Tiphanie Yanique isn't content remaining within her own mind. Instead, the writer and Tufts alumna (LA '00) enters the minds of others — a coffin dealer, a teen with leprosy, a Gambian priest — in order to weave tales from the threads of hardship and longing. Yanique's book, entitled "How to Escape from a Leper Colony," was released on March 2, marking her entrance into the published world of storytelling.
And what a debut it is. "How to Escape from a Leper Colony" has already received considerable praise; it was featured in Oprah's O Magazine and garnered Yanique a spot among The Boston Globe's list of 16 up−and−comers for 2010.
The collection of stories is a three−year project born in part out of Yanique's Tufts experience and her post−grad research as a Fulbright Scholar. She majored in English after toying with the notion of a psychology concentration at Tufts. "Psychology classes were actually among the best classes for creative writing because they taught me about how human beings work," Yanique said.
Like many Jumbos, Yanique also caught the "active citizenship" bug during her time at Tufts, participating in the International Orientation program and adding a concentration in Peace and Justice Studies to her education. "I began to think about my writing in a more socially conscious way," Yanique said. "I didn't want to write just vapid poems and navel−gazing stories."
For Yanique, a Virgin Islands native, socially conscious writing means contextualizing many of her stories within Caribbean culture and exploring issues of identity formation. After graduating from Tufts in 2000, Yanique studied Caribbean literature in Jamaica and Trinidad under a dual−country Fulbright Scholarship.
"My grandmother's generation didn't have much access to American pop culture, but my parents' and my generation have incredible access," Yanique said of life in the Virgin Islands. "The Virgin Islands are still having a conversation about identity. They have a very American influence but a Caribbean identity at the same time."
Yanique explained that although she wasnt consciously moving toward a collection, the stories she developed during and after her studies contained similar emotional cores, and eventually they morphed into "How to Escape."
The stories are varied in length — from 10 pages to a 60−page novella — as well as in content. Yanique said she used each story as a way to experiment with storytelling techniques, which included taking on a variety of voices — male, female, young and old.
"Emotionally they're all trying to do the same thing, which is talk about what it means to be longing for attachment — either to a person or a physical place," Yanique said.
This theme of longing often makes for stories that appear tragic, but Yanique, who speaks of her characters as if they could speak back, believes that unhappy circumstances don't necessarily make for unhappy protagonists. "I think it's just that life is kind of hard, as beautiful as Earth is," she said. "Some of the characters are dealing with difficult stuff, but I think many of them handle their difficulties with sensitivity and grace."
While at Tufts, Yanique took creative writing classes with Professor Jonathan Strong and completed an undergraduate Senior Honors Thesis under his supervision: a 150−page novel set in the Virgin Islands. The thesis, Strong said, was the single longest fiction project he's had from a student in the last 10 years, and it provided a sample of the sort of flavor Yanique would bring to "How to Escape from a Leper Colony."
"Her thesis had in it the seeds of a very fertile, chock−full−of−people imagination," Strong said. "It was clear to me that this was someone who had the possibility of going on to be a writer because she doesn't just strike in one note. She was exploring a lot of territory and a lot of different kinds of people."
What's the Tufts alumna up to next? Yanique, who is an assistant professor of creative writing at Drew University, is in the process of crafting two novels and a poetry collection — a multi−tasker, she almost always works on more than one project at once.
"As an artist, I don't ever want to bore myself," Yanique said. "I'm definitely interested in flexing my muscles and experimenting."
"[Yanique] has the imaginative ability to enter into lots of people convincingly," Strong said. "You feel like you're not being led down a single road; you're opening up to a lot of people ... which leads me to believe that [Yanique] has got a lot more to tell."
"How to Escape From a Leper Colony" is now available at the Tufts University bookstore. To learn more about Yanique, visit tiphanieyanique.com.
