Out, Out, Far Out to Sea, & Alone: My First Year Post-M.F.A.

                                                             for Virginia Woolf

“. . .so I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably, all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one’s words.” ~Virginia Woolf

               We are far out to sea & alone; my wife, & ten-month old daughter Izzy—whose pictures you’ll find beautifying the landscape of my Facebook profile—the only bearings I have available to keep me from setting adrift; existing in a place apart from landmass that is the non-writing populace; agonizing over contractions of imagination & creativity on almost a daily basis; living in our heads & stargazing—even placing our thumbs over the moon like Tom Hanks in Apollo 13—at what we can’t help but believe will be eventual success, instead of doing the practical thing & earning a degree in Business, or Accounting, or Business with an Accounting focus, etc. In other words: what have I gotten myself into?

               In my case, it’s quite simple: four years ago, I, of sound mind & body, chose to make a mistake, given that it was the most practical option. I chose to bypass the G.T.A. program at our university. Why? I couldn’t afford the pay cut. I had three choices: 1. Leave my part-time job. 2. Attempt to balance a full course load & my teaching responsibilities while still working a few days a week at the job in order to negate the pay difference. And oh, yeah, while trying to fit in some writing. 3. Maintain the status-quo: skip the GTA, continue going to class & working my part-time job: because Mos Def said it best: “Ends can’t meet where the arms don’t reach.”

               So I have no PhD, no G.T.A. experience (and therefore, no teaching experience), and no book publications. More importantly, my current job (the job I couldn’t afford to leave), makes me (professionally) unhappier than Septimus Warren Smith (minus the suicide). This is why I pine over relative “success.” One positive is that it provides me more free time to write in comparison to my writing brethren who teach. But, with a wife and ten-month old child, “free time” isn’t necessarily free.

               Teaching or not I do manage, however. That is one reality my publications reflect; I’ve written to the tune of twenty individual publications spanning across poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, and “performance text” and/or drama. To be fair, most would consider that a very successful year for a developing writer. For me, however, if a full manuscript does not out materialize out of all this “success,” I will regard 2012 as a disappointment.           

            There is no definitive answer as to whether or not I made the right decision four years ago when I was a first-year M.F.A. student.  I have no doubts that I would be happier working in something related to my field of study, whether it be teaching, editing/proofreading, copywriting, etc. & I’ve applied to each of them in gaggles, but to no avail. I do, however, have an appreciation for my professional unhappiness given that it gives me a bit of an edge. It keeps me starving to write & write & write now, which ultimately is what’s keeping me from sinking to bottom of the sea—without my words. 

A graduate of Florida Atlantic University's MFA program, Michael J Pagan's work has appeared in The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Spork Press, Verse, Requited Journal, and other publications. He currently serves as an editorial assistant for SquawkBack Magazine, as well as a fiction reader for Burnside Review. He lives in Deerfield Beach with his wife and daughter where he continues work on his first poetry manuscript, With a Bullet, Sparrow Voices, along with his first stage play, PING.

 

Pros and Cons of Instructing as an MFA Graduate

 In relation to teaching, I think Roger Waters put it best: “These are the pros and cons of hitchhiking.” Some people would never hitchhike—it’s scary, dangerous, messy. Those adjectives fit right in with teaching, along with frustrating, time consuming, and low paying. However, the optimist in me finds a silver lining—teaching (like hitchhiking) can be fun, adventurous, risk taking, and awesome.

We all know teaching’s risks and rewards—flexible schedule but frequent home work (like 97% of the time); great benefits but low pay; fun interaction with students but the inability to please everyone; and for those of us who are also writers (or at least trying to be), the playing field is that much more challenging; we must also make time to create.

Because I love teaching (and my sanity), I use some assignments I was given as a student, hoping that if I enjoyed them, my students will too. One is an imitation assignment (for “Interpretation of Poetry”) which requires students to choose a poem and write their own version, imitating the original (its form, style, rhythm, content, etc.).

Students wrote imitations of Mina Loy’s “Mexican Desert” and Kim Addonizio’s “What do Women Want?” (providing several versions of “What do Men Want?”). The best was a response to Dorianne Laux’s “Trying to Raise the Dead”— the student wrote from the dead husband’s perspective, so the two poems became a poignant conversation. In conjunction with writing a poem, students must write an explication—what they chose to imitate from the original, how they did it, what they chose to do without, and why.

Unfortunately, I can’t do cool assignments like that in my other classes, but I try to get creative when I can. Sometimes, after an in-class writing exercise, I’ll have a sudden urge of inspiration and jot the ideas for a poem on the back of my hand or on my phone. Otherwise, the semester doesn’t leave me with much writing time.

Lately, I’ve realized that reading so much prose (both student writing and novels), has negatively affected my poetry. To help make more time for writing, I’ve joined a writer’s group, and several comments have been about the prosody of my poems. “This reads like a short story” would be great if my intent was flash fiction (maybe it should be?), but when I’ve spent the past week working on line breaks and syllabics, and I’m told it’s prosey, it can be pretty frustrating, but they’re right, and so I’m back to the computer.

I also exchange work with some college friends who are writing teachers in similar situations—lots of grading, not a lot of free time for writing—reading other poetry helps us keep from prosody.

The bottom line is that we’re writing during those final hours of sunlight, or when our significant others are sleeping or watching sports and don’t care what we’re doing, or we’re doing the writing prompts we assign to our creative writing students just to make ourselves write something. And when we’re satisfied that it’s good, we send it out to a journal or two and hope for the best. And that’s the best any of us can do.

BIO:

Melissa Garcia Criscuolo earned her B.A. in English from FIU and her M.F.A. in poetry from UF; she has worked at FAU as an instructor since Fall 2008. Her work has been published with Alimentum: The Literature of Food, PALABRA: A Magazine of Chicano & Latino Literary Art, Nibble, Subtropics (a translation) and The Acentos Review (poetry and nonfiction). Her poetry chapbook Things in My Backyard was published this summer with Finishing Line Press.

An English Graduate Advisor’s 12 bullet points of advice for first year MFA students

1)    It’s normal to feel intimidated your first semester.  You’re here to learn, and you will, so try to relax into that process. Most things hurt less if you stop clenching your muscles.

2)    For the love of everything that is wonderful in this world, meet with your advisor the first semester of classes. I mean me, you know; I can talk to you about classes, expectations, what a thesis committee is, and when you should be thinking about completing a Plan of Study. Lots of relevant, helpful info here, promise (I feel like I’ve earned this exclamation point)!

3)    Get to know the other MFA students. Ask them questions about the program, classes they’ve taken, and the thesis process. Graduate school isn’t the time to be shy.

4)    For real though, about being shy? The more you participate in class discussion (well, as long as it’s thoughtful), the more you’ll get out of classes. This is a lesson I learned a bit late, as I’ve always been something an introvert. So learn from me - speak up.

5)    Once you’ve started talking to and hanging out with all the other MFA students, form a writing group. Send each other work a couple times a month. Get together to discuss it. This is the kind of thing that can continue once you’re out of school (it did for me).

6)    Join EGSS. This is a good way to meet those other Grad students I’ve been talking about.

7)    Take classes with as many creative writing professors as possible. Get to know the department.  This will come in handy when you’re forming your thesis committee - you’ll know who you’d like to work with and why.

8)    Consider taking classes outside of your chosen genre - writing in other genres is like stretching out before intense exercise; you will bring those skills (flexibility?) back to your work.

9)    Take the Sanders’ Writer in Residence workshop every spring semester. These workshops are invaluable opportunities to work with writers you might not otherwise have ever even met.

10)    Work with Coastlines. Consider submitting to literary journals. Read as many literary journals as you can to see what is published where. This will help you find a journal to send your own work  once it’s ready.

11)    Join AWP and read the Writer’s Chronicle. Poets & Writers is another good source. Stay up to date with current events in the Creative Writing realm (a beauteous place to be, isn’t it?). “Like” the MFA page on Facebook.

12)    When you’re overwhelmed, exasperated, frustrated, and otherwise feeling uncomfortable, remember that this is your time to write; you might not have another opportunity to dedicate three years to bettering your work. Use this time up. Squeeze out every drop. Devote yourself to creative work. Although you are taking literature classes and maybe even GTA-ing, your writing needs to come first; nourish it.



Mary Sheffield is an instructor and the English Graduate Advisor at FAU. Contact her at msheffi3@fau.edu. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Florida Review, Blip Magazine, Fiction Southeast, Spring Gun, and other publications. She received her MFA in fiction from FAU. And her cat keeps a blog.

M.A. versus M.F.A. – a note to would-be creative writers

I applied to the creative writing Master of Arts program because I was scared. Scared that pursuing the three-year Master of Fine Arts without an English degree was presumptuous, overly ambitious. Scared my excitement over returning to the classroom after four years in the ‘real world’ would burn out after the first few stressful semesters. Scared I’d have a tough time juggling a fulltime job and grad school. Scared my personal life would progress, lead me in a different direction, before I could get through 48 credits. Scared I wouldn’t be any good at creative writing. I chose the 30-credit M.A. program because it was shorter. Safer.

Looking back a year and a half later, even after switching to the M.F.A., I don’t really blame my former self. There have got to be countless would-be students with similar issues – people who have always wanted to try creative writing but don’t have the background and aren’t prepared to dedicate three years of their life to the unknown. People who are interested in graduate study but have personal or professional obligations that don’t allow for a three-year commitment. People who want to write but don’t necessarily intend to teach in the future. For those people, the M.A. is a great fit – and more than that, a golden opportunity. Kudos to FAU for offering an alternative to the M.F.A. that still gives passionate but perhaps busy or apprehensive writers a real chance to learn, to write. It so happens that not too many people take that chance – at one point, I was the only student in the creative writing M.A. track – but it was undoubtedly the right program for me at the time.

To those of you deciding between the M.A. and M.F.A., know that the M.A. is a viable option that, though shorter than the more popular M.F.A., offers the same access to talented and insightful professors and fellow student writers. It’s a less conventional path to take in the creative writing world, but one that may be right for you. And maybe some of you, like me, will start on that path only to realize your initial fears were unfounded. Well, maybe not quite unfounded – it was nerve-racking to take my first workshop with students who had been writing and sharing their work for years. Being back in school after a few years in the workforce was an adjustment, and studying while maintaining a fulltime job continues to be a balancing act. My personal life did progress – I got married last semester.

But as I made my way through the program, as my confidence built and my excitement mounted and I became more inspired than I’ve ever been, I found that none of this threw me off the way I thought it would. Any residual stress seemed – seems – so worth it. Three years became a commitment I was not only willing, but thrilled, to make. I switched to the M.F.A. because my time as an M.A. helped me realize not only how much I love learning and writing, but how much more I have to learn and write. And I’ll always be grateful to have had the chance to ease into that realization on my own terms.



Risa Polansky Shiman is in her second year of the M.F.A. program. She holds a B.S. in Journalism from the University of Florida and reported on Miami’s local governments before moving north to work, study, and write at FAU.