{"id":50,"date":"2012-06-15T04:13:41","date_gmt":"2012-06-15T04:13:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/littlecubenews.com\/saraloewen\/?p=50"},"modified":"2013-10-08T03:04:05","modified_gmt":"2013-10-08T03:04:05","slug":"writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/saraloewen.com\/?p=50","title":{"rendered":"What Now?"},"content":{"rendered":"

These are some thoughts on writing and finishing my MFA<\/a>, posted at 49 Writers, a collaborative site featuring Alaskan authors.<\/p>\n

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Truman Capote said, \u201cFinishing a book is just like you took a child out in the yard and shot it.\u201d\u00a0Maybe that\u2019s a little dramatic. John Steinbeck said, \u201cThe book dies a real death for me when I write the last word.\u00a0\u00a0I have a little sorrow and then go on to a new book which is alive.\u00a0\u00a0The rows of my books on the shelf are to me like very well embalmed corpses.\u00a0\u00a0They are neither alive nor mine.\u00a0\u00a0I have no sorrow for them because I have forgotten them, forgotten in its truest sense.<\/div>\n
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I got a taste of that \u201clittle sorrow\u201d when I turned in my MFA thesis this year.\u00a0\u00a0It wasn\u2019t even a book yet, just a book-length collection of essays, and still, hitting\u00a0send<\/em>\u00a0felt kind of awful. It meant the end of mentor comments, summer residencies, school-imposed deadlines, the end of a nurturing community that had given me a glimpse into the writing life.<\/div>\n
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Sure, I felt celebratory for a couple of hours. I left the library and took a long shower\u2014my first in days. Standing in the shower, I wondered how these years had gone so fast. How I would justify babysitting expenses without MFA deadlines. Having turned in the final submission of writing I\u2019d worked on for three years, I was suddenly free to think about how I hadn\u2019t exercised in three years, or cleaned the house thoroughly, or thought about whether we lived in the right town, or what, exactly, I hoped to use my MFA degree for. Was I hoping to be a writer or a teacher? Was it possible to do both well? By the time my hair was dry, I was depressed.<\/div>\n
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Creative writing teacher\u00a0Elise Blackwell\u00a0asks, \u201cWhat Defines a Successful Post-M.F.A. Career?\u201d\u00a0in a recent article in\u00a0The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em>. She lists the many reasons people enter a writing program: to take a few years out of their lives to read and write, to earn a living in publishing or professional writing, to finish a novel or screenplay, to enter academe even though \u201cThere are full-time university teaching jobs available for less than 1 percent of graduating creative-writing program alumni.\u201d\u00a0Blackwell settles, in the end, on\u00a0her own measure of success: \u201cHow many of our students are still making art\u2014and making it well and ideally to the notice of others\u201410 years out?\u201d<\/div>\n
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Which is exactly what made hitting\u00a0send<\/em>\u00a0so hard for me\u2014the fear that I wouldn\u2019t be able to sustain my ambition or writing life for the next ten years, let alone for the rest of my life. One valuable lesson of an MFA program is learning how much work writing is. Life rarely arranges itself into tidy sessions of writing time.\u00a0During my first MFA residency, I was the only one in the dorms with a breast pump.\u00a0\u00a0The next year, the only one wearing maternity clothes. Many times, I worried that I\u2019d entered the program at the wrong time in my life. I\u2019m not sure there is ever a right time.\u00a0Still, before being published, it is so much easier to say, \u201cI\u2019m an MFA student,\u201d than to say, \u201cI\u2019m a writer.\u201d<\/div>\n
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There was an interview in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner this fall with Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt. His career advice was to \u201cpick something you love so much you would do it for free.\u201d I think the unspoken assumption is that the money will follow. But when you\u2019re a writer, you are often working for something close to free. It\u2019s not always easy to feel confident about writing as a career choice. Sometimes we have to work jobs we don\u2019t love and fit what we\u00a0do<\/em>\u00a0love wherever we can.<\/div>\n
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Last month a full-time English position opened in Kodiak. With benefits! I could replace the glasses I bought 8 years ago. We could all go to the dentist! For the past two years, I\u2019ve been working as an adjunct and patching together part-time positions to supplement a series of slow commercial salmon seasons. We\u2019re self-employed, and our health insurance costs nearly as much as our mortgage but covers only catastrophic accidents or illness. Benefits would be a really big deal.<\/div>\n
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I wanted the job, but I knew that taking on five new classes would leave little time for writing. I knew I\u2019d be lesson planning in the shower, grading papers after the boys went to bed, answering student texts and emails on the weekend. I know how I teach, how easily I pour my time into planning classes and commenting on papers. Teaching is better than headlines and Hulu and Facebook and Gmail combined when it comes to stealing time.<\/div>\n
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All weekend, the little voice that Oprah is always urging us to listen to kept saying, \u201cThis is not the right time.\u201d\u00a0As I was trying to decide what to do about the job, things happened, things my friend Amy would call signs because Amy reads books about cosmic energy and trusting the universe.\u00a0Like the night I got home from teaching and my four-year-old, Liam, was already asleep, looking angelic with rosy cheeks and arms thrown up over his head, and I realized I had seen him for a total of 25 minutes all day. 25 minutes of cereal eating, pajama changing, teeth brushing, raincoat zipping before it was time to catch the preschool bus. His little brother, Luke, is two. I know now, how quickly Luke will be four, how easy it would be to miss this. And I know already how much I will miss this.<\/div>\n
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Other signs: the same day the babysitter gave her notice; my MFA manuscript arrived in the mailbox from the graduate office. Steve Jobs died, which should be completely unrelated except that I followed a link to one of his speeches on Youtube, the one where he says, \u201cYou have to trust in something. You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something\u2014your gut, destiny, life karma, whatever, because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.\u201d<\/div>\n
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I decided to trust that body of work in the mailbox, to live without new glasses, to floss more often, to wait for a fulltime position when the boys are a little older. When I didn\u2019t take the job, I apologized to the head of the English department who happens to be a lovely person. He said, \u201cHey, you can\u2019t control when epiphanies hit. You\u2019re a writer\u2014you should know that.\u201d<\/div>\n
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So when I learned this week that my first book is going to be published, it felt like confirmation of everything that I want to believe in\u2014the creative spirit, MFA programs, luck, mentors, hard work, Amy\u2019s signs. Except the news came with the flu. And my husband\u2019s flu became pneumonia and they found that his white blood cell count was so low our doctor put him into the hospital and told us to prepare for the possibility of Leukemia. Insurance kicks in after our $10,000 deductible, but of course my first thought was that I should have a fulltime job with health benefits. Meanwhile, friends and family rallied\u2014helping with the boys, bringing food, walking our dog, texting encouragement\u2014confirming that yes, we live in the right place.<\/div>\n
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On the way home from the hospital today, I mailed my contract. I was thinking about the way life changes, slowly or suddenly, with or without our permission. Over the last three years, my MFA classmates have moved, gotten married, changed jobs, adopted children, lost loved ones, given birth\u2014and those are just the big things. Sometimes we sacrifice creative time to pay the bills, or to be a decent mother or father or spouse or friend. And then we get back to work, hoping for sorrows as small as a finished book, hoping for balance somewhere between life and writing.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These are some thoughts on writing and finishing my MFA, posted at 49 Writers, a collaborative site featuring Alaskan authors. Truman Capote said, \u201cFinishing a book is just like you took a child out in the yard and shot it.\u201d\u00a0Maybe that\u2019s a little dramatic. John Steinbeck said, \u201cThe book dies a real death for me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/saraloewen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/saraloewen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/saraloewen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saraloewen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saraloewen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/saraloewen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1826,"href":"https:\/\/saraloewen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions\/1826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/saraloewen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saraloewen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saraloewen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}