4.01.2009

close the door, open the window.

Despite my hopes, the Graduate School of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro will carry on in the fall of 2009 without me.  I applied to the Masters of Fine Arts program in creative fiction back in December and found out Saturday that they aren't really all that interested in me.  I got the steel-toed boot.

I want to write and to teach writing. To teach, I'd need a degree, so I'm out one... for now.  Luckily I'm not out both.  The latter only requires some protected time and my sweet friend Dora, the MacBook.

During the winter I had this stagnated posture with writing. It's scary to write a book, at least for me.  It feels like there is a story, which I vaguely know, that is too complex to tell.  Once I realized back in February that my only reason for waiting around was this brewing fear, I started over. I ditched the old book I'd started in the summer and began again at square one.  This was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating considering that I had poured hours into this amorphous plot.  I filed it away on Dora's hard drive for good.

I'm a good way into the second attempt now and, aside from a few afternoons of writer's block, it's going quite beautifully.  I decided, par the advice of Lamott, to let the book write itself, to let the plot make its way like a secret garden.  It's finally going well.

Rejection is the infamous horror for, well, everyone.  When I found out I didn't get into school, I felt like a dandelion twice run over by a car.  For some reason known only to the heavens every person within 100 miles that loves me was either out of town or busy, so I cooked myself some dinner, drank a glass of Yellowtail, and watched "Marley and Me," which made me cry a little more.  I guess I needed some solo digestion time.  Which I did: I digested, I cried, I sat on the floor with my back against the sink cabinet and began to think maybe I never even had any ability to tell a story, much less write a sentence, and then I let the less dysfunctional half of my brain smack the pathetic side and I stood up.

And I got back to work on my book.


1 comment:

Juliet said...

Don't be discouraged. Never stop sharing your talent- we would all feel lonely without it.

Followers