October 10, 2019
Ann Snitow May 9, 1943-August 10, 2019 Ann Snitow, a founding faculty member of Lang College and the creator of the Gender Studies Program at the New School, passed away on August 10, 2019. She was a beloved member of the Literary Studies faculty. While indeed her books and essays are crucial texts in feminist studies and in the life of the mind, as Literary Studies colleagues our remembrances here are more personal, testaments not just to her work but to the power of her being.
October 27, 2016
Sarah Leonard interviews Ann Snitow for The Nation. The interview reflects on the future of feminism, with Leonard recounting that “For her, feminism is a genie loosed from its bottle: powerful, sometimes capricious, a great force for good but occasionally co-opted by villains. […]
Helaina Hovitz (Class of 2011, Eugene Lang College) is an editor, journalist, author of the memoir “After 9/11” and co-founder of media startup Headlines for the Hopeful. She has written for The New York Times, New York Observer, Glamour, Salon, VICE, Forbes, Newsday and many others. For more of her work, you can visit her website at www.HelainaHovitz.com
Helaina will read excerpts from her new book “After 9/11” at The New School on February 9th (event begins at 5:30pm). Below, Helaina answers questions about her writing process, about being in New York, and about what it was like to study at Lang.
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Q: How has the city of New York affected your work as a writer?
I was born and raised in the city and never left, which surprises some people based on the circumstances that we had to live through being less than four blocks away from the World Trade Center, and what was starting to become known as Ground Zero. For months and months, our neighborhood was both a war zone and a spectacle for tourists, the black smog and dust hung in the air for much longer than most people know, armed guards were everywhere, there were more bomb scares about nearby landmarks, some of our stuff was destroyed, and just getting home from school was traumatizing. My experience growing up in New York City with all of the triggers and bomb scares and news warnings and loud noises all the time, always being on the alert for something dangerous or scary, really did not help my circumstances living with PTSD and not knowing that’s what I was living with. I went to three different high schools; I never felt like I belonged; I didn’t do group sports or activities.
Q: What kind of communities have you found yourself to be a part of here, and how has your interaction with those communities changed your work?
I really didn’t find a strong sense of community until I got to The New School, since my tendency was to either isolate or accidentally push people away because my own inner world could be so chaotic. Depending on your mood, the city could be a place full of excitement and possibility, or a dark, dank, bleak canvas of anger and horror and depressing things. My work as a writer has really been all about perspective in that way, which is why I’ve always been drawn to positive writing and to telling my own story, of course, because so many young people are still struggling. When I arrived at The New School I felt like I was around people who were my people. The school itself, even with buildings spread out around the neighborhood, felt like a place I finally belonged. There were times that a girl would just start crying in a poetry class because a teacher made a comment gently critiquing it, and kids who had absences because they needed to deal with things… so I think things felt very real here. Still, because of how much I was struggling personally, it was hard for me to make and keep friends, and I didn’t understand why until I was on the other side of it and was able to go, “Oh, yeah. That makes sense.”
Q: What did you study while at Lang, and how did it lead to your present creative work?
I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be a writer, but I was eager to explore—so in addition to all of the journalism classes I took here, I also took poetry, fiction, mixed media, literature, and other more nuanced classes like dream interpretation and philosophy. I was also drawn to abnormal psychology because of my journey to try and find relief for my own mental health crisis. In a way, almost all of the classes I took here contributed to my understanding of how I could start to heal and also find my place in the world as a writer. Ironically, the teaching fellow for that class is now part of a program at Bellevue that helps 9/11 survivors get access to mental health treatment, and our worlds collided when the book was released—I knew she looked familiar!
Q: Is there a relationship between writing and mental health?
Many people assume that writing a memoir and reliving the painful and traumatic moments of our past is cathartic. In a way, yes. It can show us, as authors, how far we’ve come, and allow us to deepen our understanding of what we’ve been through as we continue to move to the other side. We always know more when we’ve finished, if we’ve approached it with an open mind and desire to learn. I know that I set out to write one book in 2010, and found myself publishing a fairly different one when it finally took the form it was supposed to take years later.
What many people don’t know is that the writing process, aside from being “cathartic,” can actually reawaken trauma or any other pain that has been dormant inside us. In the year I finalized my manuscript for After 9/11 and did press interviews around the release, I learned that, while I had become almost another person behaviorally, the trauma still lived in my muscles and my nervous system, and that those painful memories can live in our brains and bodies long after we have mentally moved on and recovered from a number of struggles or challenges. So, writing our stories like this gives us the chance to heal even further, in deeper and more meaningful ways, so we can be even better off than when we started.
And, as writers of memoir, there is no real ending to our journey. We just have to figure out where to end the book, and continue to live our journey even after the final page is submitted. We all live with invisible scars and things we struggle with, and sometimes our past is woken up in ways we aren’t prepared for.
Q: What advice would you give to your nineteen-year old self?
I might go back and tell myself not to take that existential philosophy class, because it was a real bummer. But even that class revealed a lot of interesting new ideas to me about how we reconcile our identity and our past with how we want to change as we move into the future. So… nope, still wouldn’t change a thing.
Q: Do you have any tips for younger people navigating the impulses of urban life and creative practice?
Do what you gotta do, but keep yourself safe. Protect yourself emotionally and physically, but experience everything you possibly can. This really is your time and it just gets better as time goes on. Take every opportunity. Write about things you don’t think you’re interested in. Go to new neighborhoods and explore. Interview crazy people in Union Square. Ride the L train at 2 am. Ask for informational interviews with journalists or authors on LinkedIn. Ask to shadow a prominent politician for a project you’re working on. Just go for it.
