Interview With Zoë Geltman by Prem Sitaula ('25)

When you are moving up and down our legendary St. Angela Hall, you might have either noticed or entered the Academic Center. Yes, I mean the ACES center. Inside our always welcoming, exquisite and organized ACES center, you might have noticed a smart-looking lady with magnetic eyes, curly hair, and calm personality at the corner table mostly busy with a computer or a laptop- probably writing emails. If you are an ACES student, you might have already guessed whom I am talking about. Yes, I am talking about the heartbeat of ACES: Zoë Geltman. In this era of advanced technology, the world has turned into a small village. With just your name, we can probably get a glimpse of each other’s major life events. In the saga of our life, apart from such major life events which we can find easily, there are different memories and experiences that enrich and add value to our life. Just to know about Zoë’s life events, we can simply google it. But, today, let’s know a bit more about her passions, hobbies, struggles, learnings, and her overall ups and downs of life.

Prem Sitaula: You are a born and bred New Yorker. Would you mind sharing shortly about your upbringing? 

ZG: First of all, thank you Prem for the best introduction I’ve ever gotten. I will cherish that :) My upbringing: I grew up in Manhattan, on the Upper East Side, a very strange, specific bubble in New York. It’s weird to go there now as I do feel people are pretty sheltered and myopic. But I enjoyed growing up there, for the most part, although I certainly felt a lot of pressure to follow a certain, more traditional, “straight-laced” path. I spent a lot of time spying on my older sister whom I idolized, as well as drawing on my own, roller-blading down city streets with friends, and generally trying very hard to be cool, and most of the time failing. 

PS: Do you remember a time when you cried because of a bad grade?  

ZG: YES. In 5th grade, I got a bad grade on an English test and was absolutely devastated because English was my thing–I prided myself on being thought of as “literary,” so this especially hurt. I’m not even sure what the grade was, because we had a weird grading system at the time, but I think it was the equivalent of a C. My teacher handed me back my test and asked if I had ever thought about getting a tutor and I remember bursting into tears, running all the way home and collapsing on my bed (I’m sure this memory is a conflation with a dream since I didn’t live that close to school).

PS: Most of the college students these days are obsessed with Blockchain technology and Digital currency. What was a major trend or fuss at the time you were in college?

ZG: As Adrienne wrote in your wonderful parting interview with her, social media was definitely the huge thing when I was in college–although, I’m a little older than Adrienne so it was all just being born when I was in college (definitely no Instagram yet). It was the very early days of Facebook. I remember some people refusing to join because they thought it was “stupid” and others immediately creating accounts. You could kind of judge what kind of person someone was by whether they were on Facebook or not: were they an iconoclast? A sheeple? Sadly, I immediately signed up.

PS: Today you are involved in different writings from poetries to plays, what was the initial enthusiasm that drove you to be a writer?

ZG: I always wrote. I read a lot of biographies of sad women writers when I was younger (of Carson McCullers, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Clarice Lispector, for example), and I think I had this romantic dream of being like them: the glamor, the despair, the intellectual salons–I ate it all up. Throughout school, I always had some little short story that I was working on. I started writing plays, though, when I was in a play that I thought would completely change my life and career, and then… it didn’t. I’m actually glad for that disappointment because it made me realize I just needed to write the plays I wanted to be in. 

PS: Most writers say that they read a lot. How is your reading habit? How often did you read books outside the courses during your college years? How often do you read now?

ZG: My reading habit goes up and down. In fact, in college, I didn’t read much for pleasure during the academic year, and then would read a lot over the summers. These days, I read The New Yorker pretty much every day, and then I’m always reading usually a novel or a book of short stories, although I just finished the non-fiction In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying, a really beautiful account of a Buddhist monk as he goes on a “wandering retreat,” becomes homeless and destitute, and grapples with his attachment to different layers of his identity. One of my favorite fiction books is The Pisces by Melissa Broder about a woman who has serious writer’s block with her dissertation on the gaps in Sappho’s oeuvre and who ends up moving to LA and falling in love with a merman. It is cacklingly funny and absurd and surreal and really beautiful. 

PS: I think we have come to the most important part of our talk; you are a fantastic actor already praised by The New York Times. How did all this start and how do you feel to be an actor? 

ZG: Hahah. Thank you, Prem, for doing your research. Yes, I am an actor! Similar to my history with writing, it seems like I’ve always acted. When I was younger, I took acting classes and was in school shows. When I was in college, I didn’t major in Theater, and couldn’t really admit to myself that it was what I wanted to do until the very last minute–right after graduation. And now that it’s been… many years, I certainly don’t regret my decision, but I do wish I had started writing plays sooner. Being an actor has ecstatic highs and devastating lows where you feel utterly powerless–every time I’m in between projects, or I get rejected from something, I think I’ll never work again. But then, when I’m striding around a stage and commanding an audience, when people are moved by the story I’m helping to tell, it really is one of the best, most powerful and gratifying feelings.

PS: Now, let’s come to St. Joseph’s College. Please share your journey with our special, more than a century old legendary SJCNY?

ZG: My friend Megan Murtha, a playwright whose plays I have acted in, and who used to be the Assistant Director at ACES, forwarded me the notice back in 2019 that ACES was looking for a tutor/advisor and I jumped at the opportunity!

PS: In your opinion, what is the uniqueness of an ACES student?

ZG: ACES students are so unique! The very fact of being in ACES means you have a different perspective than most other U.S.-born, native English speakers. It is really fun when I get to hear about not just how students are doing in classes, or what the state some paper or other is in, but also what their plans for the future are, or their philosophical outlook on some aspect of life, or something they’re currently obsessed with. That’s why I love the narrative essays that you all do at the beginning of the year. It really gives me a chance to get to know you as people, not just students.

PS: How can an ACES student make his/her ACES experience a “never to be forgotten experience?”

ZG: Take advantage of all the opportunities! Explore New York! Explore Brooklyn! I would also say, and I wish someone had told me this when I was in college, take classes that you are genuinely interested in and excited by, not just ones that fulfill your major and core requirements.