Harvard Authors Profile: Abigail Chachkes ’25 on Romance and Corpse Meditation

It is hard to believe a story about a budding young romance could be inspired by a 16th-century saint starving herself from religious devotion. Yet, the short story “Do It Again” by Abigail Chachkes ’25 was.

Chachkes, a senior in Leverett House, recently won the Cyrilly Abels Short Story Prize for that short story, which the English Department awards each year to an undergraduate female writer. Intrigued by death, sexuality, and religion, Chachkes wanted to see if she could write a story about unique people who are attracted to each other for unique reasons and end up in a very different place from where they started.

The story centers around Mia, a young woman grieving her sister’s death, as her roommate Catherine sets her up with Jack, an expert on burial practices. Mia and Catherine begin the story thinking their upstairs neighbor has died. Mia and Jack end the story in a cemetery, trying to feel close to Mia’s dead sister.

While she doesn’t particularly see herself in any of her characters, Chachkes’s intellectual interests show up strongly in her creative work. Studying both psychology and English, Chachkes is looking to attain a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and pursue the discipline professionally. Her psychological interests find an expressive outlet through her writing.

“Not just having experiences and feeling emotions, but wanting to understand them and articulate them — I think that’s what writing is about, ultimately, a lot of the time,” Chachkes said.

Writing allows Chachkes to explore phenomena that intrigues her. That realization has led her to dedicate significant time to her creative development at Harvard, having taken a creative writing seminar almost every semester.

Her advice for other young writers in the undergraduate community is simple: “Take creative writing seminars.”

Writing has always been a personal endeavor for Chachkes. Recognition or approval of others has never been a driving force in her development as a writer. In fact, she received the recent award unaware of her nomination by faculty.

Chachkes’s style is detail-oriented and unexpectedly blunt, and she doesn’t shy away from specifics. In another writing sample shared with The Crimson, she introduces a character as the type to “do cocaine off people’s collar bones.”

“I definitely like the actual plot itself feeling a little ridiculous,” Chachkes said when asked about how she structures her stories.

To Chachkes, the point is that her stories become a little strange. She wants to engage with the hard topics, the complexities we don’t tend to understand about ourselves.

One of those areas is religion. Her own journey and engagement with religion helped to develop her interest in the practices, institutions, and figures of faith.

“I grew up really engaging with religious thought and religious texts,” she said.

In “Do It Again,” Jack teaches Mia about the Buddhist practice of corpse meditation: pondering in the presence of the body of a beloved. The story ends with the couple at the cemetery, visiting the grave of Mia’s late sister to try the method. There is an aesthetic quality to writing that Chachkes values keeping in mind.

“People know what religion looks like, almost,” she said.

Chachkes explained that there is a visual element that comes with writing about religion. That quiet final landscape in the cemetery is a key image in the story, providing a moment of emotional intimacy between Mia and Jack. Chachkes describes it as “sparse and lonely.”

Other elements of the work were inspired by historical concepts. For instance, the initial idea for “Do It Again” was originally inspired by a peculiar inquiry into religious devotion.

“I was reading about these saints in the 1500s who used to starve themselves,” she said.

Chachkes saw a connection to grief and went from there. She is also taking a class on eating disorders, and the topic connects to her interest in psychology.

Whatever path a student may take, Chachkes encouraged them to keep enjoying self-expression. College, in her mind, is a time to figure out all the little pieces of being a person.

“I tend to also write about things that I’m confused about in terms of myself,” she said.

Continuing to discover herself and take notice of the ever-present importance of storytelling matters in her mind. Chachkes plans to keep letting her values and interests guide her creative flow. As she has seen, it can lead to fascinating and sometimes unexpected results.