oubukibun

I think it's pretty standard for all artistic people to circle the drain. That tether that connects all writers especially to what we consider a work of art stems from the abyss we don't want to look into too much and yet gaze at incessantly. Haha. I told my middle-school drama students just today: If we didn't feel afraid or nauseous before every performance, whether in class or on a stage, how could we be certain we were putting our heart and soul in it at all? Living in agony is part and parcel, at least for me. Just last night I excused myself from an extra hour of sleep to finish a 20-page beast of a poem that has been hounding me for 8 weeks now. Well, hound no more. Is it any good? Does it matter? I wrote it to exorcise a specific moment and experience. It was written specifically for one person in this world. These two facts, alone and together, more than justify the existence of the words. Everything else is just a gift, or better yet, a reason to keep experimenting and playing with an empty page! This last poem I wrote I decided to say "Fuck the format!" and laid the words and sentences out in the way the actual emotion impacted me right there and then. And then I thought, "Why not try and recreate a body with some of these stanzas?" Or have multiple stanzas buried in each other, but spacing the words so anyone reading could choose one or the other? Was it 100% successful? Fuck no, haha, but it gave me so much joy to be invigorated this way. To see myself on a page and be confident to say that I liked that person enough to finish the work. "Finish it." That's the hardest lesson, one I will always struggle with (part of the reason why grad school would be such a tremendous help!), but acceptance or no acceptance, the pages will always be there for us. We just have to make sure we tend to them. :) Toodles, everyone, it's fun being in the same boat together! Let's rock it!

Is your name taken from Xena, the one and only Warrior Princess? Because that show was a bomb-diggity jam when I was a kid, and I will never, ever forget the bagpipes leading into that epic 8-9 note motif! Lucy Lawless is flawless. If your name has nothing to do with her or the show, do yourself the favor and find it, and then watch it. :)

You can politicize everything. Anything. Or nothing. For me, the absolute joy of writing is that it transforms itself to meet your demands, wishes, and even your own fears. If you want to live in a world where literature of any kind is a little less tied to 'the old ways' then you have every right to change the course of history, whether for yourself or for others. Whether you succeed is entirely dependent on what you believe success looks like, or should look like. I always ask myself, "Do I want to be known as someone who broke or pushed boundaries, or do I want to break and push these boundaries just in the act of writing myself down?" I've never been big on announcing or denouncing. Living my life typically does the trick all around. There isn't a single wall in the halls of writing that isn't constructed from glass. It's all a reflection of someone, or something, even if it is not our reflection looking back, or the reflection of what we need or want our writing to be. You step into a body of water, and the water ripples. It is never the same at any moment beyond the moment, even when we are not present. How many times have we heard or read this, and how many times is it less true because of it? Glass does not stain or wear away because many people stare into it. Time is the only decayer, so truly, is there no better way to annihilate what we do not want than through the cumulative act of writing itself? You want to change, or you want the world to change. Write it out. That's one more sword to the cause. But we are nameless. We do not tend to history if we believe we deserve to stand out from it. Virginia Woolf is a hero of mine, as are many others (Lorca, Kerouac, Chabon, Didion, Tolkien, Martí, Oliver, Keats, but we all have our own immaculate Noah's Ark), but her heroism exists for me thanks to Time. Who was she, if not one more soldier to the cause? We should trust that cause more. I have only ever written for myself. I am applying to grad schools because I want to understand my writing outside of myself, and because I yearn for the routine, the serfdom of deadlines. The bondage of an objective purpose. And because I need to stop teaching public school before it kills my joy for words dead. I don't know that any school I applied to wants me. Would even be a fit for me. But that's the glory and the pain of the blank page, isn't it? That we cull from ourselves tiny little shards and reform the glass of those halls, hoping to one day stare at each panel and find ourselves staring back. Or at the very least to be paid to do so. P.S. I chose eight schools, and I'd love to be accepted into any or all of them (to belatedly answer a question posed by someone else, about which school everyone has as their top choice from their selections).

Huh. Strange. Alaska (Fairbanks) emailed with me telling me how much money they'd be giving me through FAFSA but I haven't even been accepted into the program. Haha, talk about jumping the gun, I guess. I didn't know this was something that happened. Odd.

Thanks for the kick in the ass, the kind soul who asked about FAFSA. It had somehow escaped my mind but managed to get it sent in earlier this week. Still enough time that I'm not kicking myself too much about forgetting. As a part-time interventionist, I'm so exhausted by the end of the day (mentally, physically), but I have carved out an hour/an hour and a half at the very end of the day when I'm sleepiest to write or work on what I currently have laid out on the slab. I applied to eight schools (all over the place too) but if none of them take me at my word, then I'm just gonna have to bypass the master's altogether. I can't keep cycling every year hoping for someone to choo-choo-choose me. I need to live my life, too. Otherwise my writing will really stagnate. I'm going in for poetry, and right now (I'm a little upset this is not part of my portfolio, haha) I'm working on my most experimental piece yet: a poem that tries to recreate a state of mind or emotion or even a physical body through the syntax, grammatical structure, the words themselves. Quite frankly, I don't even think genre-blending is the next frontier, but rather, taking writing itself and projecting it onto other canvases, actually blending not just genres but forms of creation altogether in a way that isn't seen as an 'experiment' but as a new standard. I'd love to be able to live in a world where empty warehouses and halls are filled with living, breathing poems and short stories that we can touch, smell, even taste... And then wiped clean. So all we have is the page and the words. And we realize how much more transformative it is to breathe life into the writing out there in the world instead of continuing to compress and distill it into the 'perfect' sentence on a tiny, rectangular white space. We'll see. My Statement of Purpose got some editing; I fine-tuned it some. But there's only so much I can tweak before I start parsing invisible detritus, haha. And ain't nobody got time for that. I wish you all a great journey, even if it isn't the one you intended to take or receive. I wish the same for myself, because it is the only thing I know I'm guaranteed. Cheers! I'm excited to hear and read when schools start to inform people of their decisions! I'll be sure to let this forum know in case we share schools (Hollins, for one). Toodles, Manny

The concept of grad school, such as it is, is so profoundly absurd that part of me isn't convinced I'm not doing this a second time out of devotion to my own Sisyphean desire and not because I genuinely want or believe there is a needle that'll prick me somewhere in this haystack. We want you, they say, but we want you in 500 words, in 1,500 words, in 1,000 words or less. Can you handle that? Can you compress an entire lifetime's worth of thoughts, nightmares, anxieties, oppressions, and creative flows into boxy paragraphs that resist, if only vaguely, the temptation to suck on the teat of the people reading them? What then is the purpose of asking "Is this any good?" if the statement of porpoise is just another meaningless and meandering hallmark of dressing for success or a callback to all those times the teachers never called on us because they knew we had the answer or were tired of the expected "Pick me, pick me, oh me!" I've submitted all of my apps, all eight of them: UCSD, Fairbanks, New Orleans, WashU, McNeese (whose application is hands down my least favorite; they even wanted me to send them a transcript of the one substitute teaching course I took at a community college, so go them for thoroughness!), Rutgers, U of Washington, and Hollins. All over the place, just like my poems. I can't even pretend anymore. I sent my poems to my poetry professor from college for his thoughts, and we were both essentially on the same page... What does it mean, to be 'ready' for grad apps? Your portfolio is an organism, it breathes every time you breathe, it dissents every time you dissent. I have never encountered perfection nor do I believe it can be found on any subjective plane (and I don't know how one would ever analyze it on purely objective terms without destroying it, crazy talk!), so my apps talk about how my writing isn't, you know, everything and the loaf of bread too. Is it a mistake? Frankly, I just don't give a damn. I want to write, I want to spend two years finally cracking the shell open and discovering whether or not I have any stake in the writing game. Isn't the conundrum also so deliciously and grotesquely paradoxical? If you finetune your portfolio till the very last moment, who's to say the comma you removed is the nadir of your prospects for 10% of your apps, or 20%, or even 5%? What if the two paragraphs of experimental exposition landed you a place at your dream school, but only as a waitlister? You should've kept the story more abstract, simpleton! Perhaps you should've swapped that creative nonfiction piece on the trash collector you observed in Serbia with the one about the children playing in their neighborhood the instant the levees failed in New Orleans in 2005? Or... or... or... All I can do is write. And be truthful. And squeeze all of that into whatever word or page limit these institutions ask of us. If no school, quite literally no school, decides that's enough, how will I ever know it was the writing, and not just the beautiful simplicity of random luck? Or both? Or neither? Maybe no one bothered with the words, they just didn't bother at all. See? It's absurd what we human animals do. But I wager it's downright surreal that we do it anyway. It must be the boulder talking. Best to all of you. And best of all... at some point, everything is over. Thank you, Time. Cheers!

I'm currently home with my mother (I moved down to FL to spend more time with her and my dad; she was diagnosed with bone cancer about two years ago after beating out breast) and since I won't be teaching today (I'm teaching Language Arts to 7th graders currently), I figured I'd take the opportunity and fill out my grad apps so I can focus on the Statement of Porpoise. By the way, mileage variances and all that, but Purdue's application totally blows. They wanted me to write 500 words on diversity and the hardships inherent in that, etc.; I was exhausted just reading it, so I can only imagine the writing of it. Automatic pass. Thanks for the MLA formatting notes, Purdue, but you are not the right fit for me. Quick question on McNeese: Is the "Letter of Application" just their labeling of the SoP, and if so, what are the requirements (This school in particular seems to be strangely averse to giving information, at least from what I've been able to check; not as bad as WashU, but still, haha)? Aside from the fact that the application to McNeese itself takes about five minutes, haha, I was totally thrown by the lack of requests for recommenders, or really, ANY requests at all, so I immediately felt like I had botched it and somehow skipped 4-5 relevant application pages. Not that the application would've been accepted (I hope!), but one worries about these things when 'grad app brain' starts to sink in. Thinking of choosing 1 or 2 more schools, just don't know which. I might give it the weekend to mull over. Thanks for any and all responses, everyone. Cheers for now!

So, I've done some studying, and thus far my ranking is as follows: UCSD, Fairbanks, WashU, Purdue, McNeese, Michigan, and Hunter. UCSD is a likely choice for someone like me into film, but there's something about Fairbanks, something not quite tangible yet, that draws me to it. I'm still in research mode, though I confess I've never been one to deep dive very well when it comes to colleges or universities. At the end of the long day, it's my writing they need to connect with, and if they don't, it won't matter much how much I particularly cared for their latest novel or collection. I think part of it is having to kiss someone's ass, even in a nice way, in order to even nudge my toe beyond the threshold. I'm kind of excited for applications, though! Anyone here have any recommendations for a writer keen on playing with language, writing about bodies and memory (nostalgia), and experimenting with genre-blending? UCSD, Fairbanks, and WashU are my keepers, I reckon, because I haven't really found anything truly tantalizing about my other three (and Hunter's whole application page, though definitely idiosyncratic, kind of leaves a sour taste in my mouth). Cheers to anyone who can throw out any suggestions!

Phew. Think it's about time to do this all over again. Very unhappy with the educational environment here in South Florida, and I don't feel like spending my 30s working for a school board more invested in keeping kids and their parents happy than educated and prepared for the world outside their bubbles. I digress. So far, I'm planning on applying to Fairbanks, Hunter, McNeese, Michigan, Purdue, UCSD, and WashU. I intend on getting my MFA in poetry, despite currently about to work on a screenplay (depending on how well I feel it's doing, I may switch over, but early times yet), so I'd love to hear what schools that offer fully/partially-funded programs are great for that specific concentration... Or just great in general, haha ( I realize how banal that sounds, but hopefully someone here knows what mean). Last year I had my "When Pigs Fly" season: Boston University, Brown, Iowa, and Syracuse. I don't really feel the need to take my Sisyphean boulder that high across the board, but I will if someone can nudge me towards the risk. Risk is always a worthwhile venture if the program demands that kind of sacrifice. Thanks for any and all advice, y'all!

Good morning/afternoon/evening to all, Ydrl, any updates on the spreadsheet you're offering? Feel free to send it via an attachment to a message on here. I'd like to start narrowing down my actual list for next year as scientifically as possible, haha. Thanks again!

Indeed, I received my rejection e-mail earlier as well. They just needed a little nudge. Well, this has certainly been a very long engagement, but not nearly as enjoyable or thrilling as the film or the novel it's based on. I'd LOVE that spreadsheet, please. I'm a taskmaster, and pros/cons lists and scheduled activities are pretty much a part of my DNA. I will message you my email in a message so you can send it away! I do wonder if this is the right thing for me, because all I feel is indifference about the rejections. I'm not certain, but maybe that's a nudge too cavalier an attitude, or maybe it's fine. I'll probably just self-immolate once all 8 future schools I'm applying to reject my writing as well. But WHAT a way to go! Toodles everyone, and see some of you on the other thread!

I emailed BU about when rejection e-mails would all be sent out but I haven't received a response yet. I'll just go ahead and cut my losses and call it a 0/4 then. I'm inclined to do one more cycle of this, and thus far I've narrowed it down to: Emerson, Fairbanks, Hunter, McNeese, Michigan, Purdue, UCSD, and WashU. And by narrowed it down, I mean those are mostly arbitrary, of-the-moment decisions informed by that entertaining post from yonks ago where film directors were assigned to different schools, haha. Happy schooling, everyone! And, uh, guess I'll see everyone else later? Cheers!

Well, BU told someone they'd have results out by the end of the first week of April (if I'm remembering correctly?), and yet here I am, haha, with zero news. It's okay, BU, truly. Just mass-send those emails. It continually boggles my mind why non-personal rejection emails are staggered or delayed once all acceptances have been sent out. I just don't see the purpose of that, and since waitlists also go out (not sure if BU even sends out waitlist notices) around the same time as acceptances, one would think the process wouldn't need to be dragged out so much. If the pool of accepted and waitlisted folk is always small, then just do away with the rejections via those same mass-emails everyone who's not in receives? Anyway, no idea. Um, godspeed everyone! And remember to go Plus Ultra!

Egad! I had New Awlins on the mind today, actually. Will you be accepting? If so, make sure you take a moment to sit down at Cafe du Monde if you haven't already in life. That sweet smell of coffee and beignet is actually not all that dissimilar from the smell of the train station in my hometown of Camagüey, Cuba, give or take some tar and oil. ;) Such a cause for joy!! Happy to see good vibes flow back...

I'm a 32-year old man (though I say 'man' but really want to say a tiny 30-year old dork who still looks about 20 when freshly shaven, hah) with a whole life ahead of him. Thus far, I've been rejected from everywhere I applied (it's also my first 'cycle'), save perhaps BU, though I wouldn't even know how to speculate there. I spent roughly a month on my SOP and 'preparing' my portfolio; really, these were largely poems I had written within the past year, and which I was quite happy with. As I mentioned in a much earlier post, I was also a fool for including my favorite college-age poems so the readers could see the progression, if any, in my writing. See? Naivete happens in all stages of life (haha). In the words of a famous replicant, "I've... seen things you people wouldn't believe." I may not have been to the shoulder of Orion, but when I'm quiet with myself, I appreciate all I've let myself live, and experience. Teaching, and writing, conjuring a thought and letting it crystallize in my mind, letting it atomize and become everything else... Those are the only things I can say I am "good at" in a professional sense. But I've also labored incredibly to get to this point, climbed an entire mountain of English to get here, because I love words, I love the sound my fingers make on a keyboard or a typewriter, the way a single comma can jut out and accent a thought, or, bracket it away. When a phrase comes together exquisitely, it moves me to tears, and supersedes almost every other sensation, except perhaps that of the orgasm. The first lines of William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" are proof enough that there is a silver lining to existence, and it is the line that allows us to populate pages with letters, and by extension, with expression. I have never been told my writing is weak, or bad, or inferior, or even adequate. And that's because only I have the right tools to decide that. We can guide each other to a better sound, to a more delicate balance of parallel verbs and tenses, but we cannot judge the writing outside of its structures, not when we write from fucking bone marrow. How many times have you sat down to face the music, so to speak, and discovered what you want to say... Doesn't have language yet? Isn't that the ecstasy of it? Having the Sword of Damocles peering above, ready to submit judgment on something that hasn't even been born yet? Some people can write to make money, ghostwriting other people's thoughts or ideas, or even technical jargon. I can't do that. And, despite what people say, if any of you have ever read or even attempted writing fan-fiction, then I hope you have an appreciation for how liberating it can be, and how it can be a truer compass to someone's 'talent' or 'worth' than literary fiction (full disclosure: the only fan-fiction I ever wrote was a single story based on the show So Weird, from the Disney Channel, and this was yonks ago, haha). I'm not certain grad schools anywhere in the universe can claim to be sufficiently equipped to truly accept people on anything but the invisible, tattered, and innately fickle subjectivity of the Moment. I can't even be upset that no school thus far will have me. Part of that is math (I only applied to 4 programs), and part of that is my own insouciance... Maybe I just don't care enough, and so the proverbial cream of my words won't rise to the top. At the end of my life, though, what will that matter? And if it does, will it matter more than being able to turn to your own writing, years later, to find a small measure of comfort, or joy, or even a reminder of the pain that keeps the pen filled? I'd love to tell the stories I have in me, and I'd love for Boston to get back to me and say, "Yes!" But at the end of the day, I earnestly believe, whole-heart as they say, that if we do not remove the self from this process, we are tainting the experience with simple untruths. We all have dreams, and sometimes, I think we get so caught up in what that dreams looks like on the surface, we don't heed the tiny little atom that keeps thriving and evolving even as we feel all "hope is lost", the same one that eventually we turn to, the one that whispers, Just because you have a dream, it doesn't mean it will come to you the way you've always dreamed. I was a member of a D&D group back in college, and those sessions proved some of the most fruitful for me in how to build a character, a real essence of a fictional other. I spent all those sessions 'writing' even though a single word never went to a page. Don't forget that we are writing all the time. Proof is not always tangible to the body, and oftentimes, the most potent form of a thought will never be. Dreaming of being a writer, published or otherwise, doesn't necessitate the flagellation of a desk or an ink and quill. The Sword of Damocles hangs above our heads, not because it wants to slice us in half, but because it wants us to remember that there is nothing more petrifying than the not knowing, And that we are eternally responsible for the answer to that question it torments us with, What's next? I'll keep the boulder rolling always. It keeps my nerves from fleeing. If I don't hear from BU, I wish all of you, strangers I will never meet most likely, the very best, fully aware that may mean seemingly endless agonies and torments. More rejections. More waiting. Depending on whether I receive a full-time job offer here to teach middle-school English, I may not try again. If you're in that 'same' boat, don't despair, our dreams will materialize, we just have to be extra vigilant, Because, and this took me decades, It wasn't until I stood in the middle of Columbus, listening to "Adagio of Life and Death" by Joe Hisaishi that I understood that a writer, the writer that takes from his or her bones a piece to carve out the words, never stops writing even when the pages stay empty. The writing is the world, and we all deserve to make that visible to our selves, and if we can, however we can, to others. Pass the parcel, everyone. Maybe one day we'll get to read each other and never even know it. That's a world I'm goddamn thrilled to continue writing in. Be merry while ye wait for your final results!

Well, that was a wash. ... I'll see myself out.

Isn't that just part of the human condition, especially in a first-world country? So many people waiting on the outskirts for someone to be first so they don't lose what they have, and yet, so few do decide to take that first step, so everyone is left waiting until the absolute last minute. And hey, I'm not even trying to disparage those who do that. I'd probably want to keep all my cards in play too. The insidious nature of what it takes to progress or "move up in life" takes a toll on one's humanity eventually, if one lets it. I reckon this is why it's crucial to really know oneself and what one wants at this stage in the game. It makes the ability to choose between programs one's been accepted so much clearer, clearing the way for others. And still, it's dawgy-dawg.

It's silly for Iowa to mail rejections and waitlists. If the letters were personalized, then sure, it'd be a nice touch. But they're not: they're just banal, standardized messages of the "it's not you, it's me" variety in Times New Roman font, haha, so... Seems like a waste of postage, and with the collapse of the USPS, especially since March of last year, mailing anything related to grad school admissions seems like a particularly sadistic thing to do.

For what it's worth, it seems grad school application/admission season is essentially the living embodiment of: "You're tearing me APART, Lisa!" "Oh, hi, Mark." I'd take things in long, breezy strides with a drink (alcoholic or otherwise) always in hand to lubricate the silence. Also, I always miss the good stuff, but I'm so glad Facebook deleted my empty profile before Draft ever allowed me in. What a horrifying nexus of everything I absolutely abhor. Dodged a bullet there, fur shore. Phew.

I've always found Columbus to be a safe choice for anyone wanting to live in a "metropolis" without many of the hindrances or weaknesses that come with such a title. Ohioans are, deep down, hometown folk. In the combined 7 or so years I spent in Ohio, I never once had an issue... with anything. Granted, that's my experience, but there it is. Again, it's really just the football madness that pollutes the city come game day, but the coffeehouses, bars, and parks or hiking trails provide more than suitable respite from it all. If you do choose C-bus, I highly recommend you stop by the Kerouac Cafe: drinks named after authors with thematically-relevant flavors. It's a gas. The Book Loft in the German Village is manna from heaven embodied in a labyrinthine bookstore. The Gateway Film Center has a membership and they receive tons of indies as well as midnight screenings of shlock, exploitation, and '80s-'90s re-releases. Classics too. Ah, and the art museum (worked there for a bit when I first moved) has a lot of intriguing stuff from lesser-known artists and, I thought, interesting curation of works from the well-known ones.

I lived in Columbus for 3 years and went to school just outside of it for my bachelor's (Otterbein in Westerville) and I love Columbus. Small for a capital, unassuming almost, great food choices, fantastic music selections, great indie cinemas, trendy bar scene (the video game bars are a thing that will never not delight me)... HOWEVER. During football season, Columbus is a living nightmare. The OSU/Michigan feud is real, it is tangible, it is an actual stink, haha. So depending on how well you deal with traffic, crowds, stupidity leaks, and insanity, then I'd take a closer look at OSU as a serious contender for your MFA, especially since peace and quiet, proverbial or otherwise, will be essential to your success. One would think, heh.

Well, I'd hardly consider the MFA application process the hardiest barometer for writing prowess. Like standardized testing, it tries to categorize and label the quality of someone's ability to do that one thing "right" (either the MFA application process or the standardized test), but is ill-equipped to illustrate any form of real intelligence, talent, wit, or even potential outside of the parameters of either an application process or a standardized test format. The great absurdity of having to use a method that can't show me your fullest self in order to even be able to consider you at all. With all our great thinking and the vastness of the mind, we still haven't been able to sift through it all and find a solution. Is it really a wonder that so many authors, and big name authors, too, and artists, are all shunned, underappreciated, outright rejected, or ignored for most of their living? The fact that we stand as much of a chance at getting into a school if we were to sit in on a Divination class and read the dregs of our coffee than we do preparing an SOP weeks or months in advance... Well, thanks, Godot.

I think being upfront is always the best policy. Being upfront does not necessitate rudeness. However, if we're not upfront, then we risk settling or accepting offers that we can't handle economically. Schools are set up to take you or not to take you based on some unknown variable of merit that they (and only they) are privy to, and that can change at a moment's notice. The very least we can do is let them know what we require in order to be able to accept their offer and also remain a fiscally responsible human being. If they have a problem with that, quite frankly, I'd have no business accepting to go there, period. I get that there's an overwhelming need to tread carefully when it comes to the tenuous months after acceptance but before actually beginning a grad program... But we're grown-ass adults, right? We need to make grown-ass adult choices in conjunction with our trips to la-la land and our naps atop coffee-beans hills that will support our immune system for the year or two years it'll take to complete our writerly missions. If they rescind an offer or treat you differently because you deigned to inquire about funding, they can outright blow it through a horse's ass. Um, that's just my take on it, though.

It's safe to assume Iowa is done with acceptances. I received my rejection letter last week, and waitlist notices went out as well. Like the Biebs likes to say, "Never say never," but statistically speaking, the 'in progress' just means they haven't updated the system yet and you'll be receiving your "thanks, but no thanks" or "watch this space" letter soon via ze postman. Hope this has been informative and enjoyable to read.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1460423647532209/discussion/preview Think that's the link. 'Tis naught but a Facebook group. Be aware it can take a bit to be invited in.