New England Review

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Gretchen Schrafft

Gretchen Schrafft during her time at Middlebury (left) and today (right).

Intern Cristina Farfan ’21 interviews fiction writer Gretchen Schrafft ’08, who was an intern for NER in 2007 while she was a student at Middlebury College, and then went on to be a staff reader for the magazine. At Middlebury, she completed a double major in English and American Literatures and Sociology-Anthropology. Discussing both NER and her own writing, Schrafft gives an insight on her path from NER intern to published fiction writer.

Cristina Farfan: Where are you now, both geographically and professionally?

Gretchen Schrafft: I currently live in Denver, where I’m in my third year of the PhD program in English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver. I came to the program to work on a novel, pursue research connected to that novel, and continue developing my skills as a teacher of creative writing and literature.

CF: You were a staff reader for NER for several years, as well as having been an intern. What were some highlights from your time with the literary magazine?

GS: I was a reader for the magazine from 2012 to 2019, and an intern while a student in 2007. But I would say the most impactful thing, in terms of my connection with the magazine, was actually before either of those things, when I took Carolyn’s class on literary magazines my junior year. I’d guess it’s probably similar to what you’re doing now as an intern; our class functioned as a mock editorial panel, working with pieces that had actually been submitted to NER. I found my class’s reactions to the pieces fascinating, and especially remember the conversation about a story by Suzanne Rivecca called “Uncle.” It came out in NER later that academic year and went on to become a part of her collection, Death Is Not an Option, but when we saw it, it was just another submission with no particular significance attached to it. The story deals with the main character’s experience of trying to speak about sexual abuse at the hands of a relative, and probably at least partially because of that, at least in my memory, pretty much everybody struggled to articulate their feelings about it. I only remember one person being able to stand up for it and say that they liked it and that it should be published, but even then, knowing that so strongly, having a hard time explaining why.

That class conversation stuck with me, and contributed to something I tell my students when they are beginning to learn how to workshop fiction: that it’s so much harder—and also more important—to describe why you like something than why you don’t. As a student in Carolyn’s class, I realized I wanted to learn more about how to do that, which is why I approached her about an internship when the class ended, and why I eventually became a reader.

CF: Are there any particular skills you developed as an undergraduate, either in school or in an internship, that you believe have most benefited you in your professional work?

GS: Oh yes! And this is all in addition to NER (see above). I’d never written a short story before my sophomore year, when I took a workshop with Rob Cohen. The excitement and encouragement I got out of that class led me to seek out an internship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where I spent two summers helping to facilitate the Work Center’s summer workshop programming, which, among many other things, meant I got to attend packed literary readings multiple times a week and meet writers at every stage of their careers. This, together with the opportunity to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference on a student scholarship, exposed me to a wealth of contemporary writing and made the reality of the writing life at least a little bit less opaque. Without these experiences it seems a lot less likely I would have finished college determined to write and publish fiction.

In terms of beneficial skills though, while I certainly did not realize it at the time, arguably the single most useful thing I did at Middlebury was to write a senior Sociology/Anthropology essay. It was an ethnographic exploration of Provincetown as an art colony, and in order to create it I read a bunch of history and theory, interviewed artists and community members, and distilled all that stuff into prose. (Linus Owens was my kind and very thoughtful advisor for the project.) I use some combination of the skills I built up doing that when I write fiction, when I work as a journalist, when I write critical material, and when I teach.

CF: How has your time with NER influenced your own writing?

GS: Carolyn inviting me to become a reader made me feel valued for my ability to understand fiction before I really got to experience that through publishing my work. The added confidence this gave me helped me to continue working towards my goals. Also, having an insider’s understanding of how lit mags operate never hurts when you’re submitting your own work!

CF: What were some steps you took to become a published fiction writer?

GS: There are so many steps! I’ll highlight two.

Earlier in my writing life, I wrote very slowly. Every sentence had to be perfect and evaluated again and again before I could move on. I could be working on one short story for a year, and then the submission/acceptance (or, much more commonly, rejection) process takes such a long time, and all of these factors made me wonder frequently if I was deluding myself about my abilities.

Trying my hand as a freelance journalist forced me to write faster and be less precious. It gave me the opportunity to work closely with editors and learn practical considerations I hadn’t thought much about before. It enabled me to see my work in print and get paid for it and be treated like a professional writer. This did wonders for my writing process and my belief in myself.

Subsequently, doing my MFA at Oregon State University—because it is a funded program where grad students receive tuition remission and teach in exchange for a stipend, and because it is a rare environment where faculty show you, in their care and attention for you and your work, that your writing has value—enabled me to concentrate on my fiction in a way I hadn’t been able to do before. I was able to produce a lot of work I was really proud of over my two years there, and I finished certain it was possible for me to have a career as a fiction writer and teacher of creative writing.

CF: Of your own written pieces, are there any that you favor or would like to highlight?

GS: I’m still a fan of my story, “The Diaphanous Casting Agency,” which was published by Joyland in 2016. I wrote it several years before reporters broke the Harvey Weinstein story, and I remember trying to explain aspects of the piece after an early draft was workshopped in a way I don’t think I would need to now (though also, let me be clear, this was an early draft so it was also likely plain old confusing).

CF: Does your writing line up with the types of genres you like to read? Have you read anything noteworthy recently?

GS: I write speculative fiction, and read a lot of it too. A favorite that came out relatively recently (and was a favorite of reviewers here and in the UK, too), is Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall.

One of the perks of being a fiction writer is you make friends with other fiction writers who publish wonderful work. Some recent awesome books authored by folks who I can personally attest are also awesome are Corey Sobel’s The Redshirt, Kate Reed Petty’s True Story, and Marjorie Sandor’s The Secret Music at Tordesillas. Request them from your local bookstore or library!

CF: Thanks for your time, Gretchen Schrafft, best of luck with your writing.

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Emily Luan

Emily Luan now (left) and as a student at Middlebury College (right)

NER intern Cristina Farfan ’21 talks to Emily Luan ’15, about choosing poetry and finding a place in the larger literary world. During her time at Middlebury College, Luan was an English major with a focus on Creative Writing and a minor in Chinese, and she worked for NER in the summer of 2014.

Cristina Farfan: Where are you now, both geographically and professionally?

Emily Luan: I live in Brooklyn, New York, teaching undergraduate poetry at Rutgers-Newark from my apartment, writing reviews of upcoming poetry collections, and working in fundraising for small arts nonprofits. I’m also working toward completing my first full-length poetry manuscript.

CF: What were some highlights from your internship with NER?

EL: I worked at NER in the summer of 2014. At the time, I was also working at the Proctor Bake Shop and bussing tables at Storm Cafe (a little restaurant in town by Otter Creek that has since closed), and the magazine office was a quiet reprieve from the heat where I could stamp envelopes, read back issues, or file through mailed submissions. I was beginning to think about a future in writing, and these small tasks helped to normalize that big unknown. I remember e-mailing writers I admired and seeing my name listed in the final printed issues and feeling like a very small piece of a larger literary world.

CF: Are there any particular skills you developed as an undergraduate, either in school or in an internship, that you believe have most benefited you in your professional work?

EL: A lot of little things followed me the years after my internship with NER. I gained a solid literacy of the ins and outs of nonprofit magazine publishing, which I carried to my first job out of college. Learning the names of different journals and what they publish, understanding how Submittable works, poring through archives, and sorting through subscriptions was an invaluable introduction into basic magazine workflows. Seeing the back end of submissions—what a bio and cover letter should look like, how to format a manuscript—took a lot of guesswork out of the process when I too began submitting my own work.

Most importantly, I read so much writing of all genres that summer, which exposed me to more contemporary writing than is typical in an undergrad English degree. Carolyn really stressed how important it was for me to form my own opinions on the pieces that were sent up or down the submission queue. The ability to articulate what draws you to a work (a skill I think I will never stop learning) is now the basis of all my work. Carolyn and Marcy made the publishing process really transparent to me and allowed me space to make my own judgments, which I will always be grateful for.

CF: How do your two occupations, poet and a part-time lecturer, interact with each other?

EL: I’m a verbal processor, so getting to talk poems and craft with my students is a real privilege. The greatest challenge of teaching poetry, I think, is undoing a preconceived notion of poetry. I often ask my students to observe the poem as a visual object and then begin to name the emotional effect it has on them. I try to get them out of the immediate mode of analysis so that when they themselves turn to the page, they can write with less judgment and more heart and sound and image.

It’s taken some time for me to land on this process, mostly because teaching poetry requires you to articulate what a poem is or does in its most essential form. It’s a deeply complex and exciting project that has forced me to navigate my own murky conceptions of where the power of a poem lies. I’m not yet sure what impact working through these questions has had on my writing process. Perhaps less judgement of my own writing, or a bit more clarity about how I hope my poems will move others upon a first read.

CF: Did you see yourself as a poet back when you were an intern at NER, or did you have an equal interest in all the creative writing genres?

EL: I think by that point I’d settled on poetry. It never felt like it was a choice to be made because I “knew” poetry was it for me, which is romantic and unlike me but also feels true. In my undergrad fiction and nonfiction workshops, my classmates would also sometimes tell me my essays or short stories read like long prose poems—I took the hint.

CF: How do you choose which pieces of writing to teach in your classes?

EL: There are certain poems I always teach at the beginning of the semester. Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” and Li-Young Lee’s “I Ask My Mother to Sing” are two notable examples. Depending on the theme of the class, I try to meld the “classics” of the last few decades and pre–twentieth century with poems that are being published right now—last week, this year—so that my students always have a sense that the world of poetry is happening right now, all around us, and is also tied to a long poetic lineage that is filled with political and historical questions. I crowd-source recommendations a lot too. As you can imagine, my syllabi are always changing depending on what I’m reading any given month! I’m also intentional about assigning poets of color, poets from outside of the US, and poets who are working with multiple languages on the page. It helps me and my students explore how our interactions with poetry predate our literary educations, perhaps through our families, oral traditions, or cultural backgrounds.

CF: Are there any particular poems you would recommend? Or texts beyond poetry?

EL: I recently revisited Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Song,” a poem I wish I’d read when I was in college. This year, Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony and Hardly War have been really important to me in the way they enact the empathy of translation on the page. I try to incorporate translation into my practice and reading whenever I can—books from Zephyr Press and the Chinese translations in NER’s Vol. 36 No. 2 (2015) are great places to start.

CF: Thanks for your time, Emily, and best of luck with your teaching and writing.

Categories