Then and Now with Eli Kourtis

Eli Kourtis’s piece “submechanophobia, or the feminine urge to be an airplane on the lakebed” guides us with a deft and powerful narrative voice to look, see consider as pieces of a wrecked plane and its passengers emerge from the water. Eli shares a bit about who they were ten years ago, where they are now, and their dreams for the future:

Eli Kourtis

“I was an honest-to-God child when the first issue of Split Lip dropped — I would’ve been freshly eleven years old, in grade six, absolutely killing it in my language arts classes but having no idea that I’d stick with English and writing for the rest of my life. My eleven-year-old self wanted to be a scientist, actually; I was obsessed with computers and outer space and also the prospect of being rich. And, while I’m proud of her for wanting to be a woman in STEM, she was way too confident in her math and science abilities.

In the ten years since Split Lip released its first issue, I’ve grown six inches, graduated from both elementary and high school, and completely changed the trajectory of my life about five times. Wild that it took so long to find a path that I’m comfortable on; wilder still that it involves long hours staring at a Google Doc and fighting the urge to put my head through my computer screen.

Thinking about my hopes for ten years from now is a little dizzying and far more difficult that I expected it to be. There’s the standard, important stuff — I hope to be happy and relatively healthy and well loved — but most of my hopes are out of my direct control, like wanting to see my writing in bookstores. But, for the next little bit, I’m going to pretend that I’m the arbiter of the universe and nothing is really out of reach. So, yeah, I hope to see my writing in bookstores, and I hope complete strangers fall in love with my characters or feel echoes of themselves in my poems. I hope to write a complete play, from beginning to end, and have it actually be good. I hope to get a cat and name it something stupid. I hope the company I’ve been daydreaming about with my friend actually goes somewhere. I hope I get to be someone’s favourite writer. And I hope my thirty-one year old self is as proud of my twenty-one year old self as I am of my eleven year old self. I hope she thinks I did good.”