Ben Miller, MFA Writing ’26, may be decades older than many of his classmates, but his energy is youthful and exuberant. “The house may look older, but the windows are new, and that’s why I’m here,” he said. “I feel I’ve just started to see.”
He’s worked in publishing, healthcare, and hospitality, drawing inspiration for his writing in part from his day jobs. His second book Pandemonium Logs, which chronicles his clerk work at a hospital in South Dakota during the COVID pandemic, was recently published by Raritan Skiff Books, a new imprint of Rutgers University Press. (His first book was River Bend Chronicle, published by Lookout Books in 2013.) “What [I’m] writing about is basically America, where we’re at right now,” he said. “I’m a portrait artist. Portraits of places and people.”
At Pratt, where he’s in his first year of the MFA Writing program, he’s working on a documentary project about Staten Island and visual texts, with an emphasis on collage. He sat down with Pratt News to discuss his upbringing, unique career path, and experience at Pratt so far.
On Being a Nontraditional Student
Miller is embracing the upsides of returning to school later in life. “When I was getting my M.A. in English from NYU in my early 20s, I was sometimes worrying about the wrong things because I had not yet had the life experience to sort through certain complex situations, and I did not have an understanding of how long things took to make,” he said. “It’s very helpful to have more data to work with in terms of who you are and where your affinities lie.”
He praised his classmates, who “all bring to their work an impressive ferocity.” “I really admire them so much, and I’m so proud to be at a table with them. We all have sort of different aims and motivations, but courage is a part of it all, and I like that.”
Miller has never been afraid to take a risk. “To me, the core of being an artist is the willingness to start over radically,” he said. “I’m here because I love art. I’m here because I want to grow.”
On Pratt’s Campus
Today, Miller commutes from Staten Island to Pratt’s Brooklyn campus. “I see this school as a working place.” he said. “Art is not only allowed, it’s encouraged.” The energy of the environment inspires him. “There are all these minds walking by, all these imaginations walking by. Who was that person? What are they thinking? What are they making?” he said, “What’s immediate and what’s impactful is just physically being present here at this exact time in American history.”
On Collage
Recently Miller has been developing a series of collages that bring his writing and his creative collage practice together into a larger cohesive project. “The wonderful thing about collage is that it connects so many different elements of shape and color and language,” he said “And, it’s a very natural human thing because we actually think in fragments.” Miller works on his collages by hand. “I think of it as sewing, sort of,” he says. “Suddenly I found I had the freedom to weave pages into any form that suits the subject matter—a way to explore the infinite depth of a blank page.”
On Inspiration
Miller grew up in Davenport, a city in Iowa on the Mississippi River. The oldest of six, he had a challenging upbringing. In his teens, he found a creative outlet in a local writing group that met on Thursday nights. The group included writers of all ages, many of whom were older women, writing poetry, biographies, and novels for the first time. “They were literally blooming in their 70s and 80s,” explained Miller.
Their courage has been a driving inspiration in his life ever since. “I just saw it as revolutionary,” he said. “It was like, wow, they’re finally doing exactly what they want to do, and they’re doing it with determination in these rotten rented rooms—with steam hissing and the smell of dust—and they’re creating a newness.”
On Pandemonium Logs and Healthcare
Publishing a book is a major accomplishment, but Miller is cautious to keep the focus on the gravity of the subject. “I want to get people to read this book; I want to get the choir of the voices of healthcare workers heard. But this is nothing to celebrate,” he said. Pandemonium Logs records the reality and hardship of the pandemic from inside a hospital system in South Dakota, where Miller had the clerk’s task of discharging patients who had died, “send[ing] their file, in a technological sense, whirling into oblivion,” he said.
During this time, Miller struggled to process the quantity of death. “Some of this stuff seemed to be avoidable,” he said, referencing meat packing plants without COVID protections in place. “So when the first plant employee died of the virus, I sat with his name and I looked at his name, and it was just really very hard,” he said. “I did not want to discharge this man to DEATH. It was like someone had been murdered by an institution, by greed,” Miller said. “And I asked myself: why am I here? Why am I applying death to this loyal worker’s name?” he wonders. “These kinds of things haunt the rest of the book as I veer into different hospital jobs that reveal different aspects of the American disaster.“
On Bridging the Gap
Having lived in both the Midwest and the East Coast, Miller uses his writing to “create a kind of bridge between these regions” in order to elucidate “how they connect, not how they disconnect.”
“Community is such an overused word,” Miller asserts. “Communities are not created instantly; they’re very hard to create. They are sadly rare. Rhetoric, however admirable, resolves nothing. A community is created face-by-face, by eye contact, by stopping to listen and, later, by thinking about what was told. It takes incredible energy to create and sustain a genuine community.” For his peers at Pratt, he prefers a more earthy metaphor: “it’s like you’re putting down loam in a garden,” he says. “[I’ve] got my fingers in the loam here, and I’m with other workers.”