Dr. Serena Chopra: Artist, Author, Educator and Dancer

Author, dancer, filmmaker, visual artist, performer and professor, Dr. Serena Chopra is a sparkling miasma of creativity, passion, activism, empathetic artistry and focused endeavor. Serena graduated from our PhD program in creative writing and literary arts in 2018, with a focus on contemporary poetics, queer poetics and feminist theory. I had the honor of speaking with Serena recently about her current and recent work, her new life in Washington, and her new post as Assistant Professor of English at the Seattle University.

The last time Serena and I crossed paths was last October, when, during the darkest moments of the pandemic just before the 2020 presidential election, Serena collaborated with the artists Kate Speer and Frankie Toan to create No Place to Go: An Artist-Made Haunted House here in Denver. No Place to Go ultimately became an app-guided drive-through haunted tour, where podded participants visited a number of artistic installations and live performances. With the weight of the pandemic and election upon us, No Place to Go promised participants a gauged and curious view of “the ultimate fear that there is no place to be, no place to go for certain bodies in oppressive sociopolitical spaces.” Thematically, this interactive community art project invited consideration of “radical, queer modes for re-imagining the relationship of our bodies to our haunted (national) home.” I visited No Place To Go with a couple of friends last fall and found a space where joy, curiosity and fear collided among the ruins of a colorful array of painted bodies, decentering statements, and jarring but magnificent artwork. In the days following my attendance, I continued to process what I had witnessed and ultimately found the project so compelling that I pushed it into my rhetorical strategies curriculum as an instructor of first-year writing.

Dr. Serena Chopra is currently working on what promises to be an engaging poetic memoir in the shape of a familial biography that focuses on her father’s side of the family, with a history largely based in Punjab, India. During our virtual chat, Serena was generous with her synopsis of the project, noting that the research began with collecting artifacts, sensations, information and energy from her grandmother’s life during a year-long Fulbright visit to Maharashtra and Punjab. Serena provided that her grandmother married into an abusive home and suffered the wraths of a wrecked body, alcoholism, mental illness and economic imbalance. In the memoir, tentatively titled Dayawati --- meaning “of mercy” -- after her grandmother’s namesake, Serena follows her grandfather’s immigration to the U.S., tracking him from the East Coast to the Colorado prairies. Ultimately, the trajectory of the work-in-progress will track Chopra’s own experience of being in a violent household, of caring for abusive family members, and of making reparations therein. The work amends depletions of resources, centers the prairie as an act of that depletion, frames the woman as land, grandmother as prairie, and touches on themes of development, masculinity and violence. Sections of Dayawati have been published in Sink and Foglifter. Dr. Chopra noted that her work has always engaged with nature, both metaphorically and imagistically, with her first chapbook regarding closely the geology of Colorado and her obsession with the prairie.

As mentioned before, during her stay as doctoral student at DU, Chopra was able to travel to India on a Fulbright scholarship to work on both Dayawati and her film Dogana/Chapti, which she created in collaboration with her wife, Kasey Ferlic. Both projects endeavor to highlight how queer female-identified bodies creative narratives of love, domesticity, family, and sexuality “without any performances of such themes in their culture.” Chopra aligns that her work, in these ways, reaches to create an inclusive “vision of futurity.”

Being a current PhD student at DU, I thought to ask Dr. Chopra about any wisdoms she would like to pass onto cohorts behind her. Serena was delighted to plug the mantras of Dr. Selah Saterstrom, that in order “to be a visionary inside of the institution” one must work to “nourish creativity inside of the institution.” Serena noted that in order to not be eaten alive by the pressures of an academic program, one must remain aware of needs regarding time, temporality, space, and resources—elements of human existence that must not be sacrificed to the chaotic institution’s grasp.

I also asked Dr. Chopra what she has taken with her from our program, in terms of continued use and regard. Serena indicated that she continues to cherish the connections made with her cohort and the sense of community that resulted from those connections. She offered that DU, as an institution, challenged her as a queer BIPOC and, as a result, she learned to defend what was moralistically important to her in ways that were equally “critical, compassionate, and thoughtful.”

Serena and I also discussed her evolving work as a professor of creative writing, queer and feminist theory, and inclusive literature at Seattle University. Reflecting on her time at DU, she noted that what she initially saw a as a challenge to her presence became a foundation for work as professor. She finds that she asks of her students often: “How does positionality relate to you?” Dr. Chopra works to encourage students to be “holistic beings, to take power, to be a light for others.” When prompted to speak of her teaching as an act of activism, Serena keenly noted that she is “an activist at heart, but not a great leader, not a greater follower,” adding that “on the street activism” isn’t a space where she’s been able to find her voice. Chopra finds that conceptional activism is what drives her creatively and thus allows that teaching becomes her activism. In this way, she strives to create safe spaces for queer students, wherein they are able to honestly reflect on a diverse group of texts and artifacts.

Serena and her wife Kasey are currently enjoying their new lives in Seattle, where they frequently go paddle boarding, hiking and mushroom foraging, and have cultivated their own gardens. In her free time, Serena also enjoys doing yoga and continues to dance. This fall, Serena will take a sabbatical to finish Dayawati and work on other artistic projects.

I couldn’t stop myself from prodding Serena for some answers about the pandemic, specifically for some answers about cultivating a rich, fruitful type of loneliness. Ahead of our discussion, I tracked back to a 2013 interview Serena participated in for Denver’s Westword Magazine while promoting her book This Human. In this interview, Serena described contemporary loneliness as “essential.” Serena admitted that This Human was more about personal isolation, but that now, during the pandemic, she recognizes loneliness as being “a condition of the home,” a condition that can be both rich and codifying, if we are intentional with our time.

You can learn more about Dr. Chopra’s creative work, critical work and queer BIPOC pedagogies at www.serenachopra.com. 

Dr. Vincent James: Author, Artist, Educator

“I feel bloody!”

A spirited declaration offered by Dr. Vincent James’ daughter Lola, as much of an artist and thought creator as Vincent himself. Lola merrily lost a tooth about midway through our virtual meeting and was happy to show us the tactile results. Vincent’s response: “Careful for that white shirt.” Vincent cheerfully reminded me that such moments of joyful distraction are quite “apropos for the writing process” in his current world, inspiring an even-keeled process. I’m here for it!

Dr. James graduated from DU’s doctoral program in creative writing in 2020. His concentration is prose, but it should go without saying that his specialty is art in the broadest of definitions. Just a few minutes browsing his home page, www.fatherfever.com, tells a story of a multi-faceted visual artist who combines philosophy, image-making, image-capturing, fashion, sound and language to create extraordinary, intricate and haunting worlds.

Vincent currently lives and writes in Colorado, where he serves as the Managing Editor of Denver Quarterly and lectures in composition and ethics at Colorado School of Mines. He shares his home with his wife Suzanne, a new puppy, and his three children. He is the author of Swerve (Astrophil Press, 2021) and the forthcoming novel, Acacia, a Book of Wonders (Texas Review Press, 2023). Other work has appeared or is forthcoming at Ravenna Press, Tarpaulin Sky, Juked, Prick of the Spindle, Denver Quarterly, and Texas Review. With Madame Crocodile, his record, Temple of a Thousand Blows, will be released later this year. Alongside his daughters, Lola and Daisy, he makes collages under the name Rara Avis. Prints of these collages are available for purchase here and a discussion of the work is available here, written for the occasion of being awarded the 2020 Zachary Doss Friends In Letters Memorial Fellowship, sponsored by Heavy Feather Review. Vincent’s surreal visual work and succulent photos of his family can be found on Instagram @FatherFever.

Vincent was happy to parse together his creative history in an effort toward succinctly defining his approach to writing and teaching today, noting that he started up his first band at the age of fourteen and painted a lot during his undergraduate years. Vincent also added that he has been “flirting with sculpture” for a long time, and if his future life might allow it, he would love to study the art and philosophy of sculpting in an academic setting. Vincent agreed with my suggestion that his writing is always in consultation with the image, adding that in his stories, “Every character has a hidden Pinterest mood board—images in harmony with their character.”

Recent publications of Vincent’s work include Swerve, a collaborative book-length story of three detectives. Inspired by speculative coursework completed at DU, collaborators Rowland Saifi and McCormick Templeman wrote separately but in conversation under a multiplicity of constraints designed to interrogate, illuminate and embody a mysterious common thread between the stories they each wrote alone. I find myself deeply interested in the scope and sacred nature of this work that despite discussion, defies explanation without close reading. Vincent’s contributions to the work are excerpted here in Juked Magazine, and discussed here and here.

Dr. James’ forthcoming novel Acacia, a Book of Wonders, or the Meditations of Fontaine Caldwell, containing the True Account of her Captivity, as written in her Little Books was written for his doctoral dissertation at DU with  Selah Saterstrom, Dr. Joanna Howard and Dr. Clark Davis. Vincent offered that this work, set in 1980s East Texas, is a captivity narrative that falls outside of the subgenre’s expectations because it is told from the cult leader’s point of view. Vincent defines the narrator as being the, “matriarch of the fringe millenarian religious movement,” and one who first survived the cult before becoming its leader. Citing his undergraduate degree in philosophy as a continuing influence on his work, Vincent also noted that this work embodies a distinct rhetorical position, that of the caricatured figurehead, and creates a “conflicted space where the reader is determining the rhetorical situation by sitting with someone who is adhering to the wavering dictates of Heaven while experiencing a crisis of faith.” While Dr. James guarantees this work to bare a different bravado than Swerve, he does admit that some commonalities exist—combinatory methods employed, use of constraint-based cards to create a tactile writing methodology, and a continuance of image-driven narratologies that allow for the subverted scurrility of a distinct fictive noir in the work.

During our meeting, I also prodded Dr. James about his pedagogical approaches, and how they fall into conversation with his approach to diverse art-making on so many platforms. Vincent began by noting that in creative writing workshops, he works hard to draw on a full breadth of experiences. Vincent than began listing cultural artifacts that have found their ways into these workshops as points of inspiration for writing exercises—the spring 2016 Gucci collection of fashions, Janelle Monáe’s and Jordan Peele’s collaborative visual work, W.V.O. Quine’s coherentist epistemology, and the music of French bossa nova singer Coralie Clément, for starters. Vincent noted that Nature & Human Values, the version of first-year writing class he currently teaches at Colorado School of Mines, remains in conversation with these approaches and allows “emergent questions to guide trajectory” during class, while Vincent himself “maintain[s] a nimble presence in listening to the room.”

As with other alumni I have interviewed for this series, I invited Dr. James to reflect on his time as a doctoral student at DU. We ended up chatting full-heartedly about our program’s carefully cultivated communities and the plush friendships that have blossomed from those communities. Vincent feels that he left our program with a rich and broad catalog of work and a “more embodied sense of creative concerns,” adding that he feels more “intact” as an artist, with a stronger understanding of what he’d been searching for all along—a clarity in all that wild “gesturing,” so to speak. To comfort those of us still here, Vincent assured me with confidence that if I’m still wondering when I will ever have time to write: “Don’t worry. You will write. It does get there.”

As we were wrapping up our conversation, a delicate chorus of birdsongs floated into my field of hearing and I could not immediately decipher their source. Having located himself outside for the duration of our meeting, Vincent dreamily noted they were just the, “many birds chirping in [his] tumbleweed chandeliers from New Mexico.” A casual circumstance of a dreamy creative life.

Dr. Chris Rosales: Educator and Novelist

I keep landing on the line from my interview notes about cats loving square things. I had the pleasure of chatting virtually with Dr. Chris Rosales a few days ago. As the conversation began, one of my cats kept peering into the frame. Chris, in his usual friendly and keenly observant manner, asked if I had ever noticed that cats love square-shaped items like laptops.

Chicano novelist and short-story author Dr. Christopher Rosales graduated from DU’s PhD program in creative writing and literary studies in 2019. Has written about animals, among other subjects, and banks on the exquisite frailty of the human psyche with his noir fictions set in prisons, near chaotic national boarders, and atop other places of haptic spiritual darkness and light. Specifically, he is currently wrapping up his fourth novel, a noir fiction set on the U.S.-Mexico border. Having recently returned home to Southern California, where he is teaching and continues to write, Chris has come to more carefully consider the nuances of painting “the whole picture of a setting.” Writing about crime, Dr. Rosales notes that beyond the enthusiasm of telling a story, the endeavor, “ends up tempered by the everyday feeling of inhabiting a place, especially a place you call home,” adding that such narrative infrastructure spawns an urgent owing of a “good story” to his neighbors, an homage, before inviting them to read his books.

Ahead of our meeting, Chris prompted me to check out an audio story, “Pets for Penitents,” published recently in Cleaver Magazine.  Indeed I am not surprised that Chris opened our conversation by noting keen observations about cats and their habits. This short story deepened my understanding of what it means to be imprisoned, and of what it means to be intimately leveraged by a pet, a living being who does not quantify through judgement our perils, particularly at a time when perhaps that one living being was all that held one above water in the tight space of grief. This short story ascribes to the controversial allowance of keeping pets in prisons and is maniacally honest, full of detailed and haunting observations about the human instinct to care despite tough luck.

During our meeting, I prodded for discussion about Chris’ research methods toward writing stories set in culturally miasmic spaces. Chris noted that growing up in Los Angeles in the 90s, he was “always a mimic, observing every voice, every personality,” adding that these voices carved spaces in his memory and are typically aided by fervent phone calls, and by the richness of revisiting old letters. Having lived in neighbors which signify the characters in his stories, Chris warned with urgency that it is too, “easy to get caught up in the mystification of the writing process,” which I took to mean that we ought not force a grandeur upon the simple processes of observation.  Chris continued this part of discussion, noting that as an adult now with a broader set of skills toward building the complete narrative, the perception of space is different, itself a broader view, as is richer the task of accessing the voices of others. As a writer of crime-sopped stories, Chris admits that he does sometimes wonder if we need more violence in our purview, considering the chaotic sociopolitical climates which have descended upon us in the past several years. With this in mind, he promises to his readers an extended focus on handling his characters, their plights and processes, with the ever most conscientious care.

As with others I have interviewed for this project, I was eager to know what words of advice Dr. Rosales might generously offer to those of us still working toward our graduate degrees in writing and literature at DU. Chris offered that when he arrived at DU to pursue his PhD, he arrived with “a Boy Scout hat on,” and with the understanding that he would be writing all the time for the next several years, just doing work and little else. During our chat, he offered that he learned quickly that preserving and holding onto hobbies was as important as the academic work he came to DU to do. For Chris personally, playing Spanish and metal music on the guitar, working out, rollerblading, and “playing outside” as much as possible created, and today continues to perpetuate a necessary balance. Chris also noted that Dr. Selah Saterstrom was a “guiding light” with regard to personal tools, being one to encourage self-preservation. Chris also advised that we ask ourselves where we can be of service, noting that as we begin forging a space in the world for ourselves, we must also learn to harbor gratitude for the richness of thought we can offer others. He concluded that in order to arrive at our most authentic selves, we must “survive the grad school mentality of constant accomplishing.”

In addition to writing, Chris is currently teaching ChicanX and LatinX Literary Studies at Cal State University Long Beach, his alma matter. He also offered that he is currently transitioning into socio-historic studies in film, history and anthropology—a transition that has let blossom renewed gratitude for the “truly hybrid nature” of DU’s PhD program in creative writing. Dr. Rosales expanded on this, noting that he has used in his teaching approaches what he learned here at DU about how creative writing and both critical and sociohistorical context overlap. Dr. Rosales enthusiastically promised to report back on some outcomes, once settled into the new and exciting curriculums.

Returning home to Paramount, California and being able to teach at CSULB, where his father helped found the Chicano Mobile Institute and was an activist in La Raza and MECHA student organizations, brought much into perspective for him, both professional and personally, extending the reaches of how he shapes his work and his pedagogies of self-discovery and heritage. Chris also serves as a freelance copywriter and consultant in the Los Angeles area. Chris is extremely excited about the forthcoming summer, during which he will assist the California-Mexico Studies Center in taking young beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to Mexico to reconnect with their roots while writing around and into their own personal histories. Chris plans to continue doing research for his novel-in-progress while serving in this post.

Dr. Christopher Rosales is the author of three additional novels: Silence the Bird, Silence the Keeper (2015, Mixer Publishing) which won the Hispanic Scholarship Fund & McNamara Family Creative Arts Grant, Gods On the Lam (2017, Perpetual Motion Machine), and Word Is Bone (2019, Broken River Books), winner of the International Latino Book Award. His award-winning short stories have appeared in Both Sides: An Anthology of Border Noir (2020, Polis/Agora Books), among other anthologies, journals, and magazines in the U.S. and abroad. In addition to earning a PhD in Creative Writing from DU, Chris also holds am MFA from CU Boulder.

One particular moment that struck me as we were wrapping up our discussion was Chris mentioning that in his hometown of Paramount, California there is an alley named Rosales. There is much depth to a namesake, to obversion, to moments in a narrative taken from personal histories overheard and watched. I think, as cats like square objects, Dr. Rosales finds richness in shape of circumstance, sees the noir in the streets. To learn more about Chris’ work, visit www.christopherrosales.com.