#wellesley writes it

Kwan Kew Lai ’74, who WU interviewed in summer 2019, has a new book out: Into Africa, Out of Academia: A Doctor’s Memoir.

In 2006, Kwan Kew Lai left her full-time position as a professor in the United States to provide medical humanitarian aid to the remote villages and the war-torn areas of Africa. This memoir follows her experiences from 2006 to 2013 as she provided care during the HIV/AIDs epidemics, after natural disasters, and as a relief doctor in refugee camps in Kenya, Libya, Uganda and in South Sudan, where civil war virtually wiped out all existing healthcare facilities.

Throughout her memoir, Lai recounts intimate encounters with refugees and internally displaced people in camps and in hospitals with limited resources, telling tales of their resilience, unflinching courage, and survival through extreme hardship. Her writing provides insight into communities and transports readers to heart-achingly beautiful parts of Africa not frequented by the usual travelers. This is a deeply personal account of the huge disparities in the healthcare system of our “global village” and is a call to action for readers to understand the interconnectedness of the modern world, the needs of less developed neighbors, and the shortcomings of their healthcare systems.

Order the book here!

Belmont Books is also having a virtual event at 7 pm (EST) on January 19, 2021. Save the date! 

Join us as as we welcome back Dr. Kwan Kew Lai, to discuss her latest book, Into Africa, Out of Academia: A Doctor’s Memoir, with Dr. Nahreen Ahmed. Click here to register for this Zoom webinar.

About Into Africa, Out of Academia:

In 2006, Kwan Kew Lai left her full-time position as a professor in the United States to provide medical humanitarian aid to the remote villages and the war-torn areas of Africa. This memoir follows her experiences from 2006 to 2013 as she provided care during the HIV/AIDs epidemics, after natural disasters, and as a relief doctor in refugee camps in Kenya, Libya, Uganda and in South Sudan, where civil war virtually wiped out all existing healthcare facilities.

Throughout her memoir, Lai recounts intimate encounters with refugees and internally displaced people in camps and in hospitals with limited resources, telling tales of their resilience, unflinching courage, and survival through extreme hardship. Her writing provides insight into communities and transports readers to heart-achingly beautiful parts of Africa not frequented by the usual travelers. This is a deeply personal account of the huge disparities in the healthcare system of our “global village” and is a call to action for readers to understand the interconnectedness of the modern world, the needs of less developed neighbors, and the shortcomings of their healthcare systems.

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

In 2006, after volunteering in the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, Lai left her position as a Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and worked part-time as a clinician, while dedicating her time to humanitarian work. Lai volunteered in the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Vietnam, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria, Malawi and provided earthquake relief in Haiti, Nepal, drought and famine relief at the Kenyan and Somalian border, hurricane relief in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, and the gulf coasts. She worked with refugees of the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Syria in Moria camp of Lesvos in Greece, and the Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, in war-torn Libya and Yemen. She treated Ebola patients in Liberia and Sierra Leone. During the peak of the COVID pandemic, she volunteered at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, New York and on St. Croix of the US Virgin Islands.

Into Africa, Out of Academia: A Doctor’s Memoir is about her experiences in Africa. Her book debut, Lest We Forget: A Doctor’s Experience with Life and Death During the Ebola Outbreak was published in 2018. Lai is a resident of Belmont.

Dr. Nahreen Ahmed is originally from the Greater Philadelphia area. She attended DrexelUniversity College of Medicine and subsequently went on to residency at theUniversity of Illinois in Chicago where she concomitantly completed her MastersDegree in Public Health, and was also invited to stay on for a Chief Residency.

She went on to pursue a fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical care atNYU/Bellevue, and subsequently joined the faculty at the Hospital of theUniversity of Pennsylvania where she is currently an Assistant Professor inClinical Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care as well as aPenn Center for Global Health Scholar.

She launched her Global Health Career byfounding the Bangladesh Ultrasound Initiative, a training program for criticalcare physicians in Dhaka, Bangladesh and then proceeded to become the Head of Ultrasound for two non-profits MedGlobal and Bridge to Health with whom she hasworked to bring Ultrasound training, and medical care to crisis zones such asYemen, Sierra Leone, Rohingya Refugee Camps as well as low resource hospitalsin Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

Dr. Ahmed has a strong belief in capacity building with the aide of technology and telecommunications and that the key to sustainability in global medicine is via medical education and a hands-ontraining approach which empowers local clinicians.

Here are the links to the event pages:
Lai/Ahmed website page
Lai/Ahmed Facebook page

From the new series on Fiction Advocate– 

How I Got Here: You Learn, I Pay

Privilege is a topic that doesn’t always receive the subjectivity and nuance it deserves. In “How I Got Here,” writers reflect on their experience of privilege (or lack thereof) in their writing careers. We hope these personal essays will help us appreciate the complexities of individual experience and view each other in a clearer light.

An MFA is a shot in the dark. It is a degree that costs thousands and thousands of dollars to pursue and yet has absolutely zero (0) guarantee of any type of employment. You get an MFA out of sheer love or delusion. When I applied to writing programs in the fall of 2011, I did so simply because I knew I loved writing and wanted to get better at it. I also applied because I had, and have had for my entire life, my own personal patrons of the arts.

There have been many calls lately for writers and artists to be more transparent about their financial situations, from the Twitter hashtag #PublishingPaidMetoessay collectionstothis very series. I remember when I first read Ann Bauer’s essay on Salon about how her heart surgeon husband “sponsors” her writing career and how much I appreciated her honesty. So, let me lay it all out there for you. When it comes to education, the rule in my family is: they pay, no questions asked. It’s like that scene in The Sopranos, when Meadow’s boyfriend tries to pay for Tony’s dinner and Tony is pissed. But instead of “You eat, I pay,” it’s: “You learn, I pay.”

Education has always been a big deal in my family. Both of my parents have Master’s degrees, my mother’s specifically in Music Education, which she used as a piano teacher. Both of my grandmothers achieved higher ed degrees at a time when it wasn’t common for women to even complete high school. My paternal grandfather nearly completed a PhD from MIT in engineering (everything but the dissertation); my maternal grandfather dropped out of law school, but he did so to take over a local driving school because he loved to teach kids how to use cars. Classes, studying, learning, teaching, books—I was taught that these were the most valuable types of currency. I knew from a very young age that there were limits to what I was allowed to ask for in a toy store or a clothing boutique, but the local bookstore? The word “no” did not exist there. In middle school, I memorized my dad’s credit card number so I could order books on the Barnes & Noble website without bothering him (so advanced for 1998!), and he never questioned what I was buying, as long as it was books. He also never questioned how much I was buying because he had access to that other, more literal type of currency—money.

Read the rest of the essay on Fiction Advocate. 

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).

______

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.