Holding an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University–Newark, as well as an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University, new creative nonfiction faculty-member Christa Parravani relocated from Santa Monica to Morgantown this summer with her husband Anthony Swafford and daughter Josephine. Christa is the author of Her: A Memoir—an NPR, O, and People Magazine must-read memoir—and she’s jumping right in to teach the graduate CNF workshop this fall. I caught up with Christa at the beginning of August in her home in South Park to welcome her to WVU and to get to know her (guilty pleasure: the TV Land show Younger, which she only watches when she’s home alone), where she’s coming from, where she’s going, and how she approaches teaching. Read the Q & A below.

You’ve lived in New York City and most recently L.A. Morgantown must be quite a change. What do you miss about LA?

I made some really good friends in LA; I miss a few of my friends and the ocean. That’s true. I’m not gonna lie, I do miss the ocean. I don’t really miss Los Angeles. I miss New York City more than I miss L.A. New York City feels like home to me. It’s the only place in my entire life that’s really felt like home. There’s also—even though I’ve moved from a city—less longing for a city.

So far, what have you enjoyed in or about Morgantown?

Well, to me it seems like a really complicated place. The ecosystem of it feels wholly satisfying to me in that it’s equal parts beautiful and cursed. It’s haunted, but it’s totally alive and green, and the mountains seem to have a life of their own. I really love that, I appreciate it. I feel like I’m in a place that has a rich cultural history that I as a woman not from West Virginia don’t really know yet, but I can feel it here, and that’s really exciting to me. Yeah, I look forward to being able to be part of that. There’s a long history of great writing here. And living here I can see it, I can see why, it’s in the water. I don’t know what is in the water exactly, and I don’t know if I want to find out—do I want to know? But I feel that in a really immediate way, and it feels right to me.

You were in the MFA program at Amherst for a year, right? And for poetry there? What made you switch to prose, and how do you see poetry and nonfiction as connected?

I had written poetry for a long time. I had started writing poetry as an undergraduate at Bard, and my mind works in poetry, and lines. My entire life it’s been that way. Eventually it kind of transitioned between hearing something in a few words and trying to imagine something in a picture, but then what happened is I didn’t want to take photographs anymore. I had been a photographer, and I found there was a time in my life where I couldn’t use my camera anymore. My sister had died, and I couldn’t remember—it sounds insane—but I couldn’t remember how to use the camera. Honestly, my hands wouldn’t work. It was too heavy. I was too thin. It was too much. I stopped. And then I started writing poems. And they were sad, you know. They were poems about losing my sister. I put together a portfolio of poems and applied to UMass thinking that I would never get in, and I did, and I got a full scholarship. I thought, Oh my god, how can I not go? This is an amazing program, maybe these poems are alright!

I studied with James Tate, and I learned an extraordinary amount about writing during the short time that I was there. But the thing that I knew—I’d written this poem, and the poem was a poem about my sister. She was out on the sidewalk in Massachusetts where we lived, and there was a furious snowstorm, and she was meeting Abraham Lincoln under the streetlight. It was a really funny poem, and it was kind of suggestive because she was exposing herself to Abraham Lincoln. It was funny. I thought, You know, I think I’m ready to write something a little longer because the sort of presence of humor in these poems is telling me that I’m ready to touch on a subject to me that feels like it’s bigger than these poems can be.

My sister also went to UMass. She was a fiction student. If I was going to stay in the program and write about my sister in a meaningful and extended way, I was going to have to study with her professors. I just felt like I couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t have been fair to anybody. It was not going to be fair to me because I would have felt like I was there in her stead, if that makes sense. And it wouldn’t have been fair to them because they knew her and they grieved her. So, I had this amazing opportunity when I decided to leave UMass. I had met Jayne Anne Phillips at MacDowell [Colony] years before. I’d met her the year my sister died actually, and she kind of decided I was a like a daughter to her. She was my second mom. She has a great MFA program at Rutgers–Newark. I knew that if I went there I would have a good, safe place to write the book. So I went to Rutgers–Newark knowing that I was going to write Her, and that’s the only thing that I worked on while was there.

Jayne Anne is an excellent example of a writer—even though she writes fiction, she started out as a poet actually—a writer who puts the emphasis on the line. For me, the building of an essay or a book, any kind—I’ll write fiction as well—the emphasis is on building the story line by line. You’re like an architect, if that makes sense. And so I still use poetry, but it has to be sustained in prose in a way that can last. You can’t have the volume turned up as high in places. You have to modulate a little bit differently. For me, it’s always about the poetry of the sentence and the sound of the sentence. I don’t really separate those. I don’t really write poetry anymore, but I don’t separate the process of writing poetry and nonfiction that way because they feel really similar to me.

How do you approach teaching writing, then? What should your students know about you as a professor? How does your own process translate to your teaching?

My husband makes fun of me very often for having this skill—it’s a skill, I have a skill—my skill is that I can sit down with a complete stranger and they’ll tell me their life story in ten minutes. Consistently over my life, I have this skill. I’ve sat on buses and I’ve heard everything. I will call the Comcast help line and all the sudden I know all about somebody’s breakup. It’s kind of hilarious, but it always happens. It happens to me at least once a week. With that said, what students should know about me is that I’m listening. I think part of my strength as a teacher is that I listen and perceive information. I try because I care to help my students make the thing that they need to make—not the thing that I think is necessarily the best thing in the world, but the thing that I need to help them create. I think it takes a certain amount of empathy to be able to do that, and I’m tough. It’s a swirl of those sorts of things. I hope will help students. Also, for me, I like to think about what it means to be a citizen of the world. It’s important to me to be able to help people. And I see my teaching as part of that because had I not been ushered through by my great teachers, I wouldn’t have the life that I have right now, and I know that it’s really important. It’s not to be taken lightly. I approach my students with that in mind. I really can’t think of a better job, honestly.

Would you share a memorable moment from a mentor—or a bit of advice or an anecdote from those meaningful to you in some way, please?

God, there’s so many. There’s always one from every year from the time that I was a little kid til being a grown-up. If it wasn’t for my first really good teacher in high school, I probably would have gone to community college and become a hairdresser. I’m telling you the truth. The emphasis was not on education in my family, it was on just getting by and trying to figure out how to do it practically. I had a teacher who noticed that I had a gift for writing, and he helped me apply to colleges. He helped me find the colleges I could afford and the ones that would give me financial aid. I went to those colleges, and I made it. That was huge. He changed my life. I still call him. I thank him; he’s very meaningful to me.

Sometimes I think teachers know things that you don’t know. I remember that it was the first day I started graduate school and Jayne Anne was my teacher that semester. I said, This is it, I’m going to write this book, and this is the only book I’m every going to write. And she said, Come on. There are going to be at least a dozen more. I just didn’t believe her. And it’s so funny, because now when I sit down—I’m working on my second book and it’s hard, writing the second book is hard—I think about her standing near the coffee machine at Rutgers Newark insisting that there would be more books, and I feel like I just can’t disappoint her.

It’s good to have something—Oh yeah, you told me I have to.

Well it’s funny because I do have to. But she knew that, and I didn’t know that.

So, what are you working on now?

Well, I’m working on a second memoir; I’m about three-quarters of the way finished with it. It’s a book about growing up on a Marine Corps base. I grew up on Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the daughter of a very strict Marine. That is the book that I’m working on, and I’m struggling. Oh man. It’s so hard. I think it’s a challenge to set yourself up to write your second book as a memoir after having published a memoir, and I didn’t see that when I embarked on it. Now I feel like I know people will read it and they will know things about me. Before I wrote like nobody would ever read it, which is the better way to do it. I’m really wrestling with it at this point and finding myself drifting a little bit. What I wanted to write was a really straight forward coming of age memoir about growing up on a Marine Corps base. Okay, I can do that, I’ve read so many. But then, there’s this thing that happened when I sat down to write, which is that I realized that my life is bigger than that. I’ve married a Marine. My husband is a veteran of the first Gulf War. What do you do with that? I’m on page 180 now, but I’m thinking, Gosh, I know a lot more about the subject than I’m letting on. Which then, I feel like, How do I restructure the book to say that? Do I need to restructure the book to say that? Should I talk about it? All the questions that are coming up as I’m writing are exciting ones to me, but I don’t know the answer yet, and some part of me feels like maybe I don’t know yet. Even though it’s a book about something that happened a really long time ago, it’s also about what’s happening now. And maybe I need some time.

How is it having written a memoir, having Her out there? People know about you, your students probably read it. How does that . . . I’m scared to write nonfiction because what if someone reads this who knows me?

You just have to be fearless—don’t think about them. One thing I know for sure is that when you’re thinking about what other people will think when you’re writing, you’re just procrastinating. Partially the person you create is not you. It’s the version of you that suits the narrative. To me, I wrote this book, but I’m not that. I mean, I’m a lot funnier than that person is. People are surprised, they’re like, You’re funny! I had no idea. Well yeah, I know, I just couldn’t manage that this time. But there is something a little strange about knowing that people feel close to you after reading something that you’ve put out into the world and you’ve never met them. What I assume when I—because my husband is also a memoirist—this is what I assume when I meet somebody after I’ve read their book: that I don’t know them, and I don’t know that thing about them until they tell me with their mouths. Does that make sense? That’s how I feel after I published a book. But I also feel profoundly lucky to have published that book. And I feel like outside my experience with people who’ve read the book—their experience with me, rather—I feel really excited that I’ve been able to bring my sister into their lives in a way that they can meet her, because they wouldn’t be able to do that now. That’s sort of lasting and interesting to me in a way that my personal life I just don’t care about.

What’s something you’ve read this summer that you’ve enjoyed? Did you have time to read this summer?

I finished The Argonauts [by Maggie Nelson] right before the summer started, before we moved, and I loved it. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read, hands down. It’s amazing. It’s startlingly good. [Sidenote: It’s on Christa’s CNF required reading list this semester.] And I’ve been reading a lot of essays at this point, in preparation for an essay that I’m writing now, that I’m almost finished with, and for teaching as well.

When you’re teaching, memoirs vs. essays—are those different writing strategies?

One of them is like a sprint, and one of them is like a marathon. One thing that’s good in a workshop is to be able to—whether or not you think it’s going to go into a full length book or whether it’s going to remain in an essay—that each piece that you hand in has to have a life of its own and be contained. It helps you be a better writer. So I had done that when I had started writing Her. I had started to write 20–25 page chapters that really could exist by themselves someplace else. It was helpful in terms of thinking about narrative strategy and how to move from the beginning of something to the end of something and to keep an idea going through the whole piece. It taught me to be a better writer thinking about it that way. I did, once I was ready to think about publishing the book, have to pull it apart again so that there were pauses and that everything didn’t seem so neat and cleaned up at the end of every chapter. Some chapters merged, some chapters split into three different chapters, and pieces were moved. If I hadn’t done it that way, it would have been almost impossible to finish the book, I think. Because I really did it pretty quickly. I started it in the fall of 2009, and my last edits were into my publisher in October of 2012. So it was fast. It was a total obsession. It was just my favorite person, really.

Who is an author or book that you recommend to aspiring writers? Why? How was it influential in your own writing?

(Whispers: Don’t ask me that!) Oh my god. Well, there are so many. I love Robert Creeley. Reading Robert Creeley when I was undergraduate in college at Bard changed my life because I could see the way a punctuation changed a sentence or changed the meaning of everything or how a pause could change the meaning of everything. I still go back to Creeley’s poems now. They don’t really help me write creative nonfiction, but as a student of writing, they were really important to me.

Joan Didion is probably the writer who is most important to me. Play it as it Lays, The White Album, The Year of Magical Thinking, and Blue Nights are stunning. Whenever I’m lost, I will go back to Didion because she has this matter-of-fact frankness that will get you through. She doesn’t dally. One of my weaknesses as a writer is that I’ll kind of allow myself to go a little bit too long in my prose. It’s a good reminder that the short sentence that has an economy to it is sometimes the best way to go, and you just have to keep moving straight ahead. So, Didion always.

Also, John Cheever. The Collected Stories of John Cheever are really important to me for that exact reason. He has these situations that have nothing to do with my life, but he’s able to move through a scene in a really sort of, in a quick way, but then wind in this really long, beautiful sentence out of nowhere that kind of punches you in the gut. I think I want to go for that.

One last one, and it’s very serious: Simon & Garfunkel or Hall & Oates?

Simon & Garfunkel. Right?