Life Imitating Art, Imitating Life

“I was working on another novel at the time,” she recalled, but as a new idea developed in her head, the original novel seemed increasingly irrelevant. 

Juska (Bowdoin Class of 1995) visited campus over Reunion Weekend to celebrate her thirtieth reunion and take part in a conversation with A. Leroy Greason Professor of English Brock Clarke about her latest novel, titled, fittingly enough, Reunion.

Confined to lockdown with her landmark get-together canceled, Juska “started fooling around” with the idea of a deferred college reunion and the bringing together of three old classmates. “Of course, I'm sitting in my house at the time and don't even know what the future will really hold,” she told Clarke, himself an acclaimed writer.

Nevertheless, the idea gathered momentum, and she kept working on it. The resulting novel is about three friends, Hope, Polly, and Adam, who go back to their small Maine college in 2021 for their twenty-fifth class reunion, which had been delayed by a year due to the pandemic (as was the case with Juska’s own twenty-five year reunion). The college, called Walthrop, is in a town called Sewall—fictionalized if somewhat altered versions of Bowdoin and Brunswick.

The three friends have to deal with their own issues, anxieties, and pressures as they reunite and reckon with the past and how it will bear on the future. Although she was keen not to overemphasize the pandemic aspect, said Juska, it does, inevitably, feature significantly in the novel, as a shared traumatic experience from which the world was beginning to emerge in 2021. The result she described as a “reunion novel with this kind of different twist, where people are coming back to this place [but are] also dragging with them all sorts of baggage from the previous year.”

Reunion is Juska’s third novel. A founding director of the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, she is currently a visiting professor of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College.