April is a strange time as a second-ish year student. By this point of the semester, most of my peers and I are just crawling to the finish line, exhausted and desperate to crank out the last few assignments and be done with everything. But there’s a quiet melancholy floating in the air between the pollen particles; the knowledge that this journey is almost over. Even though for me, things look a little different–I’ve still got two electives to finish this summer–it’s that sense of reading the last page, closing the book, and putting it back on the shelf. A beloved collection of memories that I can always revisit, but never relive.
I started this program as a burnt-out STEM student with absolutely no clue what I was doing, and I’m ending it with only a slightly better sense of what I’m doing, but also a wonderful community of friends and writers. So I want this last article of mine for Cafe MFA to be a reassurance to the student currently stalking the AU website, trying to gather as much information as they can so they don’t look like an idiot on the first day of class. Yes, you, specifically. I was there, once, too.
When thinking of what I wanted to say to the people who would begin this program after me, I immediately started planning for a Buzzfeed-esque listicle: “10 Wacky Tips to Smash Your MFA Program!” But not only do I think we all have enough Internet brain-rot to last us a lifetime, I don’t think I would have had enough material to come up with ten unique, “wacky” tips. Everything would have just been some iteration of the same two pieces of advice, empty platitudes dressed up with different words. So to spare us all the pain of another clickbaity “omg funny lol bruh moment,” I’ll get straight to the point.
Firstly, try something new. I know I sound like a coffee table self-help book, but I’m serious. You will never have a better opportunity than this program to try something new, fail spectacularly, and then try again. Workshops are made for testing out new ground, making mistakes, and going beyond your limits. The people in this program are here because they want to be better writers, and I assume you’re here, too, for the same reason. Write a surrealist poem about donuts, an essay about your favorite fanfiction as a teenager, a short story about a world where cows eat humans and the protagonist cow decides to go vegan. Get weird with it and push your boundaries, because not only is that the only way you’ll grow as a writer, but you might also find something blooming in the mudslide of word vomit that will inspire you in surprising ways.
Trying new things absolutely extends outside of your genre of choice, and if there’s one thing I want to beat into your head, it’s that you absolutely should take a workshop outside of your genre. AU’s MFA program is special in that it’s one of the few programs that doesn’t confine you to a single genre, so take advantage of it. The skills you learn in a poetry workshop will help the language in your personal essays burst with texture and sound. Taking a fiction workshop will help you construct the narrative and meaning of your poems in clearer and more interesting ways. Your experience in a creative nonfiction workshop will help you find the things you want to write obsessively about. You are only limited by the constraints of your beliefs about yourself; leave your expectations at the door and explore.
My second piece of advice also requires you to leave your expectations at the door: you do not have to be anything other than exactly who you are. Walking into your first graduate class can be a scary experience, especially when you come from outside of the “norm” for MFA programs. Maybe your undergraduate degree was completely unrelated to literature, or maybe you’ve had a career for years and are coming back to school for the first time in a long time. Maybe you’ve known since you first held a pencil in your sausage toddler fingers that you were going to be a writer, and this is the path you’ve laid out for yourself and by God you’re going to follow it to the letter. Wherever you’re coming from, you and all your peers were accepted into this program because of your talent and your skill, and you all deserve to be here on that merit. Everyone in the classroom that first day is a spider that thinks every other person is the scariest thing in the room; the only thing you need to be scared of is the unhinged shuttle bus you took to campus.
Do you hate writing literary fiction? Amazing, don’t write it! Is your professor talking about a poet that everyone seems to know, but you’ve never heard of before? That’s okay, there’s no pre-MFA reading list! There is no “You Must Have X Pieces Published to Enter” sign at the front door of Battelle with a bouncer that’ll snap your student ID in half if you dare to cross the threshold. Who you are right now is more than good enough to be here, and no one else is holding you to the imaginary standard of what an MFA student should be. You do not need to know everything, nor should you: that’s the whole point of learning.
Some last-minute nuggets of advice: do the reading, drink your water, say yes to the invite to after-class drinks at Guapo’s. You have to go around the back of campus to park in the Sports Center garage. Go to the Visiting Writers Series, the readings at Politics & Prose, that one weird event you saw a flier for somewhere. Get to know your professors, don’t be afraid to pick their brains. Finally, write all your notes by hand; you’ll retain more information that way.
It has truly been the experience of a lifetime to be an MFA student here at AU. I hope that you, anxious incoming student, take a moment to breathe and appreciate where you are right now. It’ll be over before you know it.
I can’t wait to see all the wonderful things you write.
Written by: Michelle Ott