I Went to Grad School and All I Got was Everything I Asked For
Is six weeks long enough to change your life? Can your brain—or maybe your spirit, maybe something equally unknowable but more tangible, like your writing—change in six weeks? I think yes but I think it’s not that easy.
When I was sixteen, the summer before my senior year of high school, I attended a state program called Governor’s School, which was a six-week introduction to liberal arts studies with 399 other high achieving students about to start their senior years. At the time the program was hosted by Hendrix College. Before the six weeks were up, I felt like a changed person. I tasted something there that I wanted for myself—possibility, opportunity. I met people that agreed with me and challenged me to greater levels of rigor and thought, something that I wasn’t finding in my own life. I’d been living in the little bubble of my town of two thousand people, bored and defeated and willing to bet nothing could change, but I came back from that program with a will and determination.
That summer created huge changes in my life. I had a new vision of myself and for myself. I ended up going to Hendrix for my undergraduate. I left that summer with a belief I’d not entered it with, but it was the ideas and actions after that summer that changed everything, that changed me. That summer was a first step that led me to several others.
That summer was on my mind a lot this summer, as I drove east towards the Smokey Mountains and up to the Sewanee campus in early June. I was again headed for a six-week sojourn from my “real life”, exchanging the Arkansas River Valley and the perils of entrepreneurship for time in the mountains, studying creative writing as part of an MFA program. I was afraid as I faced the sun, driving towards a horizon line that refused to reveal itself, moving in and out, up and down. I was afraid that everything would change or, worse, that nothing would.
I arrived on Sunday afternoon with just enough time to find my on-campus apartment, toss a couple of things into it and make it to the welcome dinner where a few dozen of us ate grilled meats on a patio. I put on my best networking voice and forged ahead, pretending to be unafraid as I introduced myself, inserting myself into groups and walking up with my hand ready to shake.
I left that first dinner exhausted, worn out by the trip and my own exuberant socializing. The other students impressed me. I went away feeling like a fraud, a faker, but I had little time to ponder it as I had many bags to unpack. The next day we hit the ground running with workshop, for which we’d already done reading and feedback pieces.
We started and we didn’t stop. It was, in two words, a lot. I took a workshop class and a seminar and attended every additional event that came up—readings, talks, social events, everything. I read and I wrote, waking up at 5am and seemingly not stopping until I got into bed each night. Which is not so different from my regular life, but now there was just the reading and writing, the occasional small bit of work-work that needed to be done not withstanding. In the first two weeks and the last two weeks, I was there without my partner and my child. It is somewhat astounding how much longer a single meal will last when you’re the only one who will eat it.
At the end of it I left with two short stories that had been thoroughly workshopped, a handful of new starts, a few new relationships, and some confidence I didn’t have going in. I’m a better reader and a better writer than I was before, with a keen eye turned to the ways in which I am trying to evade the truth or the pain at the heart of a story in my own writing. I have the words now for something I had known—I am a good writer, but being good will not be enough. Creativity is the birthright of each person, but creativity and talent are not enough. I will need to be good, I will need to work very hard, and I will need to be lucky. There’s no way around it.
The timeline of creation, of art, is very long, even within the scope of our own lives. Six weeks was a single gasping breath of the creative life, one good inhale and half of an exhale. It was enough time to plant new seeds and to weed out some beliefs I’ve spent too long cultivating. It was enough for the changes to begin, but I am not changed yet. There’s no time lapse where I bloom quickly. No matter how good the instruction is, how deep the connections are, six weeks is not enough to become. It is only enough to begin. The writing life is measured in years, with the number of drafts for a short story living in the dozens and for a novel going as high as fifty, maybe even higher.
On the other side of this first summer, I have some idea of my next steps. Two to three more years of graduate school—a couple more summers like this one, one-on-one classes with published authors, and rounds and rounds of drafting and revision. I have some goal posts in mind, sketched hastily so I have something to aim for. I have some people to walk beside. I have the people who supported me to and during these first steps. And I have a million new ideas about the workshops I host each month and the newsletter I am trying to write right now and how they are part of my journey and, hopefully, a part of yours.
