Raised with an eye toward social justice and a voice to say something about it, Erika Meitner was drawn to both the arts and religious studies. In her quests for understanding more of each, she was led down intertwining paths that made her writing all the richer. Being able to live into that, however, wasn't without the need for Plan Bs. Find out how answering the really big questions of our time requires interpersonal skills developed over a lifetime.
Guest Erika Meitner was raised in a household where reformed Judaism revolved around justice and social action. As a first-generation American, her immigrant parents expected her to go into a medical career or something established. Raised with an eye toward social justice and a voice to say something about it, though, she was drawn to both the arts—particularly creative writing—and religious studies in college and spoke up for women's rights and other issues. Upon receiving a fellowship to study in Jerusalem after graduation, she studied Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, and biblical and literary translation and considered rabbinical school.
To pay off her undergraduate loans, however, she worked as a consultant during the run-up to Y2K. When she realized she was spending all of her spare time reading, she knew that wasn't the life for her and went briefly into teaching middle school. The call to both religious studies and creative writing were strong, though, and she applied for master’s programs in each. Just as she was readying herself to return to Israel, she got off the wait list at UVa’s creative writing MFA program.
Knowing the road to established poet and academic would take some time, she kept a strong of Plan Bs going—from writing residencies and another master’s degree in Jewish studies to summer teaching stints and management consulting projects. These and other experiences that relied on her ability to solve problems through her interpersonal communication skills only made her writing richer.
In this episode, find out from Erika how answering the really big questions of our time requires interpersonal skills developed over a lifetime.…on ROADS TAKEN...with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode's Guest
Erika Meitner is a poet, a parent, and a teaching artist in the academy, currently at Virginia Tech where she is Professor of English in the creative writing programs. Her latest collection of poetry, Holy Moly Carry Me, is the winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in poetry, and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. In addition to her poetry, she also creates large-scale documentary photo/text projects on urban environments and conducts ethnographic research with coastal communities dealing with the impacts of both development and climate change. Her sixth book of poems, Useful Junk, is forthcoming in Spring 2022. You can find her work at ErikaMeitner.com.
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Erika Meitner: I had immigrant parents. I'm first-generation American. And I think it's pretty common for people with immigrant parents, for their parents to want them to be, you know, doctors or lawyers or something that's a very distinct profession that's not the arts, like anything but the arts. And that was pretty much, you know, how my family felt, too.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Raised with an eye toward social justice and a voice to say something about it, Erika Meitner was drawn to both the arts and religious studies. In her quest for understanding more of each, she was led down intertwining paths that made her writing all the richer. Being able to live into that, however, wasn't without the need for Plan Bs. Find out how answering the really big questions of our time requires interpersonal skills developed over a lifetime on today's Roads Taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today, I'm here with my friend, Erika Meitner and we are going to talk about different paths to truth and wisdom and all good things. So, Erika, thank you so much for being here today. I'm so excited for our conversation.
EM: Thanks for having me, Leslie. This is great.
LJR: All right. So I ask two questions of each of my guests and they are these: when we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would be?
EM: In college I, let's see, I was a creative writing and English literature major, who also took a lot of courses in film and religion. I had started college as a classics major with pre-med courses, but that didn't work out so well. Thankfully I did terribly in my math and science classes which pushed me in another direction.
My work study job for four years was in the English department as their student assistant. And I was the editor of the feminist newspaper, The Spare Rib. I played rugby for a little while. I was in Sigma Delta sorority, and I was in Casque & Gauntlet as a senior society. And I did a lot of, I guess, arts and social activism on campus. So that's kind of who I was.
LJR: I'm going to interrupt and ask you, since you put the pre-med thing out there, you were an assistant in the English department for four years. Meaning you started that your freshman year. You said, luckily I didn't do well in math and science. So you knew when you got there, it sounds like, that pre-med might not be the right fit. Why did you pursue it? What was that about? What was going on?
EM: I had immigrant parents. I'm first-generation American, and I think it's pretty common for people with immigrant parents, for their parents to want them to be, you know, doctors or lawyers or something that's a very distinct profession that's not the arts, like anything but the arts. There was a great Saturday Night Live skit fairly recently about that, where the son declared himself, you know, wanting to be a poet and the parents are just aghast. And that was pretty much, you know, how my family felt, too.
LJR: Were you a closeted poet at that point? And just saying like, okay, I'm going to bury this?
EM: You know, it was interesting about the creative writing classes at Dartmouth, as you had to actually apply to get into them. So I applied a couple times and got rejected and I think they finally felt bad for me and let me in, because I made all their photocopies and sorted everyone's mail. So they had to see me all the time. And I was so young when I got to college; I was 17. I had to go to Hanover High to get working papers. And the other thing I did that's I guess it's not, it's a little bit strange, but it's sort of like how I roll still is I was terrified of showing up at Dartmouth and being put to work in the cafeteria. So I wrote the financial aid office a letter that said I was a vegan and refuse to support any institution with my labor that killed meat for human consumption. Which was not true. I was not vegan, but they let me pick my work study job when I got there. So they gave me like the big book of jobs and let me go through it. And I said like, oh, you know, I love books. I love writing. I'll be the English department student assistant. And so that ended up working out really well.
LJR: Excellent. Particularly when it looked like math and science, wasn't going to work out. Yeah. Okay. So, enough interruptions. There’s a panoply of things that you were doing and being during our time there, but as time was closing, what was next on the path for you? Who did you think you were going to be?
EM: You know, so that was a question because I did corporate recruiting out of Dartmouth and actually got a job working for what was then Andersen consulting and is now Accenture as an analyst in their process competency group for the financial services industry.
LJR: That sounds just like you, Erika.
EM: Doesn't it? But actually I ended up winning a Dartmouth Reynolds fellowship to study abroad for a year. And I went to Israel. I moved to Jerusalem and I studied Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. I studied translation, biblical translation and literary translation. I studied Jewish sacred text and Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. And I also studied at a bunch of different issue areas. And so one of the things I had thought was I might want to be a rabbi or do a degree in Hebrew Comp Lit. And so that was sort of my step towards figuring out if I wanted to do that. But I also had loans from Dartmouth I needed to pay off. And so Andersen held the job for me for a year. And so when I got back from Israel, I actually went to St. Charles, Illinois so that they could train me in how to program computers for Anderson, because if you remember, it was the like mid- to late nineties where they were hiring anyone they could to reprogram COBOL mainframes. So that like the world wouldn't end, when we hit Y2K. And so my first corporate job was at Bell Atlantic doing asset management through Andersen. And then my next placement was at Merrill Lynch where I stayed for about a year helping revamp their front end stock trading systems. So that was not where I thought I would end up. A sign that that was maybe not the right place for me was I was pretty bad at programming computers too. But when they figured out I could write, they put me in charge of writing all of their deal memos. So I ended up in project management, but I was spending all my time, my lunch hours, at the Borders bookstore and the bottom of the World Financial Center. Like every lunch hour, I would just go there and read.
So I ended up quitting that job and going to teach public middle school in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
LJR: English?
EM: Language arts. And my students were mostly not super literate. It was an underserved neighborhood in a very underserved school. I was hired before ‘No Child Left Behind’ when all you needed was a BA and no criminal record for a violent felony. So the bar was pretty low. I didn't know what a sixth grader looked like before I got into the classroom. I had never taught before.
LJR: And what pulled you into the classroom or into that space?
EM: It felt like it was closer to where I may be wanting to be and closer to books and literature. And it was the hardest job I've ever had still to this day. I lasted a year and then I got burned out. Middle school is just a calling.
And so then I applied to both rabbinical school and graduate school in creative writing for my masters. I got into rabbinical school. I got wait-listed at the creative writing programs. I bought a plane ticket to move back to Israel and start my rabbinic studies.
And then I got a call from UVA that the person before me on the wait list was hiking through Honduras and couldn't be reached by telephone. And did I want her spot? So I took her spot.
LJR: Oh, my gosh. So the calling didn't happen in middle school, but there were things bigger than you happening to move the world and earth so that you could choose this path, it sounds like.
EM: Yeah. And the nice thing was I was actually the whole time I lived in Brooklyn after I moved from Jerusalem, I was writing and I had a writing group that had Dave Stack in it. Who is one of the first people I had met at Dartmouth (who's a 96) when I got there, who I had been in creative writing classes with and writing with since then. And he's someone who helped me edit my first three books. So that was a really lovely kind of connection we maintain through Dartmouth.
LJR: Yeah. Okay. I have to ask about the parents, since you brought them up. You were brought up in a household of faith. Or not.
EM: Yeah, I mean, I was brought up in a Jewish, in a Jewish household. My mother was born in a refugee camp after my grandparents survived Auschwitz. My father immigrated here from Israel, but my house wasn't Orthodox or anything. We were reformed Jews. My mother was super feminist. So it was like the only denomination where women could be in leadership roles, but it was a pretty much like reformed Judaism of the eighties and nineties was about social justice and social action. So it was like, that was a big piece of it.
Yeah, so yelling, “I'm going to be a poet” at 20 something, probably not working out. But “oh, I got this fellowship to go to Israel,” probably that's good, right? But then coming back and making this decision between rabbi and maybe poet again, how did that align with your whole family's kind of wishes and hopes for you?
EM: I'll be honest. My mom was actually most devastated when I became a school teacher. Because she was, no, she had an, she has an MBA. Back when she went to get it there, she was the only woman in her class. They weren't allowed to wear pants. You know, like it was that kind of situation. And she really, because of her generation, she saw being an educator in that way as sort of a women's career. And she saw it as something that, you know, like, why are you using your degree to do that? Like, she really didn't get it. And so when I went back to graduate school, because it was fully funded—so creative writing programs, most of the time they pay you to teach college while you're in school—Like, because I wasn't paying for school, and because I was teaching in an institution of higher education, it wasn't as much of a struggle.
LJR: For her. Was the struggle real for you? Or, well talk to me about your graduate program and your experiences there and your burgeoning identity as writer, professor, any of that or all of that.
EM: I mean, I think one of the gifts about Dartmouth was that there's an..there was an amazing creative writing faculty there, and there still is. It's just new people that weren't there when I was there. And my mentors at Dartmouth were Cleopatra Mathis and Cynthia Huntington, and Tom Sleigh. And Cynthia and Cleopatra in particular were always really straightforward about how hard it was to get an academic job and be a poet. So I always kind of had Plan B backups and other things I was doing. So like I put myself partially through grad school because they paid us, but not that much. You know, being actually in the summers, I worked as a consultant and did consulting for, you know, people who needed an extra analyst on the fly. So all of the other stuff I had done and I taught to, I taught high school kids in summer programs and all of this other stuff. So I always, I never thought that I would be able to make a living as a poet. Teaching poetry like that just didn't seem real. And the average time to getting your first book published in my field is like seven years.
So I wound up kind of doing a whole bunch of different things to have a Plan B I felt really good about. And one of those things was, so I got a post MFA fellowship after my MFA to go to University of Wisconsin, Madison. And that was one of those scenarios where they get like, You know, 1200 applications and they pick five fellows. So I was really lucky to get that. But I wanted to do something in the interim, while I was on the job market and trying to get my book published, that was meaningful. And I ended up calling UVA to see if they needed a secretary in their Jewish studies program. Because my partner at the time—we weren't married yet—was still there finishing his PhD in economics. And they said, well, we have this fellowship. Why don't you apply and be our first and only Jewish studies PhD student in the religion department? So I did, and I got in, and so I started a PhD in religious studies back at UVA, in Jewish studies as a fellow. So I went back to school more. And in-between I took visiting gigs. Like I was a visiting professor at UC Santa Cruz in poetry because my first book got published after my first year of my PhD program. [LJR: Wow.] And then I kept doing my doctoral work for four years. Yeah. I ended up never finishing my doctorate because I got a job as a professor of poetry in the interim,
LJR: Because, in the artistic world, a terminal degree of an MFA is as it was kind of it's all fungible, right?
EM: Yeah. Like really at that point you needed a published book, a bunch of published work, and then MFA to get an academic job.
LJR: Yeah. So you did all of those things like this huge portfolio and varied in terms of the things you were doing to—you were calling it, plan B, but it was just kind of part and parcel of who you were. Great for gathering experiences to write about. Not so great, I would imagine for having time to write. So, yeah. How was…at that point and maybe now, what is your process of writing with a big life?
EM: I mean, I think one of the things that's always been nice about academia is you get the summers and I say this like, quote unquote off. And what that means is like, you're meant to do your own research. And so I always treated the summers that way, and I still try to go to writing residencies and other things over the summer, so that I'm, I don't have other obligations. I can just work on my writing. But I think the one thing I learned after I had kids was not to be precious with my writing time. Like I wrote a whole book on the notepad of my phone with, like, at least one child crashed out in a car seat in the Target parking lot, you know, or your own driveway or garage, like right through anything. And it's actually like a family joke that people can be talking to me, but I won't hear them.
LJR: Because you're in your element writing world. I get it. Okay. So you are these many things. How do you describe yourself now? Like what's the hierarchy of identities of Erika Meitner now.
EM: I mean, I'm a poet, I'm a parent, I'm a teaching artist in the academy is how I phrase it for myself, because I think I don't feel like a traditional academic. And anyone who's worked at a university for, I think as long as I have, or has been in higher ed for as long as I have, most of us have pretty strong feelings about the neoliberal university as corporation. And so I think that's a complicated piece, right? [LJR: Yeah.] So I think those are the biggest parts of my identity.
LJR: [kids yelling in background] Yeah. I can hear some of the parts of your identity. Yeah. Okay. So we've talked about how you get it done, but I know you're between books right now or on the cusp of birthing another. So where are you finding your poetic inspiration? What are the things that, at this point in your life or your lives experience are speaking to you?
EM: Yeah, I mean, I think like everyone else COVID has been really hard for any kind of production, much less artistic production. One of the amazing things that I was able to do both before and during COVID surprisingly is there's this incredible re artists community called the Hermitage, which is on the beach in the gold coast in Florida. And they, they sent me, it's not a residency you can apply for it. They just gift it to you. So you get a vial of sand in the mail and six weeks you can split up however you want in two-week chunks to be in a hut on the beach, basically like by yourself, but in residence with other artists. And so I took the last of those residencies during, in the peak pandemic, after I'd been like trapped in my house and homeschooling my children. With a really dear friend of mine, we bubbled together. We both had the residency, we drove 13 hours. And one of the things about that particular landscape and one of the things I've been writing about more recently is climate change and sea level rise, what we'd call eco poetics…And so the ways in which cimate change in various ways has been impacting us. And at the same time, for the last four years, I've been going down to Miami to do field work with a photographer. So I do documentary poetry also, and that's part of my academic training. I was trained as a religious anthropologist, so I was trained to talk to people about their religious practices and spaces.
And so I've partnered with a photo journalist named Anna Maria Berry-Jester to go down to Miami. And we've been going down for almost four and a half years now to try to capture some of the development along the coast, and also the impacts of climate change in that particular city. So that's kind of the stuff that's driving my work right now.
I always usually work on more internal autobiographical lyric stuff at the same time, as I'm working on more external stuff around social issues. And then I work on a lot of like weird little collaborations. Like I was just working with this psychologist along with a composer, an experimental filmmaker and a singer. We were putting her research into artistic format because we have a unit at my university that's called the Sci-Arts unit where they try to communicate science in different ways. So I love collaborating with other artists across mediums.
LJR: Very cool. And you did mention the kind of autobiographical element of some of your work. Is it hard to reflect right now on the ways you may have been changed during the pandemic? Is that kind of a work in process or ,when you're tapping the autobiographical, is it more long-term because this time has been just so raw?
EM: Yeah. I mean, I haven't, the first time I tried to write about the pandemic was pretty much this summer at a residency I had for about two weeks in that weird
LJR: Everything’s going to be fine period
EM: Yeah, exactly. It was actually like two weeks in July after everyone had been vaccinated and we were all like, we're a mortal now where I could be in a communal space, even with fully vaccinated people and like eat in the dining room together. And as someone who had an unvaccinated kid at home that was like not something we had done in, you know, year and a half. And so I think one of the complicated things about writing about something like the pandemic is that A everyone's exhausted, but B also it's shifting so quickly, you know, from. Everything's fine to like, oh my gosh, it's two days later and nothing is mine. And so I've been hesitant to kind of take the pulse of that.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. Probably much safer to take the pulse of our environment is melting in front of us. And what are we going to do? Sadly.
EM: So like when people ask me what I'm writing about now, I'm like, it's the eschaton I'm writing about the end times. It's fine.
LJR: Yeah it all comes back to religion and yeah. Wisdom. What's out there. So actually that is a good question of how you see your work today, or, you know, throughout the last couple of decades, tying up a lot of those disparate strings, whether it be rabbinical studies or consulting analytics, computers, Y2K. I mean, the end of…the end times you did it, then you're talking about it now. Are there through lines that you, particularly as a poet, can see and can pull together?
EM: I don't know if it's through lines per se, as much as I, at least for me, I'm a kind of a process of elimination kind of person. So I kind of have to figure what I don't want to do by doing it. So I think that was valuable. But I also think that all of the jobs I did gave me skills that are, you know, like I'm really good at administration and academia, which like you should never admit, or they'll put you in charge of stuff. But I think that comes in part from the management training I got at Andersen and dealing in a client facing industry, which is not something that education should be. And so I think, you know, my job during college in the summers were for documentary film production companies working as a production assistant in solving problems. Like the companies would just say, like, I need to get a Jimmy jib from Arizona to New York in this timeframe. Go figure out how to do it. And I didn't know what a Jimmy jib even was. And there was no internet. So you couldn't look it up. So you basically had like a Roladex and that and that was like, and the people in your office.
And so I, you know, I think about this a lot when we, we recently at dinner explained to my son that to get a hold of our friends, we had to call their houses, talk to their parents and then ask Mr. or Mrs. Jones or whatever, if we could talk to, you know, Johnny or…and my son was, like, so horrified that we had to have this people interaction in that particular way. But I think being trained to solve problems in an interpersonal manner is something that is something that I learned through all of those experiences.
LJR: And would you say that's what poetry is about?
EM: That's a really interesting, that's a really interesting conclusion. I do think there are a lot of different kinds of poetry. I think the kind that I write tends to be like braided narratives that have a lot of connective tissue sometimes. And so, yeah, I think that to some extent it is, and a lot of what we do as poets is creating language or metaphor that, you know, turns one thing into another so that people can grasp.
You know, one of the things about climate change that's so problematic is like the only image we have is a polar bear on a melting ice cap. And so like, how do you create new imagery that, that makes the urgency of the situation palpable to people? How do we create new language? That's a really big challenge.
LJR: Yeah. Really big problems that require interpersonal communication. I think there is a through line there, Erika, and I'm just so pleased that you were willing to kind of take us this far and now we'll get to read the next chapter when your future works, come out. But thanks so much for sharing this.
EM: Thank you.
LJR: That was Erika Meitner, who, as she says, is a poet, a parent, and a teaching artist, and the academy currently at Virginia tech, where she is professor of English and the creative writing programs, her latest collection of poetry. Holy Moly Carry Me is the winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in poetry and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Her sixth book of poems, Useful Junk, is forthcoming in spring 2022. As this year, winds down, we want to thank you so much for continuing to follow rate and review our show and for telling friends to join us, we wish you health, happiness, and good adventures down your own roads. Just be sure to tune in in the new year as we bring more stories and more friends with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley on future episodes of Roads Taken.