“I couldn’t fathom writing a novel, but after I graduated I really didn’t know what to do with myself,” she admits. Still, writing as a career remained amorphous and uncertain. That year she also co-wrote the Hasty Pudding Show, her “first major experience” of having something “consumed by more than just a workshop, an adviser, or my mom.” A junior-year workshop with novelist Zadie Smith led to writing a short-story anthology as a senior thesis. That changed when, on a sophomore impulse, she took a creative writing class with novelist and Radcliffe Institute Fellow Lan Samantha Chang (now the program director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop). “It was very difficult for me to not be judgmental,” she says, laughing, “which is a basic tenet of that field.” She switched to English and began picturing an academic career. She briefly considered concentrating in anthropology, but one introductory class changed her mind. “My freshman year I got a B, and I’d never gotten even an A- in high school, and my parents were like, ‘Good for you! Take it down a notch! Have a good time for once!’” With time, she learned to temper her competitiveness and immerse herself in the academic experience. She started two days after 9/11, and still recalls the palpable sorrow hanging over fellow students, many of them East Coasters. Shipstead says she entered as an “aggressive” high-school graduate, but the environment caused some culture shock. Harvard was a clearer path: her father attended the College, and her mother the Graduate School of Education. Her mother, she says, sometimes suggested otherwise, “Like, ‘Well, maybe…you’ll be a writer one day,’ and I was really resistant to that idea.” The current Los Angeles resident-born in Orange County, but peripatetic for a few years in-between-remembers reading as having a more prominent role in her life than writing. I find some parts so transporting I could re-read them endlessly.It may seem odd that Maggie Shipstead ’05, whose third novel, Great Circle, arrives this spring, didn’t grow up wanting to be a writer. "A feast of a book," said Shipstead, "A grand but precise collage of voices and styles and points of view, Byatt’s 1990 novel is a romantic and intellectual epic about two modern literary academics uncovering an unknown love affair between two Victorian poets. The book is a mysterious love story with a passion for literature at its core. Set in the 1990s, the story involves the pair researching the lives of two Victorian poets by combing through their journals, poems and letters.
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