Elisa Gabbert ’05 began working on her essay collection before the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, causing her writing to take a turn to reflect on the tumultuous time.
“I find that when I’m writing, essays are a way of capturing my mindset at any given moment,” Gabbert said. “That was a very painful time. There was just no way for me to remove it [from the writing] because it was so central to the day-to-day. I gave myself the grace to write about it the way I had to.”
The collection, titled “Any Person Is the Only Self,” was released in 2023. To celebrate its release, Gabbert read from the collection at Brookline Booksmith on Sept. 10 and sat down for a conversation with fellow Emerson M.F.A. alum and author, Laura van den Berg, to describe her writing process and the pandemic’s effect on the collection.
Gabbert structured the collection to mirror the arc of her work from pre-pandemic to post-pandemic.
“There’s a lot of writing about freedom towards the end. Freedom was something that I was thinking about a lot through these years,” Gabbert said.
Gabbert attended Rice University in Houston before completing her M.F.A. in Poetry at Emerson College. In an interview with The Beacon, she described her time in the program.
“I think I had never quite given myself permission to take poetry that seriously,” Gabbert said. “[At Emerson], I met so many people who took poetry more seriously than I had. People showed me that model of what it could mean for poetry to be that central in your life, and for writing in general to be that central in your life.”
Since graduating, Gabbert has published multiple volumes of poetry and essays, but this collection is innately more personal than her previous works in that she explored her unique interests as both a reader and writer in the essays.
Gabbert is and has long been a devout reader of Sylvia Plath—citing the author’s influence in her collection after having read through her poems and diaries when she was just a teenager.
“What I find so fascinating about all that material is just the way it feels like opening a treasure chest. There’s all these rich, rich, rich details, you realize she was a real person, rather than this cultural cipher,” she said.
Gabbert found an interesting contrast between the “crystalline perfection” of Plath’s published poetry and the relatability found in her diaries.
“There’s a certain messiness in the writing, and also in her personality. She just kind of pours it all out. Her doubts, her fears, and her passions. It’s just so real,” Gabbert said. “I keep returning to her over the years, and I’m never disappointed.”
Certain essays also dealt with the concept of fame, and fame seen through the eyes of famous authors such as Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf.
“There’s this persistence, patience, impatience, frustration, doubt, [in writing] and then overcoming those things over and over and over again, until finally, you start to feel like you’re noticing some differences,” Gabbert said. “But it’s such a long path, and you have to want it … because it’s not gonna just arrive.”
Speaking to the choice of title for the collection, Gabbert described her intentions for it and the origins of the phrase.
“I want it to feel a little mysterious, a little enigmatic at first, because that’s how that sentence feels to me,” she said. “It wasn’t one of those sentences that I had to work on, that I had to revise ten times before it reached that final state. It just sort of came to me.”
She also observed that there is nothing complex about the sentence, but the idea behind it is.
“It’s kind of like a line of poetry where you almost don’t want to explain it too much, or try to paraphrase it,” Gabbert said.”It works better as a line that you meditate on. You need to engage with it a bit.”
During the event, Gabbert and van den Berg connected over the essay form itself and its infinite possibility, with Gabbert identifying an “embodiment of discovery” that comes with writing one for her. “That’s the whole point,” she said.
The two authors delved into the stories and literary moments that have shaped their careers, and how they find reading incredibly integral to their lives and personhood.
“Reading is when I feel most myself,” Gabbert says to van den Berg, a poignant summing up of the inspiration for the collection and its contents. “It’s when my mind is most alive.”
