Alum’s Book Bridges the Personal and Cosmic

by Sala Levin ’10 | Photo by John T. Consoli

For years, Marlena Chertock ’13 passed through the world with an invisible disability, a form of dwarfism called spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia.

While her short stature and scoliosis were less outwardly obvious during her youth, as an adult, Chertock uses a cane. One way that Chertock has explored the experience of having invisible-turned-visible pain is through poetry. In her second book, “Crumb-sized,” released in August, Chertock uses galactic imagery to explore her searing backaches, numbness and difficulty walking.

“Unfold me gently, I’m brittle / calcified stardust,” she writes in one poem. “The black hole in my lower left back / wants to swallow me whole,” begins another.

“I’ve always been kind of a space nerd,” Chertock says. “The scope of things really inspires me—that I have so much pain but if you broaden it, I’m just one person on this earth within a universe that is so vast. It kind of gives me that perspective, if I’m in the midst of pain, to look at it that way.”

Chertock sees “Crumb-sized” (named after a bullying schoolmate who told Chertock, “You’re smaller than a crumb”), as part two to her first collection of poetry, 2016’s “On that one-way trip to Mars.” Though the themes are similar, Chertock says the first one “had a little more anger in it. This one is more like the self-love. So it’s kind of two sides of the same coin.”

The Chicago Review of Books praised Chertock’s ability to write compellingly about both the celestial and the earthly: “Chertock’s particular gift is to play with scale, trying by turns to nudge and push at and ultimately to scatter perspective. You come away enchanted, unsettled, and a little dizzy.”

Though born with the bone disorder, Chertock’s childhood was rather unimpeded by her health. It wasn’t until age 23 that her condition worsened, with a sudden, severe and persistent back pain.

“A lot of my friends are very able-bodied,” she says. “If we’re out and about for the day and I have to sit down, they get it—they see I physically can’t go more—but they don’t get the reasoning behind it.”

Chertock has long loved writing. (In third grade, a lesson on fables inspired her to write “How the Dog Got its Bark”—an admittedly blatant re-imagining of “The Lion King.”) But her personal history didn’t always play the significant role it now does in her work. “When I started writing poetry, which was more in high school and college, it started with me trying to understand other stories or get into a voice,” she says.

Over time, she turned more to herself for inspiration. “It’s more captivating, and it’s my story, so it’s more personal and more interesting for me to delve into,” she says

Living in the Jimenez-Porter Writers’ House at Maryland was critical to Chertock’s development as a writer, she says. The creative writing living-learning program “is where I really got more in-depth and went into the radical honesty of, ‘This is who I am and this is the pain I deal with day-to-day.’”

Johnna Schmidt, director of the Writers’ House, says, “Marlena’s work is both intimate and universal. She’s equally fearless when writing about her body and outer space.”

Chertock, who works full-time for the nonprofit Society for Science & the Public, hopes that her creative work will reach others who deal with chronic pain. “I think that’s kind of the goal of the book,” she says. “To be like, ‘No, there’s more of us that deal with it and you’re not alone.’”