Harvard Author Profile: Abigail Chachkes ’25 on Romance and Meditation with Corpse | Arts

It’s hard to believe that a story about young romance could be inspired by a 16th-century saint who starved herself out of religious devotion. However, the short story “Do It Again,” by Abigail Chachkes ’25, was.

Chachkes, a senior at Leverett House, recently won the Cyrilly Abels Short Story Prize for this short story, which the English Department awards every year to a female college writer. Intrigued by death, sexuality and religion, Chachkes wanted to see if she could write a story about unique people who are attracted to each other for unique reasons and end up in a very different place than where they started.

The story revolves around Mia, a young girl who grieves the death of her sister, while her roommate, Catherine, introduces her to Jack, an expert in funeral practices. Mia and Catherine begin the story thinking that their upstairs neighbor has died. Mia and Jack end the story in a cemetery, trying to feel close to Mia’s dead sister.

Although she does not particularly see herself in any of her characters, Chachkes’s intellectual interests feature strongly in her creative work. Studying psychology and English, Chachkes plans to earn a doctorate. in clinical psychology and pursue the discipline professionally. His psychological interests find an expressive outlet through his writing.

“Not just having experiences and feeling emotions, but wanting to understand them and articulate them — I think that’s what writing is about, a lot of the time,” Chachkes said.

Writing allows Chachkes to explore phenomena that intrigue her. This realization led her to dedicate significant time to her creative development at Harvard, taking a creative writing seminar almost every semester.

His advice to other young writers in the college community is simple: “Take creative writing seminars.”

Writing has always been a personal endeavor for Chachkes. Recognition or approval from others has never been a driving force in her development as a writer. In fact, she received the recent award without knowing about her faculty nomination.

Chachkes’ style is detail-oriented and unexpectedly blunt, and she doesn’t shy away from the details. In another writing example shared with The Crimson, she introduces a character as the “do cocaine on people’s collarbone” type.

“I definitely like that the plot itself feels a little ridiculous,” Chachkes said when asked how she structures her stories.

For Chachkes, the issue is that his stories become a little strange. She wants to engage with the difficult topics, the complexities that we don’t tend to understand about ourselves.

One of these areas is religion. His own journey and involvement with religion helped develop his interest in the practices, institutions, and figures of faith.

“I grew up really involved in religious thought and religious texts,” she said.

In “Do It Again,” Jack teaches Mia about the Buddhist practice of corpse meditation: pondering in the presence of the body of a loved one. The story ends with the couple in the cemetery, visiting Mia’s late sister’s grave to try out the method. There is an aesthetic quality to writing that Chachkes values ​​keeping in mind.

“People almost know what religion is like,” she said.

Chachkes explained that there is a visual element that comes with writing about religion. That final tranquil cemetery landscape is a key image in the story, providing a moment of emotional intimacy between Mia and Jack. Chachkes describes it as “sparse and lonely.”

Other elements of the work were inspired by historical concepts. For example, the initial idea for “Do It Again” was originally inspired by a peculiar investigation into religious devotion.

“I was reading about these saints from the 1500s who used to go hungry,” she said.

Chachkes saw a connection to grief and went from there. She is also taking classes on eating disorders, and the topic is related to her interest in psychology.

Whatever path a student takes, Chachkes encouraged them to continue enjoying self-expression. College, for her, is a time to discover all the little details of being a person.

“I also tend to write about things that leave me confused in terms of myself,” she said.

Continuing to discover yourself and realize the ever-present importance of storytelling in your mind. Chachkes plans to continue allowing his values ​​and interests to guide his creative flow. As she saw, this can lead to fascinating and sometimes unexpected results.