Press Play ▶️ An Interview with Irena Smith

"My ADHD diagnosis was liberating [It gave me] permission to be who I am and helped me understand how I work and what motivates me"

Look, anyone who vociferously defends the Oxford comma is a gem in my book. Irena Smith will die on that hill, which I deeply appreciate, but she’s also one of those beacon-like people who evolve before your eyes. Ex: She learned English at 9, went on to be an English major…and a PhD, took 25 years to realize she was a writer, and now has multiple publications (in English!). More recently, an ADHD diagnosis helped her re-envision herself as a writer and a human. I appreciate anyone whose creative life is transformed by realizing neurodivergence— it’s a big deal in my house! I think you’ll love the irrepressible curiosity & energy Irena brings to the Long Pause party. Enjoy! 💖

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Explain yourself. Who are you, how do you identify as an artist / creative?

I’m a Soviet émigré, a high school underachiever, a wife, a mother of three children, and a wearer of several hats that say “former” on them—former humanities lecturer, former undergraduate admissions officer at Stanford, former college admissions counselor. Most currently, I’m the author of The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays, a memoir structured as a series of responses to real college application essay prompts. I also write two Substacks—Personal Statements and The Curmudgeon’s Guide to College Admissions.

Ironically, I spent 18 years as a private college counselor helping hundreds of students brainstorm, develop, and revise their college essays before it occurred to me that I, too, had a story to tell.

You’re here because you’ve gone through a fallow period where you didn’t produce much work. How did your Long Pause come about? How long did it last?

I’ve always written, but it never felt serious, like writing writing. I wrote papers as an English major and longer papers as a grad student in Comparative Literature and occasional journal entries and, every once in a great while, snippets that I later realized fell into the category of creative first-person nonfiction. But I never wrote intentionally and consistently, unless you count academic writing. I’ve always been good with external structure and deadlines (nothing focuses the mind like panic), so academic writing felt comfortable and rewarding. The problem (for me) was that no one read my academic writing except the professor who had assigned the paper, or maybe the dozen people who might have read my article in the Henry James Review about James’s dialogic imagination and polyphony in The Golden Bowl.

At one point, when I was working on my dissertation, my father, who is a capital-C Contrarian, asked me why I was writing about other authors instead of writing my own books, and I told him I was writing a book—it just happened to be about other authors. But his question stuck with me, and nagged at me all through my teaching days and my work in admissions and subsequently as a college counselor.

If I’m being completely honest, I’m an attention-seeker (plus, I was voted Most Likely to Talk to Anyone or Anything about Anyone or Anything as a high school senior, a distinction I remain inordinately proud of to this day). I think my father’s question tapped into that, and into this low-level itch that was constantly in the background, like I had more to say. And after my oldest son was diagnosed with autism at age 2 and my entire world turned upside down, my father’s question became even more urgent. The problem was, I wasn’t sure how to write about being the mother of a child with special needs who had her own complicated relationship with language (I learned English when I was 9, after we came to the US). My husband and I went on to have two more children, I started my own college counseling practice, and life got in the way.

It took about 25 years, give or take, for me to gather the snippets I had written over the years, to figure out what story I wanted to tell, and to replace fantasizing about publishing a book with taking steps to actually get it out into the world. I know 25 years sounds like a dauntingly long time, but it wasn’t like I had been writing creatively and then took a 25-year hiatus; it was more that I became a writer through a combination of innate interest, life experience, initiative (which can take a loooong time to build up), and circumstance.

What about your creative practice feels like magic? What feels like science? Was one aspect more affected by your Long Pause?

Magic: when, after hitting dead end after dead end, I suddenly see what needs to come next—like a sentence, or an entire paragraph. It comes out of nowhere and feels like taking dictation from the universe.

There’s also magic in community; I have several writer friends who hold me accountable, who talk me off ledges, and who get that writing can be the best and the absolute worst at the same time.

Science: observable, experientially validated evidence that writing really is a craft. I hate that I came to that realization only recently and that I spent so many years thinking it was rooted in inspiration. Like any craft, it’s actually rooted in… just doing it. I know that seems so stupidly obvious, but this was my big epiphany: the more I write, the more I feel like I know what I’m doing. (On good days, at least.)

Both: seeing psychological incentives (gamification, virtuous feedback loops, motivation) in action. There is definitely some kind of magic in telling myself that whatever I write, even if I’m not in the mood, doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be long. The bar to entry can be super low: just write something. The promise that writing something, anything is better than writing nothing (and that revising the following day is preferable to the terror of the blank page) is scarily powerful. I guess that’s the science, but when it works, it feels like magic.

Check out The Golden Ticket on Bookshop

How did your Long Pause change your creative practice? Has anything shifted in terms of process or medium? What does your work look like on the other side? How has it changed?

I think my Long Pause helped me clarify how and why I write. My happy place is first-person creative nonfiction—essay and memoir—and I’ve also discovered that interaction with the people I’m writing for is essential for me to keep going. As far as medium, having a Substack has transformed my writing life in ways I could not have imagined when I started using the platform in November 2023. It’s given me a perfect container to share my writing and a built-in system of accountability (if even one reader expects a new post every week, I better deliver!). I also love the creative process of putting together each post—combining image and text, writing captions, figuring out the headline—and, of course, the reader interaction. Plus, I’ve met so many extravagantly talented writers here—it feels like the place where all the smart cool kids hang out.

Did you engage with other creative practices while you were blocked from your primary mode of expression during a Long Pause? What did you do? What did you learn?

I took a bunch of jewelry-making classes at a bead shop (now closed, sadly) near my house and went to town making earrings, necklaces, and bracelets. There was something incredibly gratifying about twisting wire and stringing beads and discovering patterns and color combinations.

I also started taking improv theater classes with my husband, and that was revelatory. I’m still a total amateur, in both senses of the word: most of the time I have no idea what I’m doing, and I love it. There’s something incredible in putting together a story on a bare stage with only an audience prompt to go on, and I think it’s because of improv that I really understood the mechanics of how a story is built—character, relationship, location, want.

There’s a ton of research that connects movement with positive outcomes for creative work, trauma recovery, and a host of other benefits. What kinds of physical practices help you access or heal your creativity?

I was diagnosed with ADHD six months before my memoir was published, which explained a lot—the last minute sprint to the finish, the lack of any kind of overarching plan, the tendency to work from a place of intuition, the chaos on my desk or pretty much anywhere in the house I’ve been. The ADHD diagnosis was actually liberating in giving me permission to be who I am and helping me understand how I work and what motivates me. Movement, and frequent changes of scenery, are my creative oxygen: I’ll write standing up at the kitchen counter or at the dining room table or at a coffee shop (there’s a lot to be said for ambient noise). Walking, too—I go on long “thinking walks,” or “plot walks” as a novelist friend of mine calls them. Just putting one foot in front of the other seems to shake loose ideas and connections that don’t readily come when I’m sitting still.

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Irena Smith emigrated from Russia when she was nine years old, and after swearing up and down that she would never learn English, she went on to major in English and receive a PhD in Comparative Literature—only to discover that a dissertation examining semantic and geographic displacement in the novels of Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov was not the ticket to fame and riches that she thought it would be. The logical next move, of course, was to become an admissions officer at Stanford and then to spend almost two decades working as a private college admissions counselor in Palo Alto, practically in the shadow of Stanford University, while raising three children who struggled with developmental delays, depression, anxiety, and learning differences. In 2023, she published a memoir, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays, which describes all of the above as a series of responses to college application essay prompts.

The Golden Ticket won the 2024 IPPY Silver Award in Essay and the 2023 Sarton Award Gilda Prize, emboldening Irena to turn to writing full time. Now, instead of guiding students through writing college essays, she is working on a second memoir and also writes two Substacks, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to College Admissions and Personal Statements. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she enjoys eavesdropping on conversations in public places, petting cats (her own and those she meets while walking), and championing the Oxford comma.

Find Irena’s writing on one—or both!—of her Substacks, Personal Statements or The Curmudgeon’s Guide to College Admissions. Her recently published award-winning memoir, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays is available wherever books are sold.