The first time I applied to grad school in creative writing my application was rejected pretty much everywhere, with the exception of two programs.
One acceptance letter came from a state school in a small town that was high profile in the news at the time for hate crimes, racism and actual cross burning. I couldn’t recall why I’d even sent them an application, months earlier. The second came from a school in Louisiana. Young and trying to sort things out, I dialed the number at the bottom of the acceptance letter. I spoke with somebody there—an administrator? A receptionist? I had no idea then, and still don’t. I asked about work opportunities, an internship, a teaching assistantship or work-study. “Oh, we can probably find a little something for you in the library,” the woman said. She put the possibility forward so casually that her words failed to inspire me to pack up everything I owned, give up my apartment, say goodbye to friends, family and my favorite stray city cats, quit my jobs and head across the country.
In Portland, I was in author Tom Spanbauer’s workshop.
I know I’ve mentioned before that Tom taught a “kitchen table” workshop. He taught out of his house, in the evening after dinner. We’d arrive to the scent of a meal, dishes washed, the aftermath, the sound of his partner heading upstairs to give us room as the day shifted to workshop.
By the time those grad school rejection letters arrived there was only a little over six months remaining before application season would come around again. Application packets were thick, labor intensive projects, and beyond the time invested, it cost money to apply. Instead of either giving up or accepting one of the two tepid offers, I doubled down. I listened to Tom’s writing advice and worked harder. I brought scattered pages into workshop, sought out criticism and suggestions, considered all input and made my own decisions about revision based on seeing how my work bounced off whatever audience I could find. I generated new pieces and revised older work, and applied to a scattering of schools again.
I was a part-time security guard at the art museum and also an intake receptionist at a Home Health Care agency, where we sent nurses and therapists out to see patients at their home. The nurses I worked with were great, and also overworked, giving their all to support others in deep humanity and human struggles.
I spent eight hours a day typing up referrals for the ill and sometimes dying. My job was to build their files. Each file was as thick as a grad school application though for the school of the body, of life and death. At my desk, I was tasked with swiftly itemizing the various ways in which life becomes too short, too fast. Respiratory ailment. Trouble swallowing…I tuned in to the stories of every patient. Without meeting them, I got to know them by birthdays and middle names and ailments. Sometimes I’d have to take a walk outside the building, to stop thinking too closely about the body’s mechanics and demands. Life is hard. Mortality is a creep. I was there because I needed more than money—I needed health insurance. I wanted to make work that would matter, beyond typing files. Then there was an afternoon when calls started coming in to my work phone.
I didn’t pause in processing files. Somebody was waiting for medical help, and the files I worked on would grant that authorization. I answered the phone still typing, Physical therapy, wound care, nursing….check, check, check…
A man with a heavy accent asked for me by name. I was typing out a diagnosis. In a distinguished voice, with something I might’ve called a British accent, he said, “This is Thomas Keneally…”
I stopped, mid bladder care instructions, and blurted out, “It is not!”
The man said, “It is. I’d like to congratulate you on your acceptance to the University of California at Irvine…”
Thomas Keneally is a Booker Prize winner. He’s Australian, not British, so I had the accent wrong because, you know, youth! I was inexperienced. But I knew him as the author of Schindler’s List among other books. He’s a big deal. His phone call made my heart race. Cardiac care…check, check, check…
The next call came almost as soon as I was off the phone. Columbia University. It turned out that I’d mailed my application to the wrong department. They let me know, but I was still granted one of the few cherished spots. Then Amherst. Then the University of Arizona, the third-highest ranking MFA program in the country at the time; they offered a full ride and a teaching position. There was none of this find a little work in the library…
I’d failed everywhere and then succeeded, turning it all around, within about six months.
Doubling down, working harder, focusing on my applications paid off.
This, I’d say, is the writing process, overall. I believe writing can be taught and that by studying the art, we grow and evolve and clarify our voices on the page and join the conversation and follow a path toward self actualization.
Maybe your goal isn’t grad school, but publication. An essay, a story, a novel, a memoir, an article…
I engaged with the art deeply and in community, and improved. So many others have done the same.
I needed to be a better writer. Increasing my focus, listening, studying and participating in a workshop helped me get there. I went on to grad school, then came back, and have been teaching and writing ever since, over decades.
I don’t believe an MFA is necessary, but I also don’t think it’s a bad pursuit. It’s one possible route among many. It’s important to work together and also to write alone, in deep concentration. Find the people who can help you make your work as strong as it needs to be, wherever they are.
I’m a big advocate of holding on to joy in the process. There was something about grad school workshops that could grind a person down, a bit, and which only increased my attachment to keeping workshop light in spirit, while deep in content. Keeping the process energized and positive requires a specific kind of dedication, and I find it more rigorous than offering a bitter bite of criticism and moving on.
Writing can be agonizing in ways that are impossible to explain to those who haven’t undertaken a serious engagement with words and truth and art. No joke. Writing, at times, can physically ache in parts of the body that don’t even seem to exist, that can’t be clearly identified, areas that are powerful and free-ranging and perhaps best described as the larger human spirit.
But it can also be so very satisfying.
While Tom S. passed along his ideas and aesthetics, he also modeled the truth that studying can take place without an institutional stamp of approval.
Learning to write doesn’t mandate engagement with a university system, high tuition and exploited adjunct faculty laboring under the pyramid of paychecks, headed up by the six-figure salaries of CEOs, CFOs, Presidents, Vice Presidents, Deans—Dean of Students, Dean of Faculty—and the rest. That’s baggage.
I’ve spent twenty-five years teaching. I’ve taught at community colleges, private schools, state schools, weekend workshops and other venues. I’ve designed a BFA in Writing. I’ve been an adjunct and I’ve been full-time. But no matter the larger framework or the institution, I always bring the same intentions, the same content, the same engagement.
I truly believe that in supporting one student at a time, one voice at a time, and coming together in classes, we can build a more engaged world of valued humanity.
Most recently, I’ve taken a few years away from teaching, but now I’m ready to step back in. I’ve been re-thinking ways I’d like to teach, and what I’d like to offer. Like writing, teaching is a conversation, and I am only one side of that. Students bring the rest. I can plan a course, but students shift the current, and I listen.
For now, I’m focusing on words on the page, aesthetic values, the history of lit, but also intentional joy, community building and supporting each student in his/her/their writing goals.
More to come.
Wishing you well! I hope you’ll take a class with me, join that conversation, and perhaps I will get to read your words, your work.
xo
Hi, Monica! Just learned of your upcoming Writing Recess via Chuck Palahniuk's Plot Spoiler, and would love to join in. Is this an in-person opportunity only? I'm in Michigan... Thanks!
If you do a writing workshop… i am so interested ❤️