some thoughts on gentleness

I've been thinking a lot about the idea of gentleness lately. It all started far before I was conscious of it, as is always the way with such things. But it really sprang to the forefront with the title of a Jen Bervin (swoon!) lecture during my VCFA residency.


The unconscious part had been brooding in my heart for over a year now, the knowledge of how mean and hard I had been for the past long while. Ten years or more, if I am going to be honest. How sarcasm and irony governed my responses like reflex, and how cruel I was to myself and others in an attempt to dissimulate a deep self-doubt and -loathing. It suddenly seemed as though I had washed up on a foreign shore, or on some distant moon, and before I even opened my eyes, I knew I was alone. I was beginning to understand that cruelty as humor can only resist so long before it is simply cruelty. I started to see that my heart had better to offer than judgement.


I began a year of intentional kindness then, to see how it would change me. I failed so completely that I am ashamed. It was much more difficult than I'd imagined. But there were moments when I could feel it working - there were relationships formed and friendships deepened and I experienced some honesty with myself that led me to apply for an MFA in the first place. But it was still something of an exercise, something I was doing without fully understanding why, only knowing that it was important.


So in June, when I found myself suddenly in the midst of exceptionally loving people, who were so common in mind and soft in spirit, that the pieces started to fit for me. I started to really understand the challenge of gentleness and the power of kindness, and I found that for the first time in my life, I really have that capacity. After so long struggling against my family, myself, religion...the list could go on forever, that I was finally at a place where my heart was soft and open.


Of course, once you start noticing something, it begins to appear everywhere. I feel like everywhere I look lately, the word "gentle" appears. I thought I'd share a few of them...


Two weeks ago, on one of those quote-a-day calendars:

Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal;

avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among people.

                                                                                          - Lao Tzu

Last week on So You Think You Can Dance, Marko and Allison danced to Jeff Buckley covering a Smith's song called "I Know It's Over." If you don't know it, the song is about being aware of having failed someone in a deep way, and at the end of a relationship. The part that matters goes like this:

It's so easy to laugh

It's so easy to hate

It takes strength to be gentle and kind

And this morning, while I was thinking about marriage and paging through William Carlos Williams' "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower":

It was the love of love,

the love that swallows up all else,

a grateful love, 

a love of nature, of people,

of animals,

a love engendering

gentleness and goodness

that moved me

and that I saw in you.

I'll admit I'm still not sure what it was that first morning, what it was that told me my heart was open after so many years of being fastened shut. But I am working daily now to swallow bitterness and ignore snark. 

Gentleness, I think, from here on out.

midnight in paris

Full disclosure: I love Paris. Not in the ooh Montemartre or gotta get to the Eiffel Tower kind of way, but in the get-lost-and-drink-things-and-meet-crazy-people kind of way, which is how I’ve spent most of my time there.

The first time I went to Paris, I was nineteen and living in Madrid, and went with one of my flatmates. We stayed at a place called Hotel Perfect, which is wasn’t, but it was. Our room was a tiny atelier with one bed on the top floor. It had a miniscule balcony that looked out over the rooftops of the city and a had a shared bathroom down the hall. Although I don’t remember everything about that trip, I certainly remember the first evening we spent there. We went to a little café across the street from our hotel for a glass of wine, and were immediately accosted by two French guys, Michel and Roman. Michel spoke no English, but Roman had spent a summer in Boston. He told me about it approximately fifty times throughout the evening, more and more bitterly as my flatmate and Michel made out with real urgency under every lamp along Rue Rodier and it became clear that fate would not smile down on him in like kind.

Although I was not taken with either of the boys, I was taken with the Paris they showed us: neighborhoods where nary a tourist could be found, and really we shouldn’t have either. We went to a little club in a back alley with stained glass windows and a venue in the basement. An African jazz band played all night – I can remember the electric violin and the layers and layers of drums. The air was inspired and hazy with smoke, and I danced with a man from Gambia whose name I wish I could remember. I drank too much red wine, talked politics with a Spaniard and a German, ate a hot, sweet crepe on the sidewalk at 4am, and watched the sun come up alone from my rooftop perch. It was a perfect first night in Paris.

with my husband in 2009

I’ve been back since, alone a few times, once with a my wonderful friend Line, whose Syrian family lives just outside the Arc de Triomphe – with her, I smoked hookah and discussed the Arab-American problem in horrific French – and most recently, with my wonderful husband for our last anniversary. Each time, I have found a new neighborhood to explore and have met new people to reveal the city to me. So when I heard about the new film Midnight in Paris, directed by Woody Allen and starring Owen Wilson, I ran to the movie theater. No, really.

I was delighted. For those of you unfamiliar with the premise: Owen Wilson is a struggling writer engaged to a horrible woman and visiting Paris with her terrible parents. He goes for a drunken walk one night to escape their pedantry, and as the clock strikes midnight (yes, this is a fairy tale), a vintage car pulls up and the crowd leans out to invite him along for a ride. In a moment of magic, Wilson (well, his character) is promptly whisked into the world of Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dalí, Buñuel, and a bevy of other heavy-hitters from the Paris of the 1920s. In the charming, mostly-lost way that Owen Wilson navigates most of his films, this film swings back and forth from the exciting Paris of the 20s to the still-enchanting Paris of our own day. Of course, all of the literary and art figures we meet are caricatures of themselves. Dalí can’t stop talking about rhinoceroses, Buñuel mumbles about films, Picasso rants about his lover and argues with Gertrude Stein about the quality of his paintings. Zelda Fitzgerald is drunk and wild; Hemingway can’t stop talking about bravery and killing things with guns. And I loved Gertrude Stein as played by Kathy Bates (with an oh-so-brief appearance of Alice B. Toklas – fitting, non?), presiding over the whole melee with wit and insight, buying a Matisse for 500 francs, guiding the young novelist to find his voice.

the louvre at sunset

The cast truly was an ensemble, and most of them really delivered. I wish that Adrien Brody had seen Dalí’s Lanvin commercials, or perhaps his weird egg-birth home movies; he didn’t seem to have the incredible arrogance and self-amusement that Dalí always embodied. Rachel McAdams, however, was wonderful as an easy-to-hate fiancé uninterested in her husband’s writing or in Paris itself. Her parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy) are rich, right-wing Americans who assert early on that they are “certainly not Francophiles” and exhibit all of the discourtesy and blindness I most fear in American tourists. (Except you, dear reader! I am sure that you are a lovely traveler who makes every effort to communicate in the host language, observe cultural norms, and that you never, ever, shout on a subway.) They reminded me of a long-ago ex’s parents in their cultured rudeness: In preparation for a dinner at an haute French restaurant, I put on the best dress that I owned. When I appeared, his mother told me gently, “Oh, that will do just fine. Of course you couldn’t have known that we’d go someplace nice.”

stairs, and more stairs

                There is, of course, a moral to the fairy tale. First, leave your horrible fiancé and move to Paris, where all of your dreams will come true and you will meet a girl that loves to walk in the rain. I’m kidding, a little. Our struggling writer finds his voice, but it is by letting go of the nostalgia that fogged his mind and kept him living in the past. The movie says, with no subtlety: today is your moment, make your own destiny, fly!

It’s a silly movie, of course. But I loved it, left the theater with a song on my lips and a great urge to go back to Europe immediately. I’m pretty sure that was the whole point.

                  

some musings on interrelated short stories

Dear Reader,

As you may or may not know, I happen to be working on a collection of interrelated short stories spanning a few different continents and a web of connected characters and world events. It is also the case that I've recently read a spate of novels in the same vein, and am intrigued by the mechanics of each (very different) collection of stories.

I'd like to chat with you about three of those novels, and get off my chest what worked for me and what didn't, and see if you agree. Please don't agree. It's so much more fun that way.

Let's start with Colum McMann's now-famous Let the Great World Spin. This collection is perhaps the most tightly knit of the three books we're discussing, and the POVs of each character intertwine to create two beautiful and sorrowful plot lines. But McMann plays a clever trick in his novel: he uses the 1974 man-on-wire incident to tie the novel to a concrete place in time, as well as to provide a backdrop for the stories he weaves in and around New York City. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, French tightrope walker Phillipe Petit managed to string a cable between the World Trade Center buildings in the summer of 1974 and walked, skipped, and danced his way between the two towers repeatedly until finally apprehended by the NYPD. It's a stunning, symbolic act of artistic hubris and defiance of law that anchors the novel and imbues the stories with a sense of I-was-there verisimilitude.

McMann begins his story in Ireland, with a protracted chapter that is so clever as to be self-congratulatory, and so long as to mislead the reader into thinking that our first narrator will also be our last. We meet one of the central characters of the novel through the eyes of his brother, and witness the greater part of their childhoods from that perspective. I almost put the book down two-thirds of the way through the first chapter.  It felt forced, coerced; the narrator slid over years with a sentence and his characterization of his brother seemed too reverent to be realistic.

I'm delighted and relieved that I didn't stop reading. As soon as I got past the first chapter, the novel roared to life, with beautifully wrought, thoughtfully written perspectives alternating between the Irish brothers and their menagerie of friends and lovers and a middle-aged socialite who is falling apart after losing her son to the war in Vietnam. Each voice is distinct, each perspective clear, and by the end of the novel I was heartbroken by the beautiful stories. If some brave editor had hacked that first chapter in half, it would have been love.

This seems to be a theme for me...

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad was named on of the best books of 2010 by just about everybody that makes a list of that sort, and I ordered it on impulse without knowing the first (or lamentably, last) thing about it.

This collection is much more restrained. The choir of voices narrating the story rise over the course of four or five decades, teasing out revelatory episodes from her characters' lives that illuminate their silences or absences throughout the rest of novel. We never see the full picture; there is no satisfying knowing at the end. Rather, Egan pulls various threads throughout the books, showing us a man at fifteen and then again at thirty and fifty, but all through different eyes, different perspectives. The effect is dizzying and lovely, and precludes expository fillers. We experience the titillation of dramatic irony; the narrator might not understand why Bernie is acting that way, but I do.

I was completely taken in by this collection - in fact, I believe that the first chapter of this book, and several others beyond that, are perfectly written: tight, beautiful, honest. Many could stand alone as stories outside the metanarrative. And so my devastation was pretty extreme (it was ugly, dear reader) when I came to a point three-quarters of the way through the novel and there was a chapter written in PowerPoint.

Seriously. It was written on PowerPoint slides, one per page.

Even worse, the conceit was that it was the perspective of a teenaged girl, and that she kept her diary in this format because she liked to toy with the SmartArt functions to organize her thoughts.

Full stop.

1. I teach teenagers for a living.
2. I love PowerPoint. SmartArt makes me weak in the knees.
3. Teenagers do not love SmartArt. They also do not love PowerPoint.
4. Teenagers do not keep diaries on PowerPoint.

And then, in the last chapter of Goon Squad, we find ourselves in the near-future, a science-fiction reality where everyone is totally dependent on their smartphones for communication. Children, who are called "pointers," apparently because they can figure out smartphone technology while still preverbal, are making and breaking musician's careers based on their arbitrary music selections. All in all, a disappointing, slightly bizarre finale in an otherwise well-crafted novel. It's a case of trying too hard and all the worse because Egan didn't need to. Her prose, without the gimmicks, would have held up to scrutiny.

The last collection, The Imperfectionists, by journalist Tom Rachman, isn't crippled by weak links as Egan and McMann's collections are, but it also doesn't soar to the heights that Let the Great World Spin and A Visit from the Goon Squad frequent. The locus of the collection is an international newspaper in Rome. Rachman tells the stories of the various writers and editors that haunt its columns from the paper's inception in the 50s through its closure in 2007. The chapters jump from Rome to Paris to an airplane headed for Atlanta, each with a (very) different character, decade, circumstance. Rachman, who actually worked in a newsroom in Rome, has all of the details just right, down to the newsman jargon and misogynistic overtones of the world of journalism. One chapter in particular has a twist that you don't see coming and that makes your stomach sink as the truth becomes clear.

Rachman's fetch is the use of newspaper headlines as chapter names. Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn't. But the rest of the book is sincere and sympathetic to its characters without being sentimental. The imperfect people that appear in this novel are well-crafted, realistic, and flawed - everything I love in a character. And the newspaper is a fine vehicle to tie these disparate lives together: it gives common ground to the characters without any expectation of real commonality.

Again, we have an imperfect view of the world our characters inhabit. There is no exposition, other than the inter-chapter italicized backstory, which Rachman uses to tell the story of the various owners of the paper. But even those chapters are limited to the POV of the character they describe, so we never get a bird's eye view of the plot. Long story short, The Imperfectionists does the interconnected-story-novel well, if not ingeniously. It also reminded me that I'd like to go back to Rome for a bit.

Anyway, what do you think about these novels? Is it innovative or contrived to use PowerPoint as a vehicle? How much exposition does the reader need to be satisfied with the plot?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

                                                                                                                                              Talk soon,
                                                                                                                                              Rachel

the self-publishing polemic

Dear reader,

Recently, I've been hearing a lot about self-publishing. Generally, the conversation goes like this:

Person talking to me or writing on the internet: Did you hear? There is some girl who writes formulaic novels about vampires and love affairs and sells them for next-to-nothing on Amazon, but hey! she is making a fortune doing it, and why shouldn't we all take a nom de plume and publish a bunch of saleable garbage so that we can be rich too?

Me: Is that a real question?

Person talking to me or writing on the internet:  I mean, of course it would be ironic of us, and not represent our real literary voice or interfere with a serious career and no one would ever know!

Me: Except our neighbors, who notice that we now drive a hybrid Ferrari instead of an old VW.

Okay, those aren't exact quotes, but I think that you understand what I'm trying to say.

There are also people who self-publish because they aren't interested in reaching a large audience, or just want a family history printed for people who are actually in their family, but those aren't the self-publishers that interest me.

I was over on htmlgiant the other day and read Roxane Gay's column about this topic. It's called "Taking No For An Answer," and it was a very thought-provoking read. Her premise is that we've villified the publishing industry to such an extent that writers are starting to see self-publishing as this liberating act.

"We are not taking rejection any longer!" we yell, and post our drivel defiantly on the web or as an Amazon e-book.

Gay argues that perhaps we are too quick to demand recognition, that writers who are rejected by publishers often have products that are not ready to be published. (Stop yelling about injustice. I didn't say always.)

I think what is comes down to is this: why do you want to publish a book?

If the answer is seriously to make money, then perhaps you should go into prostitution or time-shares. I hear they can both be quite lucrative if you have the right personality.

But seriously, the reason that I want to publish a book is because I feel like I have stories to tell, a literary voice that someone might want to listen to - and hopefully more than once. I would like to be able to support myself as a writer, yes, but my endgame doesn't begin with an $ and end with .00.

What I am trying to say is (and mind you, this is from an unpublished wannabe), that I'd rather wade through a pile of rejections and write something I can claim with my real name than make a couple hundred thousand dollars for writing about bloody necks.

What do you think? Is self-publishing as self-congratulatory an exercise as I perceive it to be?

                                                                                                                            Talk soon,

                                                                                                                            Rachel

an ode to books (or, i love you, i love you, i love you)

After graduation, I set about liquidating my belongings for the move back to the United States. Towels and kitchen things went to college-poor friends, my bike went to the family down the hall, and then things got very serious. All of the books I’d amassed in three years of studying literature in two languages, plus the stacks purchased solely for pleasure, towered before me on a haphazardly shelved wall. The thought of leaving them behind made me nauseous; it was not possible. So I left my shoes. I left my clothing. I left my shampoo. And I filled four enormous suitcases with my books, carefully aligning the spines so their pages would not be crumpled in transit.

My nerdified youth secured my relationship with books early on. Little league softball? No, thanks, I just got a copy of Little Women. The memories of my childhood are comingled with the smell of the page and the thrill of discovery. It all started with The Secret Garden; I was in first grade, and felt as though I’d entered a secret society that gave passage to magical worlds other than my own. In my school years, I soaked up the required reading: Harper Lee, Charles Dickens, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Conrad, and then stayed up til dawn reading Plath, Salinger, Camus, Kerouac, Chekhov, all of whom made me feel dangerous, alive, elite, invincible. And then I found Nabokov. I remember reading the first page of Lolita, then reading it again, then reading it out loud, just to hear the exquisite resonance of the language. I became aware, for the first time, of how emotive language could be: that prose could be poetry, and that words were like music.

            My current reading life is an ordered jumble of fiction, non-fiction, biography, and memoir. I am an adulterous reader; at any given time, I usually have my hand in at least three books. On my nightstand at the moment are David Foster Wallace’s The Infinite Jest, the memoir of Patti Smith, a collection of Raymond Carver stories, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s book about vegetarianism. On the shelves are bindings that remind me of the places I have explored, the friendships I have made and lost, and the stories that inspired me to be a writer.

            So much of what I have learned from reading is not literary; it is universal. Flannery O’Connor assured me that religious crisis was intrinsic to the human experience. From Proust, I learned that the quotidian could be transcendent. Ian McEwan showed me in Atonement the horror of betrayal, and that “it wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy …above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you." I think that truth is the secret of the fiction writer, or really any writer: the ability to look at another person and see their story, imagine their fears and prejudices and dreams, and create a character as complex as the reader. I aspire to create those characters – the ones that break your heart and make wrong decisions, but that are utterly human.

I am captivated by writers who incorporate place and language actively into the fabric of their fictional worlds, who remind us that our environment powerfully informs our behavior. There are writers that do this effortlessly, as Junot Díaz does when he plays with intermingling Spanish and English in Drown and The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao. There are so many others – Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Gabriel García Márquez – that create settings that are so vivid and alive that they become a force, if not a character, in their novels. The verdant Sundarbans sweat out of Midnight’s Children; in A Bend in the River, the Congolese jungle is an open-mouthed trap, spring loaded with tension; Macondo mirrors the lives of generations of Buendías in Cien Años de Soledad. These writers are inspirational for me, exemplars of the kind of thoughtful universes I want to create for my characters. That these worlds are fictional is indubitable. That they are unreal – it’s just not so. Somehow, these carefully imagined worlds seem to bring us even closer to what is true.

I try to read as much new fiction as I can. Along with Granta, McSweeney’s, and Zoetrope, to which I subscribe, I try to read other quarterlies as often as possible. They have turned me on to writers that I have followed through collections of short stories and then to novels. The humor and pathos intertwined in the work of Ben Fountain and Eric Puchner have me watching to see what they will produce next. I was pulled into the alter-realities of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City and Daniel Alarcon’s Lost City Radio. And I feel that Jonathan Franzen’s most recent reflection on the American family picks up where Roth left off in American Pastoral a decade ago.

When I am working on a project, I find that my reading scale tips to the side of nonfiction, as I research my story and the history, language, and peculiarities of the characters. I much admire writers who devote themselves to getting the details right. Barbara Kingsolver, for example, is an author I have read since my early teen years, and who continues to impress me with her tireless research. Her most recent offering, The Lacuna, is an ode to Mexico City and to Asheville, NC, a fictional biography of Frida Kahlo, and cautionary tale about anti-communism in the United States. The years of research represented in that beautiful novel belie a dedication to historical accuracy, cultural realism, and speak to her great imagination.

Lately, I have been interested in writers that write fiction based on nonfictional experiences. Dave Eggers’ What is the What and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, not to mention Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and any number of works by Graham Greene, are revisitations and reinventions of personal histories. 

These stories fall much more in the vein of my own work: fictional stories populated with familiar faces and re-imagined lives. I love to start with a real place, a sense memory, and work outward from a moment. There is such precise joy in seeing and touching and smelling a place deep in memory and feeling the life of a place breathe back into you. As I was applying to MFA programs, I remember being so attracted to Bennington’s slogan. Read a hundred books. Write one. It seems so simple, doesn’t it? But there is such a difference in reading for pleasure and reading to dissect a book, to figure out why it works, how it works. It is such rewarding work, though, reading. We learn so much from others’ worlds, and bring so much from our own. In fact, I think I will go have a read right now. I’m galloping through Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists this afternoon, and really enjoying it. I’ll let you know when I’m through.

                                                                                                 Talk soon,

                                                                                                      Rachel

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