Victoria Redel
I'm Made Whole By What's Out There.
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
Victoria Redel was my professor at Columbia University. While I’d been making good friends amongst my fellow students for a while, I hadn’t yet met the teacher who changed everything. Then in my final semester, I landed in Victoria’s workshop and, well, everything changed.
First of all, Victoria is supersonically kind. And patient. And wise. She takes the time to get to know her students as humans, not just writers. She’s also deeply funny. And has a breathtaking love affair with language. While she writes fiction and nonfiction, her first calling is as a poet and she weighs each word with equal measure tenderness and ruthfulness—and she taught us to do the same.
On top of this, Victoria is a ridiculously gifted writer. Often when I’m reading something of hers, I have to put it down for a moment not only to luxuriate in the language but so that I can recover from that depth of beauty. The Psychic and Getting Close are but two examples from her four glorious books of poetry. Her most recent collection Paradise garnered star reviews. She’s also written five books of fiction. Her debut novel, Loverboy about a mother who loved her son a bit too much, was made into a film directed by Kevin Bacon. A daughter of Jewish refuges, The Border of Truth, influenced by her father’s flight from occupied Europe during WWII, tells the story of a seventeen-year-old Holocaust refugee who is trapped on a ship denied entry to America. Her essays have appeared in Modern Love (wonderful story of how she met her husband), Lit Hub and O Magazine, amongst others.
Born in New York City, Victoria grew up in Scarsdale. She earned her BA in visual arts from Dartmouth and her MFA in poetry from Columbia. She’s taught writing at Columbia University, The New School, Vermont College and is currently faculty at Sarah Lawrence. She’s received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in New York City.
We chatted about intergenerational trauma, hiking, and using up the body.
Long before there was a word for it, you were writing about intergenerational trauma. If you feel comfortable, can you share some of the inherited trauma in your family and how it’s personally affected you?
I grew up thinking I was lucky, which isn’t a word typically connected with trauma, but I think it's a word probably connected with children of political refugees. Lucky has always played a big, almost apologetic, role in my relationship to trauma. I grew up on a dead end street in a safe, suburban town so I balk a bit at ever using the word trauma, even inherited. But both my parents were refugees of the Second War and neither of them were born in the countries where their parents were born. In the case of my father, his father left Poland and went to Belgium on route to South America, but then settled in Brussels. On my mom's side, she was born in Romania. And her father was born in Alexandria, Egypt and her mom was born across the river from her in what was then Russia or Bessarabia, what's now the Ukraine. Everybody had to leave a home and country, often multiple times, because of unrest due to war. Not to seek the better life but to seek a life. Both my parents on different paths came here, in complicated ways, during the Second World War. I didn't go through any of the dislocation or loss of family but was raised under the shadow of the challenges they had endured and survived. I never understood until years later that ever lurking presence of their trauma was anything I'd internalized.
I didn't grow up in a family where their experience of war and dislocation were spoken about a lot. In fact, it was almost never spoken about. I've often thought there are kind of two paths of survivors of war: one are the people who speak incessantly about it and the other who will never talk about it.