Catching up with Professors Cody and Aurora
By Jizelle Villegas ’26
The Words is excited to welcome back Professors Cody Klippenstein and Aurora Masum-Javed to the English and Creative Writing department after taking some time to do some exciting things!
We sat down with Prof. Klippenstein, who has returned after taking a semester away from Mac to teach at Hamline University’s MFA program, where she taught a graduate course called Myth and Magic. Of the experience, she said, “It was really interesting to get to know and read some graduate students’ fantasy novel projects.”
Alongside teaching that course, she also worked on her full-length novel, currently titled Where You End and Where I Begin. This novel is close to her heart, as she’s been working on it since 2020, during the pandemic. While being away from Mac, it actually doubled in size and she didn’t know it would be this long of a project.
“I love this one personally because it’s got all the things that I love reading in it,” Prof. Klippenstein said. “It’s got ghosts, and Chinese American witches who are possessed, it’s got the borderland of life and death in it, and it’s got a particularly vengeful old Chinese woman spirit who wants to take revenge on a tiny upstate New York town.”
Prof. Klippenstein’s book sounds wonderful, and we’re excited for it to be on our shelves in the near future. Right now, her agent is shopping around, so we wish her good luck in the process.
Prof. Klippenstein missed and also gained important things while being away: “I missed talking to Mac students regularly about writing and writing processes, but I think one of the things that kept me going and productive while I was away was talking regularly to graduate students who were working on whole novels. That was really interesting because I was constantly having conversations with people who were in the trenches, in the middle of their giant, multi-hundred page novels.”
During her time, she was able to do other things for herself amidst writing her novel and teaching graduate students. She actually wrote a novella and other short stories while “procrastinating” on her novel, and had fun doing that.
She also made a point to visit the ocean because she loves it and it makes her feel grounded, peaceful, and provides a way to reset while working on her novel and teaching.
We then sat down with Prof. Masum-Javed to hear about what she’s been up to now that she’s back teaching here after a semester break. She was recently awarded the Jerome Hill Artists Fellow grant this past year, while also being a McKnight and Minnesota Arts grant recipient. For her time away, she told us that “It was interesting. I got really lucky and got a bunch of grants and it was nice to take some time away. But honestly, I missed teaching.” She went on to say “Turns out I really like structure, [and] students to be inspired by and in relationship with.”
She was spending time participating in a year-long Finish Your Manuscript program, taking care of herself, and being a caretaker for her mom during her time away.
As for things she missed about Mac outside of teaching, she said, “I definitely missed Professor Emma Törzs, who’s my office mate. It is nice to share an office with someone you love. I missed the sense of camaraderie that’s created in a creative writing class specifically.” To end off, she said, “I missed my students mostly,” which is a shared sentiment between her and Prof. Klippenstein.
Another thing that was similar between the two of them was that Prof. Masum-Javed also allowed herself time to be near a body of water. She said, “My favorite thing was getting to swim at Cedar Lake almost every day. That was a real plus just to have that flexibility.” She added, “A lot of days, I’d be able to swim before or after classes and it’s really life affirming to be in water.” Her time spent at the lake sounded peaceful and “absurdly magical.”
Though she wasn’t teaching here, she was still teaching online courses at night for younger students’ extracurricular activities; she was a public school teacher before becoming a professor and has had a teaching career for over 15 years. She shared that they were working on fiction stories and that she loves that the kids’ imaginations are “so strange” and teaching kids of all ages feels familiar to her.
Reflecting on taking some space away, she said, “When I returned, I felt like I came back with clarity that I wanted to participate more deeply and retreat less.” Having this revelation has stuck with her as she enters personal and professional endeavors.
We’d like to thank Professors Klippenstein and Masum-Javed for their time to talk to us and enlighten us with their stories from their semesters away, as they seemed productive and rejuvenating in a lot of aspects.