I would bet that there’s one person every undergrad in the Carnegie Mellon English Department knows. Her name is on hundreds of emails in our inboxes. We all run to her office with questions about our schedules, knocking timidly on her door, hoping we’re not intruding as her fingers clack away on her keyboard. She’s our go-to resource for all of our concerns. And if we do happen to ask a professor or another advisor a scheduling question first, the conversation usually somehow ends with: “Talk to Kelly Delaney.”
* * *
As she walks over, smiles, and takes a seat beside me in Maggie Murph Café on a Thursday afternoon smack in the middle of midterms, one of the first things I notice is her dress. It’s button down, tan with delicate red details worked into a bold pattern of birds and butterflies, made of a material that reminds me of Corduroy the Bear in those picture books. I notice how sophisticated it looks paired with a green and white beaded necklace. As I sit with my laptop open, waiting to take notes, I wonder how she always seems so put-together. I feel like I’m always dashing to class or to meetings at the last minute, sweaty and out of breath. But she always seems so composed, and now is no different. Even as we’re surrounded by frantic studying, scattered hums of discussion, piercing laughter, and murmurs on the phone in Korean, she sits calmly and folds her hands on the table as she begins speaking.
* * *
After graduating with a degree in fiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh in 2003, Kelly began working for the English Department at Carnegie Mellon in January of 2004. “I knew that I wanted to write,” she begins, cupping her hands around her tea. Her nails are nicely maintained, not with manicured French tips, but with shaped white tips nonetheless. “But I had a son, so I needed something more solid than a lot of my friends were doing, something with health insurance, that kind of thing. A lot of my friends were like, ‘I’m moving to New York or L.A. to see where the wind takes me!’ And I remember thinking, ‘That’s nice, but I can’t really do that.’ So this was really a great job for me. With a part-time office support position in the English department, I had time to work on my writing while also being in a place where I could make grammar jokes with people and they didn’t think I was crazy.”
I’m surprised at how much she sounds like a lot of students I know. Being able to make grammar jokes and not have people think I’m crazy is certainly a perk I enjoy as a writing undergrad here.
“I wanted a stable job,” Kelly continues, brushing her hair back from her face, “but to be able to get my creative side out as well. I started out kind of learning how the department was structured, helping with whatever needed support, like if a printer needed paper or whatever. I did that for about a year. Then coming on full time, I had been working with the coordinator of academic programs, and was in a place to take over that position. Just last year I became coordinator of undergraduate programs, which has been really great, because I have time to work with undergrads and hear what they really need. This job is really perfect for me: I have time to write on the side and time to spend with my family. And I don’t think I could not be with writers and poets on a daily basis.”
* * *
Kelly tells me she grew up in Oakmont, a suburb about fifteen minutes from CMU. “It’s a cute place, not a whole lot happening, but a nice place to grow up.”
Every summer, Oakmont has their annual street fair. Traffic is blocked off, and the brick street of Allegheny River Boulevard is filled with vendors, lined with booths of sandwiches, hotdogs, and fruit, and even a Chinese food booth with fried rice; booths filled with cheap romance and mystery novels from little book shops; booths with pamphlets for non-profits and religious organizations; booths selling dresses and Vera Bradley bags on sale. There are historical societies with little girls in white lace dresses handing out flyers, clowns making balloon hats and flowers, a costumed shark looking like he wandered away from a furry convention. The brick street is perfect for wandering up and down and looking at everything for sale. It seems like the whole town comes to the street fair to see these 40 to 50 or so booths.
* * *
“My family has always been really supportive and pleased with everything I’ve done,” Kelly says in her soft voice. “But my high school had about 150 people in it and any kind of different interest was asking for teasing, which I did not have energy for.” During high school she found an outlet by participating in the Schenley program, a part of Pittsburgh Public Schools’ magnet programs for specialized interests. “It had thousands of people, and was too big for anybody to care what anybody else was doing.” And for Kelly, it gave her a jump-start in ballet, which she had been doing since age four. What had started out with her always dancing around as a little girl, her mom still laughingly remembers, ended up being a committed passion. She took ballet classes at Pittsburgh Ballet Theater, continued dancing all the way until nearly age 19, and was a trainee with Richmond Ballet for a year. But she didn’t stick with it to become a professional. “Ballet’s aesthetics at the time…I didn’t really fit into them,” Kelly says. “And it became apparent that if I wanted to continue dancing, I’d have to move every year. I didn’t want to make my career the only factor of my life that I considered, so after a really long, heart-wrenching process that I kept pretty private, I decided to stop—that was in 1997. My family was really surprised, but I had other goals in life. And then I worked as a waitress for a year, and that made me realize that I wanted to go to college. It’s good honest work, but it’s really tough, and so I started thinking about what else I wanted to do. And I always did like writing.”
However, transition from ballet to academics was tough. “With ballet, it’s so intense that you’re used to being busy all the time,” Kelly says. “But as I grew up, dance took priority—I was so sure I was going to dance. So on the one hand, it prepared me because it was so intense, but I hadn’t really learned how to apply that same intensity to academics. So I had a year or two in college where I kind of floundered. I took some random classes and was content with B’s or C’s, maybe a few A’s. But what really turned me around was that I had my son, Kingston, when I was still in college. I had to finish college because I wanted to set a good example for my son, (who is now eleven), and I had to get serious about life so I could take care of someone. After undergrad, I went to school at CMU to get a masters in Professional writing, and I wanted to get A’s. I found that intensity again, but it was really tiring. I’m glad I’m done now, because it was kind of too much, but it increased my writing skills exponentially. I’m kind of embarrassed to look back at things I wrote before then.”
* * *
Throughout her career, Kelly has transitioned through several kinds of writing. For a while she did freelance writing. “Doing freelance writing at home with a kid is a special kind of hell,” she says. “People who do it all the time, my hat’s off to them, because it’s really hard. Web writing is more flexible, because it’s not a traditional outlet. Now I write for two different websites: MamaPop.com and actclassy.com, and that keeps me writing every day, basically. Actclassy was actually started by my friend Brad who works in Heinz College. It’s fun to write for a humor website—I get to do snarky takes on current events. My latest article was about weird Amazon recommendations, which are a whole genre in themselves. People will sell unicorn meat, there’s a whole line of hand sanitizers with names like, ‘Maybe you touched your genitals…”
* * *
Behind the counter at Maggie Murph Café, there’s a loud grinding noise as someone orders an espresso to keep themselves going for the rest of the day. Kelly is no stranger to hard work at Carnegie Mellon, but she nevertheless feels happy and at home here. As she describes how much she loves the way quirky and seemingly contradictory interests are normal at CMU, she seems to embody the essence of the university. “You don’t get weird looks if you have other creative things that you do,” she says, her eyes brightening. “I love that everyone has their nine-to-five job, but then they have other pursuits that they fill their lives up with. That’s part of what makes people interesting. You don’t just have to be one thing. For instance, my boss has always been supportive of my writing. And I think it’s really cool that if there’s an engineering major who also wants a degree in creative writing, that’s totally normal. I think it’s really good that there’s a generation of people in the world who don’t define themselves by their diploma.”
It’s an attitude that has served Kelly and Tom, her husband of twelve years, well. “I wanted to have a steady job that I was interested in, but it’s important when you’re in an unsteady economy to be adaptable in ways that satisfy you and make you happy,” she says. “Like my husband, he graduated in the middle of the recession and couldn’t get a job. So even though he majored in electrical engineering, he took the chance to explore his interest in music—and because of his background he’s been able to take a more scientific approach with the equipment. He’s also a pretty decent writer, and he works with underground music labels—he does liner notes, and sometimes gives me stuff to edit and critique, which he always regrets because I get into it and rip it apart,” she says, laughing. “I was the stereotypical English major where two plus two equals applesauce, so we always joke that our son has the perfect team of parents. Tom can help him with math and science, and I can help him with English. I really wanted to make sure that my son has an interest in reading, so we’ll sometimes write a story together, a few lines by a few lines, taking turns. I think it’s important to have a balance between math and science, and those intangibles like writing and story-telling.”
* * *
I ask her if there’s any person at Carnegie Mellon who has helped her through a rough time.
“The faculty are always really busy, but every now and then you get to see them in their less guarded moments. Sharon Dilworth…I don’t know what she takes, but she’s always so happy and bubbly. And she wears those high heels so I can always hear her coming down the hall before she arrives,” Kelly says, quirking her lips into a smile. “She sticks her head into my office and says, ‘Hey Kitten!’ And I always reply, ’Hi, Dilworth.’ …I don’t call her Sharon and I never have—I’m not sure why. But one day when I was still in grad school and I was having a rough time, we were discussing how it’s so sad that drinking in the office is a thing of the past. We were joking, ‘If you could just have a glass of whiskey, that would help so much sometimes!’ And then the next day, there were ten of those airplane bottles of booze she had put on my desk for me. CMU can be a really serious place, but when it sort of cracks for a minute, it’s kind of a relief. That’s one of those moments where I knew I was at the right place. And those bottles of booze are long gone.”
* * *
Despite her belief in the importance of not defining yourself by your degree, Kelly’s favorite part of her job is commencement. “I’m a sucker for big events, for rites of passage,” she says. She smiles, seeming amused at herself. “At commencement, it’s so cool to see these people that you’ve known for several years taking that step forward. You know there’s that Monday afterwards when everybody’s just going to be like, ‘Well, what now?’ when the confetti’s gone and it’s so quiet—but all that’s not a concern for that day. Everybody’s just so proud of one another. Part of my job that day is to hand out the diplomas, and they’re so symbolic. I get to physically hand off a huge part of people’s lives, and to see students one last time before they go off into the world. There are different people every year, but there’s always that same feeling of joy and accomplishment.”
* * *
After the interview, I find the actclassy article in question. It’s by username KDIDDY. “Kdiddy is a lifelong Pittsburgher and always has trouble readings people’s facial expressions when she tells them that. She’s been a writer since somewhere around second grade, when she penned a novella about a monster who attacked her suburb, devoured all of the kids in her Catholic school, and put a hurt on the supply of hot dogs in the cafeteria. Since that auspicious beginning, she’s earned a few fancy-pants writing degrees and vomited her words in print and online (kdiddy.org, MamaPop.com). Her hobbies include wife-ing, mothering, showing hoes no love, carbs, and candy.”
Not that I was exactly intimidated by Kelly before…but I have a feeling that when I visit Kelly’s office from now on, I’ll feel much more comfortable—like I’m talking to a friend.
And I also know that I’ll always be wondering what exactly she’s typing there at her computer.