personally, to hear their stories and advice because it quells my own anxieties about trying to make it as a writer.

WU: You are currently working on two books, one based on your MFA. thesis.  Can you tell us a little about these projects?

EB: My MFA thesis was a memoir and historical narrative about my family’s small business––an insurance agency in Somerville, Massachusetts that has been in our family now for almost a hundred years. While the business has barely changed, our family––and the city of Somerville––has evolved significantly around it, and my thesis was about how a family can evolve from factory-working, fresh-off-the-boat immigrants, into privileged, upper class, Ivy-League-attending artist types through this one, tiny, prosperous business. The book is about how hard people work to protect themselves from all kinds of loss––saving up money, obsessively going to doctors, buying expensive insurance policies, checking and double-checking and worrying about every possible worst case scenario and thinking you’ve got it all covered––but how, in the end, you can’t protect yourself from everything. Loss, and death, are inevitable.

My other project is actually about loss too. This book project is a collection of linked essays about all the pets I’ve had, and all of the unfortunate ways they’ve died. Three of these essays have already been published on The Toast under the series Dead Pet Chronicles. But in addition to my own personal stories, I’ve been researching all the varied and wild ways that people mourn their animals––pet cemeteries, taxidermy, mummification, artificial diamonds made from cremated ashes. It’s amazing what people do for their pets. Though, I think the thing I like the most about working on this project is that as soon as I tell anyone about it, it’s like being the priest at confession––people open up to me about hamsters trapped in walls and puppies they ran over with cars and fish they replaced without kids knowing.

WU: Is there a particular essay that you have written that has the most significance to you?

EB: “Freedom, My Dear” was published on The Butter. The fact that it was published on The Butter alone is hugely significant to me––The Butter is the sister site to The Toast, run by amazing essayist Roxane Gay. The fact that Roxane Gay, whom I worship, read my essay, and, not only that, liked it enough to publish it––I died a little with joy when that happened. But more so than that, writing “Freedom, My Dear” was a really important experience for me. The essay started out as a total mess––all these different ideas stemming from an experience at the Russian Baths in New York––and I was really lucky to have one of my best writer friends and editors-for-life, Ariel Garfinkel, go through at least half-a-dozen drafts as I tried to figure out what I was saying. I would like to point out that several other writer friends also read drafts of this essay, and for them, I am forever grateful as well, but Ariel not only helped me figure out structure––she also patiently pointed out flaws in my logic and thinking and gently helped me see when I was actually making some unintentional but extremely transphobic comments about women’s spaces. Writing that essay made me examine my way of thinking, and my own inner prejudices and biases, and try to understand how to fix them. And even so, the end result wasn’t perfect––one commenter on the essay pointed out that I had made some assumptions about trans women’s genitalia, which I hadn’t intended to do, but I had nonetheless. That essay, to me, is the perfect example of how writing can help you figure out not just how to say something, but how to think and what you think, and how we are all always growing and learning as people, no matter how old we are. Also, writing that essay made me really appreciate having honest and kind friends/editors like Ariel who are willing to provide a safe space for me to try out ideas and call me out on things.

(And now go read Ariel’s essay on Salon. It’s incredible.)

WU: Do you participate in visual art projects as well?

EB: Alas, since college, not so much. While teaching at Mother Caroline Academy, I did do a photography project of my students’ accessories, but besides that, I’ve really been focusing on writing exclusively for the past three years. I’m still a visual learner––I will forget something entirely unless I see it written down, and I draw these crazy charts to try to figure out the structure of my essays and writing projects––and even while I’m writing, I’m always thinking of visual components to complement the work. My thesis was full of photographs and scanned letters and doodles and artifacts, and it’s very hard for me to separate words from visual components. Similarly, most of my photography, painting, and printmaking projects in high school and college involved words. For example, I took a lot of photographs of graffiti around my high school and then did double-exposure prints of the words overlapping with other images I had taken. Words and images go together for me. My dream is to find an agent/editor one day who supports my visual art drive and will allow me some say in illustrations/photographs in my book. But that might be a pipe dream. Publishing houses have whole art departments for that stuff.

WU: What is the most important message you try to communicate through your writing?

EB: One of my professors at Columbia said that every writer has a theme or subject that they just can’t shake, and that every one of a writer’s works can be traced back to scratching at one idea. I guess, at least with my two book projects, I am trying to understand how people try to protect themselves from––and later cope with––loss and death. I also want to understand and show the role that humor plays in the darkest times. I love a good black comedy. As my grandfather says: what’s the difference between a Russian tragedy and a Russian comedy? In a Russian tragedy, everyone dies. In a Russian comedy, everyone dies happy.

WU: You are also an extensive reader.  Any recommendations for WU readers?

EB: Yes! I have so many recommendations! I set a goal for myself that in 2015 I am trying to read fifty books by women, with a majority of those books by women of color. You can check out my blog for updates on the challenge and to see the twenty-seven books that I have read so far in my 1st Quarter Check-In and 2nd Quarter Check-In posts. Also, follow me on GoodReads to see what I am reading in real time!

WU: What plans do you have for your writing future?

EB: Short-term––I will be teaching middle school again this fall, so I hope to learn how to balance the demands of working full-time in a school with making space for my own writing and reading because, to be honest, I think making time for my own writing and reading makes me a better teacher––what example are we setting for students if teachers are not continually in the process of learning themselves as well? I also am applying to writing residency programs for school vacations and next summer. Long-term––I want to finish one of my book projects so it feels strong enough to begin to query agents, so then I can obtain an agent, create a book proposal, find an editor, get a book deal, the whole glamorous thing. And, eventually, one day, I hope to be able to teach writing at the college or graduate school level, because I find, selfishly, that I am a better writer when I am also teaching. Students give me creative energy and drive, plus they hold me accountable––I can’t go around telling them to write if I am not writing anything myself.

WU: To continue to follow E.B.’s writing, check out her website, her blog, and her Twitter.

The post Wellesley Writes It Interview appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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My dearest WZLY, 91.5 FM, Electric Ladyland,

I never thought about radio until I met you.

I listened to it, sure. When I was a kid, my mom and I would have sing-alongs to ‘80s pop hits on Mix 98.5 FM; in middle school, my friends and I would blast Kiss 108 FM or Jamin’ 94.5 FM to hear the latest Backstreet Boys or Nelly hits; and in high school, I would turn my car radio to Emerson College’s WERS 88.9 FM, to listen to indie music and feel cool. But I never thought much about how the radio played the songs that it did. I grew up listening to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion with my grandparents in the car, laughing to stories about Lake Woebegone, realizing that Garrison Keillor was a real person, who wrote these stories and performed them for the airwaves, but when it came to most radio stations, I didn’t think about the people sitting behind the dials, picking out the next song, adjusting the volume, timing the transitions, and avoiding dead air.

When I got to Wellesley, I was overwhelmed by all the possible extracurricular activities. I love extracurriculars, and always have; I am prone to signing up for too many things. In high school I did a lot of theatre, was part of Amnesty International and the Environmental Action Committee, and was the editor-in-chief of the literary arts magazine, so, when I first arrived on campus, I began to look for familiarly themed activities. I became a recycling rep for Claflin Hall almost immediately; I signed up to take a theatre class my first semester. But as I was thinking of what else to do, I got a life-changing suggestion.

I was on a bus––some part of First-Year Orientation––sitting near one of the First-Year Mentors. The senior asked me what clubs I wanted to check out at Fall Fling, and I expressed my many and overwhelming interests.

“Well,” said Ashira Greene ’07, to whom I will be forever grateful, “have you ever thought radio? You should check out WZLY. It’s pretty awesome.”

Radio? Who knew?

I became involved with the station my very first semester, interning with Courtney Campbell ’07. By spring 2007, I had my own themed show––Soundtrack System, where I only played songs featured in the soundtracks of movies and television shows.

By fall 2007, I held the position of Record Librarian on WZLY’s Executive Board, and by fall 2009, when I returned from studying abroad, I was the Publicity Director, co-planning concerts with the Promotions Director (a.k.a. my BFF Ami Li ’10; together we formed the “Promicity” committee), designing merchandise (those black V-neck t-shirts with the shakily drawn WZLY 91.5 FM Electric Ladyland logo, the infamous BITCHES LOVE TOTEBAGS totebags, the key-shaped WZLY bottle openers), littering the campus with fliers for Jukebox the Ghost, Toro Y Moi, Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, sliding broadcasting schedules under dorm room doors, throwing glam rock-themed parties in Lake House, and having the time of my goddamn life.

But rewind, reset the record needle, how did this all happen?

First, I fell in love with your space. I entered during the fall open house, when the already-established DJs attempt to lure newbies into the cult of radio. Finding you at first wasn’t easy, with the radio station being located in the basement of the mostly abandoned, slowly decaying Schneider Hall. I heard stories of the building’s heyday: the bustling original Café Hoop, student government buzzing in offices upstairs, people sprawling on sofas, hanging out, talking, radio DJs and non-WZLY members alike flowing in and out of the radio station lounge. But by fall 2006, the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center was in full force, and Schneider had been reduced to phantoms, except for you, still plugging away in its basement. While the older DJs spoke with longing for the old Schneider, I liked this version. I liked that to find you, WZLY, you had to enter through a seemingly-broken door, descend into the dark, wobble on the sagging rotting stairs, pee in a frightening basement bathroom (which was most definitely haunted––an EBoard member once saw a ghost in there during a meeting), all in order to find the warm, glowing pulse of the radio station where, day or night, you could always find a friend. It was like a secret clubhouse, and, becoming part of it, I felt cooler than I ever had in all my high school years of Amnesty and the lit mag.

I felt cool being part of you, WZLY, but what is feeling cool really except feeling comfortable in a place? Even more than Claflin Hall, where I lived for all three of the years I was at Wellesley, the radio station itself became my home on campus. That bright little patch in the heart of a dark, decaying building, full of old nasty sofas and a billion CDs and records and the graffiti of DJs past. I spent hours reading the names on the walls, studying the old posters, leaving my own legacy in Sharpie. I pulled all-nighters writing essays on the torn, plaid sofas. I shot-gunned beers in the sketchy stairwell outside the station. The radio station was the first place I brought non-Wellesley friends visiting campus.

Even my family’s dog, Gwen, got a tour of your station. It was my home more than any dorm room.

But radio is about more than just a cool-looking station filled with the favorite song lyrics and signatures of hipster DJs. Radio is about communication, and connecting people by beaming out one broadcast signal and reaching as many ears as possible. That’s how you started, back when you were WBS 730 AM, on April 20, 1942. You, WZLY, were about getting women’s voices heard; you were the very first all-women college radio station.

My first year, your webcasting always seemed to be broken, and so my mom, who lived a half hour away in Lexington, would go grocery shopping at the Wellesley Stop and Shop, timing her errand so she could sit in her car in the parking lot and listen to part of my show. The thrill of that first time I spoke, “For requests, call 781-283-2960,” and a person actually called––even if that person was just my enthusiast mother––I knew someone was listening. Someone heard me. It felt like magic, speaking into that microphone, fading out a song, queuing up the next one, into ears across the world (or at least the town of Wellesley).

When webcasting was fixed, my grandfather would play my show on a computer at his insurance office in Somerville, and call in to request songs from the Goodfellas soundtrack. And when I spent the entirety of my junior year away from Wellesley and webcasting you, my beloved WZLY, made me feel not so far away in snowy, dark St. Petersburg. I would wake up extra-early to listen to my friends’ late-night shows, using Skype to call the station phone to make requests.

Because it was the friends I made through you, WZLY, that made it all worth it. I could always count on someone to show up during Soundtrack System to banter with me on air and keep me company. I actively looked forward to EBoard meetings on Sunday nights––an excuse to lounge around the station and catch up on the week with the individuals who would become my best friends at Wellesley. One rainy, dark, winter day, after getting dumped by my then-boyfriend, H. Tucker Rosebrock ’10 entered the studio to find me slumped and playing the Gary Jules “Mad World” cover from Donnie Darko. He shook his head, offered me a cookie, and then requested something lighter. By the end of the two hours, I felt better. Even the few friends I had who were not WZLY DJs loved to hang out at the station and sit in on my show (Virginia Cary Ritter ’10, Lee Hanae Ung ’10, and Ali Barthwell ‘10 were among the most loyal). 91.5 FM tied us all together.

And you, yourself, WZLY, you became a friend too. The days I had my radio show to myself––sitting alone in the studio, busy enough queuing up tracks that I couldn’t try to multitask and also do homework, but idle enough that I got a chance to just sit, think, and listen to music––I was the most content and happy I ever was in college. I never felt alone or lonely in the station. (Though maybe it was just the presence of that Schneider bathroom ghost.)

You were my community. Other Wellesley students had TZE or ZA, The Hoop or El Table, Blue Notes or Tupelos, Shakes or Upstage, but my society, co-op, music group, production, was WZLY.

Even now, as an alum, I remain loyal to you. The little money I can donate to Wellesley, I try to earmark in your name. I continue to buy Electric Ladyland merch, as I have a soft spot for each new Publicity Director who has succeeded me, and I am impressed by how much they have stepped up their sweatshirt game. (Also, those DJ pins they made are flawless.) I continue to be proud and a little embarrassed by the number of times I found myself wearing more than one of your items at a time: a vintage WZLY t-shirt under my Varsity Radio sweatshirt with my Bitches Love Totebags totebag on my shoulder. When I crashed 2009’s Five Year Reunion this past spring, of course I was part of a group who “broke into” the radio station––which had been left generously unlocked by understanding current DJs. My heart swelled when I saw my old messages scratched into the white cement bricks, found old posters I had designed tacked up, and I smiled when I saw that a note I had sent a recent Publicity Director after buying a new sweatshirt had been taped on the wall near the ceiling.

It’s been years since I last spoke on air, but I still panic with each new threat to your existence. How dare anyone threaten to remove you from your cozy, historic, probably-definitely-not-up-to-code location in the basement of Schneider! I was devastated when I heard the news that the current EBoard decided to sell your 91.5 FM frequency. While my heart hurts that the 91.5 FM era is over, I hope that you will never change in your sense of place, community, and connection.

Plus, I guess, with the FCC out of the way, you can finally be completely wild and free (though we never let the FCC ruin our fun before).

And so I leave you, WZLY, with those seven famous words.

tit shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker,

E.B.

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All images courtesy of E.B. Bartels.

The post Open Letter to WZLY 91.5 FM appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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Dear Gap Body Hidden Underwire T-Shirt Bra Size 36B,

By now you’ve probably disintegrated as much as synthetic shiny material and wire can disintegrate. By now, at least, you are very, very mushy. That is, assuming you weren’t carried off in the mouth of a professor’s dog or tossed in the trash by Wellesley’s fastidious buildings and grounds crew or tacked up as some as some weird trophy by current members of the Wellesley student body. I know that my friend group at least would have made a bizarre shrine to a bra we found in the mud outside of Instead, but maybe that was just us.

I didn’t mean to leave you there, in the mud, behind Instead that night. I promise you. I never intentionally abandoned you. I was just having so much fun – as you remember, my friends and I had rigged up a kiddie pool – a biddy pool, as we called it – full of bubble bath and hot water pumped in through a hose from the Instead kitchen sink, and sat in the warm spring night under the Massachusetts suburb stars, soaking and talking and passing around bottles of wine and Jim Beam.

It was the last week of May, and we were free. We had finished all our work for our classes. Many of us had jobs. We were ready for graduation, which was the next day. It was the time for us to feel excited, empowered, and ready for whatever was next, but mostly we just wanted to sit and soak and talk. We were comfortable with our bodies and each other, secure enough to take off our bras and toss them to the side as we climbed into the biddy pool. Most of all, we were comfortable in this serene Wellesley College bubble that had been our home for four years. We could do anything here: we could skinny dip in Lake Waban or streak on the golf course or climb the fence to get onto the boat dock and share a flask of whiskey. And we were told we could do anything when we left as well: we could be artists and lawyers and academics and mothers and secretaries of state or even the president herself. Rules didn’t stop Wellesley women.

We were just starting to realize what a special thing we had at Wellesley – just how not-the-real-world it was. That revelation wouldn’t fully sink in, for me at least, until many years after I had been away from campus. But that night held the beginning glimmers of appreciation. At Wellesley, during Senior Week, Campus Police might show up by the biddy pool and look at the empty liquor bottles and students in various states of bathing suits and underwear and nudity and shrug and sigh. No arrests, no fines, just a: “Quiet down a little, okay?” And so we continued to lie in the warm, flowery water, talking and drinking and pretending that Senior Week was much longer than a week, and that the ceremony the next day would not change anything.

When finally the bottles were all empty and the water cold and some sensible person suggested we all sleep a little before donning our tams and gowns, I remember walking back to Claflin across campus. That thick foggy mist had settled over Severance Green, and there was something spectacular about the hazy silver air. It seemed only further confirmation that we did not live in the real world at Wellesley College. I was so taken with the beauty of the campus that night, I didn’t even notice that I had failed to put my bra back on under my t-shirt.

I woke up a few hours later in the bright, harsh morning light of my Claflin suite to my roommate standing over me, adjusting his bowtie. “Don’t you have that Russian Department breakfast soon?” I gasped when I saw the time – my parents were probably already sitting in the small, cozy department office on the fourth floor of Founders that had been my second home next to Claflin, and I scrambled to get dressed, trying to ignore the mix of last night’s leftover buzz mixed with the beginnings of the worst hangover of my life. I grabbed my graduation dress and slammed open my dresser to pull out fresh underwear, only to notice that I didn’t have a bra. I had already packed and sent home a large amount of my things, and I had left myself only one bra. The bra I had been wearing the night before. The bra that now sat in the mud somewhere behind Instead. You.

I panicked and threw on the top of a bikini that I happened to have in my drawer – it would have made more sense to wear that to the biddy pool the night before, but Senior Week wasn’t about being practical and planning, it was about spontaneity – and made myself as presentable as possible before rushing to the Russian Department, where both my parents and my three favorite professors gave me a knowing look.

But, for it all, I didn’t miss you. It was tragic, yes, to leave you behind. Bras are expensive, and I wished you were with me when I had to go back to Gap Body in the Ville later to get myself a new bra. And wearing that bathing suit top under my graduation dress and gown all day was not exactly comfortable, but still. If you were collateral damage for one of the best nights of my college life, so be it. Your loss will always represent those perfect Wellesley nights, still far from the real world but full of so much excitement and potential, strong and ready, spontaneous, drunk, happy, full of love, and free.

Please don’t take it personally.

Love,

E.B.

The post Open Letter to That Bra I Lost During Senior Week 2010 appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

—

“Are fish supposed to look like this?”

My two roommates appeared by my side, our faces almost touching as we peered into the tank, so close our breath fogged the plastic. The three of us peered into the one-gallon tank on my dresser, full of neon pink rocks, a fake plant, a gray plastic castle, and a purple-maroon Betta, our beloved Wanda, the mascot of Claflin Hall, room 107, who was not doing well.

“She looks… swollen,” Anna said.

“Kind of puffy,” said Leigh.

“Why are her scales sticking out like that?”

Wanda floated in her tank, barely bothering to swish her fins, ignoring the flakes of food I sprinkled on the surface above her enlarged head. Her scales – normally a bright, shiny metallic purple – were muted and protruding, no longer lying flat against her skin.

Leigh, on the premed track, turned to her computer. After a few minutes of research, she had the diagnosis:

“Dropsy. It’s definitely dropsy.”

The post A Fish Formerly Called Wanda: Dead Pet Chronicles appeared first on E.B. Bartels.