"Close observation is an act of love": A Conversation with Creative Nonfiction Writer Jessie Petrow-Cohen
We met Jessie the way we met each other—through our friend Will, a poet, who speculated that we might all get along. The beginning of the very end of summer, the last warm night in September, we found ourselves around a wooden table in the backyard of a Greenpoint bar eating branzino.
We didn’t say it then, but both of us wrote later that we thought our younger selves would be very happy to know that we were spending gorgeous nights among the company of bright people, eating fish. Between pulling tiny bones out of the gaps of our teeth, we talked and talked about writing until there was no more fish to eat, and two branzino skeletons were laid neatly across our plates.
Jessie Petrow-Cohen is a Brooklyn-based writer who shapes immediate, everyday sensory experiences of grief into creative nonfiction essays that have become popular through her Substack, aptly named “Claiming Writerhood.” Jessie’s short essay, “On Molting,” is the 2024 Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest winner and will appear in the upcoming issue of the Kenyon Review.
On a far crisper afternoon than the evening we met, we spoke with Jessie in Kate’s backyard about writing as a practice of presence in the face of loss, the genesis of her Substack and the momentum to write, her residency at the Kenyon Review Workshop, and how writing and close observation are acts of love in an unpredictable and difficult world. We began, of course, with a question we grapple with in every moment of our lives as writers: the question of permission to write in a world where time is precious and earning money feels urgent.
ELIZABETH: I remember when we first met, you were talking about giving yourself permission to write and then getting into nonfiction writing, and I was wondering if there was a catalyst for allowing yourself to begin writing, or were you always a writer?
JESSIE: I definitely have not always thought of myself as a writer. I was a really voracious reader as a kid, and I always loved to write. I got to college—I went to Duke which is just not a very creative environment, really to the point where I didn't even think of myself as that creative while I was there. I did intuitively seek creative things. I wrote, acted in, and then helped direct something called All of the Above, an all-female performance group where actresses would perform anonymous monologues. In a lot of ways, it was creative nonfiction. I wrote and performed monologues, and when I was directing, helped choose the monologues that other people would perform, and I loved that.
It was the best thing I did in college, but it wasn't an identity thing. It was just like, ‘oh, this is the thing that I do that I'm obsessed with.’ Similarly, I took creative writing classes, but it was always on the side of the other things that I was doing.
I studied psychology and chemistry and was in a lot of science classes. Writing was on the side. When I graduated, I worked in consulting, and I didn't do any writing at all for the first two years that I was in New York. I was just working in consulting—really busy and tired.
The impetus for when I started writing more seriously was that my mom got sick when I was a senior in college. She was sick my whole senior year, and then the year after I graduated, my other mom got sick. So both of my moms had cancer at the same time, which was just devastating, but also really breaks your belief in any form of structure in the universe. It was just like, ‘oh, literally anything can happen.’ I took some time off of work when my mom was sick and, for the first time since graduating, had a minute that was not programmed.
I was taking dance classes and doing random shit trying to fill my time and feel less horrible. I was on the subway on the way to a doctor's appointment with my mom. I pulled my phone out and I just started writing in the notes app.
Over the course of a day, I wrote what I now see was an essay. It was the first thing that I had done in the midst of a lot of illness and hard stuff that felt really good. And so I started doing more of it.
I was on a three month family medical leave, and I wrote that first essay a few weeks in. I wrote every day, like six to eight hours a day, for the next three months. I just had so much coming out of me. And the writing was awful. I wouldn't want to look at it now at all.
“But I felt like I was understanding things that I didn't have another way to understand. And I felt like I was clicking into myself. I had been operating some 20 degrees to the left or right, and when I was writing, I was in myself.”
That was, I guess, almost four years ago, now. Since then, I have just started writing more and more. I started taking classes and getting better at writing. I didn't think about myself as a writer at all. It was just this weird thing I did literally all the time by myself. At a certain point, maybe a year later, I was like, ‘okay, I want to force myself to put some of this out there.’
I made my Substack and called it “Claiming Writerhood.” The idea was ‘I will claim writing as a thing I actually do and try to think of myself as a writer.’ I started with maybe five friends on the distribution list. Then, more people started following and reading it. I was writing about loss and impending loss, and I was writing about illness. I think people were finding that they were either having similar experiences or had had similar experiences, and they were responding in ways that reinforced this notion that I was capturing something that they had felt too. That was really encouraging both from a writing perspective and just from a human perspective.
And it kind of worked. I started thinking about myself more as a writer. An editor from the Washington Post came across my Substack, somehow, and reached out to me asking me to write for her. This was a little over a year ago now, and that felt really validating like, ‘I'm doing something here.’ I ended up writing a few pieces for the health and wellness section of the Washington Post that were in a very different style, like more journalistic writing, but based off of these essays that had originally been on my Substack. That was really cool and since then, I have tried more and more to put writing in the center of my life.
My mom passed away last summer, and writing was literally the thing that got me through. It is the thing that continues to be what I turn to in the extreme messiness of grief. I think that's actually what it looked like. I take classes. I'm about to teach a class. I've done residencies. I've done workshops. I have tried to just weasel my way into getting to work with authors that I really respect and really like, and that's been really cool. And now I think I'm at this place where I'm doing two different things and trying to do them all the way.
I have a job. I work at the New York Times. I'm on the business side. It's a good job as jobs go, but I'm in Excel, I'm making slides and doing random business things. And you know, I work like a full eight to seven throughout the week. And then I'm trying to also make writing into a full time endeavor.
I'm very tired, but I feel like writing is so momentum-driven. I feel like I have a constant fear of losing that sense of momentum because I'm not happy, and I'm not myself if I'm not writing, talking about writing, being in writerly spaces, thinking about writing. It has been shocking to me how connecting it is to be around people who get that and who have that similar sense of ‘I don't know what the fuck this thing we're doing is, we're literally just putting words on a page, but it is the meaning of life.’ So yeah, that was a really long answer, but that's my answer.
KATE: On that note, I'll ask what are some specific places where you have found a writing community? Could you talk about your experience at the Kenyon Review workshop and some background on how you ended up at this workshop?
JESSIE: So the Kenyon Review workshop, which is a week long in the cornfields of Ohio, is really, unequivocally, the place that I have found the most intense, enduring and just energy-giving version of a writing workshop and a writing community.
I got there in kind of a crazy way. I definitely have confidence issues with my writing and probably wouldn't have applied to the workshop. I didn’t think that I would be able to get into something like that. But last year, I wrote this essay that is kind of experimental and wonky. It's called “On Molting,” and it's about changing in the face of grief, and how strange it is that you keep evolving as a person, even after losing someone. Like, all these other facets of you keep changing. And that's kind of beautiful. And it also feels really weird because the person you lost won't know that new version of you.
So, I just wrote this kind of wonky essay, and ironically, I actually workshopped it in a class, and everyone hated it. I was like, ‘all right, didn't work, oh well.’ Later, I was on Twitter, and Melissa Febos, who is the queen of creative nonfiction, and I love her—she was one of the first people I read where I was like, ‘oh my God, there's a genre for this.’
She had just tweeted that she was judging the Kenyon Review’s, short nonfiction contest in 2024, and the deadline was that night. I was like, ‘fuck it, I'm just gonna submit my weird essay that everyone hated.’ It was crazy, the coolest thing that's ever happened to me is when they called me to tell me that I had won. I did a literal spit take. That doesn't happen, you know, it was so crazy. It was so cool. And because I won that award, I got to go to the Kenyon Review workshop.
So that's how I got to go, and it was such a gift. I don't think I would have felt confident enough to apply and put myself in a space with all these people who either were in MFAs or had done MFAs.
It was very good for my confidence and for my writing life that I got to go. It was so immersive. You're generating work. You're talking about writing. You're hearing other people's writing. People were so generous, it was such an encouraging, warm environment to make things in. I met [our mutual friend and poet] Will [Duanmu] who I cannot say enough wonderful things about. I've rarely met a deeper thinker or a more intuitive person, and it felt like finding someone who was literally sitting in my brain, able to articulate things before I could articulate them, and that was so cool.
Then our other friend, Imogen, who is also a poet and now a fiction writer, was someone who I felt like would look at an essay and be like ‘oh, it actually starts here’. She could just see the things in my mind that I was grasping for but not quite reaching. It is insane what it will do to your writing to have people who can see around the bend of your mind before you can, and I feel like it really opened so much up for me.
KATE: That’s so wonderful. Such a special experience, oh my God. And also so crazy to get that phone call and realize that you had won.
JESSIE: This is funny, the essay is about having a threesome—that’s the core of what it’s about. The girl who we had a threesome with is mentioned by name in the essay, but there was no part of me that thought I would win this contest. I wasn't like, ‘oh, am I comfortable with this being on the internet?’ No! I just thought that it would never be on the internet, and it didn’t matter. I had to reach out to this girl and be like, ‘sorry, I wrote an essay about having a threesome with you, and now it's gonna get published, do you want me to change your name?’
She was very cool about it. She didn't care, but I had to send it to her. It was a whole thing, but it was just such a real example of the fact that there was no part of me who thought this would get online because I would not have submitted it if I thought that it was.
ELIZABETH: I want to go back a little bit to this permission to write and grief, which is such a personal and isolating experience. It's also something that is so human, we all experience grief. I'd love to know more about how writing gave you permission to grieve, or how grieving gave you permission to write, if at all. I’d like to know how the experience of gaining connection with others through your work made you feel that you could be a writer because people cared about what you had to say.
JESSIE: That was really well-articulated. I think I felt both of those things. My mom was sick for seven years. She was sick for a long time, and we always knew she had ovarian cancer, and we knew that it was terminal from the beginning. In the six months before she passed away, we knew that it was coming soon. I think there is a former version of myself, a version that hadn't found writing yet and that would have really dissociated away from the grief.
I think the reason that I love writing so much, and specifically love nonfiction, is that it is a close observation of the world. I think observation can be such an act of love. In the lead up to losing my mom, I observed everything so closely. That was hard at times. Maybe it would have been easier to dissociate or separate myself, but I didn't.
Writing was the thing that I held on to as a reason to be present and actually go through all of these feelings of impending loss very closely. It gave me a way to not just observe, but then, take those observations and make sense of them. That was really organizing. That's something I think about a lot with my writing.
“It is close observation as an act of love—that is how I think about what I'm trying to do. Writing allowed me to do this. I have memories of the time before my mom died that I don't think I would have been able to hold onto with such high definition and clarity if I hadn't been writing about them at the time. That was a gift that I feel I gave myself. “
I think in grief, it's taken on a slightly different shape. My experience of grief—I think everyone's is different, of course—but the cliche that it comes in waves, this is something I really relate to. The thing that I have felt all year is I'll feel a wave of emotion come, and I don't recognize it as grief. I recognize it as feeling really shitty in a different way every time. Maybe it's extreme exhaustion, maybe it's horrible anxiety, maybe it's total hopelessness. It's just a wave of feeling and, because I have created this habit of having a wave of feeling and trying to write about it, I can identify it as grief.
This way of taking these versions of grief and being like ‘oh, I'm grieving, that is what’s happening,’ it’s so cathartic. It is helpful to just let the wave hit and continue through instead of being pressed under the surface of it all the time. In so many ways, the act of writing has been my partner through the lead up to loss and through loss, itself.
In the year following losing someone that I love so much, the only way I know how to talk about the experience I'm having is through the lens of writing. I don't talk that much about what it's like to have lost my mom, but I can talk about what it's like to write about having lost my mom. And that gives me a way to share this with people. I don't talk that much about these waves of emotion that come, but I write about them. The people that read my writing, they make it so that I'm not just in it by myself. There are people that know what's going on and that, in and of itself, feels comforting.
The last thing I'll say on this is that I am teaching, in October, a “Writing Through Loss" workshop that is essentially aimed at this. I want to give people a place where they can have the feeling of grief, but they're still in control. You are the narrator of the experience. You are taking this feeling, putting it through your brain machine, and exiting it from your body. That is so moving to be able to do.
I'm trying to think about the class not only as a place for people to share experiences of grief, but as a place to relate to each other over the writing. Because that's what I've been able to do. It won't be: ‘oh my god, I'm so sorry that your mom died.’ It will be: ‘wow, the way you wrote about this was really affecting for me.’ I just think that can be an easier way to share sometimes, or it has been for me at least. I'm trying to be thoughtful in the way that I structure the class to create an environment where people feel safe to do that.
I want to create writing prompts that elicit this such as thinking about nonlinear narratives because grief is so nonlinear, or writing in the mundane because mundanity and grief go hand in hand. I want to have a prompt that’s really bizarre, something like thinking about nontraditional narrators and asking people to narrate this piece from the perspective of a duvet cover that you lie under when you're sad. Just thinking about different angles into an experience that helps you, that literally moves the experience through you.
Sometimes people talk about how nonfiction writing can be ‘oh, it's like journaling, it's just therapeutic, blah, blah, blah.’ It is, and that's what art is. Art is therapeutic. Art is taking a part of yourself and saying, ‘see me,’ and that is a therapeutic act in whatever form of art you're making. I think I lean into that in my work. I try and be like, ‘yeah, I'm having a fucking feeling, that's the point of this.’ And I think it's really beautiful when you can make something like that lets other people feel their feelings too.
ELIZABETH: I'm so excited about this class. It just seems like it's such a wonderfully thought through passion project, and I'm really looking forward to hearing how it goes. We've talked about this, and I know we both have this experience of having a very stable job in New York. I personally always viewed college as a time when and place where you go to learn how to get a job, and if the job is good enough, you’re set. Life is stable, and you may have some space outside of the job for art and creativity. But that’s not always the reality of life or of corporate America. I have found that sometimes these great jobs become all-consuming, or maybe you lose your job, or maybe you have a great, stable job, and it’s just not fulfilling your life in the way you thought it would.
I know that you have talked about wanting to get an MFA, and it’s another example of how there is no structure in the universe, you can’t control your desires or what might happen in life. How have you been giving yourself permission to pursue writing and leave this stable job at The New York Times to go get an MFA?
JESSIE: I've been thinking a lot about trading discomforts recently, and this idea that no matter what you do, there are going to be things that are uncomfortable. One of the discomforts that I have right now is that I do not have a lot of time. I am squeezing writing into every moment that I can. I'll write from six to eight AM. I am in a class once a week. I am about to teach a class once a week. I try to have one day of the weekend open for full writing time. I can see in my head the calendar of where I am trying to fit writing.
“Writing doesn't just happen on the page. It's being in the shower and your thoughts landing on writing. It's walking through the park and noticing, ‘oh, the leaves,’ and just being able to see a leaf and not be thinking, ‘oh my God, and I have to do these seven things, and I don't have time.’ There's a headspace that is effective for writing, and that headspace is hard to find when you have a million other things being demanded of you.”
I have tried to be really thoughtful about carving out larger chunks of time within this job, because of the fact that I know you need to get into that headspace to write.
Residencies are one of the ways I do that. I went to a residency in Virginia last year. I'm going to one in Vermont for two weeks this year. That means that I don't have vacation days. I use them all on residencies, and my poor boyfriend is just like, ‘can we go somewhere?’ And I'm like, ‘no, sorry, I have to go to a residency.’
Time is the one thing that I am in active discomfort with right now. I'm very aware of the fact that if I take the leap and do the MFA, time is what I'll be given, and I will trade the discomfort of [not enough] time for the discomfort of [not enough] money.
Right now, I work in journalism. I don't get paid some crazy amount of money, but I get paid enough to live comfortably, and I will trade that living comfortably for more time and for being more uncomfortable financially. I think that balance in my head is something that I actually don't have a good answer for what the right thing for me to do is. I think that I want to be someone who says ‘choose time.’
Choosing time will be a little more financially uncomfortable. I think there's an element of the financial pressure that would apply to my writing life if I take this leap and give myself this gift of time, and I’m nervous about that. I'm very hard on myself in general, and I’m nervous about a situation where I gift myself time and invite financial anxiety into my life. I am nervous that some of the joy in the writing will be diminished because of my sense that I need to see a certain amount of progress because I have gifted myself this time. I am worried that by pressuring myself to see a path to financial security with writing it will no longer become a reprieve. I'm nervous about the trade of discomforts. I don't think it feels obvious to me which discomfort is actually going to be more uncomfortable.
I am in this sort of maniacal process right now thinking that I can do both—I can keep this job and, essentially, write full time just by never sleeping. It’s hard to imagine I won’t do an MFA at some point. No matter what I choose, it will probably always be uncomfortable.
The other thing that is very much a part of my decision making right now is that my partner doesn't have a job. He used to run a biotech company. He closed it down about a year ago and has been on a sabbatical figuring out what's next. I think there is a part of me that's more risk-averse right now because I want one of us to have a form of financial stability and right now, I am the partner with the financial stability.
I'm very aware of the fact that just leaping and doing the MFA will not suddenly make my life perfect. It will make other things a lot better and some things worse. Worse isn’t the right word. It will be a different kind of stress. I am in a constant loop in my head trying to figure out which stress to choose. Which brings us back to what my writing teacher always says, ‘life is really good and a little shitty no matter what you do.’
My current thinking is to try to use this year as a trial ground to see what it looks like to do both my full time job and writing in parallel more seriously.
I am doing a year-long essay class incubator that starts in January. I’m really excited about it. I will be workshopping a full manuscript over the course of the year while in my job—a test for what doing both my job and writing more full time will be like. Based on the stress I am experiencing right now trying to do all these things, I foresee being like, ‘I need more time.’ I am so overwhelmed right now. I’m very overwhelmed by the number of things required to keep regular life moving and the life I want moving.
ELIZABETH: I laugh and cry because it makes sense. I am trying to figure out if I can do grad school over the course of two years while I’m working, and then I wonder why am I trying to balance work and do school instead of leaning into the idea of grad school and fully enjoying it, but I live in New York, and I need coverage for my insulin.
JESSIE: That’s why I like this idea you guys have so much. The financial element of it is so real, and I wish that it wasn’t. I think capitalism is so bad for making art. It's so bad in so many different ways. It’s hard for me to not get ahead of myself in my head and get stuck thinking, ‘well, what am I going to not be able to do if I don't do this now?’
Financial anxiety is something I will really really spin around. I feel a lot of pressure to put myself in a position where I am not spinning around financial anxiety if I can. I am feeling a sense of trying to make working full-time and writing work together. There is some voice in my head that is like, ‘if you can do both you should.’ It’s not the kindest voice, and I'm not sure how rational it is, but it’s definitely a voice in my head.
KATE: One thing I am interested in asking you and other people that we interview is what kind of practical advice you would give someone—or perhaps yourself—say three years ago. What have you learned recently? There’s obviously so much left to figure out but, given where you are now, what would you say to yourself three years ago?
JESSIE: The first is to do it a lot. Do it a lot even when you don’t want to. I think that writing consistently genuinely makes you a better writer, and it is probably like everything in life which is if you do it more, you will get better. It feels really good to know that you're getting better, so do it a lot. Ways I have made myself do it a lot more practically are taking classes. Taking classes is so good for structure. Just be in a class all the time, if you can.
Find the teachers you like and take their classes over and over because they will learn your voice, and they're going to start to be able to give you more tangible and practical advice. They will push you. Be in a class as much as possible. The accountability of someone being on the other side who is going to read your writing—especially someone you respect—is huge.
The second thing I would say is find ways to share your work. Substack was really big for me. It was really good for me to put work out there and feel it reverberate off something. I think that was a really powerful part of this idea of permission to write or feeling like a writer. It was this notion of ‘wow this resonated with someone, this did something for someone.’ It doesn’t really matter how many people there are. If it’s just one person who doesn’t know you, something about that is so moving. Write as much as possible, put your work out there, just do it and don’t be a perfectionist about what you put out there. You’re not going to like it in a year, anyways, so just put it out there because there’s diminishing returns—just do it.
Third, find people to talk to about your writing. It is disorienting to feel like writing is becoming an increasingly big thing in your heart and your self, and all the people around you are really good friends with a version of you where that wasn’t true before. They are so excited that you are writing, but they don’t want to talk about the meaning of, say, this word in this sentence or this part of the page for four hours. Finding people that do want to talk to you about writing and who can reinforce the notion of writing as part of the self is so huge.
More than anything, this summer was so big for me. Going to Kenyon and meeting people who would love what I had to say and would love how I said it, and I felt the same way about them, that was huge. We would sit and talk for eight hours. Having yourself reflected back at you is really powerful and validates the identity shift that writing has been for me. There are people who know me and this new writer version of myself, and there are people who are like, ‘oh, this is my friend, Jessie, and I guess she writes on the side.’
I can’t explain to you—my entire life is an equation to write. For me, everything is an equation to find more time. Do it all the time, be in classes, share your work even if it is shitty, and find people to talk to about it.
ELIZABETH: In a time when it’s increasingly difficult to be a writer, how and why do you keep writing?
JESSIE: Because it’s like the only thing that I know how to do to feel like myself.
It’s the only thing where I feel fully inside of myself. Everything else feels like I am operating a little to the left or a little to the right, and the space between my actual self and where I am operating is an energy drain. When I am fully clicked in, and that happens when I am writing, it is so energizing. It feels so embodying, and I feel so me. I think it’s the thing that brings me joy. Reading good writing brings me so much joy. Making writing that other people might get joy from or sense of resonance from brings me joy.
I've never found anything else that feels like it fits better and feels like it fits how I want to engage with and provide for the world than writing. ✱
Jessica Petrow-Cohen is a Brooklyn-based creative nonfiction writer. Her essay “On Molting,” was the winner of the 2024 Kenyon Review’s Short Nonfiction Contest judged by Melissa Febos. Her senate testimony on behalf of same-sex marriage was published in The New York Times and Senator Raymond Lesniak’s book, “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in publications including The Kenyon Review, Brevity, The Washington Post, and her substack, “Claiming Writerhood.” Her work has been supported by The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and The Vermont Studio Center.