Other years, in some other times, I've heard a snap. She has a handbag, and the closure clicks. She has some glasses that she keeps at the ready, and they're in a case that makes a sudden, sharp thwack when she closes it. Or, the door closes with a particular click. Usually there's something. Some little sound, done in just her way, and we know the autumn is about to begin this year's course. It's almost time.
Usually, she gets into our room ahead of the scheduled season, and she makes herself comfortable and waits for the heat of the summer to subside. She doesn't interrupt the heyday. She has composure, this woman. Dignity. Calm. She knows how to wait in readiness.
But this year? This year I've been listening just like I always do. I'm the student at one of the corners, with a view of the room, and probably not in a conversation. People don't talk to me when I'm waiting. Not usually, anyway. Sometimes I say something engaging. Inviting. It's okay. You can talk to me. I sympathize with your nervousness or your lethargy. (Only I don't -- not with lethargy.) Anyway, I'm already here when she comes in. I love that moment, when the small sound happens and a flash of electricity goes through the room and gets forgotten in the next moment. I love the anticipation of the beginning of another term. I hold my breath. I wait. Autumn signals her arrival sometime near the end of August - or even earlier - and I love the delicious intake of breath when I hear her.
But not this year. The heat has come back on for the next little while, and all my wooly clothes are too warm to wear in full sun, and my sweaters and I must wait a little longer ... but ... wait a tick. Is that her? There's a teacher sitting down, right in the middle of the room, in an ordinary place, just like everyone else. She's ready to start. But I did not hear her come in.
Her window was open - that's why she caught it. The scraps of summer had
begun to blow away, but she had not closed the windows yet. On this
morning she sat at her desk in her little office, half listening to the
familiar sounds of her husband's morning kitchen routine below, and
found a slow smile relaxing her face and releasing something - something
that had been waiting, unknown, unseen. The scent of wood smoke wafted
through her window. The pellet stove was on. He must have turned up the
thermostat. Salt of beach air on summer nights past. Comfort of the
cotton sweatshirts slightly gritty with the sand, scratching against
sun-tendered skin. But also the promise of early evenings and of candles
lit in the dusky winter. Both the summer and the winter rode into her
office, carried on that smell. She knew that there would be another
sputtering blast of summer heat before she could settle into the damp
and cool of her home in the rain forest - before the pellets would heat
the house every day - but on that September morning, she woke again. The
air carried the scent of her heart.
Searching for information, and came across a few personal blogs -- those people talked about what they were doing in their search for an MFA program, and because of them I found a program I think I like, and besides -- this blog is very neglected, and it's still not even 6:00 in the morning, and I need to write some of this stuff OUT. OF. MY. HEAD. or it's going to drive me insane, so here it is.
The Low-Residency MFA and Me
I'm trying to remember why I started looking in the first place. For the last couple of years, my advisers, and most respected and admired instructors, and even my fellow students on some occasions, have spoken in some kind of huge, strong, clear theme of Grad School. It's come with a "duh - are you joking here?" face, and it's come with an "I hate to be the one to break it to you" face, and it's come with the "you'll see it when you're ready" face, and it's come with the "no, this is the truth" face ... but it's always come with the same message - the same answer to my constant whining worry, What Am I Supposed To Do With This Degree? Answer: go to grad school. (Or, go to grad school, silly. Or -- go to grad school, and it's obvious, so stop pretending you don't know the answer.)
And yet, until this month, on the first weekend of the month, I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it until I found out, at dinner, in Ashland, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, sitting across from instructors, and near instructors, and in conversation with instructors, that the MFA in Creative Writing is a "terminal degree." (cue: semi-hysterical laughter -- really? We call it "terminal"? Perfect.) "What does that mean, 'terminal degree'?" I asked. "It means," she said, "that in that discipline, it's the highest degree people achieve. There isn't a PhD in Creative Writing -- so you could teach."
Oh.
So ... grad school? There's an idea.
Come home from Shakespeare in Performance (taken for credit), and write performance analyses. Write Graphic Novel analysis of Chris Ware's Building Stories (see below). Do an Improv on Twitter of Midsummer Night's Dream, Act III, as a final project (freak out at the homework assignment that goes with it because formatting stuff out of Twitter and putting it into a document is horrid). Write final for the other Shakespeare course, and bash brains against the stones trying to make a coherent argument about Othello's fragmented self being his downfall. And then ... in a haze of brain mush and a stupor of wonder, notice that the three letters - M F A - are floating in the air around my head, like cartoon birds when the person's been clobbered. There it is. MFA. Terminal Degree. Teach. Teach. MFA. Google.
Find #1: Already considering Goddard, because a lot of people to go Goddard from Marylhurst, and because back in the day (a few months ago), their Transformative Language Arts degree looked -- purposeful. It looked purposeful. It looked like a Reason To Go to Grad School. It looked like a way to be of some use in the world. It looked like what it is -- brilliant. And it's the only domestic version of the cutting edge work happening in the UK, Australia, and Canada (all of which are a bit too far away for me to go for grad school) But it's not - right. I've been trying it on for a while, and it simply doesn't fit me.
Find #1a: Goddard's MFA in Creative Writing, out of their Port Townsend campus. Okay. Put that one into the Definite Possibilities pile. It's still Goddard, and it fits better.
Find #2: Bennington. This is, in fact, what I believe about a real Liberal Arts education. I believe this in my bones and cells and breath and pulse. The (retiring) president of Bennington said this at the close of a TED conference a few years ago, and it makes me want to follow her into battle.
And besides ...the motto of their MFA program is: Read 100 books; write one. ALSO exactly what I believe and how I want to do this.
Find #3: The ratings lists. In the past little while, the top schools emerging include Bennington, Goddard, and a few others, and so I looked at them all, and I started a bookmarks tab for keeping track, and I went back over and over (because on the Saturday after finals week I felt unable to do anything else) and one of them is a lot closer to home than Vermont. I live in the Pacific Northwest. Pacific University is only a couple of hours away from here. A low-residency at Pacific makes all kinds of sense. My teachers have suggested it. Top rated. On all the lists. This should be a good fit.
Except . . . I need some cross-pollination, and it needs to be from a part of the country where sincerity and truth are not assessed by our cultural habit of earnest self-referential, self-conscious, self-amazed, and self-validated ways of knowing. I need someone to tell me something besides Find Your Own Truth. I don't want to be enabled. I want to be workshopped.
Find 3a: Now, whoever heard of this? "The Whidbey Writers Workshop Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing
(MFA) Program is the first in the country - and perhaps in the world -
to be offered not by a college or university but by an organization of
writers." Well, that's interesting. Info sent for. Local, but not, apparently, all about the self-reference, and there's a strongly pedagogical vein in this one. That's good. Available online writing samples, though ... not so good. Hm.
Find #4: The east coast is better at being sharp. Pointed. Rigorous. A couple of years of externally imposed rigor. Yes. That's what I want. Okay ... so what's there? So far, it's Bennington (crazy expensive), Goddard (weirdly west coast in the enabling department - but that might be a false impression - info packet sent for), and ... wait. What's this? Stonecoast. I've seen those ads. University of Southern Maine has a low residency MFA called Stonecoast. "A Top 6 ranked low residency program offering courses in Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry, and Popular Fiction." Okay, that sounds good. "Monthly packets encompass original writing, revision, and critical
essays and annotations as well as optional interdisciplinary research
and internships in teaching, publishing, and community service/social
justice." Oh. Yeah. That sounds very good. More info please.
So there it is so far. At the end of the month, I have appointments with advisers because next year at this time, I'll have graduated from college for the second time. This time, my degree will be accredited, and I will be prepared for grad school, and I want to go, so now I only have one more question.
Can a woman of my age who lives where I do become an employed MFA? Because - well - grad school's all fine and good on its own merits, but if I'm going to borrow all this money, I need a job when I'm done so I can pay it back.
It's that time of year again. I'd like to think that my current state of "ACK!!!" would be nonexistent if I were not also in school, but I know it's not true. It's Advent. It's inconvenient.
Inconvenient to shop in the chilly rain or sleet. Inconvenient to find the decorations and wonder how on earth the camel became a cripple during his year of storage in the box of figurines. Inconvenient to do finals for school, or to prepare for the Christmas pageant during a highly inconvenient spate of surprisingly violent illnesses (for kids' parents, of all things!), and employment changes for kids' parents, and schedule craziness for kids' parents. (Maybe I should just gather up all the children after Thanksgiving and keep them together someplace safe.) It is inconvenient to relocate wrapping paper, or to paint the living room (a thing I might still attempt). I have no idea when I'll have time for Kringla baking. But I will have time. Always, in the end, there is enough time, and all in all, this is simply, inconveniently, the way it goes.
And why should it not be this way? After all, it's not particularly convenient to travel to a different town during the ninth month of one's pregnancy, and it's certainly not convenient to have a baby in a barn. It wasn't very convenient to have the holy oil profaned by the soldiers of Antiochus. It's not convenient to chop wood to bring in for heat, or to see to the animals during a storm. The season of lights happens because of the darkness -- and Advent brings us the most convenient thing of all.
Lamps in the temple. Baby in the stable. Candles in the windows. Such small things to conquer the powers of darkness. So inconvenient.
Today is the Saturday before Advent I - the first of the four Sundays before Christmas Day. Today, I place three purple candles and one pink one into a brass wreath I keep in a cupboard. In that same cupboard the set of Fontanini figurines I add to each year is waiting, in the happy hope of someday having a whole village surrounding the Holy Family, and a pack of grandkids to help me set it up in future years, and in the meantime, I have my own peaceful delight in placing the characters on top of the piano, interspersed with the various candles I will light every night from now until Epiphany. This year, I will also work on some final projects for school - and I will wonder how many more years the first half of December will be a time of school projects (and whether I can find a way for this always to be true). And my office. I want to start on another straightening up and rationalizing of my work space because my map of the world after the new calendar year will include a more explicit intention for the things that happen in here. My map of the world does not need new continents placed into it. It just needs new labels and illustrations.
There are a lot of ways to look at a thing - at a life - at a life's work. Perhaps I have finally traveled far enough to know a little more of what is important and what is not, and what is important to me and what is not, and to make room for building the things I can build. Maybe we have to know enough about living before we can choose our lives. In any case, my map of the world is changing again, and this time, I know it. This time, I choose it.
And what that's called when it's at home is this: writing in the wee hours, before the rest of the world wakes up (which I hesitate to say online because I don't want anyone to take this as an invitation to call me!) Writing at least once a week at the Hood River Library, which I discovered this week, and where I felt precisely like Alice. All I did was fall down a hole, and suddenly worlds and characters and places and many, wonderful, lovely, perfect words and a universe of impossible things were --- they just were.
“It's no use trying,” said Alice. “One can't believe impossible
things.”
“I dare say you haven't had enough experience,” said the White
Queen.
“When I was your age, I did it for an hour a day.
Why sometimes,
I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), aka Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
See that kid? Yeah. That is exactly how I feel sometimes. Exactly. Sometimes, it's just (((clang!!!). Sometimes, it's Suddenly I See, and the curtain goes up and the music starts, and ... kapow! Lights!! All at once, a thing that was in shadow is completely, clearly, crisply right in front of me.
That's what I got this morning when I was trying and trying to find words for why Recollected Life isn't what I'm writing anymore. Gradually (the work part is never "suddenly"), I remembered the dependable path. What does this feel like in my body? When did I feel like this before? Oooooh, yeah!! This is the moment when the kids are done with school work, and they burst out of the house and leave me in the quiet and slight disorder of the end of the school work time. This is the moment at night when they're finally asleep, or the moment of rare oddness when someone else has them for the day and the car drives away from me with them inside of it, and I go back indoors and look around and see the things they've left behind and feel ... feel ... this. That. There. Then. Recollected Life was that thing.
Funny, how every painful and wonderful moment after the era of babies is always compared to that era. Once, when I was a teenager, my mom was in the hospital. On the way back to the car after visiting her, my dad said (to himself, mostly, but out loud), "All this trouble, and we don't even get to take home a baby." Now I know what he meant. Babies aren't easy, but the reward is right there, crying or laughing in your arms, and you know what you're supposed to do next. It's obvious. It's imperative. It's a baby. And that, there, then ... it's not my life anymore. They drove away, those babies - in their own cars!, and here I am.
This is the quiet I soak up like a dried out houseplant someone put near the sink for watering and then forgot. I love this quiet. I exhale into this quiet. This is some of the lasting nostalgia and still, a little, of the sharp, bittersweet pang of no more babies. This is bereavement without loss, this is a mourning conclusion and a welcoming openness. This is the party for the weaning of the child, and I am sometimes, still, the weeping mother, smiling at the well wishers, knowing that the other mothers' looks are full of sympathy for me, even while the congratulations are in their mouths. Or ... I was that mother. That's not this. Hardly ever, anymore. That's not here or now. That's what Recollected Life was. That's why I needed a new blog. That moment (which lasted, apparently, for five years! Labor goes a lot slower when you're giving birth to yourself!) - it's over. Recollected Life was that moment, and now I'm done with that one. I'm through. I'm here. Now. And - those shoes somebody left in the way? Nobody's going to carry those shoes back upstairs but me, and this is only fair. They're my shoes.
Other years, in some other times, I've heard a snap. She has a handbag, and the closure clicks. She has some glasses that she keeps at the ready, and they're in a case that makes a sudden, sharp thwack when she closes it. Or, the door closes with a particular click. Usually there's something. Some little sound, done in just her way, and we know the autumn is about to begin this year's course. It's almost time. 
