For writer Erin Campagna, college was a time of transformation and emotional grounding: facing challenges, navigating love and loss, and forming relationships with others that would change her forever. “These times, in my memory, exist in juxtaposition. They made me who I am. They’ve contained some of the best moments of my life and some of the hardest. But those things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. They existed together. And so did I. I continued existing,” she says.
Campagna’s fictional short story collection, And So We Exist, explores moments of young adulthood and self-discovery mainly inspired by her own experiences. Much of the collection was composed during her senior year of college in completion of her creative writing honors thesis.
“I find that I write in the most genuine way when I’m pulling from what I know,” Campagna says. “I can describe something I’ve been through and make it feel real because it was real. A lot of the stories actually happened to me or they mostly happened to me, and then I built on that initial idea. Call me Sylvia Plath, because I am self-inserting all over the place,” she laughs.
From stories like “To the next girl he falls asleep beside” to “Endings & Beginnings,” Campagna introduces scenes of rumination, heartbreak, and grasping for understanding in tandem with unyielding existence. Her stories emphasize that despite our challenges, heartache, and the moments we try so hard to understand but just can’t, we continue living, and so we exist.
“While all the stories feature different characters, plots, and subjects, they are all loosely intertwined through the overarching theme of states of transition,” Campagna says.
Her characters are sometimes caught between one stage of life and another, or perhaps between one person and another. “They aren’t totally sure of themselves. They are riddled by anxiety and by choices. Sometimes they feel trapped. Sometimes they feel like there are too many choices to be made.”
And So We Exist includes a variety of conflicts from ordinary to extraordinary: meeting boys at parties; seeking identity and autonomy; wanting so badly to fit in while at the same time, wanting to feel self-adequacy when it comes to both interpersonal relationships and academics.
“But at the core of it,” Campagna explains, “It’s also about love.” For Campagna, this idea of love exists in many forms — what it means to be a daughter, a friend, a sister, a lover, and at the end of the day, “just a girl.”
“I examine the love between friends. I examine some relationships that are loosely tinged with romance, but mostly tinged with something else. I wanted to examine the moments and types of connections with people who hurt us so badly, to be completely frank. I wanted to understand why we tear ourselves into pieces for love.” Campagna says.
Stories like “These Arms of Mine,” which was inspired by a real-life girls’ trip to the beach, or “407,” dedicated in loving memory of her close friend and roommate, Katherine Acierno, accentuate the resonance of female friendships in Campagna’s life.
“Girlhood means everything to me,” Campagna says. “My friendships with my female friends have sometimes felt stronger to me than actual romantic relationships that I’ve been in. These people are my lifeblood. They’re my everything. They’re a part of me. I completely subscribe to the thought that we’re a mosaic of everyone we’ve ever loved, and that female friends especially imprint upon us.”
Campagna feels that writing about her experiences through the medium of fiction has provided an outlet for honesty and vulnerability, and in doing so, she hopes that she can help make others feel seen. She claims that fiction is not only a space for her to narrativize her thoughts, but also to create stories out of them to which others can relate and find connections.
She says, “If I don’t want to think about something, I’ll avoid writing about it. But seeing the things written out that I’ve gone through, it’s almost validating in a way. I’m taking a stand. Yes, this happened to me. No, I’m not forgetting it. I’m going to give it a voice. I accept what happened. I process what happened. This is me owning my truth.”
What’s consequently unique about And So We Exist is that many of its stories deal with the aftermath. Rather than focusing solely on the pivotal events that change the characters’ worlds, Campagna’s stories create a space for processing, exploring the questions of what happens next and how to live in the wake of these changes.
“I felt for so long that I was someone who could never let anything go,” Campagna admits. “After writing And So We Exist, I’ve realized there’s also beauty in recognizing that it’s okay to never fully let anything go. Not to a point where it destroys you, but just to acknowledge how easily we’re impacted by the people who we let into our lives and into our hearts, and they’re going to make a mark. It’s okay if some pain never goes away.”
Though Campagna says that she has yet to reread her book cover-to-cover since its publication in 2022, she emphasizes that her feelings as a college student were just as valid as who she will become in her subsequent years, and she hopes that readers of the same demographic can recognize a similar validity in their own experiences.
“I felt things for people that were accurate and real in those moments. To diminish those feelings would be to diminish the realness of what that version of myself felt. It might not always be a pleasant trip down memory lane, but it’s not fair to diminish what past Erin was going through,” she says.
For any aspiring writers, Campagna offers these encouraging words of advice: “If you have a voice that you want to be heard, and words you want on a page, and a story that you want to tell, you are a writer. Going the route of self-publishing was the best decision that I made.”
“It is both the most wonderful feeling and the most terrifying feeling to be perceived by others,” Campagna continues. “And it’s a big step to put yourself out there. But if you want to, the pathway is there.”
Campagna is currently working on her second book, a memoir collection of creative nonfiction. You can purchase a copy of And So We Exist here.
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