Public and Professional Writing Program

🍂🍁 Happy October, Panthers! Join us on the 29th in the Cathedral for the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation Internship Event! This is a great opportunity to meet and chat with a wide range of journalists and specialists that make this federation possible. They’ll provide you with access to various opportunities, including a fully-paid writing internship. And if you don’t feel like chatting, just stop by and hear a little bit more about the PBMF! Pizza and drinks will be served :) 🍁🍂

For this week's Faculty Friday, we spoke with Liberty Ferda about STEM writers, and her own work.

Read the full interview below, or check out our Instagram for highlights!

—Where did you go to school, and what degrees did you get?

I did my undergraduate study at Otterbein College. It's now Otterbein University. It's a small College in Ohio and I studied English and business.
And then I actually came to the University of Pittsburgh, initially for graduate school. I got a masters of Fine Arts in English, creative writing, with creative nonfiction as my focus. I did a certificate in pedagogy and started teaching then. I've stayed on and taught in the English department ever since.

—Was there a particular point you realized you wanted to teach?

It was part of my graduate program for funding. To be honest, teaching is a way to help fund your graduate study, and the English department has a really robust teacher training. You are technically a TA, but you have your own classroom right away, so it's a really robust training ground. I wouldn't say I set out to do that. I just wanted to be a writer, find a way to do that… it was part of my graduate study and it fit, working with writing and helping others with writing, all while learning myself too, you know.

—What classes are you teaching this semester?

This semester I'm teaching Grant Writing for Nonprofits, one section of which is an online asynchronous course that was developed through the College of General Studies. It's a pretty flexible option for people, particularly non-traditional students or students who are going back to school. I usually have at least a few General Studies students in that class.
That’s one I teach every semester, there's quite a demand for it, so I have that one and then I'm teaching an in-person section of that same class on campus.
I am also the assistant director of the engineering composition program, which is a joint thing with the English department and the Swanson School of Engineering.

—What distinguishes you, as a teacher?

Our English classes are nice and small. They're capped at 19 or 22. It's always been a good opportunity to get to know students and make it a good community environment where students feel comfortable. Developing a nice, comfortable, collegiate environment is really helpful with writing classes, particularly when you’re critiquing each other’s work.
Engineering-writing classes, those are big, big classes that they have, 80 students or so. Our writing course within that is a team taught program and so we don't go into the classroom every week. It's integrated into their first-year engineering class and we visit the classroom 5 times per term. Despite the size and the less frequent meetings, I still try to ask students their names and get them involved in conversation and discussion. It's harder with a big class, but it's still doable and I think it's just more enjoyable all around. I don't do a lot of lecture-based classes, and if there is some of it's definitely not the majority of what I’m doing in the class.
I like to involve students in conversation and make it a comfortable environment.

—Do you find that engineers tend to be unenthusiastic writers?

Sometimes, freshman engineers have this idea of what they’re pursuing, and they’ll say, “well, I'm not going to really need to write in my career, I don’t like writing, I’m not good at it”. We do try to address that through the course. It’s a two-semester course, and we try early on in the fall to explain to them the importance of writing and how it actually comes into play. There’s a lot of real-world touchpoints in the curriculum—they'll hear other engineers talk about writing, they write a conference paper in the spring that they present to actual engineers in our community. We try throughout to explain and demonstrate the utility and necessity of writing.
It's not just an engineering problem, though. I do like that Pitt has a writing requirement, so everybody gets a chance to have a well-rounded education that includes humanities.

—Engineers in particular, what are the benefits of having that background and confidence with writing?

Well, they will have to write for sure. They will have to communicate. Depending on the field, there's all kinds of, you know, lab reports, there's grant writing, academic papers, there's all kinds of things. There’s a surprising amount of writing that they will have to do and encounter.
Writing is one of those muscles you need to train and will need to flex. Throughout the course, we provide opportunities for students to step in and take it in avenues that interest them, to take ownership and find their own interest areas. That can also help them to see the relevance of it. It makes eating their veggies, so to speak, more palatable.

—What sort of writing projects are you working on right now? What forms do you like to write within?

I’m always working on several things. I’m working on about four poems right now, and I started a short story last week… I don’t really have a long form project I’m sitting down with right now, that’s really something for longer stretches of breaks, like in the summer. I wrote a couple of drafts of a memoir project in grad school, and I still like to read and write memoir.

I do try to write every day, I’m trying to get back into the habit of handwriting every day. There’s research out there about how that tactile movement can activate certain areas of the brain, so I’m trying to do that too, and that’s been good. It’s been good to remember the elements of play with writing, the art in the practice, and the fun of it, too. In the midst of a semester, it is a dance to carve out time for personal writing.
I studied creative nonfiction, so that's my primary genre. I usually have some kind of small magazine story I'm working on. I really do like doing that kind of stuff, not just to pay bills. I do a lot of PR writing for Pitt, too. A lot of profiles. Those are one of my favorite writing projects. I love when they say, “hey, there's this really interesting person, will you interview them and write about them?”. I love talking to people and writing about them, getting quotes from others about them, and pull out that illuminating part of their lives that might inspire others. I don’t have an active assignment right now. Freelancing very much ebbs and flows.
I do some writing for the brand manager at Pitt, and those don’t have bylines, those are sometimes ads, or short sponsored content for the Post Gazette, and that’s been an interesting practice. It’s a little different from PR, but still a creative practice not unlike poetry, with the very condensed word count.

—This is a selfish question, but do you have tips for interviewing?

I can speak to what I do. I do a lot of research beforehand. For example, I profiled this young woman who was involved in a documentary released by Disney, so I watched the whole thing. I try to come in prepared, because on my assignments from Pitt it’s a professional context, and these people have very limited time. I’ve written stories for the medical school magazine, and doctors particularly are very limited in time. Like you said in your email, sometimes I try to provide questions beforehand on request, and to have them typed out beforehand. When they’re prepared ahead of time, I don’t have to be preoccupied with what my questions are while I’m interviewing.
I also always try to get a quote from someone else, regarding the person, so it’s a more well-rounded view.
Drafting, too, drafting is always worth it.

—What’s a piece of advice that’s helped you out?

Some advice I’m thinking of, that I got from Cathy Day, she’s a professor in Indiana now, she was teaching at Pitt when I was getting my Masters’. She was talking about, when you’re publishing, putting out creative work, imagine: who do you want to read it? Who needs to read this story? That can help inspire you to write, thinking, “oh, I’m putting this out into the world and this will speak to someone, right?”

—What inspires you to write?

I think I just like it.
It's very satisfying to me, for example, to finish something like a magazine piece I'm proud of, and I turn it in. There’s something that's satisfying about that that you don't always get with other creative work which can, in a way, almost always be kind of unfinished. It can be difficult and unpredictable, but yeah, I just like it.

—Stepping away from your work, is that just time or is there a more elaborate process?

Just time. Just, “I need to go back to this tomorrow with fresh eyes”.

—Do you enjoy editing your writing?

I do enjoy editing. I've done editing and proofreading professionally, like for a magazine. And I used to work at McGraw-Hill Education, editing for them. As for editing my own work, I think that's a lot of what revisiting writing allows you to do. That stage of first draft can be kind of messy and painful, and then you go back and add layers. I think there’s more editing as you get further along… yeah, it’s a different process. I like the later stage, because I’ve already got something down, now it’s like polishing.

For this week's Faculty Friday, we spoke with Jeff Heinzl about inspiration, zine-making, and music video.

Read the full interview below, or check out our Instagram for highlights!

— Where did you go to school and what degrees did you go?

I went to Furman University down in Greenville, SC for my undergrad and I majored in English and silently double majored in education, getting certified to teach. It didn't actually count as a major, but I was very much involved in the Education Department as well. I came to Pitt and got into the PhD program for Film & Media Studies and, along the way, I also picked up an MA in English.

—Was there a certain point that you realized you wanted to teach, or was that always part of the plan?

I wouldn't necessarily say always, but it's been in my mind for a long time. When I was in high school, I sort of decided that I wanted to teach high school English, and then you know, that's the track I was on.

I had a moment in undergrad where I was like, “oh, should I stick with this or should I just drop the teaching and focus on grad school and?” But ultimately, I stuck with teaching.

I taught a year of high school in between undergrad and grad school, and during that time I just was so overwhelmed by teaching high school that I kind of panicked and applied to grad school. So my idea of the level I wanted to teach shifted later on. Teaching is definitely something that's been interesting to me for a long time and—with my parents, who’re teachers as well, it was something I was seeing a lot of anyways when I was younger.
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—What do you enjoy about teaching? What makes the work fulfilling?

I just really like people It's a really awesome thing, to get to know somebody through what they create. So whether that's writing essays or, you know, creating social media posts, or graphic design things like album covers, or magazine layouts… it's just really cool to see how each person's mind works a little differently, both in terms of the style or approach, as well as in terms of what interests them as something to write about or create about in the first place.

—What classes are you teaching this semester?

I'm teaching 2 sections of Seminar in Composition, and a section of Integrating Writing and Design.

—What side projects are you working on, when you aren’t teaching?

I interviewed a few music video directors/musicians, creatives, and I'm just trying to transcribe those interviews and then house them in a pretty document that I can distribute. I completed the first part of it—t was connected to an event that now happened over a year ago— through Screenshot Asia and more generally, the Center for Asian Studies at Pitt. At the event— the virtual Cuban day—there were technical difficulties, so I didn't get to interview or ask questions to the artists in the way that I'd wanted. So, then, I went back and connected with them again and got to ask the questions that I'd wanted to ask. Now I have all that information, I've had it for a while, it's just a matter of getting it into the form that I want to distribute it in.

—What really got you started on studying music videos as a form?

Yeah, that was definitely a surprising path for me when I started my film studies PhD. I was very interested in slow cinema— a lot of global art cinema—but then I was realizing that a lot of my favorite art films had these really intriguing musical sequences. With the availability of HD video right around that moment—2013, 2014— suddenly, when I saw some music videos I was like, “oh, these kind of work similarly to those scenes in art films that I really like.”

And so then I was just intrigued by breaking down that high-low divide; there's this really prestigious art cinema over here, and then there's the silly little music video over here. And I'm like, “no, I think there's actually a deep spiritual similarity between the two that's worth fleshing out”. So then I started diving a lot more into music videos and trying to understand what I liked about them and how they compared to the understanding of art cinema that I had. It’s been an increasing obsession, as time has gone on, watching the form evolve, and getting into different kinds of artists and genres… the whole wide world of it is fascinating to me. So yeah, I just got sucked in.

—-Would you like to speak more about music videos? Maybe about the role they play in culture, about them as kind of a disconnected art versus as part of a larger whole, like in art cinema, as you were saying.

Part of what I keep liking to push against and play with is this idea that music video is superfluous, right? I think it's often said, “why do we need this? We already have the songs, and the albums that combine the songs, what do we need music videos for?”, and so a lot of early music video scholarship, even still, wants to chalk up music video to elaborate advertisement for something else.

I think that it kind of works the opposite, in that I think what music video reveals is that anything could be understood as an advertisement, but that's not necessarily the best or most intriguing view to have. Instead of seeing everything as an advertisement for something else, it's better to take out what it is doing. I think the idea that people take something that exists— a song— and then use that to inspire more art is a really intriguing one because it points at the way that inspiration works and the way that no art exists in a vacuum. It's here because something else was the impetus for it.

A 3-minute-long music video could have as much interesting meaning to unpack as a three-hour-long art film. That notion intrigues me, especially in a fast-paced social-media-heavy world where things are often given to us in little chunks. So, music videos— the best music videos, anyways, the ones that I like writing about— are this really thoughtful way of, in a short little aesthetic experience, packaging up all of the ideas that a song holds and whatever the person creating the video wants to bring to the table in that process.

And so there's a way in my mind that music video is a more manageable cinematic experience, right? It's not a TikTok which is just a few seconds long. It's not like an hour-long TV show, or even a 30-minute-long TV show. It's this little bite-sized refuge from all of the chaos. It's not super long, so you get to dive in, and for me it prompts my thinking in interesting ways. After those few minutes it's done, and you move on to something else. Maybe you return to that down the road, but still, in terms of how much time is involved with sitting down and experiencing it, it’s this nice middle ground between really short and longer forms.

—Discounting music videos for being forms of advertising seems kind-of silly to me. Are you going to say that a piece of music on the radio has no value? That serving as spectacle is the work’s only value?

What's interesting there is that when writers were initially talking about music video as similar to advertisement, it was at a time when the record industry— music industry—still relied heavily on record sales for revenue, and now record sales are not where the revenue is at, it's in live performances mostly.. You could argue, at this point, that an album is an advertisement for the live show but why? The album is so interesting! Why not accept it as a work of art, and as worth experiencing? If you get to go to a live show, cool, but if you don't, you still have this beautiful thing to spend time with, you know?

—The album is an ad for the for the show, but that's a non-starter. We we don't have to limit it to that.

—I won't force you to pick a single favorite, but what are some music videos that stand out to you, either as personal favorites or as cultural touchstones?

Man, great question. There are so many that it's really hard for me to narrow it down. When people ask this question, part of what comes to mind first are the ones I wrote about in my dissertation. I tried to write about a pretty wide array in there as well.
The video for the Earl Sweatshirt song ‘Grief’ is really nightmarish in a effective way, and so that one stands out as an unforgettable audiovisual experience. It was directed by Hiro Murai, who went on to work with Childish Gambino— Donald Glover— to create Atlanta. He was one of the big creatives behind that show, so I think his visual style entered like a more prominent place in the televisual discourse following that video.

There is this video of Moses Sumney’s ‘Cut Me’, and the video is really beautiful. It came out right around when COVID first hit, though I don't think the video was intended to be about that at all… it just happened to be released, you know, in March of 2020. The video takes place in the hospital, he’s riding on the top of an ambulance at some point… so it's all of this imagery, that he conjured up, which entered our headspaces around when it was released. That one is a cultural touchstone, for me, at least.

In in the past five or so years, I've really been trying to bone up on the older music videos, discovering what existed in the 80s. I watched some music videos in the 90s, and it's been great to go back to some of those. The ones that Michel Gondry directed, like the Kylie Minogue ‘Come Into My World’ video, those are so fun. .That particular video goes around in circles, I like how Gondry uses structure. That's one from the 90’s that I love.
The Radiohead video for ‘Karma Police’ is another big touchstone for me. I think that's such a cool and creepy video, nightmarish, so maybe that's a running theme through videos I like.
That does remind me that I am actually actively trying to plan an event with the Horror Studies Working Group that's about horror and music video, so maybe that's why a lot of these more scary videos are on my mind, but I like campy, silly videos, too.

There's this podcast I sometimes listen to, just called the Music Video Podcast, and they did an episode on the other Jacksons, everybody other than Janet and Michael, and what videos they created. There’s this video by Rebbie Jackson called ‘Centipede’ that I think is so silly and funny, but it's like about a haunted painting. It starts in an art museum, and then we enter the painting and all of this ridiculous stuff happens… so yeah, in my mind, music video is an endless riches of fascinating audiovisual stuff. Those are a few that come to mind right away, but you could ask me tomorrow and I'd probably come up with 10 different ones.

—And maybe I will.

—Do you have a form you particularly like to write within?

My tendency is much more towards short form, poetic writing about music video. What I like to do is take between 100 and, say, 300 words to write about a video. I prefer coming up with a very specific word number constraint, and I try to write an entrance into the video, I don't try to describe the whole thing. I find something about it that sort of mimics the short form nature of music video, that punctually gets at some of the key images and ideas that a video presents. I haven't published a ton of this stuff.

In that group of interviews I'm trying to put out into the world, I wrote introductions for each of those parts, I think each one is exactly 300 words long. I find it really helpful to put a limit on myself and then use whatever space within that limit to describe, question, analyze. Sometimes it's personal, sometimes not. Whatever the video inspires is where I take that. I'll be at 103 words, and I go “what 3 words do I take out to bring this down to the hundred word point?” That makes me focus even more on finding the essential aspects of my experience with the video that I really adamantly want to communicate, you know? And then I put those whatever, 100 words, 300 words next to some images from the video, 5 or 6 images that pair with the words so it’s, hopefully, a conversation with anyone who reads it to think about how what's in those words kind of ties to the images.

—Or go watch and watch the video.

Yeah, yeah, sure. No, I mean, that's definitely the hope, that the writing gets people to go watch. One of my dreams is to start a music video archive, because so much of it exists solely on YouTube. If something goes down or an artist decides to pull their work, then it’s gone. I think having some kind of visual record of images next to some writing is an important way of evoking the video, even if it has disappeared from the Internet.

—There is that very scary impermanence with a lot of borne-digital stuff, especially media tied up with intellectual property, copyright, IP law. Kind of scary.

Absolutely. I have experienced that thing, where a music video I love just disappears. I get on YouTube one day and it was on the playlist… now it's not. There is a real scariness to it, but I think at the same time… it doesn't cause me to panic as much as it's intriguing. Ultimately, a lot of things in the world are impermanent and disappear without us being ready for them to disappear. I have friends who are like, “well if anything that I'm writing about is on YouTube, I make sure to download it, get it onto a hard drive somewhere,” and while I think that's great and I respect that approach, for me I sort of like the idea that things organically disappear. I mean, I don't love the idea because it makes me sad to see something I like disappear, but at the same time the nature of things. You might as well embrace it.

—Regarding those snippets or music video reviews you mentioned, I could see that formatted as a zine. Usually— there's no real ‘usually’ with zines… have you have you produced one before? Have you been involved with production on a zine?

I have started producing a number of zines and have not finished any. It's something that I aspire to be part of for exactly the reasons you're describing. You know, it's an idiosyncratic form. Each one is a little different. You can pretty much do whatever you want to with the zine, and because I'm not necessarily as wrapped up in that traditional academic form, I think it appeals to me as a way of communicating. I don't know that any music video zines have existed up to this point. There's no archive with all the zines out there, so maybe several have been produced. I don't actually know, but I like the idea of using that format to house some of the stuff that I'm playing with in terms of music video.

I'm teaching Integrating Writing and Design next semester, and I'm teaching it over the summer, so I'm really going to be spending a lot of time with that class. I think zines are a logical path for that class to take, if students are interested in going that route. I want to make sure I'm responding to what my students’ interests are, but I think having an opportunity to play with both digital and print in this very specific kind of medium that's fine-tuned to whatever the creator wants to communicate is so cool. I have this ideal version of that class, that maybe down the road we could have like a zine that we collectively produce in the second-half of the class or something. Something we could circulate out into the world once the once the class is through, that kind of thing.

—I would be very interested to see that.

—Do you have a piece of advice, for aspiring writers, film makers, designers, something that's been helpful to you?

I guess what I would say is: create your own path. Allow that path to speak to you in a way that nothing else does. I know I'm sort of mixing metaphors there, right? Paths don't normally speak, but why not? Why can’t paths speak? I'll allow them to speak.
What I’m getting at there is that it's really easy, and tempting, to follow commercial imperatives. If not commercial ones, to try to tap into what you think people want from you. You might come into something with your interest, and then you get this idea from working with professors, or your boss, that they’re looking for something. I think that, ultimately, you end up losing a lot in that bargain. If you can quiet some of those outside voices and find what really connects with you, in a deep-rooted spiritual kind of way, then that's ideal. That self-determination is an essential part of the process. First figuring out that thing is, I think, really, really important.

Of course that's always going to exist in conversation with other people and stuff. Inspiration is never an isolated thing. But quieting some of those outside voices in order to find what you're moved by is important in becoming your own person with your own ideas about stuff. And then after you've formed that interest, you can think about how to put that in conversation with other ideas.

—I like that. You're going to have to factor in coercion and constriction and all the forces actually on you, but there has to be a first step where you take into consideration, like, “Oh. What do I want? What makes me feel alive?” The paycheck, the rest has to be considered, but it will be later in that process.

Absolutely. I do think grad school is a very interesting and helpful place for establishing that. It's not always going to send you on the tenure track superstar route which, I think when a lot of us enter grad school, that's probably what we're thinking about, at least in the humanities.

That ambition can distract you from what is most important to you. I wouldn't recommend grad school for everybody, but I do think there are benefits. It's not just grad school, more just finding ways of being somewhat stable, at least somewhat stable financially, and then allowing that time to really dive into what moves you.

It's the first Faculty Friday of fall, folks.
This week we spoke with Sarah Leavens on perfectionism, editing, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, and how glue sticks can take your writing to new heights. Read the full interview below, or check out Instagram for highlights!

—Where did you go to school, and what degrees did you get?
I did my undergraduate at Whitenburg in Ohio, I did a BFA in Studio Art, painting at the time, and a BA in Creative Writing. I worked for about 4 years at a nonprofit before I went to graduate school at Chatham, which is what brought me to Pittsburgh. I did an MFA in creative writing and my focus genres were poetry and nonfiction, as well as a certificate type of thing with travel writing and one with pedagogy.

—At what point did you decide that you wanted to start teaching?
Great question. When I was in my undergrad, doing my painting, doing my writing, I really thought I was headed into a career as an artist, as a writer, y’know, as an individual who creates, and then I got involved in this nonprofit that I ended up working for full time. I got involved in it actually through a kind of internship situation and they were doing art and writing with kids and families and it put me in a teaching position with them. I was helping out with various projects and stuff and I had an amazing mentor there. She saw me as a teacher and I had never considered that for myself before. And then I realized that I really loved doing it. I worked with that program for a while, which was an arts education program. I decided that a career I could see for myself would be teaching in higher education, and writing on the side. So I kind of had the painting fall away into a hobby sort of thing. But I thought I could teach writing, I could do writing, and I thought that the higher education setting would be the best for me and give me the space to also do my own thing.

—I guess this might be too personal, but do you find it difficult to keep those personal practices going?
Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I don't think that’s too personal. I think that that is something people should know. You know, any job you're going to struggle with a balance between your creative work and the work that you have to use your time and your mental energy for during the day. So it's really difficult. When you're in school, it's nice, undergraduate and graduate school, because that is kind of your job, doing your creative work is your job, but then once you work full time, it becomes harder to balance. That is an ongoing challenge for everyone I know. It's not impossible, you know, it's just difficult.

—Are you teaching classes this semester?
I am. I’m teaching The Language of Policy and Power: Topics in Diversity, which is a PPW course that is surprisingly fun. It might have a stodgy name, but it’s really interesting, and I have an amazing class. I work in the Writing Center as one of my teaching assignments, and I am also the internship coordinator, and mentoring some graduate teachers this semester as well.

—What do you do outside of the classroom? What occupies your spare time?
Oh, good question. I occasionally teach with The Pennsylvania Artists and Schools and communities through the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. I've been teaching at the Powerhouse for a few years. (Powerhouse) is a house of women who are in early recovery from drugs and alcohol, and I really enjoy working there, teaching with teaching, working with them, I would say. I do that in the summer, spring and summer time when we're not in school, I teach poetry and visual art and collage and bookmaking.

Last year I decided that I need a project that does not have to do with writing or work. I have always liked to hike and I got really… I sort of got into it as a project.I set a goal to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, and so I spent a year training for that. I went and did that this last summer. I think I'm going to do it again because it was such a wonderful supplement to everything else in my life. I spend so much time looking at screens and sitting down that it has been really great to, spend at least one day a week outside, not looking at any screens. Moving around.

—So you said you got a certificate(?) in travel writing during your grad studies…?
Well, part of the reason that I went to Chatham is because they had this travel writing program. Everyone at that time had to go on one field seminar, which was an annual 10-day trip. I did two of those and an extra travel writing class because I was like, “why wouldn't I travel every single year and write,” if I could? The first year, we went to Turkey, which was incredible. The second year we went to Vietnam, which was also incredible. In my undergrad, I went on a writing trip to Japan, which was fantastic. Early on in my teaching career, I taught a travel writing course in France one summer, for the Center for the Arts.
I don't necessarily have a favorite place to write about, I just love going and writing… I mean, it's useful. Writing is a useful way to see the world around you newly, even if it's a place that you've been all your life. It's just so exciting for me to go and write in new places and learn about totally different ways of being.

—Do you have like a favorite spot you like to write?
I generally write in my house. I don't have a favorite place, really. I just kind of move around. I have a studio area on the top floor of my house that I use to do art and write, but I also write there.

—What sort of projects are you working on right now?
Right now, I am working on writing about Tanzania and my trip on Mount Kilimanjaro. In the year leading up to it, I started writing a lot about walking. So I feel there's a project there that is forming… I would say that's my ongoing project.

I also am just challenging myself to write every single day. I'm part of a writing group that does that and that is a project in itself. Just finding time every single day to write something.

—Do you handwrite or type, what does that look like in action and on the page?
I have done it in my notes app on my phone. I handwrite it as often as I can just to avoid screens, and occasionally if I feel like I want to write something long then I'll use my computer and type. Occasionally I'll do a collage or something with sound words. It's really trying to eke out something creative every single day. Some days it’s bigger than others. Some days it's awful. And really anything you know, but it's a practice. It’s building that habit of “I'm gonna write every day, regardless of the quality”. Yes. Yeah.

Yes, because I think a big thing when we're thinking about that work-life balance, creative work vs. professional work balance, it's easy to fall into, “well, I don't feel like writing tonight, so I'm not going to”. What I have found is the less I write, the less I have the impulse to write; the more I write, the more I have the impulse to write, and the more I'm thinking like a writer all the time.

—How do you combat perfectionism in your work?
Oh, it’s so difficult. Just finding time every single day to write something, to eke out something creative. Building that habit has really helped. Some days it’s bigger than others. Some days it's awful. There is just no way to write something perfect every day. You know, I spend a lot of days with something that I would definitely call a lousy first draft. I am trying to recognize that I made something, now I can go back to later and revise. Again, I think the less you write, the more pressure there is to do something finessed, but if you’re doing it more often then there is, by default, a lot of stuff that is not great. That is fine. It’s part of getting it out there.

—To me, it seems like the longer I go without writing, the more the work I end up producing needs to be perfect. It needs to be the sign I can still write.
There’s something about writing, that if we don’t do it for a while, we feel like we lose our writer card. Most writers I know have that issue with themselves, that we need to prove to ourselves that we can write, whatever that means.

—How would you describe the Writers’ Café that you run?
The Writers’ Café is held various Fridays throughout the semester, usually meeting in the Writing Center. It is an informal community of writers, a Friday afternoon of people who like to write getting together. We have folks come who are English majors. We have lots of folks come who are not English majors, who are just interested in doing some writing. It’s a great way to just get yourself to do some writing in a very low-pressure situation and have the good vibes of a writing community around you.

We always have a professional writer lead the session, and there’s generally a theme to it. It’s usually a 2 hour session, the writer will talk a little bit, and then there is always writing time, then time to share if you’d like. A lot of people share. You don’t have to share. We also give away books by the writer. We had one a couple of weeks ago that was led by Bill Lychack, who is also Pitt faculty, on the theme of oblique strategies… approaching writing from other avenues of expertise, so we talked about this book that he had written, a cultural history of cement, and how much it taught him about writing. So we thought about work that we had done and did some writing about that and came out with a really interesting conversation.

—What inspires your work, writing, and art?
That’s a good question. “What inspires my work”? I don’t know. I think, just, an interest in creating, or experimentation. Reading inspires my work a lot. All of my colleagues and friends who are writers inspire my work a lot. And the experience— this is so corny…— just the experience of living. It is inspiring to write about, to want to creatively represent it and share that with others.

—How do you go about editing?
My practice is to try and think about the shape of the piece first, and then once I feel it’s in the appropriate shape, to start looking at the language.

—What do you do with ideas you’re attached to, but which don’t belong in what's at hand?
I make a document that I call “the cutting room floor”, and then anything I’m taking out is put in there so it still exists, so I’m not totally killing my darlings. I’m sending them off to camp somewhere and I can come back and visit them whenever I want to. It makes it a lot easier to cut things. I always save my files in versions, so I can go back to an earlier version if I’ve done something drastic that I end up hating.

—Cutting room floor is exactly what I call those documents, too.
Is it? Yeah. How funny.
—I don’t know, something about butchery as a metaphor seems to stick with… is it?
I don’t know where that comes from, I always thought it came from film editing. Like, when you’re editing, you had to splice films together by hand, I’m definitely not a person that knows much about this, but then there would be all these little pieces that would float down. That’s what I think of, but butchery works too.
—I think yours is factual, but I’m partial to mine, too.

—What’s a piece of advice you’d like to give, to writers in particular?
Carry a notebook everywhere you go and, ideally, also a glue stick. Write things down, glue little pieces of things in... make it an instantiation, a physical representation of your life and your brain. It’s always with you, as you move through the day, so you can always write.