new beginnings (in the middle of things)

A Spanish gypsy named Pintór once told me, as we stared up at the ancient walls of the Alhambra, “Toda vida es cuento. Eres un personaje en mi historia, y yo en la tuya. Así nos comprendemos.” All of life is a story. You are a character in my story, and I in yours. That is how we understand ourselves. He was illiterate; I had never heard it articulated so well. Suffice to say that I have always had trouble differentiating the events of my life from literary narrative. 


        My love of language and chronic wanderlust have taken me around the world, each adventure captured in a gaggle of notebooks. Some, from the years I lived in Madrid, are mostly in Spanish, others spattered with words and phrases in French, Portuguese, Otji-herero, Greek, Aymara, the languages of each landscape I explored. I’ve always felt that language and place are intrinsically entwined, that there is something effortlessly communicated by a purring “r” or the crush of consonants in a nearly vowel-less word. Each new place meant a barrage of new smells, tastes, and sounds that I tried to grasp in my writing. For a long time, I thought that I would one day turn those stories into a memoir. But when I began to write, I found that being faithful to reality was much more difficult than I’d anticipated. There were other characters, faces from the sidewalks, conversations overheard in a café, begging to be explored. Revisiting those worlds with the freedom to manipulate and invent allowed me to examine the themes that most interested me and elucidate those ideas through characters alternately simpler and more complex than their non-fictive counterparts.

            I moved to Spain immediately after high school, partly as an escape, but mostly because I loved the language and wanted to achieve real fluency. I studied Spanish philology and literature during the week and traveled around the country, sleeping on the beach or in caves with the gypsies and squatters, on the weekends. In the four years I lived in Madrid, I managed to travel as far as the Greek isles on my thumb, loitering around a fish market until I found a trawler who agreed to give me a ride on his ketch. I was serious about my studies and serious about my cultural education as well. As an editor of my university’s bilingual newspaper, I was driven by deadlines and enjoyed the challenge of proofing columns in both Spanish and in English. And my literature-heavy course load ensured that I was reading, discussing, and writing about novels constantly in both languages. It was fascinating to read Hemingway write about Spain in English and Reinaldo Arenas describe New York in Spanish. I very much enjoyed my undergraduate years and think fondly of that period of intellectual rigor and self-exploration.

            After college, I had debts and doubts and decided it would be prudent to wander on a less-permanent basis. I was fortunate enough to be offered a teaching position despite my lack of training, and was surprised to find that I loved it. I went back to school in the evenings and obtained my licensure, and poured my creative energies into designing lesson plans, rewriting curriculum, coaching competitive public speaking, and sponsoring student clubs like Model UN and Operation Smile. I took students on a summer trip to Perú to immerse them in language and culture. I was designated a Distinguished Educator of the Year. I fell in love with my work.

I doubt there is really a moment in which a person decides to forgo art in favor of more practical pursuits. If it were so simple, we would stare down the prospect with our young faces and march bravely toward an impractical but fulfilling horizon. No, I suspect that it is instead a series of sensible decisions that we make to accommodate our families, our security, and our careers, that eventually leads us to a quieter, more painful moment cast years into the future, a moment in which we realize that we’ve ignored the inspired core of our nature, that we have become a consumer instead of a producer of art. Fearful of such a moment in my own offing, I took stock of my creative life about a year ago. I realized that I hadn’t written – beyond journaling – for seven years. All of my creative energies had been channeled into my work, which, although gratifying, was not fulfilling that essential artistic need. I made a decision to set aside time to write seriously.       
    

I joined a writer’s group called The Muse and took a class on narrative travel writing. I felt inhibited by the form, the lean sentences and pesky adherence to truth. Last spring, I asked to join the Open Studio, a workshop for independent writers working on longer projects. Since then, I have been participating regularly in the group, submitting ten or so pages every two or three weeks. It was a change that challenged me. It is wonderful to have a deadline again, to have a group that reads thoughtfully and provides insightful criticism week after week. The collaborative environment has afforded me a safe haven to test my work and ten sets of eyes to tell me when something does not make sense.

After a year of participation in The Muse workshops, I felt that I was ready to take the next step in my writing. Although I am still devoted to my teaching, I decided that I was no longer satisfied relegating my writing to the side. I decided to apply to some MFA programs in creative writing. Like many others who have careers that they love and marriages that anchor them to a geographical location, a full-time program wasn't really an option for me. Although the writing programs at Iowa, Johns Hopkins, and University of Virginia were dreamy, I essentially weighed the pros and cons, and threw my lot in with the low-residency format. Instead of moving to a campus for two or three years to study and teach full-time, the low-residency format allows you to maintain your current career and travel to a campus twice a year for about ten days. Many of the programs also have programs in translation, creative non-fiction, and young adult fiction, and a few of them offer residencies in alternate locations as far away as Santa Fe, Puerto Rico, or Slovenia.

After a too-fast month doing final edits on 25 pages of fiction as well as writing personal essays and re-writing critical essays for submission, I licked envelopes, crossed my fingers, and sent applications to Vermont College of Fine Arts, Bennington College, and Warren Wilson College. And then I waited a painful month in limbo before I heard the verdict: accepted at Vermont College and Bennington, rejected at Warren Wilson. I was surprised when Bennington told me that I had exactly one week to accept or reject their invitation. Who makes a decision in a week? It was not an easy decision to make; Vermont's program so appealed to me, especially with their optional focus on translation and residencies in Slovenia, but I kept getting hung up on the allure of Bennington, and the delicious abstract list they sent me of the talks that would be given in June. At the last minute (literally), I called Bennington and declined their invitation. I am headed to Vermont.

 I could not be more excited about starting this new course of study. I look forward to having a structured schedule of critique and editing, to learning about and improving my craft as much as I can. I am also excited by the possibility of completing a concentration in translation, having the opportunity to share the voices of writers that I love with an English-speaking audience. My goals are simple: to learn more about the craft of writing, the mechanics of a well-structured novel, and to become an adept editor of my own and others’ material. I hope to mine my travel history for interesting and important stories that have urgency and significance. I know that I can become a better writer and teacher through this process, and am prepared to devote myself to the task. More than anything, I hope to appease the creative craving in my gut, and to write a story worth reading. 

                                                                                         Talk soon, 

                                                                                         Rachel