Elisa Gabbert on writing through disaster

By Chi Pham     3/25/25 10:06pm

Memory deceives. Perception distorts. For Elisa Gabbert ’02, the ubiquitous condition of our times is ‘unreality’ — modern society’s tendency to process catastrophe as media spectacle and bury anxieties beneath routine. In her 2020 essay collection “The Unreality of Memory,” she dissects why tragedy leaves us scrolling, watching and forgetting.

In her opening essay, Gabbert remembers the Houston sky was “bright blue” on the day of the Sept. 11 attacks. When she arrived at the student center, she noticed a crowd gathered around a television, watching the coverage as if it was just “something on TV,” Gabbert said.

“It was just super surreal and eerie,” Gabbert said in an interview with the Thresher. “People were kind of wandering around, basically doing their typical routines, wherever they would normally go … There was sort of no right way to react or act, so we were all just kind of going through our typical motions.

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“I remember … not really knowing if we were supposed to go to class or not because they didn’t actually automatically cancel all classes or anything like that. And I had a yoga class that I was supposed to go to, of all things, and I remember going … and I remember some people getting up and leaving, crying. 

“But there was a real sense of just unreality, and nobody knowing how we were supposed to act. It was just so out of anyone’s experience at that point.”

The collection emerged from Gabbert’s preoccupation with the relationship between disaster and psychological processes — how tragedy, though endlessly documented, remains difficult to fully grasp or make real, she said.

“Around that time when Trump was elected for the first time, I just had this real urgent sense that I needed to take on more difficult and serious subjects,” Gabbert said. “And that was one of the first essays I wrote when my mind was there, when I was thinking more about climate catastrophe [and the] ways that it seemed like reality and the systems around me were falling apart … That essay was the first one I took on when I wanted to think, how do we think about this new kind of reality?”

Gabbert said her fascination with understanding how people respond to unreality is rooted in her broader interest in the cognitive sciences, which was her major at Rice. She first became aware of the field of study while looking through a course catalog just before starting her first year.

“I thought, ‘Wow, I didn’t even know that was a thing,’” Gabbert said. “I’m still fascinated by all that stuff — philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, how we think, why we think, how the brain works. It’s my jam.”

A cognitive sciences and linguistics major, Gabbert attributes her love of language and literature to her mother, who encouraged her to become a “voracious reader” from an early age, she said.

“Language became the primary way I think and think about thinking,” Gabbert said. “Before I really wanted to be a writer or identified as one, I was being told by others, ‘Oh, clearly, that’s what she should be.’ It actually took me a long time to come around to feeling that way.”

In high school, she used a single typewriter to compose poems, typing them on colored construction paper and assembling them into chapbooks. Despite her relative isolation from the “cool counterculture alternative world” she aspired to, Gabbert said she dreamed of creating a zine.

“I didn’t even know it was pronounced ‘zeen,’” Gabbert said. “I had one friend, Amanda, and we both used to fantasize about making a zine and publishing our own writing in it. That was when I first got excited about the idea not just of writing, but of being read, of having a readership … I would read those poems [in “The Best American Poetry” anthology] and look to see where they were published, trying to figure out, should I be sending poems to The New Yorker?”

Since then, Gabbert has established herself as a prominent poet and essayist, publishing seven collections of poetry, essays and criticism. Her work spans multiple forms, and while she explores similar themes in each of her pieces, Gabbert approaches each with a distinct impulse, she said.

“Essays usually start bigger,” Gabbert said. “I want to spend a lot of time on it — go to the library, get a bunch of books on the subject, fall down YouTube rabbit holes, watch weird movies. 

“Poems, on the other hand, are usually really fast,” Gabbert continued. “It’s rare that I’ll work on the same poem across multiple days or weeks.”

Although Gabbert only took a few English classes at Rice, the ones she did take left a lasting impression. She said she attributes much of her success in poetry to workshops taught by professor emerita Susan Wood, who encouraged her to apply to creative writing graduate programs — including Emerson College, where she eventually received her MFA in poetry.

“She was wonderful,” Gabbert said. “I don’t think I would have … made poetry such a central part of my life if it weren’t for her. She made me feel like I could do it and that I should take it seriously.”

Now a poetry columnist for The New York Times’ Book Review, Gabbert said one of her poems was rejected by Rice’s undergraduate literary magazine when she was still a student — a blow she dubbed “the new Einstein-flunked-high-school-math.” Nonetheless, her early criticism lives on in the archives of the Thresher’s Arts & Entertainment section, where she contributed a review of “Shrek” in 2001.

Poem rejection aside, Gabbert said she instantly fell in love with Rice and felt she had finally found her community and environment.

“I was always a bit afraid to look like I was trying too hard or cared too much about school in high school,” Gabbert said. “Then I got to Rice and felt surrounded by people who completely embraced being into learning, liking books, going to class and being unabashedly intellectual.”

Gabbert said her linguistics classes stand out among her favorite memories of Rice. She was especially fond of a class on conversation analysis taught by linguistics professor Robert Englebretson, whom she worked for as a grader.

“There are these particular moments where they somehow opened my mind to something that, once you start thinking about things in a slightly different way, you can never go back,” Gabbert said. “You’re just sort of expanded forever, and I just had a lot of moments like that at Rice.”

The impression Rice left on Gabbert is matched by the one she left. Englebretson said he recalls her as a remarkable student in the very first class he taught at Rice.

“She is one of the many outstanding and memorable [linguistics] majors I have had the pleasure of working with over the years who are doing excellent things,” Englebretson wrote in an email to the Thresher. “Way to go, Elisa!”

After graduating from Rice and receiving her MFA from Emerson, Gabbert describes her professional career as "working down two parallel paths," she said. By day, she works as a content director, and by night, she writes as a poetry columnist.

“I continued to work in jobs where I was either writing or editing, but my poetry career was totally separate,” Gabbert said. “That continues to this day … I never had early illusions that I’d be able to make a living from poetry alone. Even though now I write more prose, publish books with major publishers, and teach sometimes, it’s always been these two parallel career paths, and I’ve just kept doing them both.”

Reflecting on her accomplishments thus far, Gabbert said she is most proud of when her work resonates with others. One writing project in particular — an interactive close reading of a W. H. Auden poem published in 2022 — stands out as a career highlight, Gabbert said.

“I managed to do the impossible act of communication, getting people to see things the way I see them,” Gabbert said. “It was clear that it was the most-read thing I’ve ever written … People really got a lot out of it, and I just got so many emails. It was so rewarding on every level.

“Sometimes you work really hard on something, but nobody reads it, or people don’t seem to get it … but that was one of those times where it really felt like it worked out, and all the work paid off.”

Gabbert said she is resistant to the thought of giving advice to her younger self. In lieu of prescriptive wisdom, Gabbert said the process of “just figuring it out” is the only key to literary success.

“All you need is to feel passionate about it,” Gabbert said. “You have to have that impossible ambition, like, ‘Maybe I should send a poem to The New Yorker,’ even though you’re not ready. You’re not going to get published in The New Yorker when you’re 17, but just having the idea, the dream — ‘Should I do that?’ All those impulses are the right impulses because you’re excited about reading, you’re excited about writing, you’re excited about being read.

“The worst thing that I, or any of my friends who teach writing, encounter in aspiring writers is people who write but don’t read … You have to be doing both at the same time. Everything else is just a matter of figuring it out because there are so many different paths, and there’s so much luck involved … You have to love it so much that you can’t give it up.”

Gabbert’s 2024 poem “Here Lies Dust” — The Yale Review’s most-read poem last year — is a meditation on the passage of time, which she said would require her “to live for 20 more years” to write another poem as good. Indeed, time is a central part of Gabbert’s writing process, as she said that great writing requires sustained thought.

“The best essays are always things you’ve been thinking about your whole life,” Gabbert said. “So if you … want to write a great piece of writing about anything — about a certain poem, a certain book, about money, about roses — you have to have the idea, and then you really have to say, ‘Okay, now what I’m going to do is … just think about it for a really long time.’ This is how it has to be because it came from your mind and your mind only.”

Reflecting on the fundamental role of writers in today’s world, Gabbert said she believes there doesn’t necessarily have to be one.

“I do sometimes wonder, why am I doing this?” Gabbert said. “And the simplest answer is really just that it makes me happy … It’s worth all of us trying to do whatever we can to make it worth being alive … For me, being part of the writing world, having a writing life, is really as necessary for my well-being as the basics — food, staying hydrated, getting sunlight and oxygen.

“Like the existential threats I was writing about in ‘The Unreality of Memory,’ everything’s only gotten worse. But I feel more resilient and stronger than I did when I started writing that book. And I think it’s because I’ve managed to shore up my sense of personal purpose. Feeling better about my purpose makes me feel like I’m more able to help other humans.”

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