Booted From the MFA Womb

The ripping Kansas winds and humidity blanket let me know I am definitely not in Montana anymore. I want to go home but where is that? If I clicked the heels of my pink flip flops I might get thrown in a worm hole.

My Camry (equipped with a U-Haul trailer) thinks it's some kind of badass parked with the 18 wheelers in the Econo Lodge parking lot of Salina. I've spent the past twelve hours becoming intimately acquainted with the roadkill wildlife of Nebraska. Feathered, furred, domestic, wild, taloned, pawed, clawed. Too bad I can't work some kind of matchmaking deal with all those taxidermy schools in Montana.

I've also had too much time to wonder what I'm doing.

Two more hell days of driving and I'll be in New Orleans to meet fellow MFA grad Anne Marie Inge. She asked me on the phone the other day that gut wrenching post MFA Q: Have you been writing? I was actually writing pretty soon after graduation, but everything got put on hold for the move. And a kickass trip to Glacier National Park. It's weird to think a few weeks ago I was hiking to Iceberg Lake and communing with mountain goats. And in a few days I'll be slurping oysters in Nola. All it's takes is a lot of driving and fuckload of money for gas.

Now I live in Seattle

Do you know how I know that I now live in Seattle? The city has seen fit to give me a library card! Because what I really need in my life right now is more books. I haven't even unpacked all the books I own, but that's neither here nor there. We do what we must in order to find comfort in chaos.

My review of Paige Ackerson-Kiely's In No One's Land is up on Gently Read Literature (see link at right).

This morning, I attempted to write two imitation poems--one on Frank O'Hara's Lana Turner poem and one on Baudelaire's "Double Room." This is the first writing I've done since graduation.

I've learned a couple things over the course of my move:

1. The style of my clothing is "too old". This from the lovely lady at the Buffalo Exchange in the U-district, where I attempted to sell my skinny clothes this morning in order to buy groceries (perhaps my insistence on buying groceries is directly linked to said skinny clothes no longer fitting me). New city, new harsh truths.

2. MFA closure comes not from graduation, but from leaving town. As long as you remain in the same physical space as your MFA program and your MFA friends, you are still in the thrall of it all. You can convince yourself that what you've done is a significant thing and everyone around you will concur. The minute you leave, it's over. No one cares that you earned your MFA. Very few people even know what MFA stands for. And when you explain what MFA stands for (I don't recommend this), most people look at you as if you are stupid. And then you begin to wonder if maybe you are a little stupid. You think on it a bit and decide that, yes, you are profoundly stupid. And when the next person asks what you've been doing for the past two years, you tell him or her that you were teaching. Or freelancing. Or just about anything other than attending an MFA program. And that denial is your closure.

Back to the pile of boxes...