Elise Hu

Yep, both before, the summer before I graduated from college and then the year afterwards.

And it was a very, very interesting job.

It was fast-paced.

People were smart, interesting.

I liked being sent out into my own city to explore.

I liked being sent to

to corners and people who I wouldn't have found on my own and having a reason to ask them about their lives.

But I was aware that I really did want to do a different kind of writing.

I learned how to master the form of what a new story looks like and how to have paragraphs towards the end that could be lopped off.

But I wanted to surrender to that alchemical process that happens when you make something and don't just record something.

And I could feel myself – literally, it was like a shoreline.

I could feel myself like wanting to step over into embellishment, into something else.

And I knew that that was not sustainable.

And I feared I would make a mistake.

And I wouldn't know I'd made a mistake.

I mean, again, this is like believing the things that I write more than how they happened.

Right.

So I was talking about this, that, and the other, and it was my mother who, and it's fitting that we should speak of it now because the great poet Derek Walcott has just passed away, and he was my teacher and my mentor.

My mother said, I saw that that poet whose work you love teaches at Boston University.

Why don't you just apply to that program?