Dr. Lea Graham Interview
Dr. Lea Graham is an Assistant professor of English at Marist College. She recently published a collection of poems titled, Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You. Graham, a native of Arkansas, has definitely traveled and done what she wanted. I recently sat down with her for a brief interview and to receive some advice.
I’ve had three classes to date with Dr. Graham and always receive tremendous feedback and support. She’s published her own work and she really knows how to get her classes engaged in the workshops. She also introduced to one of my favorite writing genres – nonfiction, specifically, the brevity and reckoning essays. I asked her what her graduate school experience was and what her advice would be to future graduate students. She gave me a lengthy reply, but after transcribing it from my voice recorder and thinking about it, she really put me at ease. There shouldn’t be any rush. Some writers need to experience the world and travel.
“I did both my M.A. and Ph.D at the University of Illinois at Chicago,” Dr. Graham said. “So don’t choose the school for the place. But, in a big city, there’s a lot of choices. And I already knew that UIC would be the right place for me to stay and I knew some of the writers there.”
Dr. Graham explained that an M.F.A today is a better choice than just getting your M.A. Dr. Graham knew she wanted to go for her Ph.D, so it ended up being fine that she only went for her MA at first. However, an M.F.A. is its own degree, not just a stepping stone. She said she may have thought differently if she knew what an M.A. and M.F.A. meant.
She went on to explain how she took time to do other kinds of work. She mentioned doing advocacy work, work for nonprofits in Central America, as well as work in political issues and a lot of inner city organizations. It worked out to a total of six years out of school before she decided to head back.
“There’s always a question with writers, at which point do you stop relying on your experiences and you rely more upon your reading,” Dr. Graham said. “I don’t want to play up experience. I would say the median age of graduate students is still around 32 to 33 years old.”
Dr. Graham did all these different kinds of work and then realized she really knew what she wanted to teach. She had been an ESL teacher and spoke Spanish. This helped her get her foot in the door and actually gave her a small head start. She explained how you need a second language and one of her projects was on translation. It ended up being a part of her doctoral dissertation.
As for being back at school? “I liked it,” Dr. Graham said. “I got smarter. One thing I would say, I got more mature as a student as I went along. I wasn’t a mature undergrad. I was serious and inquisitive, but at the same time, I don’t think I had this confidence that ‘if I get serious I can take this somewhere.’ And that’s what graduate school really did for me.”
It took Dr. Graham six and a half to seven years to complete her Ph.D. She moved to Massachusetts part way through and the long distance complicated the process.
One of the big questions students ask themselves before deciding on graduate school is WHERE DO I WANT TO TAKE THIS? In my own life, I’ve considered teaching. So I asked Dr. Graham about this. She told me about her experience at UIC. “The great and terrible thing about doing grad work at a place as big as UIC, is that you’re really teaching classes,” she said. “You’re really learning on the fly how to teach a class.”
Being one of her workshop students, I asked her what that atmosphere was like for her. He explained how workshops vary from class to class. A lot of writers don’t like them and you can never really tell what a workshop class will be like until it begins. “It’s high anxiety,” she said. “A workshop is based off everyone’s work.” Orchestrating a class based off student’s work can definitely be a challenge.
The teaching at UIC pushed Dr. Graham to definitely stay on that path. She always knew she would be writing. She mentioned that she had journals from her six years outside of school. If she never published another piece of work, she noted that she would always be writing. She doesn’t really like the rush to publish writing, but explained that it is what it is.
“I think we’re at a turning point in writing because it’s so public all the time,” she said. She brought up current blogs. She said how some are brilliant and others are messes. Technology has changed the face of writing and people are still figuring out how to marry the two together successfully. She also brought up how academia has changed as well. “The reasons that people used to go to school for then are a little different now,” she said. She admitted she could be wrong, but anyone can see that times have changed in the academic world.
Dr. Graham offered me some final words of advice and some interesting examples. “You have to live your life,” she said. “To quote “Sex and the City”, ‘choose your choice.’ Think about why you want to do it. Why do you want to teach? Why do you want to be a grant writer? Writing books, you’re just going to have to do that besides everything else you do.”
She gave me the example of a friend who would wake up at 2 a.m. and write until 5 a.m. He would then take his son to school, teach his classes, come back and do it all over again. “People make great sacrifices to write,” she said. “The great thing about writing is that you can always do it, no matter what.” Dr. Graham is up writing two hours before she comes in to teach her own classes. She laughed about how she should be doing lesson plans, but sometimes you have to make that trade-off.
“What are you inspired by?”
A link to Dr. Graham's work:
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