Helen Phillips, CA ’00, Upper School visiting writer and fiction author, discussed the writing process this week with Colorado Academy students. She joins other authors who have been invited to campus to read from their work, including Ibtisam Barakat and Kyle Boelte, CA ‘00.

 

Phillips, who has written fiction novels And Yet They Were Happy, The Beautiful Bureaucrat and Some Possible Solutions, describes the writing process to students as more of “an editing process.”

 

“I’ve been talking to them a lot about writing rough drafts and letting them sit and then really revising them and whittling them down,” says Phillips. “That process gave me a new way to work as a writer.”

 

It’s how she wrote her first book, And Yet They Were Happy, heralded by Publishers Weekly as a “cunning work that winks at reality as it carves out its niche deep in fable territory.” And Yet They Were Happy is a collection of 340-word short stories.

 

An assistant professor at Brooklyn College, Phillips has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts and appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, BOMB and PEN America. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, The Iowa Review Nonfiction Award, the DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Award, and the Meridian Editors’ Prize.

 

With all of her accolades, Phillips credits her teachers at Colorado Academy for being some of “the most influential" in her career.

 

“The things I learned here stick we me,” she says. “Things like (Upper School English teacher) Chip Lee saying, ‘Get to the point in an essay. Only use the words that are necessary.”

 

Brevity is one takeaway she hopes students will digest during her time at CA. Another is perseverance.

 

At age 11, the Yale graduate lost all of her hair due to Alopecia, an autoimmune disease. “I hope the students will take from my lectures an example of someone who has gone through something that at first seemed like a real negative and then turned into a real positive.”

 

Phillips, who has also written a Middle Grade novel (for students ages 10-12), Here Where the Sunbeams are Green, is expecting her next novel, The Beautiful Beaurocrat, about the “unfeeling machinations of the universe,” to be published later this year. She will give a book talk on The Beautiful Bureaucrat at the Tattered Cover on Saturday, August 8 at 2 p.m.