Professor Soma Mei Sheng Frazier (pronounced mayshung) is the professor I know the least about, and so, I am extra nervous to meet her. When she joins our Zoom call, she has a virtual background of a wintery scene, which is both surprising and delightful, reminding me how the autumn we are currently in will eventually dissolve into the frosty and serene holiday season; upstate can be especially picturesque sometimes. Internally, I note that of course a poet like Professor Frazier would be apt to use Zoom’s technology to set a visual scene, like all writers appreciate. It makes me reflect on my own visualization to her, the two of us meeting, seeing, and hearing each other for the first time, even if virtually. As I come to realize talking more and more with Professor Frazier, the power in these reflections is important to understanding the beautiful depth and knowledge she carries about not only creative writing but being a woman of color, a mother, and a professor.
Professor Frazier is not shy at all during our interview, talking candidly with me about pretty much anything that works into our conversation. Her voice is soothing, like a warm cup of tea on a cold night, yet still decisive in giving me answers. For me, she will be the most uncharted territory of any of my interviews, but she is just as interested in me as I am in her. The ease at which we begin talking, even after five minutes, only makes me more and more eager and enthusiastic. I had heard about her from some of my friends in the Creative Writing program who recommended taking a poetry class with her, though I still have not been able to fit one into my schedule. For this reason, and because she is in her late 40’s, I assumed she had been at Oswego for at least five years. She surprises me by stating that though she has been teaching for 29 years in total, she only started at Oswego at the same time as me, the Fall of 2019, making her the professor I speak with who has been in the department for the shortest amount of time. I feel the connection immediately in our shared newness. Like me, though Professor Frazier has experience in other colleges before Oswego, she can note the specific things that make this university special: “The students are so thoughtful at Oswego; it’s just such a nice community. Not being a student, I don’t know if students feel similarly, but that’s made it really easy ‘cause they are kind to one another. It’s been pretty easy for me compared to a lot of my friends who are educators.” It reminds me of my first days at the school back in 2019, nervous and at times downright petrified that I would be hated, only to find a welcoming and loving community that valued my intelligence and personality.
Professor Frazier even goes further, speaking to the way in which her peers at the university have helped in easing her into life at Oswego: “My colleagues, at least in the Creative Writing program, really respect one another, truly value one another, and we understand that if there’s no work-life balance, our teaching will suffer, so we divvy up things amongst one another. I have friends who are at lovely universities that sort of dump everything on the junior faculty before they’re tenured, so I think it’s both the institution and the people that have made this such a smooth first year.” For a moment, we both gush about the opportunity presented within this interview series, and Professor Frazier notes her own enthusiasm for learning about her colleagues more in-depth. It is an aspect I did not consider until she brings it up, specifically what she is interested in, which is the prospect of understanding more about the Chair, Professor Leigh Wilson. It makes me smile to know the lasting impression Professor Wilson’s touch has had on the department even for new people. Professor Frazier’s excitement, I realize, is important to understanding how we consider the knowledge we give each other and the greater world with even the smallest of gestures.
Previously, Professor Frazier taught at Cogswell College along with Oakland School for the Arts, a charter high school, though she reveals her first teaching job was as an undergraduate freshman teaching illiterate adults in the community, meaning she started teaching the earliest in her college experience from the other professors I spoke with. Similar to Professor Wilson, one thing that Professor Frazier notes about her move from high school to college was the difference in the privilege she was surrounded by: “It was strange. I had come from a rural New Hampshire town, and I only had one working parent the whole time I was growing up, and I got there and it was a very moneyed campus. It was like entering this other realm where they actually had a woman they called the ‘maid’ who was a cleaning professional that would come in and clean our dorm rooms and replace our toilet paper, that sort of thing. In that regard, it was completely different, but the education I got was really strong.”
This privilege is not exclusive to class differences either. When I ask about her racial background, Professor Frazier, candidly and with a small giggle, describes herself as an “oriental cracker mix,” Chinese and Texan mixed, though she has never lived in Texas but the white side of her family is from there. Before this, Professor Frazier lived in the Bay Area of San Francisco, known for its bohemian vibes and firmness on inclusivity of all races, ethnicities, and Othered identities. Professor Frazier relays to me her experiences and perspective as a mixed-race woman in an academic environment: “I came and was put into a prodigy cohort at Oswego, which is for women and people in STEM, particularly underrepresented people in STEM, people of color, and queer folks, and I was thinking ‘Wow, I check a lot of those boxes.’ So I do feel like, for me, there is a responsibility to help make this a more welcoming, diverse, and inclusive space, and make sure that diversity is reflected in the types of authors we read. I want to bring trans authors in, people of different income classes, and the like.”
This context has played an important role for Professor Frazier in managing the types of conversations bound to happen in any literature and writing based course. Professor Frazier emphasizes the value of the student’s voice in the discussion while simultaneously noting that it is not the responsibility of students of color or in other minority groups to give their wisdom on the subject, “I don’t think that should be placed on students, and it often is, and I feel like sometimes, the whole class will not physically look, but sort of ‘lean in’ towards people who are representing the groups that are being discussed and that’s a heavy burden to bear.” Professor Frazier’s ability to engage and reflect on her experience shows the value of having a diverse staff, both visually and non-visually (as Professor Frazier also notes to me she is queer, like myself) in a university. Her perspective also brings in a number of different dimensions in understanding the types of classroom dynamics happening across the country, especially in the current landscape we are in. The importance in understanding each other physically, especially our voices, is something that Professor Frazier hones in on within the new online world and the world of poetry. However, this is not her first rodeo in an unconventional or diverse teaching environment.
The most moving thing that Professor Frazier shares with me is her time teaching in a women’s prison. The first time she mentions it, she glosses over it, as if this is a job everyone takes at some point. I have to ask her to stop and backtrack, because it is such an unexpected detail and one I am fully interested in. She tells me that this is where she fell in love with teaching, teaching a course called “Women’s Right to Write,” a bookmaking course: “They wrote children’s stories for their kids on the outside, they illustrated them, and then they read them and we recorded them, and we sent the kids the tapes so they could play them before bed so it would be kinda like their moms were reading to them. If you read about incarceration and understand a lot about why people are there, you feel like you’re mentally prepared, and I thought I was. But to go in and just to see, oh, these are people without resources who have addictions or untreated mental illnesses, basically is the population. I hadn’t thought I’d have kids, but to see these women who, by and large, had not had the easiest lives caring so much for their kids on the outside…I was like, this motherhood thing, maybe I’ll consider it someday.”
Professor Frazier is the only one who I talk to extensively about her home life. She is married to a man and has a 10-year-old daughter. Professor Frazier describes motherhood to me as the movie Clockwork Orange: “milk bar, mind-control, and violence to your body, that is how motherhood starts off. But it is actually the most enjoyable thing I’ve ever encountered. I get the most pleasure from being a mom.” Though motherhood is certainly not for everyone, Professor Frazier’s experience with it, and the love, joy, laughter, pain, confusion, anger, and sadness that encapsulate so much of our human experience is something that is also encapsulated in the poetry that she writes.
Like being new to the university, Professor Frazier and I also share in being poets. As she states (with love), “poets are weird,” and I have to laugh in agreement. One of her poems, “No Results for That Place,” formats each stanza on the opposite side of the page. I tell her I’ve done this before with my own poetry and have my own reasons for it but I’m interested in hers, though instead she wants to know mine first. When I explain that I usually do it because I like to give a double meaning to a poem, one where the reader can put different pieces of the literary landscape I have carved out for them together in different ways, Professor Frazier excitedly agrees, describing it as “Tetris poetry.” Though certainly the subject matter of our poetry is similar, in that it touches on darker themes about trauma, loss, and heartache, and that is a bond within itself, seeing the glee that comes onto Professor Frazier’s face as I explain my reasoning and in turn her seeing mine, is an experience in and of itself.
Currently, Professor Frazier teaches two classes, Creative Writing 205 – Introductory Poetry Writing (with two sections), and Creative Writing 313 – Digital Storytelling. As every professor has their own spin on what is done in a workshop focused class like Intro. Poetry Writing, I ask what her specific one is. She explains her own philosophy towards poetry: “I think poets are drawn to writing poetry because they love that distilled form of language where every word counts. In a novel you can mess things up royally and clean it up, but in poetry, you can’t mess up or the poem is shot. So many poets live with the language that they tend to do more experimental things.” As she recognizes some of the stigma towards poetry is within how dark some poetry can be, she tells me she also focuses on the power of spoken word poetry in introducing different concepts of hope and inspiration within poetry, “Because you have to catch it all in real time, it tends to be much more linear, and can be more inspirational.”
Prior to all of my interviews, I thoroughly researched the professors I asked to include in this series in order to better understand what topics to discuss. A part of the research I did on Professor Frazier included a spoken word poem I watched, which was included in SF Weekly’s “Exhibitionist” series. Though even the written form of this poem would have been sensational to read, the chilling rollercoaster ride that the video form of Professor Frazier looking directly into the camera and reading it gives me is something otherworldly. I have to ask her about it, and she responds, “They’re two almost separate arts. Spoken word and written word tap into different tool kits to do them well. When you’re reading a poem on the page, it’s a very interior way to have a conversation and you don’t feel someone’s eyes on you. Reading in your own private space is a completely different experience, but when you’re writing for someone to read that way, you don’t know what kind of experience they’re having, whereas when you’re reading to them in a room, you can vary your pitch, your inflection, lean toward them, lean away, and gauage from their reactions what they’re feeling/thinking, and you can amp it up or take it down a notch.” Professor Frazier’s thoughts tap into something every other professor I have spoken with has talked to me about, and it is the magic of communication inherent in the way literature works.
Professor Frazier also notes the way in which this plays out in classrooms, particularly workshops that thrive off the type of critique given, “Because our discussions are online it’s a little weird because in the classroom, students get to see one another’s facial expressions, but for the asynchronous parts of the class, they’re just reading these words.” While Professor Frazier is expressing the difficulties inherent now in every course that has had to make the switch to completely online, she is also expressing the power that communication through literature gives us. Her other course in Digital Storytelling, which is creating an online multimedia publication for the college, shows the importance in the levels of connection that are available within literature, both spoken and not. The name of this publication, as she tells me, will be “Subnivean,” a word that refers to the area between the surface of the ground and the bottom of the snowpack. I am reminded once again of Professor Frazier’s Zoom background, the unspoken yet also spoken communication it gave us, and the ways in which we distill the everyday language we pass between one another. Our lives are collections of multimedia experiences, particularly in a pandemic, that are constantly communicating those distillations inherent in poetry, both written and spoken uniquely.
As Professor Frazier tells me, poetry, both reading and writing it, is a “cathartic” activity. Reflecting back on the conversations I had with these women while trying to write their articles, I am forced to listen to the audio recordings I took of our interviews to quote them directly. This is the activity I have dreaded most during the process, having to move the timestamp back and forth to find quotes, listening to the small and sometimes awkward pauses in conversation, dips in my voice, background noise, and otherwise overthinking the flow of the conversation. Yet as I come to the end of this series, I realize the poetry in the recordings I have, and the cathartic activity it has been to listen back and then write down that poetry here for others to feel. While I can’t replicate that experience for others, I certainly can help with it, and that is by recommending that if you ever reread this article, to listen to this in the background with it. In that way, you can feel as though you are in the subnivean of communication with us too.
Professor Frazier recommends reading Florida by Lauren Groff, which she describes as prose packed with powerful emotion and thought. Thank you to Professor Frazier for letting me interview her.