Rachel DeWoskin

By Jasminum McMullen

Writuals explores how our city's rich literary heritage, cultural diversity, and iconic spaces inspire routines that fuel the work of local authors. 

Rachel DeWoskin is the award-winning author of five novels: Someday We Will Fly (Penguin  Random House, 2019); Banshee (Dottir Press, 2019); Blind (Penguin Random House, 2015); Big Girl Small (FSG, 2011); Repeat After Me (The Overlook Press, 2009); the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton, 2005), and two poetry collections, Two Menus (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and absolute animal (University of Chicago Press, 2023). Her awards include a National Jewish Book Award, a Sydney Taylor Book Award, an American Library Association's Alex Award, and an Academy of American Poets Award, among others. Three of her books, Foreign Babes in Beijing, Someday We Will Fly, and Banshee, are being developed for feature film or television. DeWoskin's poems, essays, and articles have appeared in journals and anthologies including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Baffler, The Sunday Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and New Voices from the Academy of American Poets. DeWoskin has been a professor at Boston University, New York University, and the University of Chicago. She is the curator of T41’s Poetry For One project, and serves on the national steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action (WDA).

CLHOF: What are your “writuals,” and how have they evolved?

Rachel DeWoskin: They involve a masochistic requirement of staring at the page, even and I guess especially when it’s blank and impossible, every day, even if just scratching in a notebook in the car or on a park bench between 3-D life obligations. I try for the always-heralded mornings, just after swimming, when my mind is most lively. But that doesn’t work every day, so I don’t have rules so strict they allow me to bail if I don’t fit the writing in when I’m most lucid. I love to write out in the city, especially at the Art Institute, where if I’m really lagging, I can look at something brilliant and shift my POV. I have a writers group, and we keep one another afloat, read chaotic drafts, and offer a level of solidarity and community too vast to describe properly without being embarrassing and seeming hyperbolic. Finally, having babies was an amazing improvement; I militarized my time, and my girls gave me a kaleidoscopic view of the human condition and expanded my heart and mind until I could keep a dazzling number of ideas and ways to feel in both.

CLHOF: If you could have coffee with any Chicago author, past or present, who would it be and why? How has their work or legacy influenced your writing?

Rachel DeWoskin: Ha! Honestly, it would be the playwright Zayd Dohrn, which is convenient since he’s my husband and we have dinner together every night and it was in our vows that we would read each other’s drafts in perpetuity. But if that seems smarmy or like a cheating answer, then Chris Ware. I absolutely love his comics and books, from their inimitable sensibility (so supremely Chicago and true), to their wild level of profundity (contained in what looks like the schleppy reality of daily lives). His capacity for empathy and willingness to take artistic and political risk thrill me. When I opened Building Stories and read it backwards and forwards over and over in all sorts of orders, I imagined him imagining the lives of those characters. I find the scope of his imagination amazing. I’ve met Chris on occasion at literary events and dinner parties, but have been incapacitated by shyness.

CLHOF: Chicago is a city known for its activism and social consciousness. How, if at all, do these civic engagement and social justice elements find their way into your writing rituals or themes? Do you feel a duty to reflect or challenge the city’s socio-political landscape in your work? 

Rachel DeWoskin: Of course all art is political, and I’m on fire watching Chicago writers and artists not just embrace that fact, but also make radical and generous use of its most important possibilities. Those include hope and change, as well as rage, opposition, and a commitment to connecting human beings across the terrible things dividing us. There are art, theater, and poetry events alive across all our wards (look at our poet laureate! Look at poetry as part of the architectural biennial! Look at Illinois Humanities!); our public libraries are ensuring kids have the (human) right to read in our neighborhoods (check out the CPLF’s The 81 Club Project!); our indie bookshops refuse authoritarianism daily (look at Women & Children First's banned book group and read-ins!); and we writers—so many of us—are writing directly into the good fights.

As for my own work, my next novel, Doe, examines one woman’s life in and out of prison, suggesting ways we might reframe our notions of justice. Many of us teach in IL prisons, because writing is a kind of freedom, and because everyone everywhere deserves education and the right to read and write. Last year, I founded the 900 million poem project, asking folks all over Illinois to send me haikus about what they’d do to keep our state lovely – with a 900 million dollar budget. Because that’s what the state has earmarked for the reconstruction (doubling down on) two recently closed prisons. I have hundreds of lovely and often very funny haikus; please send one if you're reading this! Finally, I serve on the national steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action, and chair our IL Committee. Come to our readings during Banned Book Week, of our new one-act Ban the Bans, if you want a giant dose of good-fight-art, fun, and camaraderie. Those are the core characteristics of Chicago’s literary scene. I love us.

CLHOF: Name a movie shot in Chicago that best describes your writing style.

Rachel DeWoskin: I’m both worried and incredibly hopeful that it’s Ferris Bueller kissing his girlfriend on the parade float while they both skip school and come of age in the neon 80s. 

CLHOF: What advice would you give someone who wants to write and publish in the city?

Rachel DeWoskin: Do it! Make your pages. Ride inspiration as far as it will take you and then revise, preferably at least in part by finding a crew of beloved Chicago writers (we are the warmest, least pretentious literary scene in the world) and building a little writing community of your own so your work doesn’t become demoralizing or lonely. 

Jasminum McMullen is an Associate Board Director at the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, interested in engaging writers from or living in Chicago about their writing rituals. Her writing has appeared in Black Joy Unbound, Mamas, Martyrs, and Jezebels, Past Ten, and The Elevation Review.