Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, scholar, and a graduate of Wellesley College, class of 2008. Her debut collection of poetry, Arrow, was released in September 2020 with Alice James Books in the United States and Carcanet Press in the United Kingdom, and has received coverage in The New York Times, NPR, and The Guardian. Her first scholarly book, tentatively titled Grave Dangers: Death, Ethics, and Poetics in the Anthropocene, is in progress. She is Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, where she teaches in literary studies and creative writing.

Sumita’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2019, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. Her essays most recently appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her scholarship appears or is forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE), Modernism/modernity, College Literature, and elsewhere. Previously, she was Visiting Assistant Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, at Emory University.

Wellesley Underground’s Wellesley Writes it Series Editor, E.B. Bartels ’10, had the chance to chat with Sumita about publishing, reading, and writing. E.B. is grateful to Sumita for willing to be part of the Wellesley Writes It series in the middle of her book debut!

EB: Thank you so much for being part of the Wellesley Writes It series, Sumita! I’m excited to get to talk to you about writing in general, but especially your debut collection Arrow. Can you start off speaking a bit about how this book came about?

SC: Thank YOU so much! This is such a joy. 

The book that’s now Arrow went through about seven prior full versions. 

EB: Oh my gosh! Wow.

SC: While there’s a lot going on in there, the most fundamental story I wanted to tell was that of the experience of living in the aftermath of severe domestic violence, other entangled forms of assault, and grief (in my case, particularly for my sister, who died in 2014 at the age of 24). The word “aftermath” is a tricky one, because there is no neat and tidy “after” violence or grief, particularly when one considers the varying scales on which various devastations and mournings take place. One of the main narrative arcs of the collection, though, is that of becoming someone who can embrace love and joy and care and kinship even when those concepts have been weaponized or altogether foreclosed for all of one’s childhood and adolescence. And that’s a narrative that requires a sense of an “after” that I am deeply fortunate to have personally experienced. That’s the main tightrope the collection is invested in walking, which forms the through-line around which and with which its other preoccupations and obsessions orbit and collide. 

EB: Wow, thank you so much for sharing all that, Sumita. I especially like what you said about the lack of a “neat and tidy” ending – isn’t that always the case when it comes to writing about things from our own lives? We want real-life closure but sometimes have to settle for just narrative closure instead.

I meant to say also congratulations on the publication of your collection not only in the US but in the UK as well! What was it like to put that version together? The same? Different?

SC: I was wildly lucky in this regard. Some years ago, I published the poem “Dear, beloved” in Poetry, before it was in Arrow—and in fact before this version of Arrow even existed. At that point, the editor of Carcanet reached out to me to say that the press would be interested in bringing out my collection in the UK. I kind of panicked! 

EB: I totally would have, too!

SC: As I mentioned, there was no Arrow yet. I was on a much earlier version that was “complete,” but when I looked at it, I knew: This ain’t it. And querying US presses was therefore not something I was prepared to do at that time; UK publication was even less within the realm of my imagination. I essentially told them the manuscript was in progress and asked if I could reach back out when it was ready and if I had secured a US publisher. Some years later, the collection was picked up by Alice James in the States and I reached back out to Carcanet to see if they were still interested, and they were! Alice James and Carcanet worked together during the production process, so while there were certainly some differences in approaches across either side of the pond, much of it was really streamlined, and that is all thanks to the outstanding and immense labor of the extraordinary editors and staffs at both publishers.   

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Go to Wellesley Underground for the complete conversation!

The post Wellesley Writes It: Sumita Chakraboty appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

Anissa M. Bouziane ’87 was born in Tennessee, the daughter of a Moroccan father and a French mother. She grew up in Morocco, but returned to the United States to attend Wellesley College, and went on to earn an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University and a Certificate in Film from NYU. Currently, Anissa works and teaches in Paris, as she works to finish a PhD in Creative Writing at The University of Warwick in the UK. Dune Song is her debut novel. Follow her on Twitter: @AnissaBouziane.

Wellesley Underground’s Wellesley Writes it Series Editor, E.B. Bartels ’10 (who also got her MFA in writing from Columbia, albeit in creative nonfiction), had the chance to chat with Anissa via email about Dune Song, doing research, publishing in translation, forming a writing community, and catching up on reading while in quarantine. E.B. is especially grateful to Anissa for willing to be part of the Wellesley Writes It series while we are in the middle of a global pandemic.

And if you like the interview and want to hear more from Anissa, you can attend her virtual talk at The American Library tomorrow (Tuesday, May 26, 2020) at 17h00 (Central European Time). RSVP here.

EB: First, thank you for being part of this series! I loved getting to read Dune Song, especially right now with everything going on. I loved getting to escape into Jeehan’s worlds, though sort of depressing to think of post-9/11-NYC as a “simpler time” to escape to. My first question is: Reading your biography, I know that you, much like Jeehan, have moved back and forth between the United States and Morocco––born in the U.S.A., grew up in Morocco, and then back to the U.S.A. for college. You’ve also mentioned elsewhere that this book was rooted in your own experience of witnessing the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11. How much of your own life story inspired Dune Song?

AMB: Indeed, Dune Song is rooted in my own experience of witnessing the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11. As a New Yorker, who experienced the tragedy of that now infamous Tuesday in September almost 19 years ago, I would not have chosen the collapse of the World Trade Center as the inciting incident of my novel had I not lived through those events myself. So yes, much of what Jeehan, Dune Song’s protagonist, goes through in NYC is rooted in my own life experience. Nonetheless the book is not an autobiography — I would consider it more of an auto-fiction, that is a fiction with deep roots in the author’s experience. The New York passages speak of the difficulties of coming to terms with the tragedy that was 9/11 — out of principle, I would not have chosen 9/11 as the inciting incident of my novel if I did not have first hand experience of the trauma which I recount. 

EB: Thanks for saying that. I feel like there is a whole genre of 9/11 novels out there now and a lot of them make me uncomfortable because it feels like they are exploiting a tragedy. Dune Song did not feel that way to me. It felt genuine, like it was written by someone who had lived through it.

AMB: As for the desert passage that take place in Morocco, though I am extremely familiar with the Moroccan desert — and have traveled extensively from the dunes of Merzouga to the oasis of Zagora — this portion of the novel is totally fictional. That being said, I am one of those writers who rides the line between fiction and reality very closely, so if you ask me if I would ever let myself be buried up to my neck in a dune, the answer would be: yes. 

EB: How did the rest of the story come about? When and how did you decide to contrast the stories of the aftermath of 9/11 with human trafficking in the Moroccan desert?

AMB: Less than six months after 9/11, in March of 2002 I was invited back to Morocco by the Al Akhawayn University, an international university in the Atlas Mountains near the city of Fez. There I gave a talk which would ultimately provide me with the core of Dune Song: the chapter that takes place in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where following a mass in commemoration of the victims of the 9/11 attacks, an Imam from a Mosque in Queens was asked to recite a few verses from the Holy Quran. The Moroccan artists and academics present that day were deeply moved by my talk (which in fact simply recounted my lived experience); they told me that I should turn my talk into a novel. I thought the idea interesting and began to write, but within a year the Iraq War was launched and suddenly a story promoting dialogue and mutual understanding between the Islamic World and the West seemed to interest few, so I moved on to other things. Nonetheless, the core of Dune Song stayed with me.

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Go to Wellesley Underground for the complete conversation!

The post Wellesley Writes It: Anissa M. Bouziane appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

Patrice Caldwell ’15 is the founder & fundraising chair of People of Color in Publishing – a grassroots organization dedicated to supporting, empowering, and uplifting racially and ethnically marginalized members of the book publishing industry. Born and raised in Texas, Patrice was a children’s book editor before shifting to be a literary agent at Howard Morhaim Literary Agency.

In 2018, she was named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch honoree and featured on The Writer’s Digest podcast and Bustle’s inaugural “Lit List” as one of ten women changing the book world.

Her anthology, A Phoenix First Must Burn – 16 stories of Black girl magic, resistance, and hope – is out March 10, 2020 from Viking Books for Young Readers/Penguin Teen in the US/Canada and Hot Key Books in the UK! Visit Patrice online at patricecaldwell.com, Twitter @whimsicallyours, and Instagram @whimsicalaquarian.

Wellesley Underground’s Wellesley Writes it Series Editor, E.B. Bartels ’10, had the chance to converse with Patrice via email about publishing, reading, and writing. E.B. is grateful to Patrice for willing to be part of the Wellesley Writes It series, even with everything else she has going on!

EB: When did you first become interested in going into writing and publishing? Did something at Wellesley spark that interest?

PC: For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved writing. It’s how I best express myself. That love pretty naturally grew into creating stories. I’ve always had a very vivid imagination. I’ve also always been pretty aware that publishers exist. I remember at a young age noticing the logos on the spines of books (notating the imprint/publisher), so by the time I was a teen I could recall which publishers published my favorite books (served me very well in interviews, haha) and was curious about that process. But I was a theater kid, intensely, that’s what I thought I would do, but then I decided to go to Wellesley and majored in political science (especially theory—I took ever class Professor Grattan, she’s brilliant) but then dabbled in a bunch of other subjects, including English. I think English courses definitely strengthened my critical thinking, but I absolutely do not think you have to be an English or creative writing major in order to work in publishing or be a writer. My theater background is just as helpful as is my political theory one. (I have friends who are best-selling authors who did MFA programs and others who never went to college.)

Wellesley was my safe space. I came back to myself while at Wellesley. I wrote three (unpublished) manuscripts during my time there, starting the summer after my first year, and I held publishing and writing related internships. I also took a fantastic children’s literature course taught by Susan Meyer (who’s a children’s author herself!) that changed my world. I highly recommend it. We studied children’s literature, got to talk to an author and a literary agent, and we wrote our own stories. I later did a creative writing independent study with her, and I truly thank Professor Meyer for expanding my interest in writing and publishing.

EB: How did People in Color Publishing come about? What goals do you have for the organization? What would you like people to know about it?

PC: I founded People of Color in Publishing in August 2016 to allow people of color clearer access into the book publishing industry, better support networks, and professional development opportunities. It really is about sending the elevator back down for others after climbing (& maybe even assembling) the stairs.

We’re currently working towards nonprofit status. You can learn more about us and our initiatives at https://www.pocinpublishing.com/ and sign up for our newsletter, which is incredibly well done. As you’ll see when you visit the site, the organization really is a team effort. I don’t and couldn’t do this alone; I’ve had an amazing team with me from day one. We each play to our strengths and work really well together. (The org is very active on Instagram and Twitter, too!)

EB: I am really excited about your collection A Phoenix First Must Burn, coming out from Penguin Random House on March 10, 2020. What inspired you to put together that anthology? What was challenging about the process of compiling the anthology, and what was rewarding about it?

PC: Thank you; I’m so excited for it as well. I talk about this more in the book’s introduction, but I was inspired by my eternal love for Octavia Butler—the title even comes from a passage in Parable of the Talents—as well as similar adult market anthologies like Sheree R. Thomas’s Dark Matter, and wondering what one for teens would look like. The answer is power and imagination like I’ve never before seen, in the form of a kick-ass, #BlackGirlMagic anthology that’s hella queer—I love it and wouldn’t have it any other way.

Before I became a literary agent, I was a children’s book editor. The editing of these stories was the easy part. It was super fun. The hard part was wrangling of everyone, haha. Thankfully they were amazing to work with and I wasn’t doing it alone—my then editor Kendra Levin also has a fantastic editorial eye.

As for what was rewarding, my younger self needed this. Like I said, it’s Black and queer. Since Toni Morrison passed, a day hasn’t gone by in which I’ve thought, about how she wrote for Black people, especially Black women, unapologetically. I feel that deeply. I got to work with some of my favorite writers writing today. How often does someone get to say that, you know. And, I grew a lot as a writer. I never thought I could write a short story, but I did. We’ve been getting some really great early reviews (like this beautifully-written starred review from Kirkus, OMG!) But going back to how my younger self needed this, the most rewarding thing has been the people who’ve reached out how excited they are to read it and how much they’ve been craving a book like this. It’s a dream come true. A dream I strategized to reach, worked my butt off on, and so yeah, I’m over the moon.

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Go to Wellesley Underground for the complete conversation!

The post Wellesley Writes It: Patrice Caldwell appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

Here’s the beginning of the interview:

Kwan Kew Lai ’74, M.D., D.M.D., is an infectious disease specialist who has volunteered her medical services all over the world and the author of Lest We Forget: A Doctor’s Experience with Life and Death During the Ebola Outbreak. In 2004, after the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, she spent three weeks in India, caring for survivors. She soon left her position as a full-time Professor of Medicine in Infectious Diseases and Internal Medicine at UMass Memorial Medical Center and created a half-time position as a clinician, dedicating the other half of her time to humanitarian work.

Since 2005, Lai has volunteered as a mentor to health workers addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Vietnam, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria, Malawi and has provided earthquake relief in Haiti and Nepal, hurricane relief in the Philippines and drought and famine relief in Kenya and the Somalian border. She has also worked with refugees of the Democratic Republic of Congo and internally displaced people in Libya during the Arab Spring and South Sudan after the civil war and treated Ebola patients in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Most recently, she served as a medical volunteer in the Syrian refugee camps in mainland Greece and in Moria refugee camp on Lesvos, Greece for refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iran and the countries of the Sub-Saharan Africa and in the world’s biggest refugee camps for the Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Lai has blogged extensively about her experiences.

Originally from Penang, Malaysia, Lai came to the United States after receiving a scholarship to attend Wellesley, where she studied molecular biology. “Without that open door I would not have gone on to become a doctor,” Lai wrote in her Doctors Without Borders bio. 

Lai has received numerous awards for her work, which include being a three-time recipient of the President’s Volunteer Service Award. In 2017, she was awarded Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award. In addition, Lai is the lead author of many publications and presentations. Her research has included HIV studies, infection control, hospital epidemiology, and antibiotic trials. She has served on many committees, task forces, and boards, including the Governor’s Advisory Board for the Elimination of Tuberculosis in Massachusetts. She is also an avid marathon runner and paints when she is inspired.

Wellesley Underground’s Wellesley Writes it Series Editor, E.B. Bartels ’10, had the chance to converse with Lai via email about Lest We Forget and about her experiences at Wellesley and beyond. E.B. would also like to make note that Lai made time to answer these questions even while busy with her 45th Wellesley Reunion! 

EB: How did Lest We Forget come about? What inspired you to write the book?

KKL: I first became aware of the Ebola outbreak in March of 2014, I began to follow it very closely. I read about Ebola when I was in my training as an infectious disease specialist. It is a deadly viral infection but it usually occurs in Africa and I knew that it would be unlikely for me to see a patient with this infection. In the summer of 2014 when WHO finally acknowledged the seriousness of the situation, the nightly TV images of people desperate to get into a hospital and bodies lying in the streets because they were too infectious to be touched, moved me. I knew I had to be in West Africa to volunteer.

I started blogging a few years ago when I went to volunteer to enable my family and close friends to keep abreast of my situation and so I did the same when I started volunteering in the Ebola Treatment Unit (ETU). Deeper into my volunteering I was very moved by the courage and resilience of the patients and the dedication and dogged determination of the people who worked alongside me and who risked their lives working in the frontline. After my first stint in West Africa, I was interviewed by NPR international health correspondent, Nurith Aizenman, about my experience and she had urged me to write a book. I had thought about that as well before she brought it up but I was too taken up into my second stint of Ebola volunteer by then. When I was in Sierra Leone doing my second Ebola volunteering, I was also contacted by an agency who wanted to represent me with either writing a book or making a documentary. However just before I left for Sierra Leone, I signed with my first agent about my book on Africa which is about my experiences as a volunteered doctor in HIV/AIDS and my work in the refugee camps. I did not feel it was ethically right to deal with another agency. Nevertheless, writing a book about Ebola became more urgent, I wanted to write this in honor and memory of the people afflicted by Ebola and the frontline bola fighters who put their lives on the line. It took me awhile for me to convince my agent to present my book on Ebola first before my book on Africa.

Go to Wellesley Underground for the complete conversation!

The post Wellesley Writes It: Dr. Kwan Kew Lai appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

Here’s the beginning of the interview:

Crystal Marie Fleming, PhD, is a writer and sociologist who researches racism in the United States and abroad. She earned degrees from Wellesley College and Harvard University and is associate professor of sociology and Africana studies at Stony Brook University. Fleming writes about race, sexuality, and politics for publications including The Root, Black Agenda Report, Vox, and Everyday Feminism, among others, and she has tens of thousands of followers on social media. She is the author ofResurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France, which was published by Temple University Press in 2017, and How To Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide, which was published this past fall by Beacon Press. Dr. Fleming is also writing a children’s book Rise Up! How You Can Join the Fight Against Racism, to be published by Henry Holt in fall 2020.

Wellesley Underground Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Shelly Anand, and Wellesley Underground’s Wellesley Writes It Series Editor, E.B. Bartels, had the opportunity to speak with Crystal about her new book, her evolving education around race and racism at Wellesley and Harvard, and her thoughts on the state of race and racism in the U.S., France, and the world.

Crystal: Thank you so much for taking the time to check out my book and to feature it on Wellesley Underground.

Shelly: We saw people talking about it on Twitter and both E.B. and I had a chance to read it over the holidays.

Crystal: Thank you for reading it!

E.B.: Of course! I am always excited to read a book by a fellow Wellesley alum.

Shelly: We were both interested in hearing about your process for how this book came about and when you realized that you wanted to write it. How did you make this book become a reality? What sparked the idea of I need to write a book about how people need to be less stupid about race?

Crystal: The short version is after the 2016 election I was feeling a lot of things: disbelief, despair, and anger, but also really motivated to write a book for the general public. My first book, Resurrecting Slavery, was an academic book, which was based on my dissertation. That came out in 2017. And while I was really happy with that professional milestone, I didn’t want to restrict my writing to a small group of academic specialists. So, I wanted to write something for a broader audience but I wasn’t sure what it was going to be. Then, finally, the idea for How to Be Less Stupid About Race crystallized in the aftermath of the 2016 election. As you can tell from the title, it was really about me being fed up with a lot of the racial ignorance I saw across the political spectrum. After I came up with the title and the pitch, I found a literary agent (Michael Bourret of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret), wrote a chapter that spring, and then really completed the bulk of the writing between summer 2017 and early 2018.

Shelly: E.B. and I loved the book’s blend of your personal experiences, pop cultural references, and citations to academic works in sociology and critical race theory. How did you find the balance in what voice to use, as both an academic and a younger black woman on social media?

Crystal: That’s a good question.  I would say that blogging and social media really helped me bring together the academic topics with language that could, hopefully, reach more people. I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to write clearly about my scholarly work and interests on social media, where millions of people have read my writing over the years. I wanted to write beyond an academic context so my blog was a space for me to reactivate my creative writing and to share some of my thinking in public and that was very different from strictly academic manuscripts. Once I started writing on my blog, and then eventually on Twitter, I developed a new way of distilling and explaining really complex ideas.

The great thing with social media is that people will tell you what they think about what you are writing. Sometimes folks will ask you: “What do you mean by that?” That helps with that distilling and clarifying. I started getting feedback from people and what I found was that a lot of people understood what I was saying, which was pretty reassuring.

Academics usually don’t receive any special training for writing in an accessible manner, so it took me a long time to develop that skill and find my own voice.  I really wish graduate schools and doctoral programs included more opportunities to learn to write clearly so that academics can broaden our teaching and impact, but instead we typically learn to write with a lot of jargon.

Go to Wellesley Underground for the complete conversation!

P.S. If you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Fleming and you live in the Boston area, be sure to come to her talk at Framingham State University at 4:30pm on Monday, February 4, 2019! I will be there!

The post Wellesley Writes It: Dr. Crystal M. Fleming appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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Diamond J. Sharp is a poet and essayist from Chicago. She has performed at Chicago’s Stage 773 and her work has been featured on Chicago Public Radio. She has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Vice, Pitchfork, Lenny, PANK, The Offing, Fjords, Winter Tangerine, JoINT Literary, Wellesley Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, BLACKBERRY and others. Sharp has been an editorial fellow at The Root, a features editor at Rookie, and a staff writer for Laundry Service. Her essay “Friends for Life” and her interview with Margo Jefferson were recently featured in Tavi Gevinson’s anthology Rookie on Love. A Callaloo fellow, Sharp has also attended the Wright/Hurston workshop, and is a member of the inaugural Poetry Foundation Incubator class. She has a B.A. from Wellesley College and an M.F.A. from the Pratt Institute. Sharp lives in Brooklyn.

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Diamond J. Sharp 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.

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