MFA Student Spotlight: A Conversation with Alina Cohen
by Emily Collins
Welcome back to CutBank’s weekly student spotlight where we interview current MFA students at the University of Montana. This week’s spotlight is Alina Cohen, a fiction student and UM writing instructor at work on a collection of short stories. I recently sat with Alina where we discussed fiction, new voices, and the joys of living and writing in Missoula!
Emily Collins: What drew you to the MFA in fiction program at the University of Montana?
Alina Cohen: They let me in! I applied to MFA programs during three different cycles and the application readers here liked my writing and offered me a stipend to teach. The program is paying me to sit around in the mountains and read and write and talk about reading and writing with other smart and passionate people. How could I say no?
EC: Who are your favorite fiction writers, memoirists, poets, etc.?
AC: I come from the world of art writing, and Peter Schjeldahl is always a guiding light. He infuses poetry and real feeling into everything he publishes. I don't read much memoir, but I distinctly remember reading his personal essay, "The Art of Dying," in B Flat, my favorite basement bar in Tribeca, just months before the city shut down. I cried in the bar and then on the subway and then in my (now ex-) boyfriend's apartment once I started telling him about this essay. To have that effect on a reader!
Ottessa Moshfegh, Ann Beattie, Mary Gaitskill, Roberto Bolaño, Philip Roth, and Deborah Eisenberg are some of my favorite fiction writers—I'm slowly working my way through everything these people have ever published. Some newer voices that interest me: Bryan Washington, Mieko Kawakami, Mary South, and Brontez Purnell. I'm dying to read the new Mariana Enríquez story collection and the Clare Sestanovich collection that comes out this summer.
A few brilliant writing group peers have great books coming out this summer, which I was so lucky to read all or part of at early stages: Beth Morgan's dissection of Internet stalking, A Touch of Jen; Calvin Kasulke's Several People are Typing, which is the first-ever novel written entirely in Slack communiques; and Rax King's essay collection, Tacky, ft. Guy Fieri and the Jersey Shore cast.
EC: What are you working on writing-wise and what do you hope to gain during your time at UM?
AC: I'm working on a series of short stories about love and money. My characters aspire to better relationships and financial security while deluding themselves about the nature of their real problems. I’m interested in the specific weirdness of the suburbs, the vagaries of female desire, and the reverberations of family dysfunctions.
At UM, I hope to get more writing done, and to make it better!
EC: When you're not writing, what are some of your favorite hobbies, interests, etc.?
AC: I love skiing; I'm making good use of my weekday pass up at Snowbowl. I recently downloaded the Down Dog app for yoga and have become an online yoga video connoisseur. Cooking and baking have become recent passions. Before the world shut down, and I moved to Missoula, I looked at as much visual art as possible. Lots of gallery hopping in New York. It was always so exciting to find bold, moving new paintings, sculptures, and multimedia works by young artists. I can't wait until that world reopens.
EC: When you look back on your journey as a writer so far, what excites you the most?
AC: What most excites me is that I'm still doing it. It's a wacky endeavor, and I think it's always easier to stop than to keep going. I've gotten better at accepting rejections, caring less about what others think, and quieting the voices in my head. It's all an ongoing battle, but one that I've been delusional enough to withstand so far, and I hope to be just as delusional in the future!
EC: Bonus Question: If you could quarantine with any writer throughout history, who would they be and why?
It seems dumb not to choose a great food writer here. I recently finished MFK Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf, and I think she could feed us very well and very cheaply. I'm making my way through Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Italian Cooking, a brilliant and transportive primer. I'd love to hear about Hazan's travels and hard-won culinary lessons. Both women turned a domestic task into an art form—and wrote about it with wit and verve. More than their delicious dishes, I'd value these women's sage words about writing and creativity in the kitchen.
Alina Cohen is an MFA candidate (fiction) and a writing instructor at the University of Montana. She previously worked as a staff writer at Artsy.net and has published freelance journalism and criticism in The Nation, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, The New York Times, Elle, and The New York Observer.
Emily Collins is the Interviews Editor for CutBank and a MFA in fiction candidate at the University of Montana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Orleans Review, The Florida Review, The Atticus Review, The South Carolina Review, and others. She’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and other anthologies. When she’s not interviewing incredible writers, she enjoys hiking and volunteering.