Serena Chopra, an assistant professor of creative writing at Seattle University, is a writer, performer and multimedia artist. A published author and recipient of Official Selection at several national and international festivals for her film “Dogana/Chapti,” Chopra has garnered recognition for her innovative creative projects. Recently, she was one of 35 awardees who received a prestigious award from the Creative Writing Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
But before she ever considered being a writer, she aspired to be a ballerina. Chopra was first enrolled in dance classes by her mother at the age of two. Throughout her childhood, she received classical ballet training.
By the time Chopra reached high school, she was dancing upward of 30 hours a week and engaging in several forms of dance—jazz, tap and lyrical. She was always in the studio.
Her hours of dedication and time paid off. Chopra attended the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder on a dance scholarship. In a contemporary program that values a range of styles, Chopra quickly found that her classical training clashed with the modernity of the curriculum.
“I was shocked. I had never taken modern [dance] really before, and it was sort of upsetting to roll around on the floor. I just wanted to be a ballerina.”
Initially, Chopra resisted the idea that she needed to expand her scope of movement. After clashing with the dance faculty over expectations, she decided to take a year off from the dance program. This led her to begin taking creative writing classes. Prior, she had only read a little bit of poetry, sometimes jotting down her own poems in long-forgotten journals, but she had never studied it or known anything about its history.
The first poetry class she ever took was with a graduate student named Ian. Given that Ian was teaching from a textbook, the environment was low-stakes, allowing Chopra and her peers to be unafraid of exploring.
“It made for a really good balance of understanding that creative writing is about joy and play and laughter, but also has this serious critical element to it. I was drawn to it because I think, naturally, I am a playful person. It’s what I love about dance and movement.”
Ian’s class not only changed how Chopra understood language, but it also changed how she understood dance. Previously, Chopra’s experience with dance training was characterized by a desire to perfect every pose and shape. The bounds of how she allowed herself to move were strict, but studying modern poetry and modern dance alongside one another showed her that creativity doesn’t always need to be confined to rigid rules. It can be elastic.
“What I started to understand is it’s not just about perfection and getting to the step and getting to the pose. It’s about moving. It’s about journey. It’s about play. It’s about being alive.”
This realization led Chopra to a newfound love for ballet. Along with having Gabriel Masson, a well-renowned performer, as a teacher who had given her the most essential piece of life advice she’d ever gotten about art—“If you only focus on the steps, you’re going to miss the momentum”—she was no longer worried about being the best dancer in the room.
Once she graduated from her undergraduate program in 2006, Chopra applied to CU Boulder’s Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program to continue dancing with Masson. Immersing herself further in the study of poetry, questions regarding art and language as forms of liberating craft began circulating in her mind. Chopra developed her ideas under the instruction of Elizabeth Robinson, Julie Carr and Selah Saterstrom.
Saterstrom, in particular, was a formative teacher for Chopra. With a focus on divinatory poetics, a framework that views reading and writing as forms of embodiment, Saterstrom’s methodology inspired Chopra to become more critical of curricula that failed to include diverse perspectives and voices. She identified hypocrisy within the program: she was on a diversity scholarship, but was being asked to write like the authors she was reading, who were primarily white and male.
“We are trained in a certain way to read and what to read and how to read it. Anything that falls outside of that is illegible.”
Chopra is deeply interested in writers who have the ability to make logic slippery. Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and George Oppen are but a handful who use language as a medium to undo constructs and preconceived notions of how we think language is supposed to operate. “Orlando” by Woolf and “Helen in Egypt” by H.D. are two of her favorite books. However, Chopra was not always a bookworm.
“I’ll tell you a secret about me, which my mom always laughs at, is that I didn’t like to read much as a kid. I read two books on repeat.”
As a child, Chopra found the plots of most children’s books to be unamusing, except for Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” and Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” which were Chopra’s repeat reads. The first time she read L’Engle’s novel, she was eight, and it was then that she became conscious of time as a notion. She read it all through high school, along with Alcott’s novel, because she loved the character Jo March, whom she described as a “feminist icon.”
Once Chopra completed her MFA, she pursued and obtained a doctorate at the University of Denver. Shortly after graduating in 2018, she moved to Seattle upon accepting a teaching offer from Seattle U. Many of the courses she teaches are adaptations of graduate-level classes she taught at Naropa University in Boulder while a graduate student. Her course “Queer Experiences and Poetic Memoir” is one of them.
A few of Chopra’s research interests include trauma writing and the problematics of neoliberal healing narratives, which involve critiquing how we process grief within capitalistic structures. More often than not, we compartmentalize our pain and frustration, pretending that the process of grieving is linear, but such is never the case. Chopra has struggled with this experience in academic and personal spheres.
Her course “Writing Grief” was born out of the recognition that people lack spaces to grieve in community, especially after an incident on campus in February 2023 when a shelter-in-place order was issued in response to an armed carjacking in the Broadway garage.
Chopra recalls being in the Garrand building, teaching “The Feminist Epic,” when a text notification from Public Safety was sent to student phones informing them to stay put or immediately take shelter. Anxieties were particularly high this afternoon as this circumstance followed shortly after the Michigan State University shooting.
Growing up not very far away from where the 1999 Columbine High School massacre took place and having lost people to gun violence, Chopra went into panic as she found herself in a nightmare come to life.
“I just kind of stood back, and the students took over. They put desks against the door. They closed the blinds. They knew exactly what to do.”
Once campus was cleared of any threat, Seattle U sent a message informing everyone that they could return to regular activity.
“All of us were just like, ‘I go to my next class? I guess I’ll go.’ I canceled my next class…This is no commentary of the university, but the way we societally deal with trauma is to just pick ourselves up and to go on because the system can’t wait…It occurred to me then that we don’t know how to grieve. We’re not given permission to grieve. We’re not given permission to grieve as a community.”
Only in its third quarter, “Writing Grief” pushes students to practice grieving together. Toward the end of the course, an exhibition is hosted, encouraging Seattle U community members to recognize grief as a communal occurrence and that we do not have to be isolated in the pain we experience. She hopes to deepen her research for this course with the NEA fellowship and continue developing a book that will be a lyric exploration of loss.
Outside of the classroom, Chopra takes ballet classes with Annie de Vuono at Dance Conservatory Seattle. She also enjoys a wide variety of outdoor activities, such as hiking, sailing, paddleboarding, but especially writing on the porch in the sun with her cat, Clo. An avid gardener, mainly of flowers, Chopra is currently tending to dahlias, gladiolas, irises and zinnias, along with many more.
She is most proud of allowing herself to become both a writer and dancer instead of abandoning one or the other in pursuit of a singular path.
“A family member of mine once told me, ‘You need to pick a lane and focus. Are you going to be a dancer or a writer?’…I’m really proud of my younger self that was gritty enough to know not to take that and for knowing that I didn’t have to pick a lane. That I could make a life out of poetry and dance and filmmaking, and continue to expand that list of things, too… That’s really hard to do. No one’s gonna legitimize you as an artist. You have to do it for yourself. And I think I’m pretty proud that my younger self just was like, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna be an artist,’ and did it.”
