Senior thesis update

I am a ball of stress.

First things first, I’m writing about college comfort foods as graduation approaches. If you want to participate (students and recent grads only), you can answer some questions here. Feel free to share with the college students in your life!

Today’s newsletter is another draft from my senior project. The Artist’s Statement serves as an introduction to the project, outlining my influences and motivations. I hope you enjoy.

When I decided to major in Literary Studies, I felt like a fraud. I loved writing, but I was no writer. Although I spent much of my free time in high school fascinated by books, magazines, and newspapers, I never felt legit. By sophomore year, most of my classmates were taking advanced English courses, but I was never able to finish the placement test.

“I’m never going to get into a good college!” I wailed to my mom when she picked me up after my first failed attempt. The same thing happened the next year, so I decided to put more effort into the articles I wrote for the school newspaper. By senior year, I was promoted to editor-in-chief and had my sights set on studying journalism in college. I loved writing for the paper (and for my “regular” English teachers), but without the honors classes to back up my efforts, writing felt frivolous. It wasn’t that I didn’t take it seriously—I did. I considered myself someone who was good at writing, but not a writer. What I loved most about writing was arriving at an answer. I posed questions like, “What role does the Wife of Bath play in the Canterbury Tales?” or “What happened to the stories of our Black alumnae?” Journalism and I felt like the perfect match.

And then came the first field assignment from my journalism professor freshman year. We were instructed to ask strangers in Washington Square Park if they smoked weed. Scandalous. I couldn’t do it. As a first-year student at The New School, I was already embarrassed enough to be at the bottom of the totem pole again. How dare my journalism professor make me talk to strangers? I guess I didn’t quite understand what journalism looked like in the so-called “real world.” I just want to write, I thought to myself with tears in my eyes. More shame rushed over me after my failure to talk to anyone. I missed my box. 

Over Thanksgiving break of freshman year, my creative writing professor assigned to us some essays out of Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and I felt like I was in middle school again.

In seventh grade English class (which my grade school called “Integrated Language Arts” in an effort to stand out from the dozens of other private schools in the region), we were required to hand in weekly journal entries. My teacher was known for being a pushover, but I was determined to impress her anyway. At the start of each month, she gave us a calendar full of journal entries, and we were required to hand in five journal entries a week; I always handed in ten because I thought they were so much fun. After our unit on poetry, a group of classmates and I kept writing poems during our ten-minute snack break, and by the end of the year we gifted her a little manuscript of nature poems. In eighth grade, I was placed into an English class taught by the “mean” teacher. I loved her class. We read stories with real substance, like To Kill a Mockingbird and “Flowers for Algernon,” instead of reading from the stack of anthologies like the younger kids did. I think she liked my writing, but I know she absolutely hated my handwriting; I was no stranger to rewriting assignments at her request, being sure to cross every “T” and dot every “I” perfectly. These classrooms were the first places I felt a passion for something. In English class, anything was possible, and at home in my diary I’d write about how cool it would be to be a real writer one day.

After Thanksgiving, Chee’s essays became a life raft for me. My writing professor told me I wouldn’t be writing all that much in the Journalism + Design program at Eugene Lang College, and I started to seriously consider Literary Studies as my major when it came time to declare a path of study the following year. I thought about the woman who nurtured me into the reporter I thought I was and wondered if I was letting her and myself down. When I felt like I was sinking, I looked to the little red book of Chee’s essays; it reminded me of my why. 

My why is quite selfish. I write because it makes me happy. At times I feel as if I have nothing to say that hasn’t already been said, but then the question asking begins. Why should others care? How can you get them to that point? How can I make this sound like myself? And writing has always felt super good. Putting together a piece—the research, the drafting, the editing—is gratifying no matter how hard it might be to put each piece of the puzzle in its place. Chee’s writing reminded me of what I was working towards: writing that makes the reader feel like they’re being taken care of.

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One night during the spring semester of my freshman year, my roommate and I were trying to decide if we wanted to go to The Whiting Awards reading at The Strand. We checked the website to see how long it was going to be, but when I saw who was hosting the event, I couldn’t let myself not go. I don’t remember what was said during the reading; instead I stared at the back of Chee’s head all night. Just like I never worked up the courage to ask a stranger in the park if they smoked, I never said hello to Alexander Chee. I wasn’t sure what to say to someone who had so recently “changed my life.”

Writing is a lot like staring at the back of your favorite writer’s head. You know what they look and think like, much like you know what the point you’re trying to make is. You can see the point you’re trying to make right in front of you, but sometimes you can’t find the words—or courage—to say what you’re trying to say. That metaphor simplifies the process, but I can assure you that the process of this project (and everything else I’ve submitted in the last four years) was anything but simple. Yet, in the process of poring over everything I’ve ever written, I found courage. 

I have never felt more confident in calling myself a writer than I do now, and that is mainly because of the subject matter of this project. For so long I was embarrassed by my interest in food—who isn’t interested in eating? I wanted to care about something more “original,” but somehow I always found myself at the mercy of eating. Gathering around a table with others has served purpose in each chapter of my life—childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood—and restaurant culture is the only thing other than writing that has “set my soul on fire,” so to speak. 

Leaning into my interests has allowed me to gain the courage needed to venture out into the “real world” as a writer. Although I leave this place more confident, I know that no piece will ever be perfect or complete. There is only so much metaphorical staring at the back of heads you can do until you have to turn in a manuscript for a grade.

Thank you for being here! If you, too, are a college senior on the brink of graduation, please consider telling me about the foods that got you here. We’re so close. It’s bittersweet.