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Nina Li Coomes, Creativity, and the True Power of Imagination

The English Department is excited to welcome Nina Coomes to our major. She is a Lecturer and Japanese/American writer who believes in helping each student protect the flame of creativity that lives inside of them. I was able to sit down with Nina to learn a little more about her history and what goals she has to her students and herself.
"My family, we came here from Japan in 2001, and we spent the first four years in rural Illinois, which was a real experience for us. Then we moved to Albany Park, which is why I got my undergrad at UChicago, and then my graduate degree at Northwestern." 
Nina didn't start out with a focus on being a Writer, or even an Educator, "[At UChicago] I was in a major that only exists there called Comparative Human Development. It was a degree that required a lot of interviewing and a lot of asking people about how they make meaning in their life or what mattered to them. I thought I was going to be a social worker, and I grew up in Japan--I am half Japanese--and I realized at the end of my undergrad that if I were to go into social work it would be very likely that my entire life would be monolingual, that my professional life would be only in English. I realized a little too late that I didn't want that, so I spent a year floundering and then working internships and trying to figure it out, and then I landed a job as a news producer for a Japanese news network. The network was like in the way that like CNN has a Tokyo bureau, we were the New York bureau for news in Japan. There, I found that my degree was actually super useful, as [the job] was a lot of walking up to people on the street and just asking 'Hey, what do you think of 9/11?' so a lot of trying to ask Americans stuff and interview and research."
She then took a role at Harvard as a research assistant. "That was also similar, kind of like asking big questions but mostly a lot of admin work, and both of those jobs at the end of the day found me wanting to make sense of what I've done in the day of work, but on a on a more creative or beautiful level, not necessarily just what I had done right, not just the five-minute clip that I had produced. So, I started writing essays and then a mentor told me about a new MFA in Chicago. Since I was looking for a way to get back to my creativity, I applied. Suddenly, that was not just my, I don't want to say hobby, but it was something I was doing reflexively, but I had never allowed myself to entertain the idea that I could be a Writer. And so getting into that program was kind of the first time all those things came together that way."
After obtaining her degree, Nina got a position working as a Writer for United Airlines. "I was there three years, and I am a big proponent of being really pragmatic about money as creatives, like that was a fine job for what it was, but there were some things that were coming out of the woodwork that were mismatches with what I valued in life and what I cared about. So, I started to look for other day jobs, and it's not that I was not looking to go into academics, but it just so happened that Nami Mun, who was one of my thesis readers in graduate school and taught probably the most influential two classes that I took there, put this up to her social media feeds. [Seeing the post] I, for one moment, allowed myself to imagine a life with summer break, a life with Nami and other creative intellectuals as colleagues, a life teaching others to write."
As she has begun to settle into her role as Lecturer, Nina has come to enjoy her role, much more than she initially allowed herself to imagine. "Two things that come to mind when I think about my life at Loyola are, first of all, I'm sure so many people say this, but the students that I've worked with have been really authentic and down to earth. And this class, especially my UCLR that I'm teaching is the first time I've ever taught a class like this, it's about speculative fiction, and the class itself is really speculative in the way, like there's not a ton of like what you might consider traditional classwork, instead we create, we think,  draw things from memory, and the class is game which is great. As the semester goes on I find that my students are starting to open up about what it is that they care about in their real lives. In in my previous job, I had a team of three people, but mostly I worked by myself, and to be in touch with all of these students and their real lives has been really, really grounding. The second thing I love [about working here] is that I walk to work; and that sounds really trivial, but what I mean by that is, I walk to work every day and I feel the change of the seasons on my body, I see my students out and about, I say hello to people. This job has fully plugged me into what it means to live in the city of Chicago, in the neighborhood of Rogers Park, in this community of students and faculty, and workers and writers, and I feel like a full person; I feel embodied and that has been really a gift that I could not have seen coming."
When it comes to her approach in the classroom Nina is ready to try whatever generative methods she believes will work for her students. "I'm a big fan and borrower of Linda Barry's work, the Cartoonist. She has this incredible book called Syllabus, which is just like all of the syllabuses of her classes that she's taught. at the University of Trigon, I want to say. She has a philosophy of list making and of breaking down the preciousness of art making; just being like, no, you just have to do it. It doesn't matter if you feel like you can't draw Batman, you have to draw Batman. So I borrow from that. [For my students] I think I have one main goal which is that I want to help them protect the thing inside of them that wants to make stuff. And that can look a lot of different ways, like I don't really want to bog their creativity down with what can sometimes be perceived as busy work. 
Also I have been thinking a lot about--like all professors and all writers I'm sure--generative AI and what it means and without trying to be abstinence only about it. When I started this job I was talking to Suzanne (Bost) and she said something about thinking about AI in terms of 'Why is it that students feel that the things they think, the things they've imagined, are not worthwhile, and rather they should have a machine do that for them?' and so in my Speculative Fiction we're talking about speculative literature, but the real thing I want to do is say 'If you can imagine something, that is your superpower.' To be able to imagine anything and it doesn't matter if you go into marketing or if you go into science or whatever, to be the kind of person who can think, 'Well what if this was a different way?' I feel like I'm preaching but it's so it's so important to help that thought process."
"In my classes we're doing it all! We've had music, we've had food, I've made them look at a painting for the length of time it took to finish a lifesaver, things like that. I got some feedback that some of the students wanted to do some less writing heavy exercises, so we've also been drawing a little bit too. Nothing is off limits."
As Nina looks for what her next steps and future at Loyola can look like she hopes that collaboration can play a big part in what's next. "I think it would be really cool to collaborate with other writers, other professors, other departments. And that can mean teaching classes with other people or hosting events with other folks, but I'm interested in stretching out across the department, and the school, with curiosity towards other folks. I also just, I want to take full advantage of this chance where I'm being asked--and what a privilege it is to be asked this--to stand up in front of people and say, 'Yes, I'm a a writer'. [To me] that looks like actually tackling the third revision of my novel in a real way, selling manuscripts, writing essays that I want to write, just encompassing the same kind of generativity and creativity that I'm trying to protect in my students."
So what does Nina's writing docket look like? "[Well] I'm working on so many things! Currently I'm in edits for an essay for The Eater, which is coming on Wednesday, about the Yakult Ladies (See link for essay in "Department Announcements" below). Do you know what Yakult is? That's like a really small little probiotic drink that you can buy in supermarkets in the West, but in Japan and other parts of Asia, they're actually delivered by women on bicycles and you flag the ladies down and buy them. So I am editing an essay about that. Otherwise I've got this novel, which is speculative climate fiction, that I am working on. I also am turning my attention towards a second manuscript of essays about whaling, specifically in Japan, which is one of the last industrial commercial whaling nations, which, you know, as someone who loves whales it is like a sore spot, but also as a Japanese person, I understand it is quite complicated. There have been a lot of scientific and Poli-Sci Social Science books written about this, but not a lot that's from the human experience. I'm overall interested in why people eat what they eat or why we put meaning to certain foods or stuff like that."
You would think that someone juggling so much would have very little for recreational reader, but with Nina, you would be wrong. "I'm a big reader. I am a huge CPL (Chicago Public Library) fan. I'm constantly borrowing things from the library. I'm rereading Tara Westover's memoir, Educated, and then I'm reading a novel called Liquid, which is really prescient and kind of depressing, but it's about a woman who graduated from her English PhD and can't get a job and therefore turns her professional academic attention to marrying rich. And it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek comedy, workplace commentary. Right now I'm finishing Eve Ewing's book, Original Sins, which is not necessarily fun, but very eye-opening. I think one of my favorite quotes for Eve is, she was saying something to the effect of 'Sure, Elon Musk has a lot of power and a lot of money, but I would beg to differ that I have a much better imagination. Our ability to imagine, to create, that's where we're betters of these folks, and that has to be what we draw upon, you know?' I love that quote, it was the first time it clicked for me that if you can just look at a situation and imagine a different way, well that's all it really takes."