C.P. Chang, Fiction Writing Tutor

C.P. Chang has always been writing . . . in seventh-grade poetry, in freshman English, and throughout an undergraduate math degree at Harvard. Even after working for a software consulting firm, traveling to Germany, and as a student-at-large at Ohio State, the notion was always nagging at him. He avoided it mainly to please his family, who were very strict in pushing him towards more concrete ventures.

His literary influences include Robert Owen Butler, Lorrie Moore, and Salman Rushdie. He prefers fiction to nonfiction, and would like to achieve what he calls "the dream": being a published novelist. Outside of school, he loves to play pool and basketball, and he likes to drink. "I feel old sometimes," says C.P. "I feel like I've had a lot of life."

Profile by Joe Tower

A Conversation with Aaron Golding, Transfer Student and Fiction Writing Major

NC: At what level of education are you?

AG: This coming fall semester will be my senior year as well as my first bachelor degree. I think like many people, I took a while to figure out what I wanted to major in at a community college and then went to the school that I thought would be most helpful to create the image of knowledge that I wanted to possess.

NC: Where did you grow up?

AG: I grew up outside Detroit with my father; we lived in a few different homes before moving to West Bloomfield. It was a plain land of strip malls and people with way too much money on their hands. West Bloomfield's children drove Lexus cars and SUVs, had an array of bling-bling and lived in mini-mansions. They, and I don't know who they are, but they said that West Bloomfield had some of the best schooling, but I didn't hear it. I dropped out my second semester of my senior year in high school. I guess I needed a break. For the next year and a half, I did a lot of nothing until I had a need to explore school. I finished high school in another town where I wasn't distracted and then jumped right into college.

NC: What made you decide to come to Columbia?

AG: I guess it was the picture of Eric May on the website. A few people that I knew had told me about Columbia, so I looked on the website, and the first thing I remember seeing was his picture where he has his arms up like he is raising the roof. It just seemed inviting. Call it intuition or something, but I just made up my mind. This was the school that I was coming to even though I didn't know anything about it, except it had a fiction writing program. But I mean, I didn't know that Eric was in the department or anything like that.

NC: How did you hear about Columbia?

AG: Like I said, I heard about it through a few friends. I was working as a bartender for a catering company, and I was at this wedding. I happened to bump into this girl that I had gone to high school with. We were catching up in-between me pouring and mixing drinks, and she somehow mentioned Columbia and I was like, what is that? So I checked it out. After that someone else mentioned it to me because they wanted to do ceramics and they were thinking of coming here.

NC: Where did you go to school before?

AG: I went to Oakland Community College, where I played around in all of the arts that I was interested in. I tried photography, jewelry making, music, acting (which I am not good at), and creative writing. I failed my first creative writing class, but decided that I was missing something, so I took it again and passed, and then went on to the advanced creative writing class and had fun doing that.

NC: When did you know you were a writer?

AG: I have no idea. I wrote here and there in journals, mostly bad poetry and small observations of things that were going on around me, but I never thought that I wanted to be a writer until I took those two creative writing classes that I was talking about. I realized that I wasn't that bad and my teacher was encouraging me to continue it, and I said what the hell.

NC: You're a Native American Indian. How does that affect your writing?

AG: Well, I have thought about that. I am Seneca, and that I think pop culture doesn't have enough Indians, or any minority for that matter, displayed in the media and images, so I, of course, want to bring that to light. But it sounds so blaa, blaa, blaa...like I am some noble hero and I'm not, I like a diversity of characters in my writing.

NC: What are your plans after you graduate?

AG: Well, part of me wants to take off and disappear in the vast fogginess of Europe, but I might just stay here in Chicago and go to grad school to get that master's. I still have a year to figure it out.

Interview by Nicole Chakalis

This fall 2004, Aaron will preside over the Student Board, an organization that actively assists the Fiction Writing Department and the student writing community in activities such as Story Week, student readings, Fiction Writers at Lunch, the Charity Book/Bake Sale, and in producing the student newsletter, Fictionary.

Phillip Klapperich, Playwright

Phillip C. Klapperich moved to Chicago in the summer of 2000 — after graduating from George Washington University with a degree in electronic media — to help some friends start a theater company. The long cold winter of that first year in a new city with no job, no money, no mommy, and only the vague idea of starting a theater company resulted in his application to Columbia's Fiction Writing grad program.

By the time class started the following fall, The House Theatre of Chicago was going into production on its first show, Death and Harry Houdini. This show garnered critical acclaim from some of the smaller papers in town and left the theater in a good position to go to work immediately on a follow-up. Phillip's adaptation of the J. M. Barrie play, entitled The Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan, opened in the summer of 2002 to rave reviews and sold-out houses. The show ran a total of 5 months and established The House as, in the words of Hedy Weiss of the Chicago Sun-Times, "The Next Big Thing in Chicago Theater." The House is in the middle of its first full season, including a remount of Death and Harry Houdini, and an original western rock musical, San Valentino and the Melancholy Kid. Phillip's second play, The Rocket Man, a sci-fi love story, inspired by the works of Ray Bradbury, opened on May 8, 2004.

Though his tenure at Columbia began as an effort to counter the depression and aimlessness of that first year in Chicago — an aimlessness that dissipated long ago — he stuck with it and completed his class work in June 2004, leaving only his thesis, a pseudo-biography of a fictional salesman, inspired by the life of Ron Popeil, entitled Incredible Accounts of Victory and Heartbreak From the Spectacular Life and Mysterious Death of WYN BINGHAM, Inventor and Pitchman to be completed.

John Lowery

Prior to becoming a student at Columbia College, I had no experience writing fiction. I occasionally wrote a letter and I kept a journal. I took Renee Hansen's Creative Non-Fiction class in Columbia's English Department and found out that I was writing things I cared about. I realized that there were things I wanted and needed to say, and that putting my thoughts on paper so others could read them was very satisfying, even when the process was sometimes frustrating. Renee suggested that I might want to take a Fiction Writing class. After taking Fiction I and II, I was hooked. I changed my major from art to fiction.

The Fiction Writing Department has helped me to find my voice, a way of expressing myself that is as unique
to me as my speaking voice and the way I think, the way I experience the world — because it encompasses  all of that.

I often have no idea what I want to write about, or if I do, how I want to say it. Free writing whatever pops into my head is a warm up and a way that helps me to discover what I want to say. This process is also a way for me to generate a lot of writing that I can cull through and pick out what's interesting. Eventually an idea, character, or place will take on a consistency that I can keep going with and see what happens.

I wrote my Creative Non-Fiction essay "Fault Line" in Alexis Pride's Prose Forms class, which she submitted, and it was accepted for publication in Hair Trigger 24. I was blown away when I was told that it had won the Columbia Scholastic Press Association first-place award for essays for a magazine.

John Lowery is currently an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing program at Columbia College Chicago. In 2003, he won first place in the Essay category of the Columbia (University) Scholastic Press Association awards for his essay, "Fault Line." In 2004, he won the top graduate student award of the John Schultz and Betty Shiflett Story Workshop® Scholarship.

Beverly Mendoza, winner of the Sylvia McNair Travel Writing Scholarship 2004

NC: You were this year's winner of the Sylvia McNair Travel Writing Scholarship. How did you know you had a piece that fit the guidelines?

BM: Place has always been a central character in a lot of my stories, and I do either purposely or subconsciously pay a lot of attention to it. Filipino Gangster Ball was very much about Manila and this one evening in which a birthday party took place and heroes were idolized and trust betrayed. It was a lot about paradox, which in my understanding is one of the central characteristics of the Philippines. One of my

main characters is figuring out Manila; she is a child, and what better perspective is there to describe a place? Someone who has a really pure, unbiased naivety to it—it’s a lot more raw than if it was anyone older telling the story. That’s when I knew this story would be a good contender for a travel-writing contest. For me, travel writing is about figuring out a place, and what distinguishes excellent travel writing is when there is a fresh take on a place, writing that captures something, not shocking, but stunning and it makes you see it all differently for the first time.

NC: What does place mean to you in a story?

BM: It depends on what type of story you want to tell. Some stories I write could take place anywhere — Pluto or Rogers Park, doesn't matter, the place is just a backdrop. The focus is on a relationship between characters more than anything. It is more character based. We can put them in a stuck elevator or on a coral reef — an exercise that Irvine would have us do, picking a place by drawing a piece of cardboard and writing our characters in that random place for half an hour — somehow my characters act consistently to who they are from the start: same tensions, same motivations, just different venues. But that's rare in my writing these days. Place is central. Manila, Chicago, New York, they are entities that beat down my characters or lure them back, either way, place stirs something deep inside my characters and therefore adding that essential lift to my stories. It is crucial for me to use place to the best of my ability when my goal is to tell that type of story.

NC: Did you develop this piece in any of your Fiction Writing classes? What instructor?

BM: Filipino Gangster Ball was the first story I wrote in Fiction Writing I with Andy Allegretti. It was after the word volley game, and I wrote the first scene pretty fast in class. I found out a friend of the family's passed away from a heroin overdose in the Philippines one day. I wrote some horrific poetry about him and turned it in for Ann [Hemenway's] Women Writer's class in a journal entry (poor Ann — really). And then I just wrote this story inspired by this man. This character had possessed me ever since. And from then on, he was in many stories I've written, and now he's one of my two main narrators for my thesis. I steeplechased [a Story Workshop writing exercise] this piece in Betty Shiflett's class, which really helped me condense it and develop the characters more and also have things pointed out to me, metaphors I never realized I used and how to keep that consistent throughout the piece. She read, I think, the whole piece one night in steeplechase form, all twelve steps, and I've never had a workshop that truly concentrated on one of my stories that fully before. It was extremely helpful. And then I polished it up in my last Advanced Fiction Writing class with Randy Albers. Just recently I've actually rewritten a different version through Victor, the gangster's perspective, in his own voice, and it was the most fun I've had with writing in a long time. So this piece has gone through the grind and has managed, surprisingly, to survive my edits. The more I learn about writing, the more it morphs. It's the one story that has aged with me.

NC: Where did you go to undergrad?

BM: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

NC: What was your major?

BM: B.A. in Political Science with minors in Philosophy and English.

NC: When did you know you were a writer?

BM: I still don't really know that for sure. It's something I'd like to try and has taken my full attention the past three years. We'll see what happens. I can tell you when I decided to go for it. I was in my third week of law school, and I just read Interviews with Truman Capote by Lawrence Grobel. And it explained why I felt like such a freak in law school, why deep down I knew it wasn't a right fit, and that's what planted the seed, that writing could be my way out of this mess I got myself into. I saw a lot of myself in Capote, believe it or not, this short, brutal, dramatic gay man. It just seemed like he had a lot of fun using his mind in his writing, and it afforded him this amazing freedom in his life and I really wanted that for myself.

NC: Why did you choose Columbia College Chicago for grad school?

BM: I called the department finally, after I passed the damn school everyday on my way to law school and to my law job. Amidst the humdrum, it was like this constant teasing itch I needed to satisfy. I knew it was an art school. I requested some information and whomever I talked to also offered to send me Hair Trigger 23, the Fiction Writing Department student-edited literary magazine. I looked at the brochures, saw a picture of Eric May looking like some crazy evangelist and Andy Allegretti in his mustache phase, read about the Story Workshop® Method, then read all the stories in Hair Trigger in one sitting and that was it — the writing impressed the hell out of me. I came in spring 2002. And it was the first school that actually excited me and challenged me and made me feel like I fit. I remember I was just floored with the intense engagement and enthusiasm that people had in each class. I grew up in the School of Stuffiness. So it was the most pleasant surprise. I thought that everyone was so talented and so intelligent and so bizarre in the greatest way, and I kept thinking, where the hell have I been all this time? It was an awakening.

NC: What are you doing with your writing now?

BM: I keep experimenting with my writing. The more I read and write, the more I learn how very little I know. It's very much sharpening your instincts and eye each time you write a story. I just turned in my first draft of my thesis to my advisor Patty McNair. I'm trying not to dwell on it and obsess over it. So I'm taking a breather from that world for a while. I'm writing completely different stories with new characters, and it feels so refreshing and exciting. I'm chasing that feeling again of getting to know something very new and different.

NC: What are your plans for the future?

BM: Oh good lawd, Nicole. What are YOUR plans for the future? Well, immediate future is to find a job I don't quit in three days. So that disqualifies all law firms and restaurants from now on. I'm applying to Dalkey Archive Press in Bloomington, IL. I just want to be around people fixated on books for the summer. Cross your fingers. I'm going to participate in the San Francisco Voices of Our Nations Workshop with Junot Diaz in June. I'm seeing Prince immediately afterwards, and I need to find the best homage to Prince getup I can get my hands on. I'm thinking a full-out rhinestone ensemble. I'm going to Hawaii in July to learn how to surf. I need to write my second draft of my thesis. And by August I need to know where I'm going to next, because my lease runs out. Until then, I'm playing the country bumpkin down here in Chambana. I fantasize about starting a writers' colony down here with Richard Powers as the landlord to attract the writers, and me as the hostess and my mom to cook Filipino food. It's nice and quiet down here, drinks are cheap and life is slow. Come visit!

Interview by Nicole Chakalis

Beverly Mendoza is currently an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing program at Columbia College Chicago. In 2003, she won the John Schultz and Betty Shiflett Story Workshop Scholarship. In 2004, she won the Sylvia McNair Travel Writing Scholarship. She has relocated for the time being to Champaign-Urbana to work on a book of fiction titled The Never Ending Memoir of a Disgruntled Foreigner and enjoy her last days of no responsibility. You can read a collection of her novel vignettes, recently published in Hair Trigger 26.

Chris Neri

Christopher Neri, Undergrad, winner of the John Schultz and Betty Shiflett Story Workshop® Scholarship for 2004

NC: When did you start writing?

CN: I started writing at about the sixth grade, with poems and other things. In high school and in my early college days I was into playwriting. I wrote one play, which I now know had no point to it whatsoever. I always had fiction in the back of my brain. I wrote a lot but never whole stories, it was always just scenes or ideas. I didn’t really start concentrating on long prose until I came to Columbia as a sophomore.

NC: What kinds of things do you read or write?

CN: There is no real pattern to the things I read. I usually just kind of follow my nose and listen to recommendations. As for writing, it tends to lean toward horrible situations and heavy weirdness. I don’t intend to, it just happens.

NC: Who are your influences?

CN: Kerouac was huge for me. Vonnegut was some of the first really good shit I read and Hunter Thomson, especially, The Rum Diaries. H.G. Wells, Anne Rice, Nabokov, and Janet Finch teach everything you need to know about metaphor, also Eugene O’Neill, David Morrel, and [Gabriel Garcia] Marquez. Lately I’ve been reading Steve Martin; his stuff is fascinating. And I know I’m learning something from Tom Bodett, but I’m not sure what.

NC: Do you still write poetry?

CN: Yes.

NC: Does that help you with your fiction?

CN: I think studying both playwriting and poetry has benefited my prose writing. I’m not really good at either of the two, but I think working with them has helped my writing greatly.

NC: What did you submit to the John Schultz and Betty Shiflett Story Workshop Scholarship competition?

CN: “Black Lemonade and Bad Intentions at the Starkville City Jail.”

NC: Did you begin the story in any of your Fiction Writing classes?

CN: I had a slight idea of the story but didn’t really start it until I took Fiction Writing I with Jamie Kallio. I also worked on it in Megan Stielstra’s Critical Reading and Writing I class.

NC: Did you continue to develop it in any other classes?

CN: I didn’t bring it into their classes, but both Jotham Burrello and Joe Meno read it and gave me some very helpful insight.

NC: What is next for you in your writing?

CN: I’m trying to push out a novel at some point, but I’m barely started because it scares the hell out of me.

NC: What are you plans for after graduation?

CN: I’m either going to become a mailman or try to write dirty stories for pornographic magazines, but I still have a little bit more time to think about it.

Interview by Nicole Chakalis

An Interview With Latoya Wolfe, Undergrad Fiction Writing Major and Outreach Tutor Coordinator

How long have you been writing? What do you like to read and write?

I have been writing since I was ten years old, but I didn't really construct my first short story until I was nineteen and in my very first fiction workshop at North Park University. I like to read a variety of writing from Toni Morrison to Harry Potter. Good writing that I can study, mostly.

Latoya Wolfe

What can you tell us about your column for the Chicago Journal?

My short-lived column for the Chicago Journal gave me an opportunity to reflect on my experiences living in the South Loop, in contrast to living in Robert Taylor on the South Side.

How did you find out about Columbia?

I have known about Columbia for years, but I didn't enroll right away because I wanted to leave Chicago and see something new. After my sightseeing was over (I was going to school in Norfolk, Virginia) I ended up back home with a chunk of a manuscript. I then enrolled in the Fiction program and started learning my craft.

What attracted you to the Fiction Writing Department?

At first it was the variety of classes. I would research from my school in Virginia, and I was amazed at the number of fiction writing classes that Columbia offered.

What are your career/life/artistic goals?

I will, at some point, be a novelist. Right now, I'm a writer who is truly willing to do what is necessary to become the best writer possible. I am also very interested in book publishing, and I am considering (strongly) applying for entry-level jobs in publishing in New York. Later, I want to develop an arts camp for teenagers.

How will your Columbia education help you fulfill your goals?

I have become a better writer as a result of both my determination and my Columbia instruction. Also, I have been working for the Office of Community Arts Partnerships at the ACT Charter School as a Tutor Coordinator, and the administrative and managerial skills that I have acquired are definitely going to be useful in Corporate America.

Tell us about your background, your high school, etc.

I grew up on the South Side in a housing project, but I went to Curie High School on the southwest side of the city. There I studied music (piano, electronic keyboard) and I was introduced to other cultures. I knew that I would go to college because I hated my neighborhood and I had seen so many families grow new branches and live in the same place. I did not want to live in Robert Taylor Homes forever, so I tried to do things differently.

When's your graduation date?

January 2005! This fall will be my last semester.

You are a Fiction Writing major? Do you have a minor?

I don't have a minor, unless you can count all of the field experience that I am gaining by working with kids.

What's next for Latoya Wolfe?

Latoya will finish her novel, find a publisher in New York, and work super hard to convince everyone to buy her book, before running off to New York to work in somebody's publishing house.

Accomplishments:

• " Tonya from the Ten,” second-place winner, Young Adult Short Story Competition 2003, Union League Civic & Arts Foundation
• “How to Make Hot-Water Cornbread” Chicago Reader
• “Fighting Back,” story, winner of Zora Neale Hurston/Bessie Head Fiction Award 2003
• Attendee: Voices of Our Nations Writing Workshop, June 2003, San Francisco, with writer Junot Diaz
• Attendee: Gwendolyn Brooks Writers’ Conference, fall 2003
• State Treasurer’s dinner honoree, Feb. 19, 2003
• Guest lectured and read her poetry at North Park University, May 2003
• Appeared in PBS documentary Primary Focus, Mother’s Day 2004