During a visit to a medium, Julie Bogart’s deceased great-grandmother revealed herself. Wielding a hatpin, she poked Julie from behind and ordered her to “get her voice out there.”
Because Julie does not argue with crazy old dead ladies wielding hatpins, her voice is forthcoming.
Julie grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. She was an overly sensitive kid, and her mom encouraged her to channel her “sensitivities” into art. “Paint the sunset for me,” she’d suggest. Julie attempted to please her mother with her artistic brilliance, but when she pulled out the watercolors, all she managed to create was a bland, gray version of a sunset that more closely resembled vomit. Her drawings, mostly stick figures, didn’t fare much better.
Instead, she turned to an activity at which she excelled: reading. She read everything, from The Pokey Little Puppy to The Babysitter’s Club series to Christopher Pike’s gory tales to Ayn Rand and Kate Chopin and Lorrie Moore.
She started writing, too: short stories, the occasional bad poem, but, mostly, she found herself writing nonfiction, typically in the form of personal essays or thinly veiled “fiction.” She was and continues to be fascinated by the complexities of relationships—romantic, familial, friendships—and her writing became a continuous exploration of the relationships around her.
After a few angst-ridden years of college, filled with the appropriate amount of clichéd self-discovery, Julie graduated with a BA in Creative Writing and English from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She then moved to Washington, DC and worked as an editor at a small nonprofit organization.
Realizing that she was neither an editor nor a political phony, Julie fled the nation’s capitol and moved to Boston, Massachusetts to enroll in Emerson College’s MFA in Creative Writing program. Here, she perfected the art of the workshop, churned out 300 pages of memoir, and defended her thesis in December of 2007.
Her work has appeared in Sirens Magazine, North End Scene Boston Magazine, Boston’s Weekly Dig, Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, and the Southeast Review.
Julie lives in Brighton, Massachusetts. She does not own a cat. |
