Mind the Gap
Hello, fellow scribblers!
We need to talk about what you are going to do next. I, myself, am nearing the end of my MFA experience and have to make certain life decisions. Like what to do with a time in my life called Post MFA. I believe this is something like menopause; a state that will last until I die.
http://i.imgur.com/V1c0X7O.gif
It is time to embrace this change of life.
It is time to face the fact that while I don’t actually feel like a writer, I will soon have a certificate that says that otherwise.
It is also time to tell the government that the joke is one them: I won’t be repaying these loans anytime soon!
http://37.media.tumblr.com/35ab10590ee91c35fa606a1791069402/tumblr_mldfv2jD5G1rvnnvyo8_250.gif
As a writer, this is a weird time.
There is a lot of PRESSURE to do two things:
PUBLISH,
and
PUBLISH.
You could say that I am starting to feel the pressure.
http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view/1065426/ace-ventura-half-time-o.gif
Perhaps I am making things too hard.
Perhaps what I need to do is listen to what Ira Glass has to say about this time in my life: The Gap
http://www-deadline-com.vimg.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/ira_l-300×225.jpg
Some gems from Ira Glass not found in the video:
“If you are not in a situation where you are failing all the time, then you are not in a situation where you can be super lucky.”
“Learn to abandon the crap.”
“You will be fierce, you will be a warrior!”
“You will not get published, get over it. That is not why you are doing this.”
http://reactiongifs.me/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/chloe-moretz-confused-gif.gif
So, what am I supposed to do?
I think what Ira Glass wants us to think about the post MFA not as a curse given to me by my mother, but as just a beginning to getting down to some serious business.
Well, Ira Glass, I’m tired.
Tired of slogging through a novel that is not working at the moment.
Tired of making sure I have “met the requirements for graduation.”
When does it get better?
http://37.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lknaxnGr901qbpemeo1_r1_500.gif
Where do you find the strength to keep “being in a situation where I am failing all the time so that I am in a situation of being super lucky?”
J.K Rowling said in her speech to Harvard Grads in 2008 that if she hadn’t failed so miserably at life after college she could not have stripped away everything that didn’t matter and just do the one thing she knew how to do: write.
What the Post MFA really is, is a time to fail.
What I need to learn is that I need to be OK with failure because I am not doing this to get published, I am doing this because I love this.
GAWD!!!
How cheesy is that?
When I think about it, J.K. Rowling and Ira Glass are right: failure is a good thing because it sets you free from the pressures that you put on yourself, like publishing right after your MFA.
I’ve learned about 10,000 new things in my MFA, and I should use the time after my MFA to try them all.
And keep trying
And quit worrying about publishing
It will happen
It happened for those two, why not me?
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_r3FqODXWPAA/S_czV_XULiI/AAAAAAAAAEg/1rkYqVlQf9U/s1600/2921560757_06406e5bf9-450×361.jpg
Caitlin was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She still lives there, and this makes her a rare unicorn in a sea of transplanted twenty-somethings who came to be artists and drink cheap beer. Also, she is now in her 30s and has moved on to Bourbon. She is a current MFA candidate in fiction at Antioch University LA. She has been published here and there with the last one being in Chiasmus Press’ Stories from the Edge: A Northwest Anthology.
