Courtney Sender

“I believe I’m still a little beautiful, if only I would notice. I believe you’ll find that old poem and wake up and want to find me. I believe you’ll meet your angel. I believe that I’ve seen Mars.”

At the conclusion of these words uttered by Bennett Fellow Courtney Sender, the audience in the Assembly Hall erupted in applause. They were the last lines of her story “An Angel on Stilts,” initially published by the literary magazine AGNI. Sender’s reading introduced her to the Exeter community, and students and faculty alike embraced her with open arms. While she will live in Exeter for only one year, Sender will contribute her signature blend of mysticism and realism to the Academy’s long history of writers.

The George Bennett Fellowship allows a writer in the formative stage of their career to live for a year on campus with no other responsibilities, save that of writing and making themselves available to students on campus interested in a career in the literary world.

Sender noted her joy at receiving such a prestigious award. “The Bennett Fellowship is one of several writing fellowships for people in my stage of a writing career—which is after getting a Master’s in Fine Arts ... and before having a novel,” she said. “There are just a few fellowships that support people at this stage, where they’re in the writing world and have been professionals but do not yet have a book... I was very lucky to have gotten this one.”

Sender’s writing distinguished itself from other works throughout a rigorous selection process. “The Selection Committee was impressed with her work, its magical and realistic, combined, properties, and the control of her style in mixing the two, while at the same time building compelling and believable characters,” Instructor in English and Chair of the Bennett Fellow Selection Committee Todd Hearon said. “Ms. Sender’s impact on campus will probably be the time she spends with the students who choose to meet with her. The other ‘impact’ will be the good work she gets done on her novel, and all the creative energy she will be sending out into the [Academy] cosmos along the way.”

Though she now has years of writing under her belt, Sender discovered an affinity for writing early on. “My whole life I’ve been telling stories and trying to experiment with different kinds of storytelling,” she said in an interview with The Exonian. “In college, I wasn’t very good, especially at poetry, but fiction and storytelling has always been my greatest interest. After college was when I committed to that by going directly to a [Master of Fine Arts] program at Johns Hopkins.”

Nowadays, Sender attempts to blend the surreal and the tangible. “My work is pretty associative in terms of allowing itself to have sort of free floating, philosophical movement that often does take off from the real into the spiritual or the mystical … I don’t think that we actually understand our lived experience in a way that is strictly real,” she said. “There’s this sense of connection to something larger than the self. My ability to understand reality frequently requires the realm of the spiritual, so including that element of mysticism in fiction is the most accurate way to represent real life.”

To that end, Sender describes herself as a contrarian. “The role of the artist or the writer in society is to take a position or to view the status quo in a way that is different,” she said. “I mean that’s the entire point, to apply some kind of lens to the banal to make it interesting or new or seen in a different light … [I] question everything.”

Sender’s writing was also influenced by her time at Harvard Divinity School. “I think that … an environment where it was normal and accepted to take recourse to the spiritual opened me up to writing that is I think a little bit more floating, a little bit more free,” she said. While at Harvard Divinity School, Sender, who is Jewish, studied the Hebrew Bible and Holocaust study.

This year, Sender will be completing her manuscript, tentatively titled I Am Going to Lose Everything I Have Ever Loved. For the first chapter of this work, Sender received the Graywolf First Chapter Prize, an honor bestowed by Graywolf Press. “The manuscript is about the grandchildren of a Holocaust survivor, who have inherited these powerful longings, desires and hauntings from her,” she said. “[These things] affect their attempts to find love and relationships over their lives.” The manuscript explores themes Sender is familiar with, including loneliness and Holocaust trauma.

The shadow of the Holocaust looms large in Sender’s own familial history. “I was very close with my grandmother, Nana … She died in her nineties and always cried no matter what when she talked about her siblings who’d been killed, many decades before,” Sender said. “Evoking her story felt very important... It’s the lens through which I’ve always viewed everything—the onus to create some kind of safety, nest or home.”

In her career, Sender has faced both the “beauties and realities of writing,” as she describes them. “Writing as an art and writing as a career are two very different things,” she said. “There’s financial reality, there’s professional reality, there’s the reality of rejection. Gatekeepers at a lot of different levels are the ones who determine whether you have work in the world or whether it sits on your hard drive.” Sender notes that she has seen her fair share of rejections.

Although rejection sometimes hinders the creative process, isolation from others makes writing even more difficult. “Writing is, by its nature, a profoundly solitary enterprise … It is a long time before anyone can actually see the vision of what you’ve been doing all this time,” she said. “And it’s just worlds that exist entirely in your head, which can drive you insane, as you might imagine. It’s really, really necessary to have anchor points in the world of people.”

Sender has tried to combat loneliness by joining artistic communities and residencies. “There are things called writer’s residencies—I have been to ones in MacDowell, Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for Creative Arts that bring writers and artists together to work during the day and have communal meals together and talk about their art,” she said. “I’ve met some of my best friends and most important people that I know that way.”

Sender notes that she has found a similar community of intellectuals and creatives at the Academy. “I have enjoyed interacting with the students, who have been uniformly, incredibly astute and adroit and interesting to talk to about their own projects, with interesting questions for me,” she said. “I’m also going to shout out my downstairs neighbors—[Eva Gruesser and Rohan Smith], who have been so warm and welcoming … Meeting them has shown me people who are really passionate about another art form.” Gruesser and Smith, Instructors in Music, played for Sender’s Yom Kippur Meditation yesterday.

Ultimately, writing has brought beauty to Sender’s life. “You have the chance to truly illuminate a particular perspective in prose that is new and alarming and captivating and presents a world that is not the world we know,” she said. “Sometimes, [this happens] in a structure that can be honed like a multifaceted diamond. It’s really beautiful when it soars.”

In her year at the Academy, Sender hopes to convey her passion for the written word to students. “I am, and we are all, very narrative creatures,” she said. “I think art comes from a place of profound particularity—it’s a lens on the world, the truths of life, the absurdities of life, whatever it may be that is only specific to you. It’s about finding your individual voice, honing it, allowing it to grow and standing firm behind it.”

NOTE: Sender will conference with students who reach out to her, and she will be available on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Elm Street Dining Hall.