Phase Imprinting

On claiming the identity of being a writer

Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, some of my recent writing, then some thoughts on the media that I am consuming and finally notes on some vegan food. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. 

If you are here because you like my writing about science or my Instagrams about cooking, you may not be interested in every essay in this space, but please do stick around until I loop back to whatever it is that we have in common. I’d also love it if you shared this letter with a friend.

PHASE IMPRINTING*

At the end of May I was at an upscale vegan dessert tasting with someone who had just graduated from an MFA program in creative writing. There is a contingent of friends and acquaintances I have made since moving to New York that know me primarily as a baker so there was a version of this evening where any lull in conversation could have been filled very simply - me talking about desserts and them talking about their writing. It is not right to flatten people’s undoubtedly more complex personhood in this way, but there is utility to it. Except that in this case it was me, the baker and PhD scientist, sitting there with a book deal and a more than half done manuscript.

“Once it’s out, I will read your book and make a big deal out of it,” my dinner-mate said, as any polite person would. The best piece of French toast I have ever tasted, a perfectly pillowy brioche seared just enough to make each bite rich in texture and warmed by hints of caramelized sugar, became in danger of colliding with a lump of pure anxiety that started to form in my throat. I could not possibly have someone with training - a real writer - come anywhere near the work I have been devoting every evening, weekend afternoon, idle train ride and otherwise free moment of my time to for months. I made a joke about it, we laughed, and by the time the next course, a stracciatella ice cream worthy of my gelato-heavy childhood on the Adriatic coast, was before us the conversation luckily moved on.

The offer for my debut, Entangled States: A Life According to Physics, came in October of last year and since then I have written about two thirds of the manuscript, which has to be completed by December. Finding time for this work in addition to my full time job at a weekly magazine has certainly been a struggle, but my years in graduate school and later both teaching and freelancing serendipitously prepared me for it. What I have found myself much more unprepared for is how hard it is to claim the identity of being a writer.

My mom, who has always believed in the project with a truly frightening amount of conviction, asks about my writing process every time we speak. She knows I am anxious about being self-taught, maybe even an amateur, so she keeps returning to what she sees as upshots of my not having gone to school for writing. Institutions make people stuffy, and as an outsider your voice may be more fresh, she argues as her cat’s tail flickers on the edge of the video call. 

How many famous writers from the past were down on their luck, were unemployed, real starving artists with tragic life stories? Did they have the backing and approval of institutions? I bumble something about how many writers she is thinking of, writers she learned about in school, had different identities which offered them different positionalities in society and how politics and economics have changed rapidly over the years. I am dealing in generalities and a vague sense of history and she is a mom trying to champion her kid. I don’t stand a chance. You write for a living already, she reminds me. A blow to the coherence of her argument about the value of the outsider voice, but a more devastating blow to me calling myself an amateur.  

Mom, annoyingly, still might be onto something. How many writers that really make it, and how many writers that I really look up to have actually been trained to write by some prestigious institution? Realistically, those numbers are not at all high. But because I am a former academic and a former teacher, the idea of education and being formally trained hangs heavy over me anyway.

There is some irony to this, as the closest I ever got to being a starving artist was when I followed my passion for science into more than half a decade of PhD work. ‘Starving scientist’ is not a standard, romanticized trope, but does encompass a lot of people’s graduate school experience. I lived right on the edge of the poverty line throughout my doctoral training, and that was certainly a time when I felt the most as an outsider, trying to prove myself and my worth in a field historically and currently shaped by whiteness and maleness. Here, I was a different voice than those deemed normative just by who I was. While that brought me camaraderie from other underrepresented people, for which I am immensely grateful, it did not make my scholarly work easier or better. There was no Bruce Lee moment of being hit, tasting my own blood, then cracking open a new theory of topological insulators; I was just exhausted. 

But I benefitted from having pushed through and eventually being conferred a title. Much of what going to school, especially private colleges and prestigious graduate programs, does for a person is to give them the veneer of institutional approval and a shorthand that others will recognize as prestige that they might want to attach moral value to. A diploma facilitates connections and opens doors for networking and cashing in name recognition as much as it corroborates skill and talent. 

I encounter this often when the scientists that I interview recognize the name and reputation of my alma mater. I encountered it even more when simply having a PhD made me seem nearly otherworldly to high school students and their parents. Even among my friends, “did you know Karmela is a doctor” elicits a response similar to what I have often witnessed in the workplace - a mix of confusion and awe that generally works out in my favor. Of course, this lays a fertile ground for believing that what makes it justified for a person to claim a profession or a calling is institutional support, not just in terms of something as obviously capitalist as a contract with a publisher and getting paid, but at the supposedly more pure tier of ivory tower intellectualism.

Complicating things, in addition to the function of my degree in the capitalist landscape, the work I had to do to earn it also still informs how I function. In those six and a half years, I did have to engage with my field of study, with physics, in a more holistic and rigorous way than almost any other circumstance would have allowed me to. I developed analytic and problem-solving skills, and I learned new ways of thinking about complex phenomena and systems. I also gained lots of historical and contextual knowledge about the work of other scientists. 

When presented with a study in physics I can place it on a mental map of all the subgenres of this science, and in a lineage of all studies that have come before it. I enjoyed building this map over the years, and there was something deeply satisfactory about learning for a living, something that I still do as a science journalist. I find myself traversing that map daily, looking for some tidbit of information that could form just the right foundation for the next thing, or inform me of how important that next thing actually is. When I write, I worry about not having that context, about inadvertently rehashing and reinventing something that I would have learned in school, or if I had spent my 20s independently committed to literary scholarship instead of hard science. It’s too easy to imagine someone picking up my writing and dismissing it in the same way I may choose to not pitch a story about an experiment that is only very incrementally different from what I know other researchers have done already. 

My mom is here to correct me again: had I learned about something in school and chosen not to engage with it further because of that, readers would never get to learn my perspective. And this is really where she gets me. No matter how much I could go on and on about craft, at least some of the struggle reduces to this, to making space for the belief that what I have to say simply just does matter. When writing about writing, Joan Didion posed that “In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act.” When she goes on to say that “that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space,” a sense of guilt and shame creeps in. What have I done to deserve to be this kind of bully?

Because I am taking this issue up with everyone who has recently tried to check in on me and found me writing, my best friend has a take too. Their insight as someone who has actually been trained to write and has spent time in writing workshops is sharper. They give me that line about having the confidence of a mediocre white man. I hate it, but they are also not wrong. It is those who are already most privileged, already least likely to doubt themselves, already most likely to be taken seriously who most easily claim the label writer, even if their work is a simulacrum of works by more talented artists, or artists of the past. 

In my first brushes with contemporary feminism in college I was big on attaching the phrase ‘this is what a physicist looks like’ to myself whenever I could. I know I could play the same trick with ‘writer’ and I really do try - my social media feeds and my bookshelves are filled with writers who are distinctly not mediocre white men. When I imagine myself reading out of my book, in stark contrast to how I imagined myself presenting my physics research, my template does not come from someone who has a lived experience that is fundamentally different from mine. If I didn’t look like a physicist most of the time, I know that I often can and do look like a writer. 

When my favorite interview show with writers of all types shuts down I remind myself of how many of its guests said they owed their careers to a mix of confidence and luck. “This show gave me permission to zig-zag my way into writing for a living,” I tell my partner. He’s heard my talk about this a thousand times. He thinks I worked hard to get where I am today. Certainly, luck was involved but I also had to embrace my lucky breaks. So, it all comes back to confidence, and I want to work on it. When I meet friends of friends or someone strikes up a conversation with me at the gym I taste-test different words in my mouth. “I am a writer,” I say. “I have a book coming out next year,” I try. I observe people’s response, vigilant of where their curiosity and incredulity may meet.

When did I start calling myself a physicist without feeling self-conscious? When did “journalist” start to feel right? Here again institutions matter to me, as does practice. I don’t do physics anymore so it feels clear cut to say that I used to be a physicist. I do journalism every day, writing emails and opening phone calls by introducing myself as a reporter - I even have old-timey business cards that say so. 

I don’t believe in hierarchies and gate-keeping and I am by default suspicious of any body that claims to have authority over who a person can be, but the metrics we have for expertise right now rely on such bodies and institutions, and that’s a part of my daily experience. How much I think my voice matters is tied to how much I think I matter and that is, in turn, influenced by the places, contexts and social structures I move through. When I feel I need to learn more to count as a “real” writer, the other side of the coin is unlearning some of what the world I live in has loaded onto that adjective. 

So there is the issue of me, my confidence and who I look to for validation and conferral of authority. And then there is the issue of the actual book, of Entangled States entangled with the state of me, emotionally, intellectually, by the fingertips. If I can hide behind the persona of a cold and rational scientist from time to time, if I can reach for that character when I feel like there is no other way to hold my own against those mediocre but confident white men or the true believers in the kinds of institutions that have not anointed me, my memoir cannot. It’s all in the title anyway: the book is not just about physics, it is also about my life. 

Something about writing a memoir feels fraught by default. For me, the genre invokes the famous, like actors and musicians, the powerful, like former presidents, and the sordid and scandalous, like celebrities who got famous for being famous and digital natives that went viral early enough in the Internet’s history. The idea of writing about yourself also feels inextricably tied to the personal essay, a feminized genre that had its heyday a decade or so ago. While the genre never really went away - just think of all those essays in the Cut - its original boom both invited critique and gave rise to a micro-industry. Once something becomes a recognizable, and at times lucrative, genre online, the forces of capitalism are quick to codify it, flatten it and start encouraging imitation and sameness. In some sense, social media influencers or, as we say now, content creators, are adjacent to this genre, they just philosophize their lives in real time, in short video clips and images, instead of longform writing. 

In LitHub, Jess Row writes about “the pressure and the expectation that you will mine your own life for content; to become a brand, an influencer, just by being yourself,” and his critique of the modern writer as a self-turned-franchise comes awfully close to equating writers of autofiction with less literary content creators. If autofiction is on the line, how far from it can memoir be? “The imperative gets stronger the younger you are, and the more you’ve lived your life exposed to the Internet. But it affects anyone who engages in any kind of cultural production: At this point it’s so baked into the culture that it’s a given and a joke,” writes Row and I highlight the last five words, trying to convey how unsettling and true this rings.

It does not feel coincidental that when I think of personal essays and memoirist essay collections, or when I think of content creators, I think mainly of women and other marginalized people. There is a promise of empowerment in this creative and career path, of finding self-worth through being your own boss and your own product. Though there are notable exceptions and I am certainly being unfair by painting with such a broad brush, to an immigrant like me all of this feels like a repackaging of the American dream, the winning underdog narrative that was sold to me when I moved to the US at 16. In making my debut in no small part about me, am I not playing into the same base instincts that have me sharing all of my outfits and meals on social media? Is it not the same need to prove that I am an ‘individual’ who ‘made it’ and has a personality and views coherent enough to be their own brand? Am I not, in selling the story of me, and how I made sense of it, asking to be affirmed by systems that have made me feel insecure to begin with?

“I will have to promote this book. I will have to sell myself,” I say to my barber. They’re an artist and share that it took a while to claim the word for themselves. You can separate your work from yourself at least somewhat on social media, they say. Then: a person is an artist because they feel the urge to do art, and then they do it. And there is very little I’ve wanted in recent years other than to write this book. For the several months when it seemed like every publisher my agent approached would pass on it, I was utterly devastated. I needed it to exist, to be out of my head, even though it felt vulnerable and tender to keep talking about it. 

At parties, I’d stumble over my words trying to explain that it’s not just a book about physics. Even if my interlocutors did not doubt my qualifications as a writer, or questioned the politics of the memoir, I worried that they might assume that I am a narcissist. Ultimately, what kind of person wants to admit they’re putting so much time into writing about themselves? What kind of person seeks out that sort of attention? 

But I do have answers ready for this, and I believe in them. People like me rarely get to have a platform when it comes to discussing being a scientist or doing science. I am an immigrant, I am queer, and it is important that there be a record of people like me existing and doing well. Being everyone who I am, this is the book that I would have wanted to read when I was young, when my only role model options were straight cisgendered men. I used to be a teacher, I tell my imaginary accuser and inquisitor, I have seen first hand how much of a difference a single adult whose life feels like a plausible future can make. There’s research on this, I assure them, this is why representation used to be such a big word, before it was co-opted by corporations.

When I was in college I loved reading personal essays and other first person writing, in print or on digital pages of blogs. As someone who was socialized as female I understood that oversharing and getting too personal was meant to be shameful, unbecoming of a serious, respectable person. But emblazoning pages with a messy, vibrant ‘I’ rather than aiming for a style where the writer’s voice is so dry and omniscient and common sense that it becomes depersonalized was compelling. 

It was also the opposite of my steady diet of science textbooks and history of science texts which made the world feel maddeningly fascinating but also disconnected from me and anyone as messily human as me. In the first person essay, the knowledge of the world and the experience of the world were inextricably intertwined in a way exactly opposite to how western science tries to eliminate the experimenter, or the observer from its framework.

Do you know this is one of the big problems with interpreting quantum mechanics? Here, the person who does the experiment can never be ignored, so much so that many modern interpretations recast the theory as not about objects but rather relationships between all constituents of our physical world. Do you know that I’ve never loved learning anything more than I’ve loved learning quantum mechanics? So far, the word quantum shows up 166 times in the manuscript of my book.

Maybe it is hubris to think that Entangled States could bring physics closer to someone who thinks science is not for them, or could not make space for their whole self. Perhaps I am overestimating the legibility and appeal of my sense of ‘I’ as something that could glue the abstractions that physicists deal with to something more fleshy and emotionally resonant. But as Joseph Osmundson writes in a lockdown-era essay titled On Private Writing, for queer people, and many people that have been otherwise othered, privacy and a true sense of remove may have never actually been an option. 

Being visible as an other negates the possibility of privacy. When you are queer, there is also the issue of choosing whether to “come out.” If you are not immediately clockable, you still think about whether you should make yourself such. The way to find community, love and solidarity is to cross the boundary between the private and the public. This may put you in danger, but in a world that is firmly beholden to heteronormativity and all of its oppressive cousins it is hard to believe that there is such a thing as true safety anyway. Many find themselves on the public side of this boundary by default, because not everyone can actually hide who they are - or doing so feels like self-annihilation. 

“I write my life down on the page, all of it, the mundane and the erotic, the horrifying and the hilarious. Breaking the public/private binary in writing isn’t in and of itself radical or revolutionary. It depends on what we have to show and why. Reifying the public/private binary by rejecting writing that’s too messy, by claiming that writing is too personal, too sexual, too pornographic, “too much,” this will always serve the status quo,” Osmundson writes, positioning personal writing or writing about the personal as a sort of coming out, a claiming of what many could probably already see, unapologetically, in your own voice.

Realistically, it is unlikely that anything written by someone like me could ever truly be imbued with that presumably neutral textbook voice. We see it as objective and impersonal precisely because it actually belongs to a scientist/writer who is seen as the norm. Whether the reader brings in the sense of your “I” into your writing is not fully up to you, and it very much depends on who you are.

Physicists and writer Chanda Prescod-Weinstein has talked about this following the publication of her boom The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime and Dreams Deferred. Despite the book being full of facts and genuinely educational physics content, the chapters that touch more on Prescod-Weinstein’s experience of physics and her experience of being a Black queer woman physicist have motivated some media and booksellers to call the work a memoir. As she points out, white male authors often include similar autobiographical information or pepper their narratives about physics with personal anecdotes about famous scientists, but those are more often seen as literary flourishes than book-defining moments. 

Marginalized people don’t owe visibility or education to anyone, but we often cannot escape it. In all those years of being told that I am not like a typical physicist, of being unable to simply look and act like a typical physicist, me still doing physics, publicly at the university, at conferences and in pages of peer reviewed journals, was almost a kind of writing too. 

At the same time, like Osmundson argues for disrupting the status quo by choosing to not be private and be “too” everything instead, Prescod-Weinstein acknowledges that the personal, the parts of her physics practice that could have been kept private, are part of the driving force behind her writing the book at all. Echoing my own feelings, at the end of Disordered Cosmos, she writes: “I knew there would be another queer Black girl who needed a book that was honest about how shit everything is…There is nothing I can do about what happened to me, the things that I’ve gone through. But hopefully the knowledge and understanding I’ve gained by living through the things I’ve lived through means that I can give someone else better tools to navigate similar experiences.” 

A little later, her message is even more explicit: “My intended audience, beyond my seventeen-year-old self, is anyone who’s been told physics wasn’t for them. This is an anti-gaslighting book. Physics is for you.” I teared up a little reading this, even though I read it years after completing my PhD. The “you” was still me and it still mattered that Prescod-Weinstein was speaking to them. 

In my last newsletter, I briefly mentioned how much I loved Vanessa Angelica Villarreal’s Magical/Realism, which is a memoir of sorts, but also a book of theory and criticism that takes on the idea of memories and the recording of memories head on. Villareal opens the book by underlining how fraught the act of putting memories in writing is and how much value, practical, political and spiritual, there is in it for marginalized people. “What is memory but a battleground, a bordered terrain between two versions of the truth?” she writes on page one of the book. Then: “to recall a memory activates the imagination; history is a collective imagination.” 

Again, the reminder is there - even when we are not the most expected, the most “normal”, the most representative person in the room, we still have the option of being active participants of building histories and records of our communities. We can have a hand in shaping what stories and templates for being trickle down to those that come after us. And what’s more writerly than adding to the communal imaginary, than widening the space of both what can be and what has been already? 

The first chapter of Entangled States is called Memory Devices. I write about how you make a literal memory device in a lab and why it is really difficult to make an atom or a chunk of light actually be good at remembering something correctly and for a long time. And I write about my own memories, about how the first story I know about myself is someone else’s memory that has been told to me so many times that it feels like my own. I wanted my memoir to start with a discussion of memories as a warning to the reader. Yes, memories are fraught and, yes, I am trying to claim my own story here, just as I am claiming my connection with the physical world, or at least the physical world as it is described by the science that I love. 

Maybe claiming my identity as a writer, just a small step away from a remember-er, a recorder, a scientist who formally, rigorously understands that, as Villarreal writes, “everything that has happened is recorded in the matter around us” is then simply unavoidable. Maybe it is actually natural, inherent in me regardless of who trained me or what institution signed off on my origin story. Maybe to claim the identity of a writer I do not have to do anything more than what I have been doing already. It could really be as simple as calling myself a writer because I want to be writing - and if I am certain of anything right now, it is that I really do. 

Currently, Entangled States sits at about 46,500 words, only four chapters short of its first draft being finished. I want to tell you something about it that feels immensely dangerous to me - that it will be really, really good and that you should plan on reading it. And if I am wrong, if only my mom and my friends get a copy and actually open it, if it doesn’t touch anyone and those with literary credentials dislike or dismiss it, I will still be a writer.

Best,

Karmela

*In quantum physics, each object is described by a wavefunction and each wavefunction has a property called “the phase.” In fact, anything that looks like a wave will have a phase, in addition to having properties like frequency and amplitude. For an ordinary classical wave, like a water wave or a wave on a plucked guitar string, the value of the phase tells you where in the wave’s up-and-down-and-up-again cycle you are. The phase plays a similar role in the quantum world, but here it can be changed by an experimenter. If you write or imprint a particular phase value on your quantum object, you can make it start doing something, like moving forward or rotating in a circle.

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ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING

I am about to spend a week writing my first New Scientist feature in a very long time and I am very much looking forward to diving into some foundational topics in quantum mechanics in a longer and slower format than what I do in the news desk every day. Even though it’s summer and most academics are either hiding from emails to catch up on work, at summer schools somewhere sunny, or on a well-deserved vacation, the news desk has been working at full speed and I have been writing lots. Among the many papers that crossed my proverbial desk in the past few weeks I liked reporting this story about how any random sequence of events can be used as a clock if you know enough math. I also had fun with this less heady story about how big of a bowl you may need for discarded pistachio shells compared to the container for the unshelled pistachios you start with, according to physics.

READING

I’ve been making my way through the essays in Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme partly to gain a sense of history as told by people I consider to be part of my lineage, partly because the butch/femme division has always been both informative and disorienting for how I think of myself. “you're like if a rose garden was butch,” a friend recently told me on social media, and it feels generative to be processing comments like that while having access to the wealth of experience of similar, as well as very dissimilar, identities in this book.

Sarah Duignan on hospital food, why it is often so terrible, what it’s function could be and what it’s function currently is, in this insightful essay on AnthroDish.

“everyone wants to be a lit girl” on the Lit List Substack, exploring what replacing intellectualism with the performance of it on social media and elsewhere does and doesn’t do. There were a lot of great insights on book publishing and book promotion in this essay, but I thought this more general truth hit quite hard as well:

“The aesthetic of intellectualism isn’t that deep; it’s just another one-size-fits-all identity we’re selling. Every new aesthetic trend gets a pithy label, and we fall in line, eager to perform our little capitalistic dance routines. The exploration of these pre-packaged identities may be part of the process of carving out a place for ourselves, but adopting narrowly defined aesthetics as our full personality keeps us from discovering our own sense of self and making genuine connections with people in the real world.

The cool girls are both easily defined and aloof, but I suspect their detachment is a defense mechanism we are all familiar with, no matter what costume we don or performance we put on for the masses, designed to protect the soft pulp of our ego that cannot bear to be perceived at all.”

LISTENING

The new Remi Wolf record, Big Ideas, is imperfect, but incredibly fun. Wolf is a sort of maximalist artist, making hyperpop funky, groovy and at times unabashedly cringey and horny. This is a combination that is always at a high risk of missing the mark, but that also really works when it doesn’t. 

Charm, which is Clairo’s latest, on the other hand, is very mellow, dreamy and polished, with a consistent sound and style across its 11 tracks. I had not been huge on Clairo in the past and really only garnered some interest in her music when I saw her open for boygenius at a very fun stadium show, but this record just feels so …nice. She makes me want to spend the summer lounging in a soft, calm way that is rarely my default.

EATING

Cabbage and beans as a reminder of how we eat back home, but remixed and reimagined because I am always as interested in reinventions as I am susceptible to nostalgia. 

Peanut butter and chocolate cake that a friend commissioned for their birthday. This is a combination that I love but barely ever make because peanut allergies are so prevalent, so it felt like an absolute treat to finally include it in my cake rotation. I’m still working out how to best glaze cakes with chocolate, but the texture of the very moist chocolate cake, very light peanut butter frosting and the fairly bitter, crunchy glaze worked quite well here.

For a 4th of July backyard barbecue I made a big salad full of mint, watermelon, cucumbers and marinated tofu. I also brought a cake to this gathering, but my heart was much more set on constantly nibbling on something cold and juicy. We brought some leftovers to the beach the next day and I again really enjoyed it, especially because the tofu had become even more creamy in the brine, the watermelon was still refreshing and hydrating, and the spiciness from shichimi togarashi got just a touch more intense. If you’re not using watermelon in your savory summer dishes yet, I would very much recommend it.