Leigh Stein, author of The Fallback Plan (Melville, 2012), will unashamedly tell you that she’s lived with her parents four times. Her newly-released novel, a coming-of-age about post-college angst, is spliced with details from her own experience and speaks volumes to the plight of so many twenty-something’s undergoing a quarter-life crisis. Stein’s protagonist, Esther, is a recent Northwestern graduate suffering from the post-grad blues. While Esther’s narrative is bestowed with details from the author’s life, Stein’s story has a few twists and turns uniquely her own. I recently sat down with this up-and coming writer to talk about her writing process, moving in with the rents, and her obsession with Pandas. When did you start writing? Have you always known you wanted to be a writer?:  I started writing when I was in acting school because I was so exhausted; I was in all these emotional scenes and I was crying all the time… So, then I would go back to my dorm room and write short stories. That year it dawned on me that writing was a job.  So then I was like “I’m going to be a writer.” And that was eight years ago! So, you went to Northwestern? No, no. I didn’t go to college. That’s a long story, too: I moved to NY when I was 19 to go to acting school. I had one year of acting school and since then I’ve been to the New School for a year and now I’m at Brooklyn…

“Have you ever been in love? Have you ever dreamed of revenge? Have you ever felt like no one knows who or where you are, and so your body may never be discovered? Have you ever wanted for a night to never end? Have you ever wanted to run away? Have you ever gone outside and seen the sky?” In an interview with girlslikegiants.wordpress.com, Leigh Stein lists the questions above as scenarios in which she hopes her readers might recognize themselves in her poems. While universal, these questions might seem strangely adolescent, and easy, for a writer whose star continues to rise in the contemporary poetry scene. The thing is, Leigh Stein’s poetry wants you to believe in its accessibility. With its references to Lindsey Lohan and Facebook and “The Notebook,” Stein’s debut collection, Dispatch from the Future, is very “present.” Everyone may know what she’s talking about (for example, she has compiled poems only using dialogue from “The Bachelorette”), but that has little to do with accessibility. In the poem “If You See Them Tell Them I’m Stranded,” Stein writes: “All I’ve ever wanted is to ask the same question./To answer he sends me sealed, empty envelopes.” Stein could well be speaking of her own poems; hard, shiny surfaces, which gleefully, slyly repel any attempt to go inwards. It is patently obvious that Stein is as intelligent as she is glib. She writes poems about Latvian pageant queens, sure, but just to remind you that we are still serious…

Amidst the nervous titter of soon-to-be graduates, I could feel the excitement boiling under the clean, black robes at Lawrence University’s graduation ceremony. This year’s commencement speaker was Lan Samantha Chang. An Appleton WI native, Chang is the author of Hunger, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, and Inheritance. Hunger is a novella and collection of short stories, published in 1988. Chang’s prose follows the intertwined loves and lives of immigrant families, influenced by her own experience as the daughter of two Chinese immigrants. Hunger was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and PEN Center USA-West’s annual literary award and has been praised as “a work of gorgeous, enduring prose” by the Washington Post. Currently, she is the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop Program Director and the May Brodbeck Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Chang used her experience of choosing a career path as the basis of her commencement address, leveling herself to the recent graduates by counterbalancing the fear of the future with calm support. Lan Samantha Chang recalled her own experience, sitting at graduation, wondering how to answer the dreaded question: what are you doing next? “I have no idea.” Her father pressured her to become a doctor, a path she pursued instead of fulfilling her “impractical” dream of being a writer. At 25 years old, with $35,000 in student loans, Chang finally decided to follow her own path, not what her parents thought best for her. “What I truly wanted to do was impractical,…