GW Alum Elizabeth Stevens Publishes Population, a Novel

"Sharing my work [at GW], and reading the work of others, critiquing and being constructively critiqued, got me thinking about aspects of writing fiction that I had never thought of before.” – An interview with GW grad Elizabeth Stephens.

Elizabeth Stevens has just published her
first novel, Population

1. I'm as intrigued by your life story as I am by your just-published novel, Population, so let's start there.  You're currently living, I think, in South Africa. How did that come about?

Yes! I am currently living in Johannesburg. The road was long from GWU to Jozi, but I’ll do my best to give you the shorten version. At GWU I studied international affairs with a concentration in the Middle East. My sophomore year I studied abroad in Cairo, but was evacuated in 2011 to Amman at the onset of the Egyptian Revolution.  I completed the scholastic year there. In 2012, I spent another semester studying abroad in Paris, but my real passion was and still is for the Middle East, so upon graduation I returned to the region with an internship at the UNRWA (the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees) in Beirut, Lebanon. Given the spillover from the conflict in Syria, and the fact that I was living in the Shia, Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs, I was forced out due to violence. At this point I had nowhere to go, and rather than return to the States, I decided to move in with my boyfriend, who was then completing his masters degree at the IHEID in Geneva.

Moving to Geneva, I found a position as communications officer within a human rights organization, Future of Human Rights Forum. Over the course of the next year, I started managing some of their communications assistance projects targeting youth in underserved regions. While the experience was an unforgettable one, after a year I was ready to move on and when my boyfriend’s company opened an office in Johannesburg, I figured, why not? 

So that’s what brought me to Johannesburg, where I currently work for JvO Consulting, a firm that specializes in strategic communications. Our clients are mostly mining related and range from big intergovernmental organizations to independent governments to private sector mining companies. The work I do now is much different from what I was doing before, but also so much fun! Working as an independent consultant also affords me time to work on my book(s), so I really couldn’t be happier.

2.  You've also traveled the world a good deal as, I gather, a journalist.  Tell me something about that.  Did your background as a literature student at GW inspire/enable that in any way?

Absolutely! My entire academic career at GWU has helped me invaluably throughout the course of my career. Being a journalist in the Middle East would not have been possible without the knowledge I gained throughout my international relations coursework and my early writing classes helped me identify the differences among research, literary, and journalistic forms of content. My coursework at GWU helped me become a more concise writer. As I moved across the Middle East from Cairo to Beirut to Tunis, where I did some consulting work with the OECD, I was able to translate that knowledge into freelance journalism. From there, I had political articles on the Middle East published in a number of online magazines across Europe and Africa. I also hosted a travel column in a UK-based magazine by and for women.

 

3.  I've read the first couple of chapters of  Population.  It's a dystopian story of women trying to survive in a lawless post-apocalyptic America.  Talk a little more about its plot, and about your long-established interest in the horror-story mode.

Horror and romance are strangely enough my two favorite genres and I absolutely adore any artistic work that combines both. My favorite authors and titles includeThe Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson, Hellbound Heart, Abarat and Mister B. Goneby Clive Barker and pretty much everything ever written by Stephen King. I have previously published short stories in the horror genre, almost all of which are touched with elements of fantasy.

I like to consider Population a horror-meets-romance, action-adventure fest. Abel, my protagonist, is a young woman struggling to keep herself and her family alive in world run by beings from another planet, the Others. The Others hunger for power and also for the taste of human flesh.  All but extinct, Abel is one of the last humans left alive in the desolate and harsh landscape that survivors have come to call Population.  She is calculating and keeps a list of rules to live by that guarantee her survival, but when her best friend’s daughter is taken she has to make a choice: risk her own life, or leave a young girl to die. 

Choosing to abandon her list of rules and defy all her better instincts, Abel embarks on a dangerous quest across Population.  Along the way, she finds herself in an unlikely alliance with one of the things she hates and fears most -- one of the Others. In order to rescue her best friend’s daughter she’ll have to delve further into his world than she could have ever imagined. In doing so, she’ll also have to learn how to trust as he offers her something utterly foreign in Population: hope.

I’d also like to add that I really love Abel as a main character.  She’s a strong female protagonist of color. In my opinion, even though the market has recently opened up for women with an increased number of female leads in popular fiction, there is still an annoying shortage of characters of color. I have one white parent of European ancestry, one black parent of African descent. As a mixed race child, I remember how difficult it was to identify with the characters in the books I read because none of them ever looked like me. They were all white and most of them were also male. So when I first wrote my very first story -- a science fiction saga that I drafted at the age of 11 -- I made sure to include a diverse range of characters. I’ve stuck to this trend ever since.

4.  Do you have other novels brewing?  Are they in the same genre?

Always. I must have two dozen stories that are in varying stages of completion -- or incompletion in most cases -- on the backburner.  The one I’m most excited about at the moment is Population, part two -- don’t worry that won’t be the final title. ***Spoiler alert*** Population ends on a cliff hanger so a second part is absolutely necessary to continue Kane and Abel’s saga.

Population part one is quite graphic, particularly in how it deals with being a woman in violent environments. I wrote the novel this way because I feel that these are realities faced by real women living in war zones and conflict environments. As I mentioned, a good portion of my undergraduate career at GWU was spent studying human rights in the Middle East. Living in Cairo during the Egyptian Revolution also showed me how desperate the plight for women can be when law and order collapses. Abel’s experiences in Population have been largely shaped by my own experiences in and study of conflict and post-conflict areas. Unfortunately for those weak of heart -- or stomach -- the second part ofPopulation will continue to pick up on these issues, many of which we don’t discuss or talk about in our society.

You can expect to see the second part to Abel’s journey hit the shelves in April 2016. As for my other works, they are generally of the same genre -- that grey area where horror and romance may meet.  Some are more fantasy driven while others stick to the real world, and others are other worlds altogether! Whether I’m working on a long or short work, or an adult or young adult manuscript, one thing that remains consistent is my strong lead characters. That, and the fact that most of my books are pretty insane.

5.  Tell us something about your GW experience.  Did you take literature as well as creative writing courses?  Were there professors who had a special impact on you?

One of my biggest undergraduate regrets is that I did not get a chance to take as many writing courses as I would have liked. I took the required writing courses and though I was loath to do it, they helped me invaluably in determining how to write research reports and journalistic pieces. As someone who has previously worked as a journalist and who is now working in communications -- and loving it! -- these courses have had an immense and positive influence on my professional success.

One of my favorite courses I took at GWU however, was a fiction workshop with Tim Johnston. I hadn’t had much experience in writing shorter works and was nervous to share my writing with my peers, as I am also an extremely private person when it comes to my artistry. This class changed all that. Sharing my work and reading the work of others, critiquing and being constructively critiqued, got me thinking about aspects of writing fiction that I had never thought of before. I learned to pay more attention to mechanics and structure so that now when I write I avoid simple yet damaging mistakes. Several of the works I wrote for that class I later went on to publish.

6.  Do you have any advice for current students who might want to pursue a writing career something like yours?

I have three main pieces of advice for students of literature: the first is to always say yes! Don’t let opportunities slip by, because you never know how they may help you in the future. Though I was only ever paid for one piece of writing before I published my book -- a short horror story that placed 5^th in an online competition -- every single article or story that I put out there strengthened my foundations as an author, and gave increased credibility to my later works.

My second piece of advice would be to network, network, network! Things are changing rapidly in the world. Access to technology and global consumerism have lowered the barriers to entry into many industries, making being an author more accessible in some ways, but in others, significantly more difficult. While it’s easier now than ever to publish a book, it’s also harder to find a publisher or literary agent to represent you.

My freshman year in college was the first time I completed a full-length manuscript. I spent years afterwards trying to find an agent to take on this young adult book. I wrote query after query and received rejection after rejection.  Don’t get me wrong, I had some bites in the beginning and enough encouragement from publishers to keep me going, but nothing concrete ever came of it. But one day -- the day that I finished writing draft one of Population -- my mom met a woman who just happened to be opening a publishing company and who just happened to be focusing on authors and characters of color. She read my novel that evening and loved it so much that six months later I’m looking my own book up on Amazon.

My final piece of advice to new and aspiring authors would be to never give up, never surrender! I think the hardest part about being an author is finding the time and the will to continue in such a competitive (and sometimes less than lucrative) industry. However, my books arrived today in paperback and I can tell you that there is no better feeling than holding a physical copy of your own book in your hands. It makes every moment of writer’s block and disappointment and rejection worth it a thousand times over. So don’t ever give up on your passion and don’t ever stop writing. For me, I can tell you that it doesn’t even feel like an option. Writing has been stitched into my skin and into my soul.

Congratulations Elizabeth!

Population can be found via: 

Amazon 

Googlebooks

Googleplay 

NubiTales LLC

Elizabeth Stephens's Facebook 

Elizabeth Stephens's Twitter

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Sally Wen Mao Reads April 24 in the JMM Reading Series

Poet Sally Wen Mao
Reads April 24

Poet Sally Wen Mao treats words like clay.  She molds them into new ideas, even as they retain their  original meaning. Language is shaped and adapted in her hands.  She also plays with a variety of forms, including field notes, and travelogues. The results are original, ironic and fresh.   Her debut work, Mad Honey Symposium was described by Publishers Weekly as "linguistically dexterous and formally astute" with a strong connection to varied sources including "news clippings, Greek and Roman history, and Chinese myths" and maintains a "rich, deliberate emotionality and musicality."

Mao was born in Wuhan, China and raised in Boston. Her work has been featured in Colorado Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Third Coast, West Branch, Washington Square, Poetry, The Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review and other publications.  She is the winner of the 2012 Kinereth Gensler Award and a Publishers Weekly Top Ten  Pick of Fall 2014.  Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2013 and she has received fellowships from Kundiman, Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, Hedgebrook, and Saltonstall Foundation.  She is currently a professor of Asian American Poetics at Hunter College.

Mao is the Jenny McKean Moore author for April.  The GW English Department will be hosting a reading by her in Gelman, Room 702 on Friday, April 24 at 7:30 pm. 

 Here is an example of her work:

Lessons on Lessening

In the rigmarole of lucky living, you tire

of the daily lessons: Sewing, Yoga, Captivity.

Push the lesson inside the microwave.

Watch it plump and pop and grow larval

with losses. Watch it shrink like shrikes

when they dodge out of this palatial

doom.  On the sky's torn hemline, this horizon,

make a wish on Buddha's foot.  How to halve,

but not to have--how to spare someone

of suffering, how to throw away the spare

key saved for a lover that you don't
have, save yourself from the burning turret

with the wind of your own smitten hip.

Do you remember how girlhood was--a bore

born inside you, powerless?  How you made

yourself winner by capturing grasshoppers

and skewering them?  You washed a family

of newts in the dry husked summer, wetted

them with cotton swabs before the vivisection.

That's playing God: to spare or not to spare.

In the end you chose mercy, and dropped

each live body into the slime-dark moat.

Today is a study in being a loser.  The boyfriend

you carved out of lard and left in the refrigerator

overnight between the milk and chicken breasts.

Butcher a bed, sleep in its wet suet for a night.

Joke with a strumpet, save the watermelon

rinds for the maids to fry in their hot saucepans.

Open your blouse and find the ladybugs

sleeping in your navel.  Open your novel

to the chapter where the floe cracks and kills

the cynget.  Study hard, refute your slayer.

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Poets Will Support Musicians at the 24 Hour Protest Concert

This Friday, April 16, students and alumni of the Music Department will be protesting recent budget cuts in the department with a 24 hour concert.  The concert begins at 4:30pm on Thursday, 4/15 at Kogan Plaza and will continue until 4:30pm on Friday, 4/16.  Performances will include alumni bands and student groups, as well as creative writing students from the English Department.

The Victorian art critic Walter Pater explained that "all arts aspire to the condition of music."  The student poets in Professor Chang's 2470 course agree wholeheartedly, and in support of campus musicians, music faculty and students, and in support of the arts at GW, they composed two centos out of favorite lines of music collected from the community.  Centos are collage poems made out of lines from other poems. On Friday morning, from 9:30-10:15am, we'll share these centos, as well as other poems that aspire to the condition of music.  Please come support the poets and the musicians and all of the arts at GW.

Here is more information about the 24 Hour Protest Concert. And here's an article from Culture Editor Jeanine Marie in The Hatchet.

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Brando Skyhorse Reads a Poem

As this year's Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Residence, acclaimed novelist and memoirist Brando Skyhorse has generously opened the Lenthall House, the campus home of our writers-in-residence, to the Open Space reading series, welcoming student writers from GW and the Corcoran to share his work. Although he writes fiction and non-fiction and has been an admired teacher of both, he also loves to read poems.  ENGL 2470 students Cailley Para, Clara Mora, and Charlie Franz recently asked Professor Skyhorse to share one of his favorites and, with his usual brio, kindly agreed.

THE RECITATION

THE INTERVIEW

Cailley/Clara/Charlie:

What drew you to Gerald Stern's "When I've Reached the Point of Suffocation"?

Skyhorse:

I first came across this poem I would say maybe fifteen, twenty years ago. And the person I was dating at the time was working in publishing and she got invited to the National Book Awards Dinners and I didn’t. So I got to imagine like, “oh, they’re having this big fancy dinner,” which they were, it was big tuxedos, the whole thing. And so they have books that are giveaways. Basically all the books that are nominated for awards they have as giveaways as the centerpiece, you could take whatever you want. And she grabbed me a copy of it, and I didn’t read a lot of poetry so I snagged the book when she got home and started looking through it. And this was one of the first poems listed. And I believe it was in chronological order, so I’m guessing this is one of the poems written early on in his career. I don’t want to misspeak about this. And there was something about the idea of looking at the destruction of beautiful things and making your own regeneration out of nothing—that specific concept, those lines, that really spoke to me. And, you know, I think that had something to do with the fact that I was having a sort of challenging relationship with my family; I’d had five stepfathers growing up, my mother was abusive, my grandmother was abusive, and so I’d often turn to books as an escape but I had never found something that had so succinctly summarized my own specific experience. Until this poem, which I know sounds really weird but the idea of growing up in this impoverished area which, the neighborhood I grew up in, Echo Park, was… it wasn’t the worst part of Los Angeles but it was pretty rough… so to have sort of all these experiences summarized in such a succinct and specific way, you know, the idea that a poem could be speaking to the whole world and to one person that’s pretty much what drew me in.

C/C/C:

Do you draw inspiration from any poetry?

Skyhorse:

I read poetry because I want to see my better half: I mean poets are the best type of writers anywhere. And the thing that’s difficult about poetry, and why it’s good that there is National Poetry Month, is because there’s not really a national dialogue about poetry, which is weird because if you think of all the big moments in our lives that we experience on an annual basis, you know weddings or funerals or commencements, there’s always poetry there. It’s always the backbone of these specific events. Yet we never really have the connection with poetry outside of these really big important events. I’m fortunate enough that my partner is a poet, and I have friends with poets on Facebook, which is a really good way to find out about poetry, and so they keep me appraised of what’s out there and what I should be reading. And, you know, some of it's old school, some of it's writers that I should have already read. I think that it’s important that every writer makes a space for poetry, whether it’s a large space or small space, because the idea of what a poet does--it’s compressing these really complicated thoughts and expressing them in a very unique and specific way. And doing it because you really love writing! I think that’s really the key thing that I love about poets more than anything else. If you’re a novelist or a screenwriter or a memoirist, there’s always the expectation of “Oh, my book could be an Oprah pick” or “I could be a millionaire," or somehow I could sell a ton of my books or sell the rights to the movies or something.  Poets never have that. They are doing it simply because they love the written word. They love the art form. So that’s kind of why poetry is important to me.

C/C/C:

Is there poetry that you gravitate towards?

Skyhorse:

I am a big fan of narrative poetry and I think that’s because my partner’s a narrative poet. But it’s also because there’s a story component as well and I know that narrative poetry, it goes in and out of favor. I don’t know who makes these decisions, if poets get together and decide “Oh, more narrative poetry this year!” or something, but I’m drawn to anything with a good story. And the idea that you can get a compelling narrative about love or life or death or whatever in a way that is more compressed than a short story or flash fiction. I think that flash fiction is an attempt to do what really good narrative poetry actually does. So those types of poems where I feel like there’s architecture attempting to tell a really compelling story, a complicated compelling story in as fewest words possible, that’s really exciting to me. I think as a writer, a prose writer, it’s always more. It’s always more details, more put on the page. So the idea that you can get a similar effect with fewer words, that’s really exciting. And the amount of precision that goes into a really strong poem- and the poem I just read, I feel like every word on this page is doing the work of three or four things. Where as like, you know, in a memoir or a work of fiction, if a sentence is doing the work of one thing or two things, you’re lucky. So again, it’s that precision and that conciseness, that focus of energy and passion and all those other emotions, that’s really exciting.

C/C/C:

Do you ever write flash fiction?

Skyhorse:

Oh God no. 

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It's National Poetry Month & Famous GW Citizens Are Reading Poems!

April welcomes spring's first flowers and the sustained bloom of National Poetry Month. It's no coincidence that seeing with a brighter light—and feeling with a warmer disposition—redirects our attention to poems, wherein language becomes stranger, freer, and more like music. In the coming days, the students of Professor Jennifer Chang's ENGL 2470 (Poetry Writing) course will be bringing more poetry to our campus, from collectively composed centos to noisy lyric protests to a hard-hitting investigation into the imaginary of poetry within our community. Stay tuned!

This particular post inaugurates a series of video recitations and interviews with famous GW citizens sharing favorite poems and talking about where poetry fits into their lives.  A professor in English and American Studies, Gayle Wald's most recent book It's Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television was blurbed by beloved American poet, Nikki Giovanni. "Excellent job, Gayle Wald," the poet extols! Professor Chang and Ph.D. candidate D. Gilson met with Professor Wald on Tuesday to ask her a few questions about poetry. She chose to recite Langston Hughes's "I, Too," a favorite poem she frequently teaches in her courses.

THE RECITATION

THE INTERVIEW

Chang:

Why did you choose to recite Hughes "I, Too"? 

Wald:

It's a very complicated poem that keeps revealing more to me over time. I just wanted to hear it, and saying it—having the words in your mouth—feels really different. This is a poem where I feel like tone is very important, and who is speaking and how he or she speaks. I guess it's "he" since [the speaker is] the "darker brother—how he's speaking.... There's several voices in this, including the voice which says "eat in the kitchen," which is actually a quote in the poem, so I feel like hearing that voice and hearing resilience in the voice—there's determination in the voice, there's anger in the voice, there's grief in the voice... I'm just an amateur performer, but trying to figure out how any of that's going on and also because it's a nice poem to teach for beginning students—between "I, too, sing America" at the beginning and the resolution "I, too, am America," and what that means and how you [say] that... there's a lot to be said for that.

Chang:

You work on popular culture, specifically popular music and television, so where does poetry fit into that study? 

Wald:

The book I just wrote is about a show that had a lot of poetry on it, a ton of poetry, actually. And it's actually one piece of the show I don't talk a lot about [in the book], but it was on a show [Soul! on PBS] during the sixties and seventies: [poetry] was a popular art. It was part of the way people were communicating and the show put a lot of poetry on stage as part of consciousness-raising and entertainment and reaching out to people. Viewers of the show wrote poems to the TV show, so it was this amazing dialogue through poetry. I was less interested in the poems themselves than in the performance of the poems because in some ways it's kind of what the poems are doing to the audience and what's going on when the readers read them. They had poets on the show, poets who were celebrities, who would read their own poetry. Nikki Giovanni got her start on this TV show. It was like her coming out. And she blurbed my book!

Chang:

Where does poetry fit into your everyday life? 

Wald:

I think poetry fits into my life mostly through—I don't read poetry a lot, I don't really like to read poetry—but I think it probably fits into my life through music. So poetry on the page, not so much, but poetry in performance, yes. 

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CCAS E-Magazine Features David Mitchell's Disability Studies Class

"Disabled People and the Holocaust" class
on site in Germany

Professor David Mitchell's course Disabled People and the Holocaust is featured in the latest CCAS E-Magazine.  You can read the entire story here.

Here are some excerpts:

'Mitchell, who has a disability, first envisioned the course with women’s studies professor and research partner Sharon Snyder in the early 2000s, while lecturing at the University of Frankfurt. During the trip, he and Snyder visited the killing centers. “The depth of my knowledge on this topic expanded significantly,” he said. “I wanted to offer students that same experience.”

Mitchell challenged students to use the power of the horrific settings as a jump-off point for exploring attitudes toward the disabled throughout history and into today. He and Snyder noted that Nazi euthanasia programs were influenced by American notions of eugenics in the early 20th century, which advocated coerced sterilizations and permanent institutionalizations.

The T4 program represented medicine run amok, the consequence of doctors serving the state rather than individuals, Mitchell said. “These people had bodies that didn’t work right and couldn’t be productive for the nation.” At the same time, as Rodrigo Duran noted, the program was built on long-standing views of the disabled as less than human. “They argued that Germany was a body, and the disabled were a tumor,” he said. “They needed to remove that tumor to make the body stronger.”

Indeed, many of the perpetrators were never tried for the crimes they called benign “medical interventions.” And while local townspeople may not have participated in the slaughter, Mitchell suggested that the stigma surrounding the disabled made it easier for many to rationalize the medical murders. “It’s difficult to imagine that someone living in Bernburg during the 1940s would not know what was happening down the road,” he said. “The smell of human flesh and bones burning is very distinct.”

Senior women’s studies major Faith Weis said the trip inspired her to “reclaim a historical narrative” for forgotten victims like the disabled. “History has to be seen through a broader lens,” she said. “We are uncomfortable talking about the disabled. But we’re going to have to learn how to talk about our differences if we are going to give them the historical context they deserve.”

The students who participated in the class and the trip were Mehreen Arif, Julia Barrett, Alexandra Bonagura, Rodrigo Duran, Jessica Hang, Alyssa Kopervos, Lili Sten, Faith Weis and Maria Willhoit.'

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Emancipation Day Lecture April 15: Robert S. Levine

Eventbrite RSVP. Please circulate.

Please join the Africana Studies Program for

The George Washington University’s Annual DC Emancipation Day Lecture

“Frederick Douglass’s Tales of Abraham Lincoln”

Robert S. Levine

 Professor of English, The University of Maryland

General Editor, Norton Anthology of American Literature

 

Drawing from his forthcoming book, The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Harvard, 2016), Levine will discuss the image of Lincoln emerging from Douglass’s personal and public writing. Levine will revise the mythical ideas of a Lincoln-Douglass “bromance” and instead shed light on a complex relationship that altered the course of history

A force in American and African American literature, Levine is the author of books such as 1997's Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity and 2008's Dislocating Race and Nation. He has produced scholarly editions from a range of important writers, William Wells Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe among them. He sits on the editorial boards of American Literary History, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, andJ19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. He has edited numerous critical volumes, including Hemispheric American Studies and The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Recent awards include a 2012-13 NEH Senior Fellowship and a 2013-14 Guggenheim Fellowship. Levine was awarded the MLA’s 2013 Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies.

April 15, 6:00-7:30 PM

The City View Room

1957 E Street, NW

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

GWU’s Emancipation Day Lecture commemorates April 16^th, 1862, the day Lincoln signed the D.C.’s Compensated Emancipation Act, freeing the District’s enslaved. Co-sponsored with the District of Columbia Archives

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