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Questions and Answers:
Kelly ClancyKelly Clancy '03, a senior in physics, won the Robert A. Boit Writing Prize for her short story "Neville Island." The story is published in Rune 23. Why do you write fiction? Accidental reasons, really. I took my first writing class at MIT as a substitute for the literature class I couldn't fit into my schedule. And, though writing hasn't replaced reading for me, I have found it has made me a more critical reader and that I can enjoy books more thoroughly than I had before--it's rather like the difference between being a child and having one. It's also led me to realize that fiction isn't what it purports to be; it isn't what its name suggests; because it is real, more real to me than anything. When someone tells me that the things I write are surreal or imaginative, I am shocked, because to me it is reality, here and now; it is how and what I think. It is true to me, even if it is fiction to others. I write to tell the secrets I couldn't speak aloud. Paper is brave like I could never be. Where can student writers find a community of peers at MIT? I am not the best person to ask this, because if there is a community of writers at MIT, I don't utilize it. I'd imagine if one were to seek this, they might consider joining Rune or Au, or take a writing class and befriend the other students there. There is a great sense of closeness in these fiction classes; as we read each other's work and so are intimate in ways we could never achieve by solving problem sets together. And certainly, the writing professors I've had are, on average, much more accommodating than most physics professors I've had. But while they are accommodating they are not, as a rule, pro-active. They seem happy to take time out to talk to a student if he or she wishes to schedule an appointment, but, for those of us who are too shy for such things, it's hard to connect with them. How do writers and artists collaborate in Au, the MIT design collective? Much of the point of Au is its anarchy. The writers in it also design and artists also write. There is no fixed scheme for how projects are carried out. I suppose the original point of involving writers in the design collective was so that they might write up interesting slogans for posters, or think of novel ways to integrate text into a design, or write/revise the content of posters and web pages. But as it's turned out, many of Au's clients already know what text they want in their design, and essentially have wanted us to design around that.
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Institute of Technology