When Nicole Callihan ran into a classmate from middle school a few years ago, she was stunned by his surprise over her success. “He was so shocked that I wasn’t strung out on drugs or dead. He said he couldn’t believe that I was alive and not only that but that I had actually made a life for myself,” Callihan said. “I was like ‘oh wow, I didn’t realize I was that bad off.’”
Considering how tough her childhood was, it does seem quite remarkable that Callihan has become a successful writer, poet and language lecturer at NYU. But to hear Callihan talk about her life and her experiences, it is not surprising that she was able to overcome so many obstacles. She displays an exceptional amount of optimism and joy in everything going on around her.
Callihan works as a language lecturer at NYU teaching the freshman writing course, Writing the Essay. It is a class focused mainly on learning expression through essays. When she walks into the classroom, her excitement to be in class shows on her face and though many of her students are not excited about writing, they seem excited to be in class with Callihan.
She also works in the New York Public School system teaching autistic children poetry. “It’s all about connecting for that single second even, just like that moment of connection,” Callihan said. Even though she gets a great amount of joy from working with the children, she knows she could not do it all the time and welcomes the contrast between working with college students and developmentally disabled children.
When she was growing up, however, she would not have believed she would be so successful. Her family moved around a lot when she was young. She went to 26 schools before reaching high school. Most of her family on her father’s side did not graduate from high school. Her mom grew up in foster homes and dropped out of high school, but later got a GED and went to medical school. “I come from a long line of misery. No one has ever worked a job they loved. Nobody even thinks of a job as something you love.”
When she was 15, she sank into a bad depression. Her parents were divorced. She was living with her father, and she was not talking to her mother. It was then that she started writing. “I felt very voiceless, and I started writing a lot. I would keep these notebooks and not too long after that I started crafting things around that,” Callihan said.
Her writing, especially her fiction, takes on a very personal, autobiographical tone. She said she sometimes uses her writing to expose her fears and get rid of them. One example of this is her short story, “The Gumball Machine.” “It says that my husband, who wasn’t even my husband at the time, it says that he thinks that I would be a cold mother, which he would never say and for some reason writing it helped get rid of the fear that he would actually think it,” Callihan said. “It helps me realize which aspects of my life I’m just fictionalizing and which ones are real.”
When she first went to college she planned on being pre-med, but she noticed that she kept going back to writing and decided after college to pursue an MFA in poetry at NYU. It was a drastic move from Oklahoma but Callihan had a feeling that New York City held something she wanted. “It was always just this magical, mythical place. You move to New York because if you can make it here you can make it anywhere,” Callihan said. “I’ve been in New York for almost 13 years, I still get excited when I fly in and see the skyline.”
While working on her poetry degree she began waiting tables to make ends meet. She continued waiting after she received her degree but she said she knew it was a “shady” lifestyle. She realized it was time to get out after an incident with mice. “There were six little baby mice in the bathtub and my boyfriend, the chef, was drunk. We had to get rid of them and he dropped them in the toilet one by one and flushed them between each drop. And I remember thinking that night pretty clearly that this is not the life I want to live,” Callihan said.
Callihan had the sense to move on from waiting tables and go back to NYU for an MFA in fiction, which led to her current career as a language lecturer. Optimism about life is the quality she attributes most to her success. “I really believe that things will be fine,” Callihan said. “I just celebrate everything that’s good.” She also is not hesitant about trying new and different things.
Of the many hobbies she has tried over the years, the one she has found most exciting is learning the flying trapeze. She cannot do her flying routine right now because she is pregnant with her first child but she said she loves the way it feels to be upside down. “I think the link between body and mind is so intense and there’s nothing like swinging on a trapeze to really feel free,” Callihan said. Her gravity defying feats on the trapeze are not far off from her approach to life as well.
