What's up since graduation.

Does anyone have as much self-discipline as they want? Does anyone let themselves off easy, give themselves as much grace, as they want?

How I got here.

Something I repeat a lot: “Everyone I know with an MFA said, I’m in debt, and I don’t write anymore.” This isn’t entirely true. I know two people who did not say that. One works at a community college, and the other quit her program midway and began again ten years later. But a handful of people I knew with MFAs in creative writing did say that, and it scared me. So I thought about it for ten years. I quit my job in commercial printing in the spring of 2019, to “prepare to apply to MFA programs.” That wasn’t entirely true. At the time, I was on the fence over whether to focus on creative writing or archives and records management (which still gets me hot). We had enough savings that we wouldn’t go too badly into debt if I went to grad school, because K won a major award for his pre-doctoral work in history at the University of British Columbia. In the summer of 2019, I did Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way program, 12 weeks self-directed. There is one week where you don’t read anything, nothing at all, not even food packaging. That week, for the “artist date,” I biked to the cemetery. I’d been there for hours when it occurred to me that I was READING. I was reading gravestones. At some point in the past four years, I had done morning pages for 365 days. I’m currently at the 40 day mark. I never really got into the habit of artist dates.

On Halloween 2019, I started a new job, in the t-shirt and gift printing division of a busy (fun! gay!) retail store on Granville Island, which meant hitting the ground running for the holiday season. By the end of the holidays, I was promoted to Imaging Department Team Lead. I took the bus to work on March 16, 2020. I walked home. I didn’t go back to work for 60 days.

When I did, the department I was called on to “lead” was a month behind on orders, having pivoted to custom sublimation printing on polyester masks the horrifying, grotesquely missized and misshapen smiles of our customers. It was a wild, wild ride. My favorite coworker always said, “I can’t wait to read what you write about this in the future.” Someday, I will write these stories dedicated to B.

While we were very much in the thick of it, with little knowledge of transmission and no vaccine in sight, I was in line at Whole Foods when some muscle bound bro started putting his groceries on the conveyor belt while I was still paying, even as the clerk (and the signage) asked him not to. I started screaming at this bro, all kinds of things but mostly why would he do that, and that he was a piece of fucking shit for doing that. He said something like “calm down, lady,” to which I screamed, through my daisy-printed polyester mask, “I’m not a fucking lady!” (note: I’m not a lady).

(This was not the only time I screamed at a stranger in Vancouver. I’m not sure if I was more angry when we lived there, or if I was subconsciously aware that Canadians don’t have guns the same way Americans do).

I had been alone in the grocery store, but when I got back to our apartment ranting and raving, K pointed out that I was literally the only person he was seeing during lockdown, and my constant rage, my everyday hysteria over my boss putting our lives at risk to make her a little bit of money, was making the little socialization he had extremely unpleasant. I took this to heart, because while I was freaking out with my amazing co-workers four days a week, K was completely isolated. So I changed.

I was doing a little experiment, at the same time. I can’t remember if this was an arbitrary choice, or if there was more to it, but I decided to manifest Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in a Free Little Library. I never rode the bus in Vancouver again after March 16, and there were a number of Free Little Libraries along my 40-minute walk to work. It took less than a week to manifest. I was delighted, but I wasn’t at all surprised.

One day off in July, K and I lazed around on a blanket in a meadow in Queen Elizabeth Park. I was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The speaker is a composition instructor at a college, obsessed to distraction with the question of what quality means. Something about this caused me to sit up and say, with no small amount of anguish, “All I want is to do an MFA, publish some of my own fiction, and help other people make books” (I’m trained as a book designer). K said to me, with infinite patience and certainty, “That’s possible for you.” He had said variations on that before, but I’d never processed it. So, a year after I’d originally intended to, I began to prepare to apply to MFA programs. A year after I left work and didn’t come back for 60 days, I received my acceptance letter from Eastern Washington University’s Creative Writing MFA program, to work in fiction.

Doing the MFA in creative writing was either the best or second best thing that I ever did, tied with coming to understand myself as nonbinary.

I received a graduate service appointment and didn’t go into debt.

To break the MFA curse I had heard about, all I had to do upon graduation in June was not stop writing.

The first safeguard I set up was for my whole class, and a few friends from prior graduating classes, to have post MFA support group meetups. To push through any desire I may have had to take a break after completing my thesis (which contained only half of the pages of short stories I’d generated while in the program), I began #1000wordsofsummer the day of our graduation ceremony, and saw it through, writing 1000 words a day for the next 13 days, even as we drove west across the mountains and visited family and our favorite haunts and camped for a couple nights. My project was a purposeful misdirection on the next section of the 100 page beginning of a novel I wrote for our novel workshop winter quarter. I let it be ridiculous and repetitive, and it ultimately devolved into porn, which is fine, which is exactly what I like to use #1000wordsofsummer for every year (that is, for fun, not necessarily for porn). But I didn’t feel, you know, good about it.

As soon as those 14,000 words were done, I started a brand new story, and pushed on another story that had begun as a pastiche from a spring quarter class. I found a free bubble-mapping app called Miro and I mapped out how all of the stories in my linked collection connect (some don’t yet). I began re-reading the collected stories that hadn’t gone into my thesis and figuring out which pieces from my thesis were actually done and ready for submissions. Shit got weird when I started re-reading the stuff my advisor, Sam Ligon, hadn’t thought was working as well, and I was like, wait, I love this one. So I fucked around but I was working without a plan, and that turned into “spinning my wheels” in a hurry. Over the course of several days, I struggled to generate and revise. I realize now (two weeks later), that I was trying to do that thing everyone warns against: “Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.”

I don’t know where this screenshot came from, but I’ve seen it around for years.

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I’ve spent the last two weeks mad at myself for doing the summer wrong.

For going into revisions without a plan, and trying to revise new work while writing it. Also for applying for no less than 10 jobs this summer, interviewing for 6 positions, with 4 of those over the course of one week. Right now, I have covid, but it’s extremely mild (as in, I was shocked when I tested positive). Yesterday, I was ready to go back into a story from my thesis that my advisor liked fine, but I knew was really only an outline. An exercise I learned while at Community of Writers last summer was to make a list of 10 things that can complicate the story. This is probably the single most useful tip I’ve learned about writing fiction (the best technique I’ve learned is how to summarize dialogue). I’m messing around with complicating this story that was really only an outline. My teacher Shawn Vestal always recommended writing yourself into a corner you must write your way out of. Even though this is a rewrite/revision, and I have a clear plan on what this story is exploring (relationship violence that isn’t textbook abuse, the privilege of being out to one’s family, the contradiction of wanting to be a decent person and also a filthy punk), I am working to keep the analytic mind out of it. When does the analytic mind come in? I don’t know yet. Maybe only in making the connections between the linked stories.

In the last two weeks, I’ve been hard on myself for “not working on my stuff” (my writing) this summer – although, obviously, I have been. I realized this morning that I wouldn’t have done it any differently, had I known two months ago what I know now. Because I learned so much about what my stories and collection are doing by thinking about them, and I couldn’t have “gone in with a plan” before I went in at all.

A few weeks ago, in the morning pages, I wrote “Does anyone have as much self-discipline as they want? Does anyone let themselves off easy, give themselves as much grace, as they want? What would that look and feel like?” That is what I expected the summer immediately following my MFA to look and feel like. I went into it like my favorite tarot archetype, The Fool. I couldn’t have done it any other way.

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This is obviously my first post. Expect weekly-ish posts on: the practice of writing fiction, queer theory + history, being an artist and living in states of contradiction, caring about music and physical spaces, and Livejournal/Blogger style shit (fun fact: I used to have some clout in the minimalist/clutter clearing blogger world). I’m glad this is here as a place for longer form writing.