Ah, back to the real world. — 5 months ago
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.
