This autumn quarter Ex Libris correspondent Eric Canan sat down with MAWP alum Meredith Boe to dicuss life post-DePaul, paying the bills, and her recently published chapbook, What City.
Alum Profile: Meredith Boe
Since graduating from DePaul’s MAWP program in 2013, Meredith Boe has settled into a groove she can be proud of. She has a satisfying job, she’s published several poems, essays, and short stories in various journals, and a few months ago she won Paper Nautilus’s 2018 Debut Series Chapbook Contest with What City, a collection of essays and fiction.
Winning the contest felt “pretty good” but also “pretty weird,” says Boe. “It’s so much rejection when you’re submitting your work, and it’s so personal that it really can get you down.” So when she got the email saying she had won the contest, she wanted to ask, “Are you sure you meant to send me this?” They were.
Boe crafted the chapbook with the help of a writing group that spun off of the Writer’s Guild at DePaul (which continues to meet every Thursday on campus). The regular, varied feedback helps keep her on her toes and focused on publishing. For What City in particular, the group helped her realize just how connected her essays were with some of the short stories she was workshopping. The result is a cohesive collection firmly grounded in loss, transition, and the city of Chicago. It’s not always the gritty writing work that the group helps with the most, though—it’s the act of meeting itself that makes all the difference. “Even if I haven’t written anything in a month. Even just for commiserating,” she says. “Even if we have jobs we hate all day, we can get together and be like, ‘OK. This is what we really care about.’”
But Boe doesn’t hate her job anymore, thanks to her willingness to change things up. After working in contracts for the University of Chicago Press (“I would have probably been happy staying there for a long time had I been able to move departments or move up a little.”) and a very corporate marketing company (“Three months into that job I was like, ‘OK, I don’t want to work here forever.’”), Boe is now a full-time freelance writer and copyeditor, using many of the connections she forged at DePaul to bring in high-paying work.
She wants other soon-to-be-graduates to hear the lessons she’s learned. “I’ve noticed a lot of people just getting a job that they end up hating because of money, but it’s definitely possible to make more money than that freelancing,” she says, adding that you also have the benefit of choosing which projects to spend your time on. “At my last two jobs, both of them, people are just so unhappy. They dread going to work every day. It’s so soul-sucking, and you’re there forty hours a week. You don’t have to do it. You don’t have to!”
Regarding all the successful and wide-ranging writing she’s done—essays, poetry, fiction, technical freelance work—Boe says, “I feel like it’s all connected to DePaul.” She adds, “It’s a great resource to have, so don’t take it for granted.”
Congratulations to Meredith for winning the Paper Nautilus’s 2018 Debut Series Chapbook Contest with What City!
Learn more about Meredith and what’s she currently working on at her website.