#wellesley underground

Interview by Cleo Hereford ‘09

Wellesley Underground loves seeing our sibs involved in the political process at all levels but particularly the local, municipal level where substantial change can be affected. In North Carolina, one of our sibs has joined the race for Durham City Council in Ward 1. A 2009 Wellesley graduate, Marion Johnson also received a degree in Public Policy from Duke University in 2014. After time spent in Washington, DC, Johnson returned to North Carolina, where she grew up, and currently works for Frontline Solutions, a black-owned consulting firm that “serves the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors.” 

We caught up with Marion to find out more about her run for City Council. 

Thanks for chatting with WU, Marion! You grew up in North Carolina, and you’re now running for Durham City Council. Why run for the City Council and why this year?

Thanks so much for having me! I’m a big fan of y’all. I’ve worked on a few Durham City Council campaigns, and running for office has been something I’ve been strongly considering doing for several years. I planned to take 2020 off from all political work so that I could really think through whether now was the time. Obviously, 2020 did not turn out to be a relaxing year at all! But it did become a very clarifying year. Durham was already facing a housing crisis and an economic crisis, and when COVID-19 hit, it just magnified those crises for our most vulnerable neighbors. So that clarified for me that we need as many leaders as possible who are committed to making progressive choices for Durham, to make this city as accessible, affordable, and livable as possible. And now was the right time. 

Tell us a little bit about Durham and what you love most about the city.

Durham is hands down my favorite place I’ve ever lived. I came here to get my masters’ degree in public policy, and fell in love with this city that has the strongest commitment to community organizing and local advocacy I have ever seen. Durham is just as passionate about social justice as it is about food, so I’ve definitely found my people. 

After attending Wellesley and then living in Washington, DC, you returned home to North Carolina. How did your time away change your perspective on your home state?

I didn’t expect to miss North Carolina so much! My plan when I went to college was to move to Washington and get involved in federal or international policy. I had that typical adolescent need to get out and do something prestigious. But actually working at the federal level taught me how slowly that work typically moves. Things move so much faster at the local level, and you see the tangible impact on people’s day-to-day lives so clearly. So I think my priorities shifting from prestige to purpose made me see North Carolina differently, and moving to Durham specifically sealed the deal for me. 

The general theme of your campaign’s platform seems to be ‘justice:’ housing justice, environmental justice, accessibility justice among others. Why is that specifically the focus of your campaign? 

People have been talking for a long time about the difference between equality and equity. I think we as a society are (or at least need to be) at the point where we stop talking about that distinction because it isn’t moving us forward anymore. We need to be talking about justice, and about liberation. So justice feels like the right grounding for the moment and movement we’re in. 

UnderSocial Justice, you call for a commitment from the City Council to be “explicitly anti-racist, not just non-racist.” We’ve heard a lot about this distinction particularly in the last year. In terms of municipal governance, how can city governments be more intentionally anti-racist especially in a city like Durham where about 40% of residents are Black?

To me, anti-racism is about actively dismantling the status quo, which upholds white-centered power structures; and building new structures and systems that center communities of color. In a city like Durham, Black people are disproportionately hurt by a status quo that keeps displacing, criminalizing, and ignoring long-standing communities. So we have to explicitly commit to redressing harm, and not hide behind race-neutral language. We need to focus the kind of attention that typically goes to white communities, especially wealthy ones, on our communities. Even things as seemingly mundane as sidewalk repair or lead paint removal should prioritize majority Black and brown neighborhoods. 

Speaking of the last year, it’s been eventful to say the least. First, how are you and second, what did you come away with after 2020 in thinking about things like advocacy and service (Non Ministrari sed Ministrare)?

Thanks for asking! Overall, I’m doing well. The pandemic really magnified my existing mental health issues - I have anxiety, depression, and OCD, and all of my typical coping mechanisms got shattered by the quarantine. I lost a Wellesley sister to COVID-19. My dad, who lives in Nigeria, contracted it as well. I haven’t hugged my mother, who also lives in Nigeria, since 2019. But I also have the privilege of full-time employment, at a job that values our mental health. I have the privilege of a happy marriage to a woman who doesn’t make me feel unsafe in my own home. I was able to quarantine at home without significant disruption to my life, and I have health insurance. So I feel more responsible than ever to fight for a world where more people have the kind of baseline stability that I do, frankly. That world is not just possible, it’s critical. Because people are dying for the lack of it. 

Lastly, at WU we’re all for fighting the good fight but we’re also big proponents of self-care (and napping) so we also have to ask how are you caring for yourself these days? 

I have really doubled down on being a plant lady. I have so many houseplants now, and also have an ever-growing garden in our backyard. Tending to plants and growing food is very restorative. I also play The Sims 4, which is where I create the world I want to see in real life. My Sims world has numerous unions, assertive green policies, and well-designed (not to brag) affordable housing. So when I need to blow off steam, I’m likely heading to my garden or my Sims. 

____

For more information on Marion’s campaign, check out her website: https://www.mariontjohnson.com/

As someone who has followed the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s ups and downs over the last few years, I naturally activated a 7-day Apple TV trial in order to watch Prince Harry and Oprah’s 6-part series The Me You Can’t See. After watching the trailer, I thought the series would be emotional but perhaps wasn’t fully prepared for the full weight of the experience that was to come. 

I watched the first episode that featured Lady Gaga and Chopped winner Rashad Armstead among others and quickly realized that this was not a binge-able series (at least not for me). Over the course of the series, viewers are introduced to mental health experts but also the stories of real life people globally who have experienced mental health struggles. 

Boxer Ginny Fuchs who struggles with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Syrian refugee Fawzi currently living in a refugee camp in Greece and grappling with trauma in the wake of his brother’s violent war-related death. 

Ambar who was diagnosed with schizophrenia after the death of her father. 

Glenn Close’s sister, Jessie, who was diagnosed with bipolar I disorder.

The best thing about the series was not only the range of different stories and diagnoses but also the way in which those in various stages of healing are depicted throughout the series. Some like Lady Gaga (referred to by Stefani in the series) have found a set of supports and treatments that work for them while others like Rashad had just started the process of healing at the time of filming. My favorite part of the series was the discussion of the Zimbabwe-based Friendship Bench. The Friendship Bench model utilizes members of the community, many being grandmothers or maternal figures, training them to provide a supportive ear on a bench located in the community for those unable to access more formal treatment options. Discussion of this model served as the basis for further conversation about global mental health access particularly in rural or under resourced countries as well as how existing community resources can be used in order to address mental health issues and build connections for people who may feel isolated or disconnected. 

‘Enjoyed’ is probably not the right word to describe my reaction after finishing the series over the course of a week (again breaks definitely required). Having experienced my own challenges with depression, anxiety and trauma some episodes were especially hard to get through and at times required either a yoga session or for me to watch something light and/or mindless (The Parkers, for example). I will say, however, that I was profoundly affected by the series. It was comforting, for lack of a better word, to see people in the healing process working through their issues whether through treatment or building community or spending time with family but more importantly, owning their mental illnesses not as their identities but  more so as a part of their lives that they fully acknowledge they must contend with. For those who may be wondering or hesitant, this was not the Oprah and Harry show though they did share their own experiences with mental health in a way that felt like additional narratives among others being told. 

If you’re interested in behavioral health access or simply open conversations about mental illness, The Me You Can’t See is a worthwhile and, in my opinion, a must see series.

Trigger warnings for discussions of: child loss; death; eating disorders; OCD; schizophrenia; sexual assault; substance abuse; suicide/suicidal ideation; unwanted pregnancy; war-related death

For those who haven’t been following, India is currently overrun by the Coronavirus with upwards of 300,000 new infections being reported daily. The country lacks sufficient vaccine access for its citizens and is running out of hospital beds, oxygen and medication. 

Wellesley Underground stands in support of all of our Indian siblings, both those residing in India now as well as those with family members in the country. While many in the US and other Western countries are hyper focused on “getting back to normal,” it is clear that there is, yet again, two realities for many of us as it relates to issues of inequity, equitable access to healthcare and oppression. 

If you wish to support ongoing COVID efforts in India, we have put together a list of resources and suggested places to financially support if you are able: 

• Ongoing Fundraisers Related to COVID-19 Distress 
• Twitter Thread of ways to help/funds/etc.(@MythiliSK)
• India is Facing a COVID Crisis(Equality Labs; includes resource list)
• #SponsorAGirl(Myna Mahila Foundation)
• Hemkunt Foundation 
• KhalsaAid
• GiveIndia
• Feeding From Far
• CARE - India COVID-19 Emergency 
• COVID Relief Donation Form + Suggestions (@IndiraDammu)
• Mission Oxygen 
• South Asian Student Fundraiser(GiveIndia)

Having your first kid during a global pandemic makes for a very weird experience. Though the much anticipated “quarantine baby boom” turned out not to be the reality, there were still many pregnancies that started, continued, or wrapped up in 2020-2021.

Being pregnant during a pandemic is about as isolating as you’d expect. Reduced immunity plus *gestures vaguely* everything meant that a lot of people grew a person in unprecedented ways. What I struggled with the most (beyond the overarching panic and dread of a world on fire) was that there was no benchmarking. I could have made it nine months at work before telling anyone, because they only saw me on video conference from the clavicle up. There were no hospital tours, no childbirth classes, no expectant parenting groups. 

Whenever you’re going through it, there seems to be no middle ground between dry, evidence-based medicine and projecting yourself entirely into the astral plane for communing with the ancestors. Here are a few things that helped me through my pregnancy, and some things I wish I’d known earlier.

Illustration Credit: Mercedes deBellard

Prep work

There are plenty of guides about how much you should have saved or what kind of physical shape you should be in. Some of that is helpful.

Oddly missing from those guides is “get a handle on your traumas.” Talk to a therapist. Talk to a partner. Talk to yourself in a diary where you ask yourself questions about what you want to carry with you and what terrifies you about having a kid. There are questionnaires for people donating living organs, and it does not hurt to say, “Hey, if there is a problem with ANY OF THE MYRIAD OF THINGS THAT CAN GO WRONG, how would I work through those feelings? What are the boundaries I want for this process that will make me feel safer or in control?””

If you’re getting pregnant with someone who will raise this kid with you, get into it with them. Have very specific conversations about what you will do about parental leave, diapers, daycare, requests for tattoos from a twelve-year-old. My husband and I would read the Care & Feeding parenting column from Slate, debating how we would handle the conundrums of different letters before getting the “answer” from the columnist.

Also, get as full a picture of family pregnancy as you can. You might know your own birth story, but what about the other half of the genetics you’ll be juggling? I, personally, managed to mash up my MIL’s hyperemesis gravidarum and my mom’s gestational diabetes which has been…not a great time.

And ask *lots* of questions. I had pretty low-stakes issues making it into the world, but it turns out all my dad’s generation of siblings all needed to stay in the NICU. My dad had multiple full-body blood transfusions in his first days. That would have been helpful to know!

That said, what I was most shocked to learn is that there is no way to know what kind of pregnancy you’re going to have until you’re in it. Even if you’ve had a kid before—you can have wildly different experiences! There’s literally no way to know in advance!

Pro tip: you can’t know for certain what pregnancy will be like for you, but getting a broad picture can help it seem less like a cliff jump into the unknown.

Getting pregnant will take longer than you think

Once again, for those in the back, GETTING PREGNANT WILL TAKE LONGER THAN YOU THINK. 

For starters, you will need to stop not getting pregnant, which has been the focus of most young adult lives since your fertility started. I had to get my IUD removed and also get revaccinated for a bunch of things (rubella, flu, tetanus). If you were on the pill, it may take a few months to get everything out of your system. Then, you will do something to try to get pregnant and wait for two weeks. Whether it takes two weeks, two months, or ten years—it will feel like a very long time.

Especially because by this point, I felt ready to have a child. I looked at the calendar and thought, “Oh good, the kid will be X horoscope sign. They’ll have their birthday during the school year. Their birthday will be X year, and that will be easy to remember.” I made plans.

And then I just…didn’t get pregnant. And kept not getting pregnant. Every month of getting my period was so frustrating. I had charted my cycle! I had taken my temperature to figure out if I was ovulating! I swallowed these giant prenatal vitamins that are the size of a human toe!

Some people do get pregnant instantly, and many blessings on their ultra-efficient plumbing. Some people get pregnant when they don’t want to, and they should be able to have a choice about whether to have those kids. 

For most people, there will be a while between deciding to have a child through pregnancy and getting one started. It is happening everywhere, to countless people, and is one of the hardest, loneliest, most unintelligible experiences—made worse by the fact that people are shoving their feet into their own faces around you for the entire experience. You’re surrounded by people getting pregnant (magically! easily! with barely a whisper of effort!), people asking you when you will become pregnant, people congratulating you on not being pregnant because you can go out, drink, get really into aerial silks, etc. And you will have to not punch them in the face.

If you are under 35, most doctors will not even talk to you about fertility issues until you have tried for a year. That’s a minimum of twelve cycles of trying, twelve “I feel really good about this month” conversations, twelve pregnancy tests that say you’re not pregnant, twelve months at a job you may not like but stay at because they have good parental leave benefits or insurance coverage.

After a year (and after you get on their schedule) a fertility specialist can offer you fun adventures like getting dye injected into your fallopian tubes to see if they’re blocked, approval to shoot yourself up with expensive hormones (at home! with a real needle!), and any of the other amazing methods technology and medicine have discovered that tweak any of the multitude of handoffs that need to happen for a pregnancy to “take.”

If I can ask one thing, assume at least one person in earshot of your public conversation is trying to get pregnant and can’t—and be a little kinder.

Pro tip: get the cheaper pregnancy tests with lines rather than the electronic ones with words, because there are few bigger downers than seeing “NOT PREGNANT” month after month.

Find a practitioner you like

Because eventually, you will want to strangle them. It’s important to start with someone you like, so that the strangling phase will be late in the pregnancy and not a sustained hatred for nine full months.

Whether you’re pregnant or working with a reproductive specialist, having someone who listens to you will help. Some people cannot deal with hippie woo woo, some cannot imagine a pregnancy that’s all medical jargon. If you’re a person of color or want to have certain cultural traditions respected from the get-go, vetting at the beginning can avoid being at loggerheads later. Take some time to reflect on good and bad medical experiences you’ve had, and if you have options, choose someone who will not make you hyperventilate every time you have an appointment.

For me, I knew I needed a doctor who would not give me a hard time about weight gain. I have a history of disordered eating and (pre-pregnancy) was competing as a super heavyweight lifter, so am used to plenty of unsolicited opinions about my weight and what I should be doing with it. Pregnancy is fraught enough to take a single off-hand comment to an extreme, and I was deeply uninterested in negotiating an anorexia relapse while battling all the pregnancy changes.

If you have some time, shuffle up your pre-pregnancy appointments to get a feel for different doctors. I pulled up ZocDoc for my insurance network and came up with some finalists: had my annual exam by one, my IUD taken out by another, and my MMR re-vaccine done by a third. I knew my practice was right for me when the doctor offered to take all weight measurements patient-blind for the entire pregnancy.

Pro tip: think about what style of doctoring would make you feel better during this time, and give yourself the gift of one less thing to stress about.

Taking information in

Like the best of us, I enjoy a Wikipedia rabbit hole. I’m an especially good finder and am frequently tagged in as the friend who can unearth the secret Tumblr or yearbook photo of an elusive crush. I can find anything, and have a Jeopardy-level mental trapper keeper for bizarre edge-cases.

This is…not great for pregnancy, especially when unleashed on the “seems legit” constellation of mommy blogs. There are a million things that can go wrong with a pregnancy, and past a certain point, knowing more does not make you more likely to avoid or survive them.

Think of it like a fractal. Having the general shape of the tree: useful. Hyperfocusing so hard on one of the branches that you lose days in front of the computer screen, diving deeper into medical texts and unconfirmed narratives until you completely glaze over: less so.

Knowing this about myself helped me manage the unceasing amount of feedback offered by everyone from doctors to bystanders. I limited myself to one book (Emily Oster’s Expecting Better, which is wonderful), a doctor I trusted, and small doses of the Wellesley pregnancy group. I still couldn’t stop myself from reading every op-ed about miscarriage and stillbirth, but I was able to process them as things I was choosing to read instead of a compulsion I could not turn off.

Pro tip: really think about how much information serves you. It can feel like knowing every little thing will make you an expert who is ironclad against any malady. That’s, unfortunately, not how it works.

Sending information out

Like information gathering, you’ll want to decide how, when, and who to share information with. Having a pandemic pregnancy gave me a lot more power over when I disclosed than I would have had normally—I was sick as hell and it would have been a first-month discussion at work rather than a third-month one. It has allowed others to have entire pregnancies in private, only announcing when the baby has been delivered.

I found it helpful to think of pregnancy updates in concentric rings: my husband and I in the innermost circle, immediate family and some friends next, wider friend group and extended family, and then everyone else. I didn’t have to give minute-by-minute updates to everyone in the world if I didn’t want to, and a quick “Oh actually that’s private” was usually enough to keep any especially nosy questions to a minimum.

There were people who surprised me with wanting to know much more, and some who heard “baby” and unsubscribed. Both are fine!

Pro tip: if at all possible, curate a group of friends who are far from having first kids so that you can be assured of a rapt audience of “WHAT can happen??” Plus, at least one friend with a recent kid who’s very organized who can tell you what’s helpful to buy and what is BS.

Particular pandemic weirdness (good and bad)

While it has been lonely, it has also been wonderfully private. Some particular strange markers:

• It is very odd to go from several months of zero physical contact with anyone outside my apartment directly into an intravaginal ultrasound.
• My husband is going to meet our doctor at the delivery, because no one except patients is allowed past the lobby at our practice.
• I will likely not need to buy any maternity clothes, because my pandemic outfits of blousy shirts and stretchy pants to work from home will suit perfectly.
• No one touches my stomach unless I want them to.

Remote birthing classes allow you to snicker as much as you’d like from the comfort of your couch.

Things I did not know and wish I had

The way they count how far along you are starts from the first day of your last period. That is not when you got pregnant, but is the easiest way to have a consistent range for all patients (who may or may not be tracking ovulation spikes).

It is normal to have spotting-level breakthrough bleeding at some point during your pregnancy. The books will tell you this. Your doctor will tell you this. I am telling you this now. It will not make a damn bit of difference, because the moment you see blood, you will panic and be certain you are having a miscarriage. No one will be able to convince you otherwise until you get checked out.

Your entire digestive system slows waaaay down to accommodate a pregnancy, and is part of the reason for nausea. I had heard that you will need to pee all the time, but hadn’t heard that you will almost entirely stop pooping. And then once a week, you will crap yourself inside out.

The placenta can grow wherever it wants, including smack-dab over your cervix. This offends me more than I can say. That’s where the baby needs to go out! (C-section is required in these cases)

A cesarean birth is a horizontal cut, like an envelope opening and then they squeeze the baby through it. I always pictured it vertical, like opening a book.

Acronyms are a minefield on pregnancy forums. For months, I read posts thinking “FTM” meant “female-to-male trans person” instead of “first-time mom.” Don’t be afraid to Google to keep your bearings, but also feel free to create your own—DH can be “Dear” or “Damn” Husband depending on context.

“Morning sickness” is a misnomer. It can happen all day. It can happen for your whole pregnancy, though most women see a gradual decrease after the first trimester. I’m mid-way through my third trimester, and still throwing up six times a day. If I had known that earlier, I would not have tried to “stick it out” for as long as I did: cooking meals from scratch, insisting that pre-packaged snacks were for wimps. If you are sick, get comfortable EARLY. You don’t get extra points or a better baby for staying miserable, so you might as well lean in to Couch and Cheese Central. If it clears up, great. If not, at least you’re not already tired from trying too hard.

Around 4% of babies are born on their due dates. Do not assume your third trimester will be the length you would like it to be. My doctor has proposed a 37 week induction (because of all the sickness and gestational diabetes). While that is technically full-term, that news was given to me in such a way that low-balled the panic of being A FULL MONTH EARLY. As in, LOSING A THIRD OF THE TRIMESTER.

The baby is lower than you may expect—actual location is generally half-way between navel and nethers. If you’re patting the top of a pregnant person’s stomach (with their permission), you are far away from where the kid is.

There is no good news during a pregnancy. The best you can hope for is continuing to meet the baseline. I am so much more understanding of gender reveal parties, because it is literally the only test result that you can have an opinion about. No ultrasound or blood test will come back with, “Congratulations, your child is gifted!” or “They’re going to be so good at tennis!” It is nine straight months of finding out you’re high risk or not for sickle-cell anemia or tuberculosis. I stopped writing them down after awhile because it felt like every one was, “Oh damn, I didn’t even know we were still concerned about that.”

“Round ligament pain” is the technical term for sharp, stabbing pain in your groin caused by all the ligaments in your hips and crotch helpfully loosening to allow for gestation and birth. This can start as early as 14 weeks, which one would think is way too fricking early for it, but nope. You’d be wrong. The general recommendation for this is to keep your knees together, to which I say, “That particular ship has left the harbor.”

One would think that nearly a year into the pandemic that I would have the hang of spending the majority of my time indoors at home and taking all of the necessary precautions to both avoid getting and spreading COVID. Alas, this week was one where I felt particularly exhausted and, to some extent, despondent. Initially in thinking about it, there was no real reason that I could pinpoint that would account for how I was feeling. As I mentioned, we are long into this pandemic. I have been keeping up with Yoga with Adriene at least four times a week, have a healthy currently reading and to be read pile, have Half and Half cued up on Netflix for a light distraction. I have a solid self-care practice.

Then I thought about that Wellesley Alumnae survey I had just completed.

“How satisfied are you with your life?”

A simple question but one that brings up so many feelings and emotions, mostly heavy and negative for me.

The truth? I am not at all satisfied with my life.

I know rationally that comparison is the thief of joy as they say but in this Instagram/Twitter/LinkedIn/social media age, one can’t help but see what others, especially other Wellesley alums, are into and compare, compare, compare. Law degrees and medical school and new homes and books coming out and weddings and babies, etc. etc. etc.

Then I look at my own life, which on the surface, is not that bad considering how many people in the US are struggling financially due to the pandemic (a fact that when I consider my own internal complaining makes me feel worse and ungrateful). Compared to the 12 year old me, however, who when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up for the 6^th grade yearbook had visions of being both a film producer and writer or the 18 year old who wanted to be Secretary of State, the 34 year old me is slacking. To be fair, I know and can acknowledge that I have had both of series of traumas  including some in adulthood that have seriously affected my life, mental health issues that at points were either ignored or white knuckled through and a lack of economic privilege and a safety net that matters when it comes to opportunity and risk taking.  Still, that one question triggered me in a way that was unexpected.

I never expected to be 11 years out of Wellesley and on an unclear path. To not have a graduate degree (yet). To still be living in my hometown that has never suited me. To get on calls with my friends and feel like I have no “life events” to share. To feel like I am not doing anything particularly worthwhile. To still be thinking about all the ways I wish I could have done Wellesley differently had I not entered two months out from housing insecurity and family turmoil.

It all could have been different but it is not and I cannot change that as much as I wish I could.

To add to that, being an empath during a time where law enforcement continue to kill people who look like my family members or me simply for being black in America. Watching half a million people die during a pandemic due to this country’s neglectful and downright criminal response to the virus. Seeing some in this country completely wash their hands of taking precautions as soon as reports about Black, Latinx and Indigenous people being disproportionately affected by COVID were published (or in defense of their fReEdOmS depending on who you ask). Performative allyship and superficial DEI trainings. A contentious election. An attempted coup.

I wish I could conclude on some happy note, but that is not the reality of where I am at this week or frankly since June.

“How satisfied are you with your life?”

In 2021? Not satisfied.

Thank you for asking, Wellesley.

_____

Anon ‘09

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.  

EB:How did you begin writing poetry in the first place? What was your path to becoming a writer?

SC: I didn’t come into much of a sense that I was interested in poetry and in literature until college. When I got there, I didn’t have a sense of really any passions and skills that I had, and that’s not imposter syndrome speaking—it’s because I had a terrible record in high school and found nothing inspirational there, and I was also pretty busy attempting to survive the violence I was experiencing at home and working toward moving out, which I did before college. In my first year and my sophomore fall at Wellesley, I took a really broad smattering of courses, including (with wild, and probably inappropriate, disregard for prerequisites in both cases) Advanced Shakespeare with William Cain and Advanced Poetry Writing with Frank Bidart. I was very much not good enough for both of those courses! But even as I was flailing around in them, something in my mind clicked: this was something I was willing to be terrible at until I started to understand it a bit better. These were puzzles that I liked, questions I liked, problems I cared about dwelling with. It was pretty much “love at first confusion.”

EB: I love that idea: “this was something I was willing to be terrible at.” That 100% nails how I feel about writing, too.

So, obviously, as you just said, Wellesley was very important in your trajectory as a poet – the title of your book is a reference to a Frank Bidart poem! Which other faculty, staff, fellow students have influenced or inspired you? Are there any professors or classes you would tell young Wellesley writers that they 100% have to take?

SC:Following “love at first confusion,” I essentially made a second home of the first floor of Founders, so my answer to who at Wellesley influenced or inspired me could fill multiple pages!

EB: I love Founders. I miss Founders.

SC: I will invariably accidentally leave someone out and feel guilty, so I offer my mea culpas in advance. In addition to Bill Cain and Frank Bidart, I am beyond grateful to Dan Chiasson, with whom I worked on both my literary studies (including my thesis) and my poetry, and who graciously offered me more mentorship than I’d ever experienced in my life before that point; to Kate Brogan, from whom I got the bug for twentieth-century poetics, which remains the focus of my literary studies research; to Yoon Sun Lee, who taught the theory class when I took it, and planted a hugely important seed that I didn’t even know had been planted until much later simply by being a brilliant Asian American literary scholar (not a role I had ever before seen filled by someone of this subject position); to Larry Rosenwald, who was the first person I had ever met in a literary context who both knew that English was not my heritage language and, in his infinite and genuine passion for multilingualism, viewed that fact as a strength.

I wish I’d had more of a chance to get to know my peers while actually at Wellesley—my life circumstances while I was in college differed from the typical Wellesley experience in ways that made doing so challenging (for one, I worked multiple jobs the entire way through), but I’ve gotten to better know many people I knew at Wellesley more in the years since and that’s been a wonderful experience.

EB: I’ve also made a lot of Wellesley friends post-Wellesley. The Wellesley experience never ends, in that way.

SC: Since I’ve already spoken to the coursework that inspired me, I’m going to zig a bit where your last question zags: there isn’t a single course I would tell young Wellesley writers or literary enthusiasts that they 100% have to take. I don’t think one could go wrong with anyone I’ve named here (and I’ve been really excited to learn about the new additions to the English department: I would have loved to have learned from Cord WhitakerandOctavio González, and have heard wonderful things about both!). But I think that what made the Wellesley experience truly influential for me was that I had the opportunity, like Whitman’s “Noiseless Patient Spider” (though, um, not very noiselessly or patiently), to “launch’d forth filament, filament, filament,” and really listen to what spoke to me. I came in with no preconceptions, no expectations, no firm career plan (or even career plan). Knowing what undergraduates at environments like Wellesley frequently pressure themselves or feel pressured to do (or achieve or produce or attain), I don’t want to offer advice along the lines of a “must-do.” Rather, try things out and truly listen to yourself. What’s your “love at first confusion”?

EB: I know from personal experience that writing can be a really lonely practice. Who did you rely on for support during those really frustrating writing moments? Other writers? Your spouse? Friends? Fellow Wellesley grads? What does your writing/artistic community look like?

SC: All of the above! The thing is, for me, I don’t think writing is a lonely practice. When I feel most energized about writing, it is because I feel like I am in a conversation—or, to put a finer point on it, when I’m in a conversation that is nestled within hundreds of thousands of other conversations that have happened for millennia, are currently happening all around me, and will continue to happen after I’m a hunk of dirt. Tapping into that is often what brings me to the page in the first place.

EB: That’s such a good point.

SC: So when students, for example, feel really isolated or alone in their writing life, my first recommendation is to remind themselves of their beloveds. These may be actual living ride-or-die humans in their lives; these may be ghosts of writers and artists past that are important to them; they might be their most frequently bustling group text or their favorite TV show. Honestly, if one’s thinking of this question as broadly as I recommend, those beloveds probably belong to all of the above categories, to some degree. When you write, even if none of these beloveds are your subject or your audience or anything quite that easily analogous to the process, they are with you, and they have formed who you are before you’ve even picked up a pen or turned your computer on, so they are with you when you are writing, too.

EB: What is it like to now be teaching poetry to undergrads? Are you channeling your inner Dan Chiasson?

SC: Ha! Thank you for that—I just got a visual of myself trying to go as Dan for Halloween and I cracked myself up. (Dan, if you’re reading this: sorry!) I teach undergraduates and graduate students at Michigan, both in literary studies and in creative writing, and I love it very, very much. My students of all levels are brilliant, thoughtful, curious, and wildly imaginative people who often help bolster my faith in the ongoing importance of literary work. Honestly, particularly during this year, I have frequently been in awe of my students and have felt overwhelmingly lucky to be able to work with them.

EB: I know that you are also currently working on your first scholarly book, Grave Dangers: Death, Ethics, and Poetics in the Anthropocene.How do you approach writing poetry vs. writing an academic work? How is your creative process similar or different?

SC: For me the two have been inseparable since Wellesley. I essentially ask similar questions and have similar preoccupations no matter what genre I write; in terms of deciding which thought belongs to which genre, or which project a particular moment is better suited to, that’s often a matter of thinking carefully of what shapes that I want the questions to take, and what kinds of “answers”—in quotation marks because I don’t strive at certainty or mastery in either genre, or in anything for that matter—for which I imagine reaching or searching. For me, the processes for writing both are very, very similar: I draft wildly and edit painstakingly. It’s more a matter of closely listening to my patterns of thinking on any given subject or day in order to find out if the rhetorical patterns of academic prose would better suit them or if the rhetorical patterns of poetry would better suit them.

EB: What are you currently reading, and/or what have you read recently that you’ve really enjoyed? What would you recommend to read while we (are continuing to) lay low during this pandemic?

SC:2020 was such an incredible year for books! Which feels somewhat perverse to say, considering everything else was dismal and it was hardly an easy year to put out a book, either. In terms of new poetry releases—and this is not a comprehensive list, so my mea culpas here too to the many that I have loved and will end up accidentally leaving off—I have this year read and loved: Taylor Johnson’s Inheritance, francine j. harris’s Here is the Sweet Hand, Craig Santos Perez’sHabitat Threshold, Jihyun Yun’sSome Are Always Hungry, Eduardo Corral’sGuillotine, Rick Barot’sThe Galleons, Jericho Brown’s The Tradition, Shane McCrae’sSometimes I Never Suffered, Victoria Chang’s Obit, Danez Smith’s Homie, Aricka Foreman’sSalt Body Shimmer, and Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem. Two prior-to-2020 poetry collections that I reread every year are Brigit Pegeen Kelly’sSongand Lucille Clifton’s The Book of Light. I’m currently reading Claudia Rankine’s Just Usand Alice Oswald’s Nobody.

EB:Also what about Lucie Brock-Broido? I know she was a teacher of yours at one time, and she was a professor in my MFA program. I had the pleasure of once sitting in on her lecture, and it was life-changing. Are there any particular poems of hers you would suggest?

SC: I joined Lucie’s summer workshop held at her home in Cambridge, MA the summer after my sophomore year at Wellesley, and I stayed in it until I moved to Atlanta for graduate school in 2012. “Life-changing” is right—in fact, it feels a little too modest. She was transformative. A cosmos-realigner. A hilarious, brilliant, extraordinarily kind meteor. A fox with wings. A unicorn. I could go on, and on. For a reader new to her work, I’d recommend starting with her posthumously published “Giraffe” in The New Yorker. I think “A Girl Ago”and“You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World”fromStay, Illusion(2015) are also remarkable entry points. After that, I would probably recommend reading her collections in this order: first Stay, Illusion; then A Hunger (1988); then The Master Letters(1997); and finallyTrouble in Mind(2005). The sequencing here isn’t intended as a ranking in the least—my own personal favorites toggle back and forth depending on where my own “trouble in mind” lives, and each collection is dazzlingly strong and has its own raison d’être—but rather because I think the story those collections tell in that order would let a new reader have a full sense of Lucie’s poetics outside of the story that mere chronology can tell.  

EB:Any advice for aspiring young poets?

SC:Filament, filament, filament. Let your writing life be as huge and wild and disparate as the whole person you are—don’t feel like there’s only a part of you that’s “worthy of poetry,” and don’t let anyone else tell you what kind of writer you should or shouldn’t be.

EB:Thank you, Sumita! That was wonderful.

Wellesley alum Sejal Shah published a collection of essays titled This is One Way to Dance: Essays (University of Georgia Press) last year and recently spoke withHYPHEN Magazine about the process of putting out the collection last summer in the midst of a global pandemic and renewed protests for racial justice. 

Here is an excerpt from that interview: 

[Interviewer Ansley Moon]: You write in the introduction to the book, “I don’t subscribe to the notion of fixed genres — not when I and others move from one culture to another, from one kind of dance to another; from what looks like a poem to what looks like an essay to what could be a story. The world wants to know where to place you, how to classify you. I began my writing life as a poet and later turned to prose. In the last several years, for me, creative nonfiction has encompassed the wildest field of voice, thought and performance. I view the essay as hybrid and nonbinary, the aesthetic as queer.” This is probably one of my favorite descriptions of the essay, the lyric essay, and in so many ways, it reminds me of dance, of movement and even resistance. How does this resistance come into play in your writing?

[Sejal Shah]: Thank you so much. I worked for a long time on the introduction. For me, resistance came in terms of pushing back against disciplinary boundaries and classifications: how genre was defined and defended in MFA programs and publishing and how my work, for as long as I can remember, certainly since graduate school, did not seem to fit in the genres or disciplines as I encountered them. I asked poets Sarah Gambito and Cathy Park Hong to help me launch my book —  and I think that in part that was reclaiming my earlier life and identity as a poet. Sarah, Cathy and other poets read and recognized some of the essays as prose poems and called them as such. And that also felt like a kind of resistance and support. Though I had been known as a poet while growing up and in college, my writing did not fit the prevailing aesthetic in poetry at UMass; that was okay, I was there on the fiction side of the MFA program. I also had to contend with sexual harassment. I learned I needed places outside of creative writing to survive as well as interdisciplinary spaces like Asian American Studies, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, Women’s Studies and non-academic spaces like dance and yoga classes. These spaces and interdisciplinary work outside of my university became sites of resistance and community-building for me.

I think a lot about self-determination and self-definition. I’m late to the term intersectionality, but I attended a women’s college and found my voice through reading and speaking in interdisciplinary spaces. The lyric essay, a term I first heard through poets Philip WhiteandLisa Williams, felt as though it was a form that could hold my penchant for images, compression and the experience of writing around and through traumatic experiences in which the language itself fractures. Lyric essays showed me a way to hold space for silence, utterances and the unsayable.

In these essays I did not directly address some of the complexities of experience about class, sexuality, power, speech and silence in academia and in my family and culture. I identify as queer and bisexual. My writing community, my friends, my partner all know this, but I chose not to name it as an identity category in the book or in promotion. It’s something I’ve been ambivalent about writing, because of my traditional and religious parents. I did not name my queerness directly in my book, perhaps out of deference to their conservative beliefs, my father’s compromised health, and out of respect for our sometimes-difficult relationship, but I wish I had, actually, because it’s an important lens. I tried to signal my positionality, politics and aesthetics through claiming the genre itself as queer and nonbinary, ending the book on a note about the legalization of gay marriage on my wedding day and exploring my ideas about genre, politics, legibility and publishing in companion essays, which appeared close to when Dance was published. I wrote about genre slippage and hybridity in a craft capsule for Poets & Writers Magazine called “Breaking Genre.” I felt fewer rules and restrictions in nonfiction than I did for poetry and fiction, maybe because I didn’t study nonfiction (my MFA was in fiction).

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To read the full interview:HYPHEN: “I’m Never Not Thinking About Home and Kinship” (December, 2020)

This is One Way to Dance: Essays is out now. 

During the last four years, there have been many issues and concerns that have competed for the public’s attention: the Muslim ban, family separations, an impeachment, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, protests against police brutality and the recent election to name a few. Noted but perhaps less at the media forefront has been the implementation of specific policies both under Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and within individual states that aim to “re-envision” public education through a very conservative lens. In terms of public education, many of the conversations in recent years have focused on the school choice movement and the increasing use of standardized test scores to hold schools “accountable” and label them “good or bad.” The re-envisioning (or dismantling depending on your vantage point), however, which has really solidified in the last few years is unfortunately much broader than that.

InA Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of the School, authors Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider (hosts of the popular podcast Have You Heard) go beyond talking about the conservative agenda and public education solely in terms of privatization and standardized testing.  A Wolf explores other aspects of this agenda: vouchers, the rise of (pre-COVID) virtual schooling, the idea of “unbundling education,“ deregulation, limiting the role of organized labor, the use of ratings and advertising in public schools, and, at the heart of it all,  free market thinking. More than just positioning efforts to dismantle public education as only a conservative, Republican ideology, Berkshire and Schneider also acknowledge the ways in which Democratic lawmakers have also contributed to a climate in which some not only see education and the way it is currently delivered  as something that needs to radically change but also an sector to profit off of at times to the detriment of the most vulnerable student populations. 

Both in laying out the current state of public education and providing  key historical context, Berkshire and Schneider provide an extensive yet well laid out and easily understandable assessment of the issues at play in light of the substantial funding  and efforts being allocated toward a very specific re-envisioning of public schooling that relies less on the idea of public education as a public good meant to benefit the collective  and more so on individual needs that prioritize  choice, competition and cost cutting. A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door is a must read for anyone interested in the current state and future of public education in the United States.

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If purchasing, please consider buying from your local independent bookseller. 

Originally posted on An Education.