If millennials have an intelligentsia, Brooklyn-based writer Durga Chew-Bose is a member of it. Her essays, appearing in everywhere from This Recording to Buzzfeed, are not churned-out “hot takes”, but thoughtful long reads on identity and culture that command readers’ attention. We talked about how she finds her voice and creates community with other women writers, and why she resists emulating Joan Didion.

How did you start writing online?



When I graduated from college, I decided to start a Tumblr, reposting blurbs from other people’s work. The culture of screengrabbing quotes has gained a lot of momentum in the last couple of years, and I feel it’s something women do to share writing with each other. I then started writing at This Recording, which was an outlier in thinking critically about pop culture while maintaining one’s own voice. Then I began working on interviews with directors and actors for Interview magazine online, and from there, for other blogs and sites. I’ve gone through lulls or waves of deciding if I want to continue doing this.

That’s actually encouraging to hear that ebbs and flows are normal.

The ebb and flow process is especially true for women. Once you write something that picks up steam, there’s this fear you’re going to become a beat writer for some specific topic or that you need to keep producing really strong stuff. I really do believe that the process of writing, whether online or off, isn’t just the writing. There are moments in between our work, especially for longer projects, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of them.



Let’s talk about your approach to pop culture in your essays like In Hollywood, your essay on John Dunne’s Monster.

I tend to zero in on a single moment or a single turn of phrase. And I really can’t explain why it strikes me or encourages something to shoot up inside of me, but it does, and from that moment on, I kind of expand from there.

I think this comparison comes to mind partially because of who is invoked in that essay, but your writing reminds me of Joan Didion’s.

Oh God. I have a bit of resistance to that. I feel like she represents a time in my life where I assumed the only route to success was to emulate. I’ve come around to the idea that emerging as a voice, or a writer, is understanding that who I am has been a form of resistance. As women, we aren’t exposed to a lot of women writers at a young age. Largely, we’re taught that our voices don’t come from within, and that we need to find examples. It’s a revelation to realise that writers you once admired a lot don’t represent you at all.

As women, how do we find our voices?

There’s this book Woman to Woman, a series of interviews between Marguerite Duras and this French journalist Xaviere Gauthier, which was a jumping off point for me. When I first graduated from college, and I was doing interviews for Interview magazine online, I had this shame because I thought the interview process wasn’t the writing process. I thought all of my friends were writing “real’”essays and reporting things, and I was just transcribing. I do believe there is a power in conversation and dialogue. I think the transcribed voice for women is really important to women because the essay voice is edited and we’re self-editing from the day we’re little girls. Dayna Tortorici, an editor at N+1, published a book a couple of years ago called No Regrets, where she transcribed conversations between women. I think that’s a lot more empowering, and it captures the resistance that is in women’s voices by nature.

A lot of women writers are also starting TinyLetters, which is going back to a culture of correspondence. It’s not about the public’s apprasial because that is what is going to exhaust us, writing for anonymous audiences. You write for the people you know and that’s how you’re going to grow.

In your recent essay in Buzzfeed, you wrote, “There’s a type of inborn initiative that comes from never being obligated to answer questions about your name.” Could you expand on that a little?

There’s a lot of presumption that goes into writing. There’s a lot of internal questioning: Am I an expert? Can I speak on this topic? What makes me valid enough to have a voice? I’ve had to work towards the idea that I couldn’t just arrive in a room and be a person with ideas; and that I needed to respond to other people’s curiosity about who I was before I could really enter a room.

It sounds dramatic, it makes me hesitant to pitch pieces or it makes me feel like the connections I’m making between people in pop culture are not valid. I still have to explain how I came about them, because from a young age I had to explain where I was from. It makes you feel like you have to pick a side. You either have to write as the person everyone expects you to be or you have to be this kind of novel person who is going to come out of left field and talk about something no one would expect because you don’t have a name they can pronounce.

Finding an in-between with that has been tricky, but also really motivating. It’s required me to be critical of not just what I’m reading, but what I’m interacting with.

What has your experience been writing online?



I think I’m lucky that I’ve had a really positive experience because I hear the threats a lot of my friends get. But I am a little hesitant to put my entire self out there. And while my experience online is public because my writing is out there, the most positive part of it has been the private on the internet. All the women I know who write online do so much more that they’re not paid for. Sarah Nicole Prickett answers questions on her tumblr almost everyday for people she doesn’t know. Ashley Ford does her Five Things every Sunday. Jia Tolentino at Jezebel is probably one of the smartest, most brilliant writers on the internet and she shares these fun mixtapes. We are tired, we don’t always want to do it and we’re scared of burning out, but I think it’s a form of solidarity to add levity.

Which women writers would you recommend others read?

All the women I just mentioned. Ayesha Siddiqi and Doreen St. Felix are two of my favorite writers online. They’re just so smart and so outspoken. If you were to just storify those two women’s tweets, you would have some of the most brilliant thinkers of today. Katie J.M. Baker is incredible and her skill at giving voices to teenagers has been really impressive to me. Other writers I love to read are Collier Meyerson, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, and Arabelle Sicardi, whose writing on beauty has revolutionised the way I view it. I love following the work of Hayley Mlotek and Jazmine Hughes, who have both fostered such a positive presence at the Hairpin.

I also love Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton at Buzzfeed, who I recently recorded a podcast with. There’s nothing better than being in a room with two women who have incredible chemistry. It’s cheesy, but you feel invincible when you’re around women who can just jam with each other.



What is some advice you would offer to women who want to write online?



I really do think it’s important to find your women: your women editors, your women readers, your women texters. Whatever that means for you, find them and keep sharing and working with them because it’s invaluable. Also trust the connections that you’re making. I do believe our instincts are invaluable, and it doesn’t matter if your connections are being made between a trend on television shows or a trend you’re noticing in athletes or racism in sports. When I wrote that Buzzfeed piece, these were things I’ve been thinking about my whole life. After that, I received emails from young brown women, who wrote, “I didn’t realize this was a problem or this was something that I was struggling with, but I know everything you’re talking about.”

What’s one fun fact about yourself?

Every once in awhile I’ll be sitting at my desk, and I’ll really wonder what happened to the 1996 Olympics Magnificent Seven from the US gymnastics team. They were iconic and I think about them a lot. There needs to be a documentary about them.

