First packet: off!

My mentor, looking studious during workshop

    I put my last first packet in the mail yesterday.  It’s sad that I won’t be doing this anymore.  My last-last packet will go in the mail at the end of May, and that will be it.  Well, I do want to do a post-grad semester, but I need to establish myself in the full-time work world after this, so I want to wait until I have that under control before I go the post-grad semester.
    My mentor this semester is David Yoo, and he has his students mail their packets to him, most mentors, my past ones included, prefer email.  It’s a little different, but by no means difficult, and thanks to Flat Rate shipping, not expensive at all.  Putting it in the actual mail felt a little mor final than emailing it, but strangely I haven’t experienced sender’s remorse.  I think that if I haven’t by now, thirty-two hours later, I probably won’t.  This is a nice surprise on the self-confidence front, and hopefully it makes my little novel feel good.
    I had to send forty thoroughly revised pages of my novel, along with my Artist’s Statement (my last Artist’s Statement!...for now).  The page quota for semesters one and two is 20-25 pages (third semester has no creative writing quote, since most students only have the time and mental capacity to work on the critical thesis), and since I follow rules very well, I usually sent around 20.  Or 19.9.  But now there is no range.  The handbook had an example of a fourth semester Plan, and I pretty much copied that.  Forty this time, fifty next time, the entire 120-150 the third time (this includes the previous 90, with the mentor’s comments taken into account, and most likely acted upon).  I was nervous at first, because I still have two (out of six) characters to write, and they were the only two I had to do capital “R” Research for.  I’m almost done researching one, who is a soldier.  I still have to write him, and research and write the other one, but I just...don’t feel worried.  Right now, anyway.
    I decided to rearrange my chapters a little bit.  Right now, I have my novel divided into three parts, which I tried to be too cool for school and call “Book” 1-3, but that seems to be confusing people, so I might give up the ghost and call them “Part” 1-3.  So each character has a chapter in each part.  I had them all in “perfect” order (my OCD is showing, I know), but at the last minute I decided to switch it up, and I like the new order.
    I feel bad for my last two characters, because I’m still not really looking forward to writing them.  That sound so bad.  It sounds like a parent having favorite children, or a teacher having favorite students...which I also do.  The teacher one, I don’t have kids.
    I do feel really good about my choice in mentor.  David is funny, and people keep saying there is humor in my novel, and I should bring it out more.  I know he’ll help me do that, and it was also really easy to write my cover letter (which all packets have).  It’s not that my other mentors weren’t funny, it’s just that David is always funny, and my weird little self-deprecating humor (well, I hope it comes across as humor) just flowed from my fingers as I typed.  I’m off to a great start, and it’s making me a little less sad that this is the winding-down part of my grad school career.
    I will, of course, be as present as possible for the Winter Residency, when some of my favorite people (in the program and in life) will be graduating.  I’ll be there for graduation for sure, and if I can take the days off, I’ll be there every day, taking classes and eating the haute cuisine from the cafeteria.
    In addition to writing my other two characters, I need to think about the class I’m going to teach.  I don’t want to do this.  I hate being the center of attention, by which I mean I hate everyone in the room hanging on my every word.  I’m super with one on one (in which I kind of am the center of the other person’s attention), or groups that don’t encompass everyone in the room, but stick me at a podium or something and it’s over.  I want my friends to be there (and I know that unless there’s an awesome class at the same time, they will be), but I also kind of don’t.  I kind of don’t want anyone but my evaluating professor to show up.  I feel like I’ll be overwhelmed if too many people show up, and scrambling to fill the time if not enough people do.  If my class is a dud, I can just have a nice conversation with the professor about my thesis.  But I have a cute little bit semi-planned with Amanda, so there’s that.  I’m sure it will be fine, and I’m worrying for nothing.  I need to come up with a description by March 31, which sounds like a long way away, but we’re supposed to run it by our mentor first, so that means the description is going in the second packet, due March 3.  Did I mention that my third packet is due March 31 also?  And that’s also my birthday?  Sweet Jesus.  My packet will be in the mail before that, obviously, and I’m going to try to get my description emailed to Meg early, too.  That way nothing is really due that day.
    There’s so much I have to do this semester.  I’m afraid it’s going to make it fly by, and I want to savor it, cherish it, before it’s gone.  I have to decide what I’m going to read for my graduate student reading, and spend time not looking forward to doing it.  I also need to find gifts for Meg and Tanya, to thank them for the wonderful program.  That’s what fourth semesters do, who are then graduating students at Residency.  The incoming fourth semesters get to decorate for graduation, which worked out fine for us, but could easily have turned into a shit show.  Luckily, we all worked together and got our shit decided in plenty of time for school.
    This ended up being totally different than I thought it would be when I sat down, but suffice it to say, my semester is going well, but I know I’m going to cry a few times along the way.  I’ve cried other semesters, too, around the time when a packet is coming due, because I overwhelmed myself and felt like I couldn’t do it.  I didn’t cry this time, and I feel like I can do it, but I don’t want it to be over.

Happy 24th Birthday Fuckhead

I thought I had gotten rid of all the pictures of him, but to my complete and utter horror, I have quite a few saved on my computer.  This is him, the boy who terrorized me for four years.

     Yesterday was his birthday.  No, not the as-yet-unnamed-and-also-largely-undescribed boy (he says the word “boy” is creepy, but I’m not ready for the word “man”).  My ex, Mike.  That’s whose birthday was yesterday.  He is now a whopping twenty-four years old and has probably accomplished nothing since the last time I spoke to him.
    Well, perhaps that’s not fair.  He did emerge from the ether for a quick second after I got rid of him to pay me back what he owed me ($60 and a broken PS3 = $100 and a Blu-ray player; no really, I consider this equal).  And he emerged again to respond to my thank-you email three months after I sent it.
    I told Amanda this, and now I’m going to tell all of you.  I was honestly a little disappointed that he was still alive.  I had held out hope that somehow he had overdosed on insulin (he’s a Type 1 diabetic), but alas it seems not.
    Why do I harbor such resentment toward this boy?  I’ll tell you.  He was abusive.  Mostly emotionally/psychologically, but a little bit physically, too.  Most of the physical part was the first Winter/Spring we were together, but every so often we would have brutal fights where we would both get physical.  I am in no way trying to get attention by revealing this.  I am merely trying to take away his power, because one of the worst things he did was make me promise not tell anyone about what he did, especially my next boyfriend, and any boyfriends after that.  He was so vain that he didn’t want anyone else who dated me to think badly of him.  Yet he hated my high school boyfriend for calling me the c-word once.
    Funny, because I lost track of how many times he called me that.  That and a slut.  He also called me retarded if I couldn’t remember something he said (tell me, can you remember every single thing one specific person ever said to you?  Didn’t think so), and for a little bit there he could call me Autistic when I did the same.  This would be awful enough on its own, but he did it because my brother is Autistic and I shared with Mike my concern that I might be, too.  What a vile human being.  If no one else was in earshot, he would yell.  About the most unimportant things.  And then he would be so hurt if I flinched when he turned to me.  For fuck’s sake, there’s a 50/50 chance you’re going to try to blow out my eardrum!
    The physical stuff can be summed up pretty neatly, and again I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad for me, I’m trying to take away the power he made me promise to give him forever.  The first Winter we were together, we were hanging out after work (which then meant after 2 AM), and out of nowhere we began to argue.  Nothing new.  Before I know it, he is on top of me, his hands around my throat, squeezing hard.  Frozen in the shock of what is happening, I do nothing but stare at him.  I legitimately think for a second that I might die.  He stops as suddenly as he started and we lie on his bed for a minute.  I touch my neck, get up, say I have to go, and get the hell out of there without even tying my shoes.
    That Spring, we were either going to Newbury Comics or his house, he kept changing his mind.  We were nearing to on-ramp to the highway, so I shout that he needs to make a decision after ten times of changing, and he shouts go to his house!  I get on the highway and mutter that this situation is stupid.  He starts yelling because I allegedly called him stupid, saying a situation he created is stupid is the same thing as calling him stupid, blah, blah, blah.  He throws his phone at my windshield, which creates a lovely spiderweb crack across the whole windshield.  While I’m driving.  I begin to scream, and he screams back that it isn’t his fault, I made him do it.  Before he can do anything else, I bring my fist down as hard as I can as high up on his thigh as I can, to demonstrate that even though I am driving, I know damn well where the family jewels are, and next time I will hit them.  He then decides it would be cool to ram his hand into my right ear.  At the time, I had three piercings in my ear, all of which had jewelry in them.  Two in the earlobe and a conch.  The posts of the lobe earrings went into the soft spot behind my ear so forcefully that the bled.  My ear hurt so bad I had to take the lobe earrings out.  My entire ear was purple for about two weeks, and the fucker made me wear my hair in front of my ear until it was “safe.”  He would even go so far as to check on me and make sure I hadn’t exposed his “mistake.”
    The other physical stuff was various pushing or hair pulling, none of it in the cute and playful way or the sexy way.  I did my fair share of pushing and hair pulling, including a memorable time when he emerged from the shower in only a towel, and he looked so helpless falling to the ground naked.  I win. :)
    Why didn’t I leave?  Why was I with him for over four years?  The first fight we had was a bad one, and it was after only two months.  Why didn’t I leave then?  The answer is both simple and complicated.  I had low self-esteem, and still do.  When it was good it was really good.  At the beginning, when he wasn’t Satan himself, he did make me feel beautiful and smart and loved and valued and all the gooey stuff.  Later on, I didn’t want to throw away all the time I had already invested in the relationship.  It was also a lot harder to leave than I ever thought it would be.  I was thinking about it at residency, and I told someone (I think it was Amanda, but it may have been someone else) that being in an abusive relationship is like being at the bottom of a one hundred foot hole, and the person looking down at you from the top doesn’t want you to get out.  Mike wasn’t very smart academically, but he was manipulative as fuck.  He knew all my weak points, as if I keep them a secret, and he knew exactly what to do and say to have me crawling back to him every damn time.
    He broke up with me officially a little over a year after we started going out.  We then proceeded to date in secret, which really meant we weren’t fooling anyone.  His logic was that everyone would think he was a jerk for dumping me and then going back out with me, but what really happened is that the longer the “secret” went on, the more our co-workers thought he was a jerk for (what?) jerking me around.  Fancy that.  So we do this secret-dating thing for another year, and then out of the blue he tells me that I should move on.  A cute boy at the theater asks for my number (nevermind that I’m twenty-three and he is about to turn nineteen...seriously, nevermind that), so I give it to him.  I say nothing to Mike.  I go on a date with this boy, and we go back to his house and make out and get to some base that is not home but bases confuse me.  We go out again on his birthday, and I tell Mike that morning that I am going on a date with him.  He is sad and mopey and shit but I’m happy.  This boy appears to be nice.  Mike then proceeds to text me the whole time, and tells me he loves me and wants me back.  Bye bye young boy, hello Mike.  Oh, but we still have to date in secret.
    After another year and a half of this secret bullshit, he tells me he wants me to be his girlfriend again.  In a surprising show of backbone, I say no.  He has to put effort in and court me if he wants that.  He agrees.  He then gets me nothing for my birthday and is surprised when he continues to buy pot and cigarettes in excess and still gets nothing for me (he had also point-blank said he was going to get me something).  He eventually harangues me into hanging out with him in mid-May, where he buys me two books and a bag of my favorite flavor of Lindt chocolates.  Whoop de fucking do.
    What was the straw that broke the camel’s back?  Well, a few break-up songs were well-timed.  The most influential being Katy Perry’s “Roar” and Pink’s “Last Kiss,” though Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger” and Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” were in there, too.  I played the Pink (oh, excuse me, P!nk) song for Amanda, because it just has so much that I relate to, and now I’m going to bother you with it (well, the relevant parts).

I've been crying, I've been crying, I've been dying over you
I truly had.  There would be times I would sit alone in my house and bawl because I knew this wasn’t what it was supposed to be like, but I didn’t know what to do
Tie a knot in the rope, tryin' to hold, tryin' to hold, But there's nothing to grasp so I let go
That line did it for me.  If there was nothing between us, which there wasn’t, I should just let go.
I think I've finally had enough, I think I maybe think too much
I certainly do think too much.
I think this might be it for us
That was still really sad for me for a bit there.  I had put so much time into this, and now I was just going to have nothing to show for all my hard work?  But then I realized that it wasn’t that another girl would benefit from the work I put into him, it was that another girl would be subjected to the horror he was and maybe be harsher than I was
I won't miss all of the fighting that we always did,
Nope!  Still don’t
I will do what I please, anything that I want
That was really freeing.  I would be who I was, who I had been all along, who he had stamped down.  People would like me, and best of all, I would like me.  And so far, so good :)
You will pay for your sins, you'll be sorry my dear
Oh I fucking hope so.  I hope he’s in for a hot time when he dies.

    So once I knew what I had to do, I ceased being friends with benefits with him.  My plan was to just not talk to him much and never hang out with him until he gave up.  Lame-o plan, but whatever.  Shush.  That plan kind of fell apart when his dad got arrested, and then a few days later he was trying to ask me something.  It devolved into him calling me stupid, which I’m not, and even if I am, I wasn’t in the situation.  I was being sarcastic about his dad’s arrest, and so was he, and he said I didn’t understand his sarcasm.  I said I did, I just didn’t really know how to handle this situation because no one else I know has a family that’s such a shit show, so I’ve never had to deal with this.  I told him that I didn’t want his new phone number when he got it, and I just didn’t want to deal with him anymore.  I blocked him and went about my night.  He probably expected me to unblock him and try to contact him.  I didn’t.  I win.  And now I really win, because I do not hide at all the fact that I was in an abusive relationship.  Every time I actively hide it, he wins.  And I do not want him to win ever again.  Hopefully I’ll stop remembering his birthday, and hopefully soon.  I’ve been lucky enough not to have run into him since, and hopefully that keeps (not) happening.


* Note: to anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation in my area (Massachusetts) this website appears to have helpful information.  I don’t want anyone to be stuck in the destructive cycle I was stuck in.*

Radioactive

Amanda wants pictures on my blog...hope she's happy! :P

     I got home from my fourth MFA residency on Sunday.  There’s something the director always says in the wrap-up, which is that the residency has made us radioactive.  It basically means our writerly energy is palpable, but I like the thought of having a chemical glow.  I know, it’s weird, but whatever.
    It’s hokey, and everyone probably saw this coming, but when Imagine Dragons’ "Radioactive" came out, I thought it was a perfect representation of what we feel after residency.  When he takes the deep breath at the beginning of the song, it’s like us leaving campus.  Take a deep breath and go back to the real world.  He says he feels it in his bones, and I do, too.  I feel the love for my craft and for other people’s efforts at it.  I feel the love for the people I’ve met here, and it makes living in the real world without them, or at least without them in the flesh, more bearable.  That high concentration takes a while to leave my system, and it helps me steel myself against an immediate world that doesn’t understand me like they do.
    I like the thought of the energy created here putting off a tangible aura.  I like the thought of my family and the people around me being jealous of me, because I spend most of my time being jealous of them.  They can live their life without overanalyzing TV shows, books, and movies, and without getting lost in the “what ifs” of situations.  I envy being able to just exist without these thoughts weighing me down.
    Which doesn’t mean I don’t like who I am.  I didn’t used to like anything about myself, really, but now I do, and I won’t apologize to anyone for it.  I’ve grown into myself, particularly in the last year and a half, as one of my classmates pointed out to me.  She said that since she’s known me (she is in the same semester as I am), I’ve grown leaps and bounds in self-confidence, and I’ve come out of my shell.  That’s really saying something, because the shell I was in was deep, and part of it was not my own construction.  Without the program, I would never have felt like I deserved better than my ex.  But in a strictly school sense, she’s right.  When I started the program, the student reading almost gave me an anxiety attack, and it only had to be two minutes long.  I couldn’t read in public satisfactorily, and now I can.  I also introduced my mentor at a reading this past residency, something else I wouldn’t have been able to do before, and I wrote a freaking thirty-six page critical thesis.  I tend to be a quieter person, but I’m learning how to insert myself in conversations, and to laugh with my whole body when I think thinks are funny instead of suppressing it to a small chuckle.  This might be bad though, since sometimes I can definitely hear that my laugh is louder than everyone else’s.  Whatever, as I said earlier, I’m not apologizing.
    I owe the program a lot, and I’m sad that it’s almost over.  I’m trying to accept that not everything can last forever, but I do not want this magic to end.  I love the people I’ve met here, and most of them don’t live close to be by any means.  It’s going to be really depressing to not know when I’ll see them again, and to likely never see them all together again.
    Re-entry was hard this time, even with Amanda with me.  I feel so alive at residency, and the weight I carry around of no one (except, at times, my immediate family) understanding what my life is like is gone.  It was hard this time because there is only one more time.  I graduate in the Summer, and then I’m on my own.  I live close by, so I can come back to audit classes and go to readings and attend graduation, but it won’t be the same.  In the Winter, no one in my semester will be there, or it will be a special surprise if they are.  It’s all so bittersweet, and I feel like I’m not ready, but I have no choice.  I’m not too worried about my creative thesis or my class (another thing I wouldn’t have been able to do a year and a half ago).  I’m worried about not having this magic bubble anymore.  Of course, my favorite people live on the complete opposite side of the country, and I would hurry up and get financial independence and get my butt out there, but I can’t leave the girls and I can’t leave one other person.  Maybe I’m being ridiculous about them and I can leave, but my complicated feelings about that are another post entirely.  I just feel this very powerful pull from both sides, and all I can do for the moment is stay where I am because I have no money and no way (ie big kid job) of getting any.
    I hope the next residency goes by slower than this one did.

Skewl

    So I’ve been at my MFA program since Thursday.  I’ll be here until Sunday, so today is about the halfway point.
    For those of you who don’t know, I am in Pine Manor College's Solstice MFA Program.  The way I found it is actually pretty funny.  I went to Catholic high school (though I’ve never been super religious), and I looked at Pine Manor for undergrad.  Pine Manor and my high school were both all girls.  I did a tour, and the campus is beautiful, with a nice antique Administration building, a better shower/bathroom to student ratio than any other college I’ve seen, but I couldn’t do four more years of no boys.  I needed some penis in my classroom, goddammit!  Of course, I didn’t end up going where I picked, but that’s a story for another day.
    So I come to the Winter/Spring semester of my junior year of college (which, strictly year-wise, was my senior year - indeed, I was a super-senior.  Be jealous), and my parents ask if I’m thinking about grad school.  They didn’t want me to go into writing when I was in high school, because it’s rarely lucrative, but I think they had come to realize how passionate I was about it.  I loved my undergrad English courses, at any rate.  So I say no I hadn’t thought about it, I didn’t even know you could get a Master’s in Writing.  I believe you can, they say.
    So I go on the Googley and I search for Master’s in Writing.  I came across a site that would find colleges with the Master’s Program you desired, and I found a few.  To be specific, I found Pine Manor, Goddard, Lesley, and Vermont College of Fine Arts.
    I did a tour/open house for Goddard College, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Emerson College, and  Lesley University.  Each time I went to a new place I liked it better than the old.  Well, that’s not true.  I hated Emerson, and we left early.  I was disappointed, because I had looked there when I thought I wanted to get my Bachelor’s in Speech Therapy, but this time they just seemed beyond pretentious, and it gave me a bad feeling in my stomach.  Other than that, they were great.  What I liked the most was that (except for Emerson) they were all low-residency programs, something I’d never heard of before.
    If you don’t know, low-residency means that you are on campus for a short, action-packed amount of time, and the rest of the semester is spent in correspondence with a mentor.  Here at Solstice, most of the mentors work through email, though some prefer snail mail.  This is an ideal set-up if you have a full time job, as you don’t need to leave work early every day, but merely use your vacation time to go away.  It also allows people of all ages and locations to come to the program, since they don’t need to permanently relocate.
    So back to the school-checking out.  I go to all four of these, and am in the midst of filling out applications, when I realize there is no open house for Solstice.  So I email the director (Meg Kearney), and I ask if any such thing is possible, telling her I live locally.  She asks if I can come on a specific day at something like two in the afternoon, and I say sure.  What this turned out to be was a one-on-one meeting (well, my mom and brother came with me), with the director of the freaking program.  She answered all the questions I had, and if I had any stupid ones, she never let on.  I knew then that this was the place I was meant to be.
    I sent out applications to everywhere but Emerson and Goddard (because I was getting real sick of Goddard’s shit in regards to their lengthy application requirements), and waited.
    Solstice was the first to respond, and as embarrassing as this is, the only one to accept me.  Which makes me happy that they were first.  I tend to take things ridiculously personally, and I’m working on it, but a rejection would have crushed me if that’s what had come first.  Before I got my letter in the mail, I got a call from Meg herself, and a message on my voicemail with the good news.  I wasted no time in responding, even before I got the rejection letters.  I was thrilled that I would get to be a part of the community Meg and the assistant director Tanya Whiton had created.
    This low-residency program is four semesters and five residencies.  Each residency consists of workshops 9-noon on days 2-9, with classes in the afternoon.  You have to take come Craft, Criticism, and Theory classes (two hours long), and some Elective Sessions and Seminars (one hour long).  You have to take three of each, but everyone takes more.  The day the class list gets emailed is a day no real school work gets done.  For seven nights, there are faculty and guest readings, as writers not slated to be workshop leaders and mentors come in to teach classes, also.  A lot of people stay in the dorms, but some people stay in the hotel down the road that offers discounts to Solstice students and faculty.  There is a reading where the graduating students do a fifteen minute reading of their creative thesis, and a reading where the other students read 1-2 minutes of whatever work they want to share.  The second Saturday (day 9) is Graduation.  The fourth semesters decorate, which is nice unless you’re a fourth semester!  The ceremony is always classy, and there’s a reception afterward.
    Throughout the first two semesters, you work on your creative work and learn to write craft analyses, in preparation for the third semester and the critical thesis.  I just finished this semester, and it was hard, but I did it.  The paper is supposed to be 30-35 pages, and mine went onto the 36th a little bit.  I wrote about narrative distance in first and third person, so next residency (Summer), I’ll teach an hour long class about it.  I’m nervous, because I’m the kind of person who would never not use an Invisibility Cloak if I had one.  Again, I’m working on it.  The fourth semester, students work on their critical thesis.  It has to be 120-150 pages, and there are special rules for having it bound and such.  I’m excited to get back into my zombie novel.
    Despite all the ways my writing, both critical and creative has grown, my favorite part of Solstice is the people.  Meg and Tanya are so accessible, and so are the faculty.  But my fellow students are great.  Without a doubt my favorite people in the world are people I met here.  I won’t mention names, because this is spur of the moment so I didn’t get permission, but I know I can mention one name, because she blogs about Solstice sometimes, too, and that’s Amanda.  She and the other people in the program are my tribe, and it feels silly to say that, but my family just doesn’t understand me the way they do, and they never will because they’re not writers.  I’m sad that I only have one residency left, because I love this community so much, but I’m happy that I love close and I can continue to come to classes and graduation and such even after I’m “done.”  And now I’m going to go get my shiz together for the class I have this afternoon.  If you’re a random writer and you’re thinking about an MFA program, look at Solstice!