survive my forthcoming year in the wilderness.

Well, I haven’t been back to 43things in a long, long time. In the meantime, all kinds of shit has taken place, but one thing is that I did indeed survive my year in the wilderness. Of course, I’m now, three years and change later, in the midst of another such year, but I’ll survive this one too. All good, really.

Sad, sad, in a way. The deadline for applying to Ph.D. programs tends to fall around the first of the year, and by the end of last semester I was totally fried with classes and teaching and writing and whatnot, so the applying just didn’t happen.

There was one school that I was considering applying to that had a deadline of March 1, and it was actually the alma mater of one of my professors, and so I figured I’d have a leg up. But I was overwhelmed this winter, too, and I honestly wasn’t sure that I wanted to spend the next three years of my life in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Besides, the deadline for applying to Clarion was also March 1. So I applied to Clarion instead, and got in.

Sad consequence of all this is that I will have to fend for myself, sans student loans or any of that, at least until August of 2009. Happy consequences of that, though, are that I can actually do the whole application thing right, and try to get into schools that are not in Mississippi, and are in fact in places that I might want to spend three years or more in. Other happy consequences may well include getting back to being focused on writing (as opposed to academic hoohah) for a year, trying to consolidate the gains that come from being published, and a chance to spend some time reading stuff that isn’t Literature-with-a-capital-L for awhile. I like the capital-L Literature, but a lot of my best inspiration for stories and things has always come from weird random stuff that I read in other areas—sociology, history, the occasional pop-science book, architectural theory, craziness like that. So. Who knows? I might even manage to understand physics enough to cross that goal off the list at the end of this coming year.

I’m kind of scared…about making a living, being lonely and intellectually understimulated, stuff like that. But I’m increasingly coming around to the idea that it may well be the best thing, for a whole variety of reasons.

We shall see.