Back to the Blog
So, it's been a while since last I've blogged, and I have to say, I've missed it. Part of it was the fact that I was finishing up my MFA, moving, and now, looking for a job while planning a wedding and trying to keep up with my writing.
Still, I'm back now, and I think the first order of business is to discuss how the end of the MFA program seems to me now, a few months out. The first, most obvious thing I notice is the lack of concern for the writer / artist in our society, and how wonderful it was to have people all around me who cared about writing and language just as much as I did. It was just taken for granted that we all loved to write, that it was important, and that it was necessary. Out here in the cold, heartless real world, I get confused stares all the time, and a line of questioning that always focuses on, Now what are you going to do with that? or Why are you even doing it? What's the point?
Sigh.
I think the main challenge in this, my post-MFA era, is to remember that there are communities all over the country where people care about language and story, and that if I'm writing for myself and the handful of people like myself, so be it. I didn't begin writing for fame or fortune. I began to write to make sense of the world, to try to enlarge my human experience as I endeavored to understand it, and to hopefully, someday, reach other people who take succor from the well-rendered and carefully detailed stories about how people experience their lives, their struggles and their ineffable moments of happiness that give life its sacred aspect.
I'm working pretty much every day now, revising and writing new stuff, and trying to find an audience by sending things out to literary magazines. I'm intrigued by my newfound discipline, which I did not have before the MFA. I know how to get my ass in the chair now, and I know how to sit there and create a little every day. What's so satisfying is that I am making something new everyday, and while some of it really stinks, how many people can truly say: In the face of chaos, in a universe full of entropy, I created today.
Still, I'm back now, and I think the first order of business is to discuss how the end of the MFA program seems to me now, a few months out. The first, most obvious thing I notice is the lack of concern for the writer / artist in our society, and how wonderful it was to have people all around me who cared about writing and language just as much as I did. It was just taken for granted that we all loved to write, that it was important, and that it was necessary. Out here in the cold, heartless real world, I get confused stares all the time, and a line of questioning that always focuses on, Now what are you going to do with that? or Why are you even doing it? What's the point?
Sigh.
I think the main challenge in this, my post-MFA era, is to remember that there are communities all over the country where people care about language and story, and that if I'm writing for myself and the handful of people like myself, so be it. I didn't begin writing for fame or fortune. I began to write to make sense of the world, to try to enlarge my human experience as I endeavored to understand it, and to hopefully, someday, reach other people who take succor from the well-rendered and carefully detailed stories about how people experience their lives, their struggles and their ineffable moments of happiness that give life its sacred aspect.
I'm working pretty much every day now, revising and writing new stuff, and trying to find an audience by sending things out to literary magazines. I'm intrigued by my newfound discipline, which I did not have before the MFA. I know how to get my ass in the chair now, and I know how to sit there and create a little every day. What's so satisfying is that I am making something new everyday, and while some of it really stinks, how many people can truly say: In the face of chaos, in a universe full of entropy, I created today.
posted by Tiffany Hamburger at
4:16 PM
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