Emi Cohen
Emi started writing novels when she was twelve years old. A lot has happened since then, and now she’s working with a literary agency to write books for twelve-year-olds. Most of her projects involve folklore (Japanese, Jewish, or both), and complicated family histories which take a few hundred pages to sort out.
At Brandeis, she’s hard at work on her Creative Writing Honors Thesis. It imagines the afterlife as a sort of cosmic motel; when someone dies, they’re assigned an individual room containing the “ending” they truly deserved on Earth. Some people's deserved endings are pleasant… others, decidedly not.
Emi’s advice for students who are considering studying creative writing at Brandeis is to simply try it out for themselves. She says that, while workshops can seem daunting to new students, there’s a reason they’re open to everyone regardless of major—learning to write is a highly experiential (and experimental) process, and creative work is always richer when a wide variety of skills are brought to the table.