Introducing Published Writer and Visiting Professor, Caroline Crew
Benedetto Maniscalco | December 2, 2021
Special to The Echo
Caroline Crew, Ph.D., read from her recently published collection of essays, “Other Girls to Burn,” on November 10, 2021. Crew is a visiting professor of creative nonfiction at Warren Wilson College (WWC). “Other Girls to Burn,” a book about women in violence, is her first published collection consisting solely of essays. She previously released a full collection of poetry, “Pink Museum,” as well as several poetry chapbooks, all of which are available for purchase through links provided on her website.
“It was really fun to be back to reading in-person again,” said Crew.
It had been two years since Crew read at or attended a public reading. Seats were filled for the reading in room 110 of Boon Hall. It was an intimate event, even with the spaced out chairs, and everyone present, but especially Crew, seemed to be in high spirits. After a brief introduction from WWC senior Callie Williams, Crew, clad in professional punk attire, took the podium. A microphone placed in a plant on the podium provided the minimal but necessary amplification.
Crew read three essays in their entirety. The first essay she read, “Reliquary,” discusses the idea and classifications of a relic, as well as how Jesus’ foreskin might classify if it were given relic status.
“There is a healthy traffic of holy relics on eBay. These are more likely to be Second (an object owned or worn by a saint) or Third (an object touched by Christ or a saint) Class. Authenticity aside, the Holy Prepuce is unlikely to be found at auction. Or, at all. In 1900, the Catholic Church ruled anyone found discussing any one of Christ's foreskins would be excommunicated. The last surviving Holy Prepuce, located in Calcata, Italy was stolen in 1983. It seems the thief was never found— or perhaps they feared being ejected from the Church's embrace by confessing.”
— “Reliquary”
The second essay she read, “The Discomfort Index,” is a braided essay that deals with personal experiences of harassment as well as Las Vegas, strip clubs, Mercury, the titular discomfort index, and comfort zones.
“Discomfort comes to modern English from the Old French descomforter: “to sadden, to annihilate.” Comfort is a tricky concept, a privilege of a concept; one does not notice it until its lack.”
— “The Discomfort Index”
The last essay she read, “Boys on the Radio,” is a singular, page-and-a-half long sentence. It addresses the story of Orpheus who travels to hell in an attempt to bring Eurydice, his lost love, back from the dead. He is conditioned with the task to not look back at Eurydice on their way back to the land of the living and, in most tellings, fails this task, condemning her back to hell.
This essay establishes this old Greek myth and then wanders into themes of women’s roles within myths and media as to always be the second half of a man. In one sentence Crew attempts to argue against this cliche, noting all of the things someone can achieve with time not spent attached to another. The essay continues into memories of herself attached unhealthily to an older, creepy drummer. This story is then paralleled with another story of hers where she had attempted to convey warnings to a young girl in a scarily similar spot to her earlier experience.
“... but even so I could see her and I could see the drinks that she didn’t buy at the bar and I could see who was buying them and his sleight of hand not fooling even your shittiest mall magician, and when I put my hand on her shoulder, she shrugged with an eye roll that could’ve triggered an avalanche, and it crushed me …”
— “Boys on the Radio”
Crew was introduced at the reading as someone who holds a deep empathy, a sentiment she later said she did not believe to be true in herself but it was something that meant a lot to hear.
Crew was born in Plymouth, England and grew up on a farm in Cornwall. Her family's house in Cornwall appears in “The Doomsday Book,” a census taken after the Norman Conquest in 1066.
“So my house is real old,” Crew said.
Her memories of farm life had been an area of mixed emotions for her as a large amount of her professional and academic career involved erasing her rural familial history.
She describes how she has, until recently, kept her farm identity separate from her professional one.
Special to The Echo | Erin Kirk
Cover art for Crew’s collection of essays, “Other Girls to Burn.”
“It has become a project of kind of creating the persona that I think I am in essays,” Crew said. “I’m educated and sophisticated and intellectual and that (farmlife) is somehow in opposition to all of those things.”
Crew’s first experience in college took place at St. Andrews in Cambridge, England. Crew described the place as a particular type of university with medieval buildings, balls and tweed-clad professors.
“Which you should 100% google,” Crew said when talking about St. Andrews. “It is essentially what folks think of when they are trying to imagine hogwarts.”
However, she described it as jarring for someone who wasn’t used to all of that.
“Perhaps the most surprising fact about my college experience is that I didn’t talk at all. I was very, very quiet,” Crew said. “I never spoke in seminars, I just really didn’t do it.”
Crew started writing in her early 20s. Her initial professional plan was to be a lady farmer, a term she used in her childhood writings that she stumbled upon years later.
“Not sure if she wanted to farm ladies or be a lady that was also a farmer,” Crew said.
This position at WWC is her first teaching job as a professor at a college. She has spent most of her adulthood as a professional student. Crew first started teaching in 2012 when she went into her MFA program, always teaching some form of writing. She has taught at Georgia State and University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also worked in a writing program for high school students every summer.
She spent a year outside of the world of writing working for an Ed-Tech Company, where she was an office manager.
“(It was a) robotics camp for exceedingly rich elementary school students,” Crew said. “Toddlers being made to wear blazers and ties that are playing with robots, it is quite dystopian.”
The time that Crew has spent at WWC has been a bridge for these aspects of her life. She prefaces her feelings about her first semester here as “really gooey.”
“It’s really healing, and I hate saying that aloud because … I can hear my therapist saying things in my ear and I’m like ‘meh.’ She’s great, but it’s really healing because you can be both (lady farmer and intellectual).”
She described how Warren Wilson has kind of allowed her to talk about her work and life with her family, something she had generally avoided but the farm life and culture here seems to bridge the gap. The WWC experience has also made her hopeful about the availability of different forms of education for first generation students.
Her favorite musical artists are Lucy Dacus, Speedy Ortiz, Daddy Issues, Slutever and Hole.
If she got the chance to write anyone's biography, she would write about Mary Shelly, author of Frankenstein. Her knowledge on Shelly is already broad, including details of her mom as a political figure and her marriage to Percy Shelly, which Crew considers a mistake. According to Crew, Shelly also wrote Franenstein on a dare.
“That’s the life, that other than mine, I’d like to be known for knowing,” said Crew.
Crew is teaching three courses in the spring semester: forms and theories of creative nonfiction, editing literary magazine and advanced creative nonfiction.