A little over two years ago, I was accepted into the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. I will graduate from that program in about three months. My MFA experience has passed so quickly I have had little opportunity to contemplate it, too consumed with deadlines and residencies and making up stories to ponder what any of it really means.

 

That’s changed recently. I sent my thesis to my mentor last week for one final copy-edit. I have few responsibilities before my final residency. No one expects me to send them a story or a reading response, or anydamnthing. Consequently, I’ve carved out a little free time. A little time to think.

 

And I’ve decided: I’m not graduating.

 

Yes, I’m going to cross that stage in January, and yes, I’m going to get that degree. But I’m determined to take Stonecoast with me after I leave Maine, to keep doing the same things I was assigned to do when I was in the program.

 

The biggest problem with getting an MFA is pretending you’re getting a normal degree, as a means to an end. A MFA may open a few doors, career-wise, but it’s more an opportunity to practice a craft, to make writing and learning about writing a priority. If you look at graduating with your MFA as a terminal event, you run the risk that you’ll put down that pen or turn off that laptop, let your creative gifts go fallow.

 

I can’t let that happen. I know that the only way I can have a writing career is to keep writing, keep reading, keep learning. I have to keep sending out my work, getting my semester grades from the markets instead of my mentors. I have been blessed to be in a program which has transformed me as a writer, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let my creative life wither away because I “graduated.”

 

So. I’m going to keep doing “packets,” twenty-pages of creative work and two reading responses, due on a specified day each month. The reading responses I’ll probably post here. The creative work I’ll be marketing, so I hope you’ll see that too, in a magazine or anthology on the newstand.

 

I better get going. I have to finish reading Brian Evenson’s A Collapse of Horses, a dynamite collection I’m excited to tell you about. And I’ve started a new story, which, while still a jumble in my head, could be a doozy.

 

Oh yeah…note to my muse, my invisible mentor–my monthly due date is the 6th of each month. Just so you know.