One of Inara Verzemnieks’ favorite bumper stickers reads, “Visualize Tacoma.”
The sticker was born out of the early-nineties: an era when Tacoma, Washington – Inara’s hometown – had begun to reinvent itself from industrial wasteland to underground arts hub. The sticker embodied a hopeful transition, the ability to imagine what the town could be before “visualizing” it into reality. But the sticker also represents something else: two pieces of Inara that define both her, and her job as a professional writer.
Firstly, there is an aspect of taking pride in where you come from. Born and raised in the northwest, Inara loyally claims Tacoma as her home, as well as admits her annoyance when fellow Tacoma-natives – instead of taking the time to describe their smelly, yet beautiful town – default to strangers that they simply live “close-to-Seattle.” “You are so defined by the place you grew up,” she says, “and I love that I’m from Tacoma.”
The second piece lies deeper. Embedded within “Visualize Tacoma” is a larger message, noting the possibility that comes with change, and the value in being present for the stories unfolding around us. Inara’s magnetism to the writing profession is rooted in this beautiful uncertainty of life, and the work we all go through to make sense of it.
Around the same time as Tacoma’s rebirth (and, hence, the birth of the sticker), Inara was about to graduate from Stadium High School, across Commencement Bay from her neighborhood on Browns Point. As a senior, she had already fashioned herself into quite a writer – beginning with her neighborhood newsletter, but soon to include both underground journals and her high school paper. By the time she graduated in ’92, Inara knew she had found her calling.
Now a full-fledged writer, Inara’s connection to the evolving world of creative non-fiction draws inspiration from the idea of discovery: “I was never interested in breaking news, or political or process stories. I was interested in deeply inhabiting people’s lives, in writing stories that are ‘undecided,’ where you can take the reader along with you and they don’t know what’s going to happen. When you read a breaking news story, there’s not a whole lot of discovery. I like thinking of stories as a vehicle for discovery.”
Finding “the time and space” to write them, however, took Inara on a bit of a journey. She started out at the Oregonian, where she found a home as a reporter and writer for the Features department. Thirteen years later, Inara discovered that the position, while essential to her growth as a writer, could no longer satisfy the direction she intended to go: “Working at the paper was critical to me, it was critical to help me find my own voice. At the same time, I chose it, in part, for practical reasons: a consistent paycheck and benefits. After awhile, I didn’t like these practical reasons because they locked me in. They made me compromise a lot for other reasons.” For Inara, the real challenge then became finding the answer to this question: “how do you construct a life that allows you to [do what you love]?”
Today, Inara is trying to do just that. After being accepted into the University of Iowa’s prestigious MFA program, she is currently pursuing a two-year fellowship that, for lack of a better word, rules: “It’s a gift. I am paid to be there, to write, and there is no obligation. Just write, take classes, and interact with other writers.” Along with the other ten fellows, Inara attends workshops and classes like “The History of the Essay,” which as proven to be more work than she anticipated. “It makes sense… they’re just trying to flood your brain with everything,” she admits, “but I just left a job with a lot of structure. A part of me wasn’t ready to jump back into more of that.” Only a month into the program, however, she recognizes that she is still very much in an adjustment period and eagerly looks forward to the rest of the fellowship.
Her projects, while consisting mostly of class assignments, have recently begun to take a more individualized shape. Before arriving in Iowa City, Inara had five to ten things on her plate, but now realizes that gaining “traction” with just a few is a worthy goal. “I have started adapting the assignments to accommodate my own projects,” she says, in the hopes of using the fellowship experience to retain some of the momentum she feels with certain stories.
One such story links back to Inara’s own roots. As a first-generation Latvian-American, Inara grew up listening to her family’s stories. Raised primarily by her grandparents, Inara became especially aware of the story of her grandmother’s sister, who fled to Siberia to escape Latvia’s War of Independence. Incredibly, her great-aunt survived the journey, and Inara recently traveled to Latvia in an attempt to reconnect with this part of her past. While she never imagined “writing a memoir” during her fellowship, Inara also admits that, “Siberia is on my mind:” “I find myself feeling this ‘journalist hesitancy’ to write about myself. There’s some resistance there, but I feel like something important is happening and I don’t want to let that go.”
As she delves into a new phase of her writing career, Inara has followed her instincts to a place where the writing she loves can be honed and nurtured. At the same time, she does not pretend like any of it has been easy. In fact, she entrusts me with the best advice she can think of for a college writer eager to find a home in the industry: “If you believe in telling stories, you must make your choices to protect that. Don’t compromise. Defend your passion, and build your life so you can do it.” Although she ultimately decided that the paper was not for her, she admits that “money is an issue” and that “there are no easy answers to this, to writing well while wanting the security of a solid paycheck. It’s not easy, but,” she encourages, “you have to hold tight to that love.”
Before we hang up, I tell Inara what my favorite bumper sticker is – given that I consider myself somewhat of a Tacoma-native these days. “It says ‘Admit it, Tacoma. You’re Beautiful,'” I tell her, and she laughs. I guess it proves another piece of Inara’s advice: that “you have to write to know what you want to say.”
