If you're reading this post on this blog, it's because you have some level of investment (financial, emotional or both) in the MFA degree. When I applied to write for this site last year, I fully expected to recount a year chock full of nothing but reading & 'riting, the first such year in my life. However, that's not… Continue reading A New Beginning
I remember the MFA post-application period like it was yesterday. I was six months into a dead-end job that I had found through a temp agency. I felt my brain liquefying every day I worked there. The profound apathy in the building was practically on the payroll. I knew my time at this job was short when my boss declined to give me a raise (and I had earned that raise, damn it!) upon converting me from a temp to an employee. His rationale? “You’re a smart guy, you’ll leave here eventually.”
As a child, I felt like I belonged in The Boxcar Children, The Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown more than I belonged in my own life. Reading became less about fantasy and more about escape as a teenager. My portals were contemporary fiction which allowed me to imagine a world outside my troubled narrow slice… Continue reading Learning to Read (Again)
A year ago around this time, I had just submitted my first few MFA applications and was grappling with the same stew of emotions that most of us crazy enough to pursue an MFA degree feel during application season: excitement, anxiety, fear and so much self-doubt. The MFA felt like the appropriate next move in… Continue reading Staggering Along
When I applied to nearly a dozen fully funded or mostly funded MFA programs last winter and spring, the only expectation I had was that something unexpected would happen. I tried to not fantasize about New England winters, California freeways or whatever the hell it is people do in Virginia college towns. I hoped one… Continue reading Writing as Healing
