All Faculty Profiles
Christine Meade
by Emma Ceklosky
“I’m just someone who’s big on community,” says Gotham teacher Christine Meade.
Since graduating with her MFA in Creative Writing from California College of Arts, Christine simply can’t help but continue to surround herself with creative communities.
“I find value and beauty in an essay by an 8-year-old just as I would [for one] by someone who’s 68 or whatever it may be,” Christine says about her time working with young writers through 826 Boston. “You see that creative shine, or whatever you want to call it, regardless of the writer’s age.”
Even now where she lives, north of Boston, she’s found herself leading a monthly writers salon for novelists, essayists, poets, and writers of all other kinds–young and seasoned.
“I love creating community, and that’s why I honestly like teaching Gotham classes, too,” she says. “It’s a practice for me as an instructor to create a community even though we’re on Zoom. I find that a lot of times by the end of our 10 weeks together we feel like we know each other. You know, you go through something vulnerable to be able to share your work and to be able to talk about it with others.”
Creating these “micro communities” as Christine calls them, is a way she works to push past the Thoreau-like “solitary endeavor” of writing, not that she doesn’t relish the quiet moments walking with her Australian Shepherd in the nearby forest so that her “brain has time to roam.”
“I heard an author say once–and I really like this–that there’s two parts to writing. One is writing and two is the work being read. So, yes, write like no one’s reading it, but then eventually let someone read it, because it's a conversation.”
“A lot of times I don’t know what I’m trying to say until it’s already written, and someone tells me how they interpreted it,” Christine says, highlighting the very conversations she describes that sharing one’s writing generates.
For writers who haven’t found the right people to share their work with, Christine encourages them by saying, “It’s a matter of going to the writing thing, you know, going to the readings to try to meet people, going to the conferences.” You might even be surprised to see a few neighbors you didn’t know were “bookish”, as Christine says has happened to her a few times before. Then, from these larger communities you will undoubtedly stumble upon a few people with whom you can form that “intimate space of writer friends.”
