![]() That idea of desire, of passion, is pretty nebulous among creative folks there’s no easy way to convey the subjective feeling of compulsion to create. “So I was freelancing for MentalFloss, and that’s also where Guy In Your MFA came from, this desire to make work and put it out into the world.” “I had decided I didn’t wanna be a doctor, and I wanted to really try to be a writer, and I thought that meant giving it everything I had,” Schwartz says. He even had an interaction with Neil Gaiman (incidentally, Schwartz has now interviewed Gaiman for the Observer). Guy In Your MFA doesn’t tweet so often anymore-Schwartz mostly uses her personal handle nowadays-but in his heyday, he was blowing up the internet to the point of receiving his own Buzzfeed feature. And without those creative writing classes, she never would have found the inspiration for Guy In Your MFA, her first satirical Twitter project to go viral. “The thing about Brown is that we don’t really have majors, so I was technically a public policy major who met the pre-med requirements.”īrown’s flexible schedule is what allowed Schwartz to take a lot of creative writing classes as she moved through her college years. “I think I could apply to med school now,” Schwartz tells me. One of those paths is rather unconventional. ![]() Schwartz enrolled at Brown to major in public policy (with pre-med) and ended up publishing a young adult novel about a 17-year-old girl traveling through Europe with her overbearing mother. I set off to Vanderbilt to major in philosophy and ended up in law school. Barack Obama couldn’t make the event, so we got then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as keynote speaker instead. Presidential Scholars from Illinois-basically this honorific thing for graduating high school seniors who are supposedly going to make outstanding contributions to the country. ![]() The last time I had seen Schwartz in person was in Washington, D.C. And this isn’t quite a standard interview. She’s probably right that I’m hyping her up a bit in our conversation, but her accomplishments thus far are nothing to scoff at. Her debut novel, And We’re Off, hit wide release earlier this month. She’s taken her lunch break from her day job at the New York Observer to come chat with me about how she parlayed Twitter notoriety-three handles that average 75,000 followers each-into a book deal. “You’re fully overestimating how famous I am.”ĭana Schwartz says this with a laugh as we sip our coffee at Café Grumpy in Manhattan’s FiDi.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |