MFA for Mihalek is Perfect Pivot from Science to Poetry

Katie Mihalek, MFA ’24 came very close to being a physician who would write creatively on the side. Instead, she’s a poet mixing science into her writing.

Mihalek was the editor-in-chief of Emerson’s graduate program literary magazine, Redivider, and her first chapbook of poetry, Aurora Uteralis, is scheduled for a November 2024 release with Finishing Line Press.

Mihalek discussed dovetailing poetry and science, using a 3D scanner for her thesis, and more with Emerson Today earlier this year.

This is a condensed version of the conversation.

Please talk about your thesis.

[Writing, Literature & Publishing Professor] Dan Tobin [was] my thesis chair, and I’m working with [Writing, Literature & Publishing Sr Lecturer II] Mary Kovalski.

I came from a science background. During the pandemic, I had a reckoning moment about what really makes me happy. Writing is the thing. I find that science filters into my writing, I like writing about science [through] a different perspective.

For the thesis, I [wrote] a series of poems about body organ systems. The working title is Finger Print.

The poems are all about hands. It’s looking at the body part of the hand. What do we reach towards? What do we hold close to us? The sensations of touch, our blood vessels system. The poems are a 3D matrix that are cross-sectional slices of my hands. If you stack them all together, they physically make the shape of a 3D model of my hand. How do we envision poetry through the page?

And all of the poems reckon with these questions. It’s about hands figuratively, and literally, like what we hold, what we think is important, how hands play out in society, and are human nature barriers. If I’m writing poems in the shape of a hand, what does that mean?

The inspiration for it was from when I was a kid. My mother took me to an exhibit that had cadavers. They sliced the cadaver into plastinations, which are about 5 millimeters typically. They pulled it out so you could look at each small section and move through the body and understand the body. You see all the cross-sections for the organs. I thought about writing my poems as slices of my hands. I’m not slicing my hands, I …did a 3D scan of my hand.

If you took the slice of the four fingers and measured each finger, one millimeter is two lines of a poem. I don’t want to just see this is a fun little thing, I want it to read like a collection, and play with how we read things, and break out from a linear narrative.

Part of the MFA programming is teaching at Emerson. How has teaching at Emerson help you become a better writer?

It really helped me in my writing. [WLP Sr Lecturer II and First Year Writing Program Director] Steve Himmer’s WR600 — that class and teaching thereafter really changed my perspective… It’s paradigm shifting. What details will have effects in a poem or essay? ‘What are the tools in your tool kits?’ is something I stressed to students. Then we evaluate that effect — did it match what the author was trying to do? What was the author’s intent?

You also received a Master of Science from Boston University in 2021. Why did you switch from a career in science?

I’ve always been a writer. It’s at the core of who I am. I was writing poems at age 5. I really want to distill things on the page. Writing is how I process my thoughts the most deeply.

I’ve always loved science. I’ve always loved the human body. I’m from a family of health care professionals. I’m a very ambitious person, for better or worse. It was always pushed for women to be in STEM when I was growing up. I was going to be a doctor, because that’s what I was supposed to do, it was not what people were telling me to do, I had internalized it. I thought I could do it all.

As you get older you need to prioritize things that make you happy and accept that you can’t do everything you want to do.

Please tell us about your forthcoming chapbook, Aurora Uteralis, with Finishing Line Press.

The chapbook deals a lot with incorporating medical or science language. The poem [titled “Aurora Uteralis”] is about … a histology class. The whole class was looking at tissue slideshows of cells and that fun stuff. Then you go into learning about different tissues, organs, and all that. We were looking at uterine tissues, and a professor asked, ‘Do you know what vaginal plasma is?’ We were like, ‘No.’ She said, ‘It’s blood plasma.’ We were like, ‘Stop it.’

The plasma in your blood gets filtered through endometrial tissues and filtered out of the uterus and becomes vaginal fluid. That’s so weird and interesting. And I just thinking of the idea of plasma, blood plasma, and anatomical plasma. I was thinking about that and the poem starts with the scene of being in the lab class. Thinking about what we are in our bodies and what things filter out of our bodies and we become.

Aurora Uteralis

Peering down at slides of cells
packed in close, nuclei stained
purple and blood leeched pink,

my teacher told us that
vaginal fluid is plasma.

We all laughed, but she said
No, it’s true, and vaginal fluid
was plasma. In the lining of

the uterus, blood filters past
its layers, cells stay back, solution
squeezes through, clear substance

emerges condensed and stripped,
filled.

See, we are our blood.

Little curved pockets of red
floating along, oxygen carried from
vein to canal, from blush to bruise

from lung to air, plasma to planet.
Because see, when I first heard her
say our vaginas cradle that plasma,

I thought of stars. I thought
of gaseous galaxies
and burning serenity held

within my pelvis. 

How would you describe your writing in the book?

I think the writing combines scientific language with heavy nonscience imagery, and tries to balance that line between those two things of how we understand our bodies and coming to terms with our body and sexuality. 

Who or what influences you as a writer?

M

[Former WLP Assistant Professor] Rajiv Mohabir. He does a lot with his writing. He took whale songs in his book, Whale Area, and translated them into lyrics and different forms.

Ocean Vuong does a great job with blending metaphors into the idea of how we make and shift core understandings.

I’ve been reading Ada Limón. She’s the 24^th Poet Laureate of the United States. When I first started reading her book, The Carrying, I didn’t know where it was going. I can really go into the world of each of her poems, and at the end of book they connect and come together.

The cover art is a photo of yours, as you’re also a photographer. How often is there a cross section of your photos and writing?

I love to do photography as art. It’s more of a hobby for me. I would say the hand poems really pushed me into thinking visually about my poetry. I think about what we can understand in a visual versus narrative story. I love playing with photos and digitally manipulating them. I took three photos of the same sunset, flipped the photos and inverted them. It’s about thinking about perspective and horizon and how something can look different over a period of time.

You were also the editor-in-chief of Redivider.

I started with Redivider in September 2021, worked up from reader, and became editor-in-chief in May 2023. It’s been fun, Redivider has grown a lot from a staff of 10 to 75 people.

We want it to be a development opportunity for grad students at Emerson. Working on it is open to all Emerson grad students. …We want people to come in a grow with us. It’s all volunteer. It’s very much a passion project for us. We only publish work that’s outside of the Emerson community. (If you’re alumni you can publish with [them].)

How has your Emerson experience helped you personally and/or professionally?

Professionally, it feeds into my personal. I’ve been lucky to take advantage of all the opportunities, teachers, got to see what teaching looks like and pedagogy, and then jumped into Redivider and really grew from it.

I was the editor of Emerson Writes’ Spine anthology, which is an annual collection of student work from Boston Public Schools and the surrounding area.

Emerson gives grant money, and I went to a Kenyon Review Workshop last summer. That was great. There’s a whole myriad of things. Even demystifying writing and particularly the poetry world has been huge. I couldn’t do that without this MFA.

What are your professional goals for the future?

I would love ultimately to be a poet. I would like to publish a collection of poetry. I’m thinking about applying to PhD programs to teach in an academic capacity. I really want to stay involved in editing and be involved in literary journals, and maybe opening my own small press.