Elle Nash Interviews Allie Rowbottom

I started writing toward the end of my undergrad years. I guess I’d been writing throughout, like, I was good at papers and would write them for my friends, a little side hustle. And I had a job blogging for a now defunct luxury lifestyle magazine. But I didn’t take it seriously as a career until my roommate was like, “You should be a real writer, like Carrie Bradshaw.” Hilarious in retrospect, but at the time I was like, “Oh, that would be nice. I would like to do that.” So I started taking writing classes. Then I went to an MFA program and afterward a PhD because I was like, “They pay you to go to school and teach and write, why wouldn’t I do that?”