Everyone Feels As Much Imposter Syndrome As You Do: An Interview with Assistant Nonfiction Editor Hannah Seidlitz
Photo: Erik Reeves
Next up in our series of staff micro-interviews is Hannah Seidlitz, Assistant Nonfiction Editor and first year in nonfiction at NYU. Hannah is an amateur semiotician who lives in Brooklyn. She won’t let you make her feel embarrassed about her two Virginia Woolf tattoos or her Lars von Trier Blu-ray box set. Her writing appears in Longreads, LitHub, Electric Literature, QZ, Entropy Mag, and elsewhere.
WRS: How long have you been at NYU? How does your graduate experience compare to that of undergrad
HS: I transferred to NYU from Skidmore midway through my sophomore year of college, back in 2015. I went to Gallatin, where I developed my own concentration in semiotics, but since I was a creative writing minor, I spent most of my time in the Writers House. It’s funny when people from my past ask where I go to school, because when I say NYU they’re like, “Yeah, no, I know, but where do you go to grad school?” And I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I’m still here.” I love it that much. I haven’t even strayed too far from the same faculty.
WSR: Who did you study with?
HS: As an undergraduate, I studied with [Jeffrey] Eugenides, Anne Carson, Mira Jacob, Darin Strauss, and already in my first year I’ve taken the same classes again with Anne and Darin. Both wonderful geniuses. Though her syllabus the first time was built around Sophocles, and this time around we’re reading John Cage and Yoko Ono. No complaints. Nothing could pull me away from the program, or even the physical space. It’s funny being a grad student there now because I remember I used to be so timid and self-conscious entering the space, and I felt so terribly young and so terribly inexperienced. I’m still both of those things, but I think, to some extent, I’m now taken seriously—by professors, administrators, peers—as a “writer” or, dare I say, an “artist,” whereas as a wee undergraduate (literally last year) I was just a kid with a hobby.
WSR: How does your work at Washington Square interact with being a nonfiction student in the program? The genre’s new to both the magazine and the program.
HS: I’ve spent a lot of time reading slush because before Washington Square, I was an editorial assistant at Electric Literature, helping primarily with essay submissions. Nonfiction is such an exciting genre right now, and not just because the market’s hot for it, which it is. It’s been rapidly developing in the last decade or so with the advent of the Maggie Nelson-helmed “lyric memoir,” which as a label, I guess, best describes what I write, though I don’t really believe in genre as anything more than a helpful cataloguing tool.
Nonfiction is exciting to me because it seems to sit at the nexus of narrative and lyric, synthesizing storytelling techniques it borrows from fiction and aesthetic or prosodic concerns it steals from poetry, cherry-picking the choice elements of both. From my experience writing all three, nonfiction permits a certain capaciousness for experimentation. Fiction is tough because it’s got a lot of audience considerations to attend to given that it isn’t necessarily “true” or “real.” Since nonfiction doesn’t need to convince the reader of its validity in quite the same way, though of course credibility and authorship is a central question of the genre, there feels to be more room to take risks and break rules. Even though, legally, poetry counts as fiction, I think nonfiction should count as poetry. There’s so much stylistic and technical diversity. In my class alone, there are students working with hybrid cultural criticism, modes of reportage and research, straight personal essay, speculative, postmodernism, and there’s endless space for play.
WSR: Do you feel like you’ve gotten the chance to do interdisciplinary work in the program?
HS: My favorite thing about the program is how interdisciplinary it is. We can take craft classes in any genre, and the workshop space is one which encourages experimentation and risk-taking. Plus, on an interpersonal level, I always joke that I feel like a sleeper agent because early on in the fall, I was sort of shepherded into the poetry friend group before anyone knew I wasn’t a poet. I think it was the nose ring that really did me in. It’s become a bit of an ongoing gag now that I’ve been outed as an essayist, but somehow, to my incredible, unearned fortune, they still let me attend all their poetry gatherings. Having attended more than a few of their wine nights and potlucks and parties at which poetry is shared, situations in which I’ve had to perform a paragraph of prose in lieu of a poem like the absolute square I am, has pushed me to think critically about what the genre distinctions mean and what value they really carry, if any at all. Reading my own work out loud in that context has forced me to pay careful attention to the sonic properties of my language, to consider things like enjambment, breath, rhyme scheme, and I have my genius poet friends to thank for that.
WSR: What’s one thing you wish you knew before starting your MFA?
HS: If I could go back and tell myself one thing before beginning the program, it’s this: You have nothing to prove. Everyone feels as much imposter syndrome as you do. When I started in September, I was fucking terrified. I was twenty-one, the youngest person in my cohort, and I didn’t want anyone to know how much of a baby I was for fear that no one would respect my opinion or take anything I said seriously. Now that I’m a whole seven months wiser, I realize no one should respect my opinion or take anything I say seriously anyway, but that my age has little to do with it. I’m kidding, sort of. But it is an essential lesson. My work has improved demonstrably over the course of the last five submissions, and it’s because I’ve eased up on the ego game a little more each time. When I turned in my first piece, I didn’t care about feedback or improvement so much as I did about proving how “smart” I was, proving something about my vocabulary and the nimbleness of my hand, and that gross self-consciousness laid itself bare in my writing. You do your worst writing when you’re trying to prove something. I was doing a shoddy imitation of writers I loved but would never be, some Frankenstein of Dostoevsky and Didion that was dead on delivery. I thought it was a compliment that one of my classmates said my writing sounded “like something a grandma would write” because I’d wrongly conflated baroqueness with intelligence. Things that are baroque can be smart, but they aren’t necessarily.
Something my workshop professor—the ethereal Yale Review editor-in-chief Meghan O’Rourke—is always saying is to figure out what kind of writer you are and nestle into that voice with confidence. You can love a million different styles and voices, but just because you really appreciate a certain type of prose doesn’t mean it comes naturally to you. Write with confidence. We’re all faking it. None of us knows what we’re doing. Art is terrifying. Being an artist is probably the most insane, ill-advised career path on earth—next to, like, lion-tamer. We’re all stumbling blindly through the darkness, but we’ve got each other, and every book ever written, to light the way, and we’ll keep trying and failing and trying and failing and trying until something finally sticks. And then we’ll start the process over again.