That MFA story

I mentioned in passing once that I did a semester of an MFA, and a few people in this community asked for the story–and then the other day I just happened to pop over to the Bad Place website (where I am almost never these days) and by chance saw my friend Prof. Grace Lavery tweet this:

one of the weirder conceits of BAKE OFF is that food is good if it produces flavors in equal, sequenced, and balanced order. “i’m getting the lemon, the prune, and then the armagnac comes in at the end and tops it off.” but what if i just want VERY LEMON — The Great British Bake Off, of course. Make sure not to have a soggy bottom!

To which I felt compelled to reply:

Me replying to Grace's tweet, above, with "Why I quit an MFA program after one semester, basically"

Which means it's time for that story, I reckon. (With takeaways, as always.)

So. It was the year 2000. I was 25. I'd been working as a freelance writer, dabbling in Jewish text study, writing other stuff in my spare time. I'd mostly moved on from poetry to– well, something more like fiction, but it was not infrequently work that intentionally lived somewhere in the borderlands between poetry and prose.* I had recently finished a novella in that style and was trying to figure out my creative life, my spiritual life, and, like, my life in general.

*I've been working on another piece about, well, this kind of work, will share when it's fully cooked. You'll know it when you see it.

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