Rachel Howard
Photo by David Tallitsch
Bio
Rachel Howard is the author of The Risk of Us, a novel, and The Lost Night, a memoir about her father’s unsolved murder. Raised in California’s agricultural Central Valley, she has published fiction and nonfiction in Zyzzyva, StoryQuarterly,the Los Angeles Review of Books,the New York Times Magazine,and elsewhere.To support writing, she has worked full-time as an artist’s model, a vocation she wrote about in an essay published by Gulf Coast. For more than 20 years, she has also written dance criticism, primarily for the San Francisco Chronicle. She studied at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she later served as Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow and interim director of undergraduate creative writing. Living with her husband and child in Davis, California, she recently finished a book-length lyric essay and is revising a memoir about learning to sing at Oakland’s oldest piano bar.
From a young age—even before my father was murdered in our home—I needed a space apart. For me, that space was the page. It still surprises and comforts me that through reading I can hear the intimate and honest thoughts of total strangers. These days, I think of the page as a kind of cathedral, calm enough to hold pain and beauty without judgment. It still feels miraculous to me that human beings can construct such spaces through mere words.
For much of my early writing life, I wrote to help myself. When I sent my manuscript to the National Endowment for the Arts, my writing was more of a meditation practice, a way to try to help someone close to me. The page was where I attempted to find a bit of equanimity that I could bring back into a terrifying time in our day-to-day life. I had not opened the doors of those pages to any other readers when I sent them to the NEA. Imagine my amazement that the panelists walked in and stayed.
The day I received the call from Amy Stolls about the fellowship, I was painting a shallow closet (not the walk-in kind) to hold my desk and books. Recently my family and I had to move to a more expensive town, and this meant giving up my writing office. I will use the NEA funding in part for a writing space. Like many writers, my “career” has been subject to luck and the for-profit market. I am grateful to the U.S. taxpayers and lawmakers who support the NEA, for proclaiming through this funding that there are things that make us human that aren’t done for profit, and these unprofitable endeavors benefit our country. I will work hard to earn this support.