Washington Square. On air is the audio town square for the Washington Square Review. Lansing Community College's literary journal. Writers, readers, scholars, publishing professionals, citizens of the world, gather here and chat about all things writing. Hey there. This is Melissa Ford Luckin, editor for the Washington Square Review. I'm here today with Ashni Math, whose essay Pastoral is in our Summer 25 issue. Hey there, Ashni. Hi.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, for sure. Could you give us a little overview of your essay and then let us know how you came to write it?

Pastoral is a lyric essay detailing a childhood friendship that I had as a child. And it is a segmented essay. So it kind of goes through a few different phases of the friendship, and I'm not going to spoil how it ends, but in case you haven't read it, but I'll say that it felt like a very dynamic piece to write. Yeah.

Okay, let me back up a little bit. For somebody who's not familiar with a lyric essay, define that for us.

A lyric essay can be a lot of different things. So in my understanding, a lyric essay kind of borrows a little bit from the prose poetry form. And so it can be an essay that takes on a bit more lyricism in terms of having more of a. A poetic voice. It can also be an essay that plays with form. So there can be, like, hermit crab essays, which are essays that take the form of a different sort of form. So like, for example, a resume or a letter to someone or a workbook or something like that. That could be considered a lyric essay or a braided essay, something that plays with structure. A lot of different things could be considered a lyric essay. But in this case, I chose this to be a lyric essay, particularly because of the writing style. So I was playing a lot with prose poet and trying to get a sense of how I could merge that with my essay writing, because I kind of work in between the genres of poetry and nonfiction.

Do you think the lyric form in the essay leaves more space for abstraction? It's a little more open.

I do, yeah. I think there's definitely a lot of room for abstraction, which is something that I am trying to lean away from in my writing, because I've noticed that I spent a lot of my writing in the sort of abstract world with a lot of heavy nouns like grief and guilt and things like that. And I'm like, sometimes a reader just wants to see a character do something.

Do you think that's a poetry influence leaning more heavily?

Definitely, yeah. I started kind of more in the realm of poetry before moving into nonfiction. And so definitely, I have been told that I write like a poet, and I have a lot of poetic influence in my prose.

You also said that the essay is segmented. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean with that?

Yes. So basically just that there are different segments of the essay which I find interesting to work with in a. In such a short piece. This piece is, like, I think, under a thousand words. And to break up a piece that's already so short into different segments kind of gives you, like, little. It kind of gives you, like, different rooms of a house. It gives you the ability to just walk into a house and see these different rooms and get a sense for what the whole house is going to look like. But you only get a glimpse of what each room sort of looks like.

At a time to me, when I read the essay and noticed the segmentation, because it's visually, you can see it when you look at. Gives me, as a reader, more space to interpret the way that the different segments work together. So instead of them being structured, for me, how one leads to the next, I, as a reader, get to interpret that open space between the segments, as I think that's a really delicate technique. And so instead of being, like, such a strong guide as a narrative structure, it leaves a lot more space for the reader. And I think. Yeah, I think that's. Provides more space for thought and feeling, I think. So maybe that's why people are kind of looping back to the poetry influence.

Definitely, yeah.

So how did you come to write it?

So I wrote it during my MFA program that I'm currently doing at Columbia in nonfiction. I wrote it during my first semester there. And basically, I was trying to write anything, actually, for workshop, just anything.

I'm laughing because we've all been there.

I know I was facing a pretty severe case of writer's block, as I still am. Was definitely having trouble with just putting stuff on the page. So I came about this old poem that I had that started the way this essay starts. So I think it starts, Durga spoke sun, spoke sun as her father spoke shears. And I loved her once, but not like that. So I took from that poem. And I think that poem was also originally titled Pastoral. And I took kind of a few different elements from it. Some of the language, some of the scenery. It's about, like, two children playing in a creek at the beginning. And so I took some of that and just kind of spun it into what I thought would be an accurate and also, hopefully, beautiful rendering of this friendship that meant a lot to me when I was younger.

And you mentioned that you wrote it for a workshop. Just curious. How did it go?

Oh, I actually workshopped this piece twice. The first time, people liked it. The second time, not so much.

Okay, that's strange. What happened?

I don't know. I guess every workshop just has a different sort of vibe to it. Every workshop has different people in it, and it's kind of looking for different things. So I guess the first workshop, they admired the lyricism and I think felt a little bit more in line with what I was trying to do with merging poetry and prose. And then the second workshop, what happened was we were looking more for narrative in that workshop. And so I remember getting the feedback, like, what is happening in this essay? I have no idea.

They didn't like that space. The space that I like. They didn't care for that.

Yeah. And so they were like, because I know you, I know something, that I have some idea of what might be happening in this essay, but I otherwise have no idea what's going on here. And so, yeah, I kind of played with it a little bit after that workshop and tried to make it a little bit less opaque in certain areas.

Okay. You said that the first time, people were vibing with it. The second time, not so much. Had you changed it in between?

I had not, no.

Okay. I think that's a really worthwhile kind of takeaway from this moment, is that you can take the same piece to two different workshops and get completely different experiences.

Yeah, definitely.

When it sounds like the second time, you came away and, as you said, tried to make it a little more structured, a little more concrete. The first time, when they were vibing with it, was that less helpful just to have them kind of like hearts and rainbows and hug the pages?

I think both were helpful in their own way. I actually didn't end up changing the piece much at all based on either of their feedbacks. So I found that the piece kind of wanted to stay as it was, even as I wanted to change it, to make it clearer, even as I wanted to change it, maybe to make it more lyrical in some regards. I ended up changing, like, a few words here and there. But overall, the piece, the structure and the form largely stayed the same.

How did you make the decision to keep it as is?

I think I asked it, do you want to change? And it said no. You know, I kind of, like, tried playing with it, and I tried making a few changes here and there, and it just didn't seem to Flow with what I had originally intended for the piece when I wrote it as a poem in high school, and what I seem to intend for it now as an adult.

Mm. That can be one of the most difficult things as a writer, deciding what to do with that workshop commentary.

Yeah, absolutely.

Have you had other experiences in workshops that were similar, where people were divided?

I have. I have had a lot of experiences with a lot of experimental writing that I've done recently. So, for example, one essay. I wrote an essay about love, where I actually just made up a lot of science writing, and I just invented a lot of scientific terms that sounded very real. And some people were convinced by it. And some people until I revealed at the end that all of it was fake. Some people were like, wow, I didn't know all of this about love. All of these little hormones in your bloodstream activate when you look into the eyes of someone you love. I didn't know that. And some people were like, yeah, this is B.S. So, yeah, I definitely got a lot of feedback from that. People were upset that they were being messed with. People were. Some people really loved it. Some people were like, I think this is disrespectful to the reader that you're kind of messing with them in this way and just making up facts and you can't purport to be something that you're not, basically. But that was kind of what I was trying to play with in the piece, which is, what responsibility and authority do I have as a writer? And I guess, what authority do you ascribe to me as a writer when you're a reader, without really knowing what authority I genuinely do have. So that was something that I found really interesting to play with.

Did you come out of that workshop experience satisfied with the experience, like, what had happened?

I found that I really hated the piece after workshopping it. And so I never looked at it again. But it was a really valuable experiment in terms of understanding how far I can push a reader without making them angry, basically. And I think in that essay, I did make them a little bit angry, which was helpful for me to understand, as a writer, to understand, you know, like, how crazy can I make this piece without feeling like the reader is going to lose something along the way?

Do you think you'll take that experience into your future writing?

I think definitely. While I may not return to the piece itself, I may come back to these ideas of playing with the reader, playing with, like, speculative nonfiction, and kind of getting a sense for, like, how far can I push the reader? Like, I said, how far can I force the reader to be, like, outside of their comfort zone or outside of what they believe and just kind of see what happens?

Yeah. I'm just thinking that writing something that makes someone feel a really strong emotion, anger, resentment, could stir up grief. It takes a certain level of skill to be able to do that.

I hope so. Yeah. I remember during that workshop, people decided that what I had to say about love was very bleak and nihilistic. And I was like, wow. I suppose that's very telling of the author, but yikes. What I intended.

Well, I think it also speaks to what they brought to the table themselves, maybe.

Yeah.

Because to me, the more abstract something is, the more space there is for the person to bring themselves to the piece of work.

Definitely. Yeah.

So, like I said, maybe it was just them.

Maybe. It was a combination.

Yeah. It sounds like you do have a really intense love for creative nonfiction and the way that it can work on the page. How did you come to that appreciation for it?

So I actually, like I said, work between poetry and nonfiction, and so I am kind of, I guess, stuck in the middle. I don't really. I find that everything I write when it's poetry has too much narrative, and everything I write when it's nonfiction has too much lyricism in it. And so people are like, what. What is this? What is this genre that you're doing? And so recently, I wrote a chapbook of poems that is titled Grace Unknown. And it's about my kind of experiences with death, with feeling close to death and also afraid of death, and also not afraid of death and all these things. And basically that was kind of playing in between the genres of poetry and nonfiction. So I had a few different types of poems in there. Some of them were straight poems. One of them was like a villanelle, and one of them was a pantom, for example. But then some were, like, list essays. Some of them were segmented little essays that I called poems, but really were mini essays. And so I find that I don't actually reside within nonfiction very squarely. I kind of like to play around between poetry and nonfiction.

It sounds like the creative nonfiction gives you new avenues to use the poetry and the skills of poetry. It makes poetry bigger and have more possibilities.

Yes. And I think vice versa as well.

Okay. This is a question I like to ask people, and everyone gives me a different answer. How would you define creative nonfiction?

It reminds me of when students. When I was teaching high school students about poetry, and they asked me, what is a poem? Right And I was like, yes, that is a poem. And they're like, what? And so I think creative nonfiction or poetry or any genre can be whatever you want it to be. I think that a piece of graffiti on a bridge outside can be a poem, or it can be a piece of creative nonfiction, or it can be a piece of fiction, if you decide it is. And I think there's something in the. Deciding that, in the, you know, the decider's interpretation of it that puts it into that genre. So if I'm deciding that a resume is a piece of creative nonfiction, for example, then, you know, I might have to do a little bit of convincing there. But I would say there's something in that decision to make it a piece of creative nonfiction that kind of causes it to be read a certain way. Saying that this is a piece of creative nonfiction causes it to be understood as a piece of creative nonfiction. And so we kind of put different pieces of significance into it, as we would if it were just a piece of professional writing or a poem or something like that.

I like that. Gives me something to think about for the rest of the day, and I always like that. I know that you've done work as a poetry editor, so talk a little bit about that experience.

Yeah. So when I was at Carnegie Mellon University for my undergraduate degree, I worked on the Oakland Review, which was their literary journal. And so I started out as just a reader, and then I became a poetry editor, and then I became editor in chief in my final year. And that was a really, really great experience. So I got to both do poetry and prose for that experience and get a sense for, I guess, what are people writing right now? What are people. What are people submitting to the world? And sometimes it was a little bit bleak in terms of the types of writing that were being put out there. And sometimes it was really inspiring to see the amazing things people were coming up with. So, yeah, I think that was. That was a really incredible experience.

The bleakness is that from the tone of those submissions or the quantity, what made it bleak?

I would say the quality. Sometimes we were given work that was very clearly not proofread or was very clearly. We had to filter out work that was maybe not up to the standard that we were kind of hoping for, but this was kind of, like, a rare occurrence. And a lot of the time, we saw work that really moved us, inspired us, made us think, made us feel emotions, and we're really incredible in that way.

So it sounds like the submissions were pretty wide across the board.

Yes. Exactly, yeah.

How did that experience move forward with you? What did you take from it that you still use now?

I would say definitely I have a better sense of what editors in an editorial room are looking for, which is really anything I think editors can like. It really depends on how quickly they're reading, how much coffee they've had to drink that day. If they're going through a breakup in their personal life, I don't know. And you give them a romantic piece that maybe triggers something in them and they don't like it. It could really, really be anything that causes an editor to like or dislike a piece. And so I saw how fickle this process can be at times, and that gave me a little bit more confidence in my own writing, in my own submission. To be submitting to all these places and to be getting all these rejections, as every writer does, because every writer is submitting to a million places and getting rejected from a million minus one, and then they'll get one. Except acceptance that is really important to them, like this acceptance that Washington Square was really important to me. This interview process was a really valuable experience for me. So, yeah, I would say I kind of learned how not seriously to take this process sometimes just because you never know what the editors are thinking or going through or experiencing or how many other pieces they've read like it in that same day, for example. It could honestly be a combination of many different factors.

Right. There's luck, as you're describing it. Just a little bit of luck involved in good luck and not so good luck. I think that's very helpful information for anybody who's submitting to know that it's the quality of the work is part of it, but it's not all of it.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Did you see certain trends among the submissions, different topics where you'd get a bunch of things on a same topic or a certain form would just kind of dominate.

There was definitely an uptick in Covid poems when Covid happened. And then I would say kind of aligning with that. A lot of loneliness and introspection that I guess everybody had to face during the pandemic. So, like you said, the submissions were pretty wide in terms of both quality and content and form. And so I didn't really see, you know, them sort of clustering around a particular topic or theme. They all felt very diverse to me.

Just curious, is editorial work something you would want to do in the future?

I hope so. I'm still keeping my options open. I would like to teach in the future because I love working with students. And editorial work, I think, could go along with that. Like, I imagine being a professor, I would love to help advise for a literary journal, for example, or something like that. I'll see where it takes me, I guess.

You just mentioned students, and you and I were chatting before we started recording about your work with high school students and their application essays when they're applying to colleges. Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, so I run a business. I started it in college. It's called Emerging Minds College Counseling, or EMC2, which is basically a college counseling and college application service. So we help high school seniors with their college applications, kind of. We get a sense of how to, like, market them, how to brand them, and also get a sense of how to create. Create good pieces of writing in terms of their application essays. It's really uses a lot of different avenues of my skill set as a writer, because I would say learn how to give them a certain angle and also learn how to proofread and also learn how to connect with them on a deeper level. It takes a lot of different things to be able to do this work. And so I'm really excited about the work that I'm able to do and really lucky to be able to do it as well.

How does the process work?

Depends on the student. But typically we look through the prompts together. We pick out a few different ideas that are based on some extracurriculars they've done, for example, or some ideas they have about the world. And then we create an outline together. The student goes and writes the essay, and then we come back and we both revise it kind of until we're both happy with it. So we kind of toss it back and forth, do some rounds of revisions, and make sure we're putting our best foot forward with this essay. And so I kind of think of it as another form of creativity nonfiction, these essays themselves, because while they're not strict memoir, they are personal essays in that these students are writing, you know, about their lives, and they're writing about who they are and trying to give the college admissions officers a sense of what kind of student they are, what kind of person they are. So I would say I do kind of see it as maybe not a strict form of memoir, but it definitely is a form of personal essay where these students are tapping into who they are to try to render themselves on the page, which I guess is what every writer tries to do.

Right. Are there any topics you suggest they steer away from?

I get that question a lot And I would actually say, no, there are cliche essays. Like, there are the sports injury essay. There's the time we got rejected from a club, and we worked really hard, and then we got into the club the next year. There are cliche essays. But the thing is, every essay is going to be cliche. You know, like every essay, there's going to be something that an admissions officer has read before because they've read so many essays. And so really, the different thing is how you write it. The thing that makes it unique is the way in which you convey this unique experience and how it was unique to you. Because even if we have a sports injury essay, I've had students write sports injury essays. I've had students write essays in which they got rejected from a club and then they got in the next year. And so these cliche essays, it doesn't really matter that they're considered cliche or that the admissions officer has seen them before, because it's unique to the student, and the student has something unique to say about it.

How did you encourage them to express their uniqueness?

That's sometimes hard with each student, especially for students. Not to point out STEM students in particular, but a lot of STEM students have difficulty with finding out what makes them unique and finding kind of that spark that drives their uniqueness. And so I would say it's really a matter of meeting each student where they're at and kind of trying to understand what is the student passionate about, what do they care about? And maybe they, at the time, they just care about getting into a good school. But usually if you dig deeper and you talk to them for a little bit longer, I feel like I can always find something more interesting for them to say. For example, I had a student who was convinced he had nothing interesting to say for some of his University of California admissions essays. And then we ended up coming up with this amazing personal insight question essay about a fish that he had a pet fish. And he wrote so beautifully about the delicateness of a fish life, and I guess how that extends to human life as well. But how delicate this life was, how much control he had over it, how much responsibility he had. And he wrote this beautiful essay about a fish that was so unexpected but really showed me that these essays can come from anywhere. And these essays kind of go to show how unique these students can be.

It sounds like one of your initial challenges is to get each person to recognize they do have something unique and special about themselves.

I find that true of every student, regardless of whether they're My college application students, or if they're a creative writing student. So I feel like almost every student comes to me and is like, I'm not a writer. I don't know how to write. I'm not good at writing something like that, or like, I don't have anything interesting to say. They have a lot of, I guess, lack of self confidence in both their ability and their content in terms of what to write. And so I think a big part of being an educator is encouraging the student and supporting them and allowing them to realize that they really do have a lot of content and they've lived a whole life. They have so much to say and so much to write about and so much that they care about. And really, everything that they have to say is going to be valuable to the reader, even if they think that it's not at the time.

Mm. That's probably something that writers continue to struggle with throughout their lives, is questioning their own experience and the value of it to other people. So introducing and validating that to somebody at a young age probably helps them recognize it later in life when it comes up again and they start to doubt themselves again, then they can kind of rethink about how they came to terms with it the first time, or at least just recognize that it's part of a pattern, part of just growing as a person. That's pretty cool.

Yeah. Personally, I've been lucky to have a lot of really good educators who have been able to kind of nurture that spark in me as a writer. And so my college professors, my grad school professors, even I can think of teachers from high school that really sparked my interest in writing and helped me realize that I could be a writer. I think that's a really important thing. Encouraging the student from a very young age.

Absolutely. And in different ways. One of the things that I really appreciated that you were talking about earlier is how you structure what you're saying, contributes to what you are saying. So you've got two different skill sets, the structural one. Right. And then the creative one. And I would imagine that some students, if they realize they can write whatever they're trying to write in a different form, that that might help them free them up and give them kind of like a toolkit mentality if they're too worried about the creative part.

So, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, that's. It's really neat to think about it that way. You know, it's not just what you're saying, but also how you're saying it and that you can use those two pieces. All right.

Yeah. And I think, like, giving students access to a lot of different creative writing skills. For example, like figurative language, structure, I don't know, metaphor. And, you know, all these different literary devices giving them access to all these different things can help them. Even my college applications, students who are not really doing strict creative writing, but I suppose a sideways form of creative writing, it really gives them a lot more flexibility and a lot more control over the way in which they're able to structure what they're saying. So, yeah, I find that really helpful for students as well.

Yeah. And I bet some of them are surprised to know that they can use perhaps, you know, metaphors or other kinds of figurative language in the college essay.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I had a student who described. She had a classmate who was a ballerina, and she was in math. Math class with this classmate, and she described her friend as a human protractor. And I thought that was so clever. I still think about it sometimes. I'm like a human protractor. Where did you come up with that? That's brilliant. So, yeah, these students, they tend to astound me sometimes with the amazing things they come up with.

It sounds like you give them a lot of space to be themselves and that. That's probably how it shows up. Up that they feel welcome.

I hope so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's cool. All right, so if people would like to learn more about your business or find you online, where's a good place for them to find you?

Yeah. So my website is ashnymath.com a s h n I m a t h.com and it also has links to my college counseling business and some of my other work as well. So feel free to check me out on there.

All right, beautiful. Well, thanks a lot for coming on and talking to me today.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Thanks for stopping by the audio Town square of the Washington Square Review. Until next time, this has been the Washington Square on air from Lansing Community College. To find out more about our writers, community and literary journal, visit lcc. Edu WSL. Writing is messy, but do it anyway.