Dispatch for Hackley: Ronica Bhattacharya

What drew me to Hackley in the first place speaks, unsurprisingly, to what I miss most about it now: the opportunities you can have in a day there to laugh, to work, to commune with good people--to feel, in short, like you are not merely imposing your passions but sharing them. I enjoyed the latitude in my curriculum to supplement interesting core texts and tasks with others of my own choosing (Proust! Murakami! A pilgrimage! Zines!), and I got to serve a while alongside deans whose commitment to fairness and empathy continues to inspire me. Of course there were moments when, sleep deprived, the idea of seizing any opportunity beyond a donut only brought Sisyphus to mind, but we were mostly industrious and inquisitive, no? I’m just not sure where else in this world I would also have had the chance to play flute with the band (thank you, Mrs. Fitzpatrick), stalk the art room, eat 500 lunches with the savvy, pre-K set of faculty children, coach an all-male dance squad (they performed twice), chaperone a trip to Japan with Mr. Itoh as our guide, and, ultimately, establish so many good and lifelong exchanges built around literature and music. So, I miss the volume of those moments, but I’ve been thankful to visit and stay in touch this past year. I knew I was going to use this time to work on a second novel, but I hadn’t realized, perhaps stupidly, how helpful it was going to be to have time to reflect on teaching, too, revisiting memories like the ones above.

By the time I got to Hack, I had essentially completed Bijou Roy. It’s a tricky process to quantify ten years later: the book grew out of a bit of a ruthless edit I made to my MFA thesis, which left me with one character (Nitish Roy) and some change. It took a while to unpuzzle what story he was leading; the novel then took a couple years to draft, and I spent maybe five more revising it, in fits and starts.

In 2008, it found a publisher. I got the call at my desk in the deans’ office one April morning, and the rest of that day is fuzzy, although I do remember my students asking who wanted to publish it:

“A saint,” I said, slowly. “St. Martin’s? I don’t know St. Martin’s. Are you St. Martin’s?”

And they said, “St. Martin’s? Like our grammar book, titled The St. Martin’s Handbook? Seriously, Miss B? You write it on the board every day.”

And I said, “I love that book!” (It really is a good one.) “How are your poetry papers going?”

Thus began this surreal journey, and I continued to welcome involving my Hack students in it when they were game. As an English teacher, it would have been strange not to do that. Once, as I was considering a seemingly risky tweak with Bijou during the final editing phase, they were my council. All I really had to do was fix some typos, but I was thinking about adding a prologue of sorts, I told them. Was I just having a hard time letting go? To address my qualms, my students said things like, “Well, what would Salinger do here? Or is this like A Separate Peace situation? More like that Cheever story? Are you Milton or Macbeth? Why would you put a denouement in the exposition? What’s it gonna be, Miss B? Why don’t you just make it a movie?” Good questions. Later, they would help choose my pen name, too.

It’s been hardly two months now since Bijou was published, and these days, talking to Hack students about it, seeing them at readings—it’s been just as good if not all the more grounding. I’ve already seen one annotated copy of a former student’s that so thoroughly owned the book, it’s nuts--and it was eerily similar to feedback I’d just received from my former teachers.

I did write while I was at Hackley. I can’t quite separate school from writing; they’ve been mutualistically informing my every step since first grade. I wrote as a student, was encouraged by teachers, grew willful, and then I wrote as a teacher, encouraging my students, still pretty willful. So, during breaks, I made inroads with a novel, pages that I will let marinate, return to down the road. I also wrote little essays--some for and about my students--and, in hindsight, a possibly alarming number of couplets. I’m happy to write anything, is the truth, but in my obviously limited experience with novels, I find I still prefer that form most, despite and because of how much time a novel can require to research, build, read, study. I am lucky to have the time for a second attempt now, and I’ve had some cool moments at my desk seeing how, for instance, teaching Frankenstein at Hack four years in a row is totally influencing certain decisions I’m making—perhaps not just with the novel but with life, too. Oh, Victor.

I think my advice to anyone about creative writing is pretty simple: you commit to the practice. You embrace the fact that revision is not only possible but, in crafting something with depth, inevitable. And collaboration is written all over the writing process, not just in terms of finding—and satisfying—your readers. I wrote Bijou, at some level, armed with ideas distilled from “Hamlet,” James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Satyajit Ray, The Cure, Hindu mythology, Edward Hopper, and The Merck Manual (true story). I read about a number of late-1960s riots. I studied pieces by Chopin and Debussy and a number of ghazals. I may as well have said to myself at some point, “Well, in the event that this is the only novel you ever write, foolish, foolish girl, then looks like you must now fit in Billie Holiday, John DeLorean, the PGA, and Paris. Also, engineer it so nothing is really linear, but make sure there’s a plot. Good luck with that. Here’s the English language. You’ll need about fifty thousand words from it. Choose carefully. You can use a little personal experience but don’t forget what Graham Greene says about all that. P.S. cf. Edith Wharton.”

Kind of sounds like a Comp prompt, doesn’t it? In that case, this would be the prompt for the second novel: “Imagine you are in Kashmir. It is 1870. Your themes are Imperialism, technology, and blood. One central character is a French doctor. Construct the narrative like a shawl worn by the Empress Josephine. You have before you all of 19th-century literature, a pop-up book from CERN, and a way to tie this all into a third novel, set in Detroit. Use those. Go.” (I’m only five chapters in; you can still catch up, trust me. Give it a shot. As an added bonus, my mom will call you every day to ask if you’ve finished yet.)

As for plans, come January, I’ll be spending a semester as Visiting Scholar at St. Louis University, teaching a few creative writing courses. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to spending early October in D.C., at St. Albans School to see old colleagues there and at GWU, where Bijou is on the syllabus for a class I’ll be visiting. And I will surely be back at Hack this fall. We don’t even have to talk about the book; I really just want to see the new library and catch up. I hope the year is off to a great start for everyone.

-- Ronica Bhattacharya, Septemer 2010