A Visit to Topping's with a First Year Published Poet

Turning perfect rhymes into perfect grades

“My past is a present

because present may be my poison

but I will always look toward the future

peppered with sunlight, that peaks

through the clouds.”

Tomorrow, by Cecelia Allentuck

“This is good,” says Cecelia Allentuck, pointing to a copy of Satoshi Yagisawa's Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. We're standing in the fiction section of Topping & Co. at 9am on a Tuesday to chat about languages, university, and I'll See You Tomorrow, her book of poetry that was recently featured in an event at her local Barnes and Noble, an American bookstore chain. 

She’s sold almost 400 copies in six months and has already been featured in Massachusetts newspapers — her move across the world is her next big adventure. But how to balance academic work and creative writing without losing passion for either? 

Over the course of our trek through Topping’s, we stop by the Queer Studies, Young Adult, and Art History sections. Her favourite section, though, is unsurprising — we spend the most time surrounded by language books.

Allentuck studies Italian and Spanish — foreign languages are her way to gather more information that excites her about writing. “It really helps you explore more ways of seeing the world.”

I dragged the Massachusetts local out to meet me just seven hours after she touched down from a holiday in Italy. We chat enthusiastically about the Naples airport and the Trevi Fountain in Rome. Italy wasn't just a leisure trip to fight the seasonal depression, though — Allentuck spent most of her four-day trip journalling, reflecting on her experiences, and honing her tricks of the trade.

Allentuck began writing her first novel at fourteen and began work on I'll See You Tomorrow in the summer after her junior year of high school. She's always been bookish — school cultivated her creative freedom and second grade brought her the chance to write in her first poetry anthology. “I was kind of hooked from then on!”

Predictably, school reading has shaped her writing considerably. Allentuck attributes a lot of her style to intently studying To Kill a Mockingbird in ninth grade. Her biggest inspiration, though, is her personal life and the world around her. “I want to be a part of good change, but there's not many things I can do besides write, so I'm like, ‘That's what I'm meant to do.’”

The catalyst for I'll See You Tomorrow was Amanda Gorman's poetry recital at President Biden’s 2021 inauguration. “I wrote a lot of poems around election time and inauguration time about how it feels being a woman in America and in the world [...] and I started to piece them together.”

Her experiences with depression, anxiety, and grief drive a lot of her writing. Before university, she experienced a great deal of loss in her family and found solace in connecting with others through her poetry. “That was really how I realised I wanted to be a writer [...] I started writing about that loss.”

A self-professed extrovert, Allentuck thinks university has only been a new way to meet people — she still keeps in touch with people she met in freshers’ week. Her creative writing gives her an “edge” in her academic work — and vice versa. Strict word counts on essays have helped her minimise fluff in her poems. “I've always been a person who writes way too much.”

“One of my English teachers told me once, ‘Kill your darlings,’ so whenever I'm trying to make a decision I just go, ‘Kill your darlings, kill your darlings.’” Like many humanities students, Allentuck was close with her English teachers and took the words to heart. “I’ve gotten really into the idea of just getting [the work] done.”

Allectuck told me she gets most of her writing done in the holidays — uni is too exhausting to find the time to write. When she's not able to write she gets anxious, and her perfectionism influences both her academic and creative writing. “When I was 10 […] I would just be in tears for hours erasing and rewriting. That kind of describes the person I am […] Revision is definitely the hardest thing for me.”

No matter how un-poetic the subject matter is, creative writing always finds its way into her essays. “Even if I'm not making up a story I usually start my essays with an opener that's more storylike.”

“My style in prose a lot of times takes on a poetic tone so they work hand in hand together; sometimes my poems are more storylike, sometimes my prose is more poetic.”

Allentuck's favourite format is poetry slams — she tries to get involved wherever she can. “It's the intersection of writing and performance that makes me, me.”

Allentuck, who’s performed since childhood, is now in Mermaids. “They 100% work hand-in-hand with each other,” she says.  “With theatre, you learn how to write about emotions […] but then with prose and poetry it helps my playwriting because I'm able to form a story.”

She’s also a Member Without Portfolio in Inklight, the university's creative writing society, and was featured in the St Andrews Gothic journal last semester. 

What next? Allentuck’s current idea is inspired by one of her biggest fears — artificial intelligence. She’s drawn to the challenge of adapting a play she wrote in high school into flash fiction for the next issue. 

Currently trying to find the time amidst deadline season to edit a novel, it's clear her hopeful and flowing poetic voice will make itself heard again soon. As said in her recent poem Reasons, “The sun may burn/ and the water may freeze/ but their nature is not to destroy you [...] all you must do is laugh on/ sink deep and swim.”

Photo: Cecelia Allentuck