Alumni author Carlene Bauer ‘95 returned to the Evergreen Campus for the final installment of the Modern Masters Reading Series. She read to students and some of her former professors selections of her latest novel, “Girls They Write Songs About,” and shared her experiences in her career after attending Loyola.
“Girls They Write Songs About” is Bauer’s third full-length published work, following her memoir “Not That Kind of Girl” and her first novel, “Frances and Bernard.” The story follows the decades long friendship between two women, Charlotte and Rose, who meet in New York in 1997 while working for a music magazine.
“It’s a novel about the friendship between two women. That’s it. It is not ‘1984’ or ‘The Fire This Time,’ ‘Parable of the Sower,’ or ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ It cannot tell you what to do in case you wake up one day to find that the people in charge of your country went to set all of its freedoms on fire,” Bauer said.
In the excerpt of “Girls They Write Songs About,” the main character Charlotte described her bold uprooting of her childhood life to move to New York, where she meets her longtime friend Rose.
Charlotte narrated in detail about her confusing relationship with feminism. She said that while strives to look out for other women in her life, she is weighed down by a guilt that she may only believe in feminist ideologies to serve her own self-image. Bauer addressed this character’s complicated relationship with her own beliefs, revealing that this nuance is a constant pursuit for Bauer in all her work.
“I think that it’s always more fun and more pleasurable to read somebody who has made up their mind but not in such a way that they shut the door and leave you out of their conversation,” Bauer said.
Like Charlotte, Bauer spends much of her time contemplating her own experiences and how they have built and changed her. At the beginning of the event, Bauer read what she had called a “love letter” to her college experience. She described her hours of fervent notetaking and intensity for writing good work. She touched on the urge for perfectionism that felt all too familiar to the writing students present.
“Before graduating, there were so many hours spent reading and reading and writing and writing. Sketching it all up first in a spiral bound notebook and then hoping that the act of typing it up and feeding it into the computer, or word processor… did I mention I am old? But anyway, typing and hoping that somehow the act of feeding those sentences into a machine would launder them of all their flaws and set them free from all their knots,” Bauer said.
Bauer made it a point to thank her former professors present in the audience, acknowledging how they contributed growth as a writer.
“One of the things that I really loved about the professors that I had here was that they stood back, and they never told us what to think… I think we were collaborated with and encouraged,” Bauer said.
Bauer also recounted a particular conversation with a professor during her first year at Loyola, when a professor humorously told her that nobody makes money as a writer. She had happily agreed, assuring her professor that she did not need the money to get by. Now, Bauer wakes up early each morning to write and pursue her passions, balancing her writing with her day job as a copy editor for a pharmaceutical advertising agency.
Bauer shared how she got into her current career of editing, and gave her advice on how students can pursue career avenues within writing. During her writing master’s program at Johns Hopkins, she met a classmate of hers in a non-fiction writing seminar who worked as a literary scout in New York. After connecting her to others in the publishing industry through many informational interviews, Simon and Schuster hired Bauer as an editor.
“I feel like if you have a genuine desire to work in an industry, if you are a hard worker and a sincere person, that will show in your networking,” Bauer said.
Bauer’s talk concluded the Modern Master Reading Series on a note that exemplified how a writing major can make their way into the working world post-college. Bauer’s former writing professor Jane Satterfield commented on the experience of watching her former students move on to such success.
“It’s rewarding to see how someone has processed their Loyola experience… I think Carlene’s work is incredibly accessible and deeply connected to history and contemporary culture and asking all sorts of questions of how we find our place in the world,” Satterfield said.
