Dusty to Polished: Carina Filemyr
What sparks your urge to write, is it always the same?
A lot of the urge begins in the mundane. I’ll be dicing up an onion or talking on the phone with a
friend about their parents, and I’ll be struck by the immediacy of the moment. The moment is
transient, untrappable, and the best I can do is to try to make sense of the moment—its
simultaneous significance and insignificance—through language. This obsession is why I
gravitate toward nonfiction. I love reading slice-of-life works and essays about people making
sense of their worlds, by wielding their vantage points to sharpen and share their own
sensibilities.
Do you follow a specific process or set of steps when editing?
I usually edit as I write—which my advisor has aptly likened to 3-D printing. My sentences need
to be edited for clarity as I go because each sentence is a foundation for the next sentence. I
almost never go into a piece knowing what I “want to say,” so this editing-as-I-go process is a
way for me to reflect on the function of every word in every sentence. Am I saying what I intend
to say? Are the words relaying what’s going on in brain-space?
I do edit after I complete a piece by reading it aloud to myself—post the micro-editing I do while
writing. What’s the timbre of the piece? Does it make sense? If I were someone else reading this
piece, would the words have the same resonance if I wasn’t the writer of them? Editing in this
stage requires me to divorce myself from the work, or at least try to get close to that degree of
separation.
How do you know when a piece is truly “done” and ready for publication?
The saying is tired, but it’s true—a work is never “done,” at least for me. It can be ready to be
seen by the world, but nothing is ever finished. I know when a piece is ready to be seen when I
can read through it and understand what the piece is doing, what it’s about. I can trace
intentionality in the piece. I can see what it wants to do, and I can see that it’s achieved that via
its organization, diction, poetics, and pacing.
How would you describe your writing process with an image?
When you’ve finished washing the dishes that you’ve let pile up in the sink and you’re watching
the food bits and soap suds swirl, buoyed in spirals as the water slowly drains. The spirals
remind you of the shape of seashells and learning about the Fibonacci sequence in
sophomore-year geometry and the way the Milky Way has arranged itself and throwing slinkies
down staircases. All of these registers collide with each other as you watch the sink empty itself.
You now need to throw out the broccoli florets and elbow pasta that are still stuck onto the
stainless steel.
What do you think makes the writing community at The New School unique?
Writers at the New School are concerned for each other and connected by art—my classmates
genuinely want me to succeed, and I genuinely want them to succeed. We’re collaborating to
achieve something, and we’re not tearing each other down in the process. We also have superb
teachers (who double as mentors, cheerleaders, sometimes-therapists, and unwavering believers
in their art) who’ve helped us create and uphold this magic.
Bio: Carina (she/her) is a second-year student concentrating in nonfiction. She studied
neuroscience at Muhlenberg College (located in Allentown, PA), and her fascination with science
and scientific inquiry informs her writerly sensibilities. She has been published by Public
Seminar and Moonstone Arts Center.
She’s living in Brooklyn now, but she’s originally from New Jersey. Carina is fascinated by
horseshoe crabs, terroir, mountains, and her cat.
This interview series is produced by Hijab Ahmed