And It Begins All Over Again

Year Two of my MFA program at Penn State started today. Poetry workshop bright and early at 9:05 Monday morning. A lovely group of seven MFAs, one PhD lit student, and one MA lit student. And the talented, smart, and helpful Julia Kasdorf at the helm. Julia was the MFA director when I applied to the program, she called me with my acceptance, I met her at recruitment weekend, etc; then she was on sabbatical last year. The older students had talked about how great she was in workshop, and after one day, I think they’re right. We didn’t actually workshop today, but we discussed our ideas and goals in terms of “voice” (the general theme of the workshop this semester), we each read a poem we’d written over the summer, and we discussed the reading we’d done for today (selections from Frank Bidart’s collected poems). It’s a nice group of people, and the vibe is very positive. ‘Twas a perfect way to begin the semester!

I’m undecided right now on the other class I’ll be taking this semester. Since this is a two year program now, and I’ll be working on my thesis, I’m registered for thesis credits which means I only need two “real” classes. Right now I’m registered for both a lit seminar on Shakespearean tragedies and a lit course on the 1930s which promises to be heavily political/cultural studies-ish. I’m masochistically considering staying in both of them, but I think I’ll end up dropping one.

I’m teaching an Intro to Creative Writing class, which I’m thrilled about. We meet for the first time tomorrow at 8:00am. I posted an overview of how the course is set up in a comment to JayTee’s post on teaching so I won’t reiterate it all here, but it’s basically a mixture of instruction and practice in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction (i.e. lecture/discussion, lots of writing exercises, one workshop per genre).

What else? Oh yeah, that whole thesis thing…. It is so strange to me that a year ago I hadn’t even begun my MFA program, and now I am halfway finished. While it would be nice to have a third year, I think the two year program is for the best (I don’t think I could take another year in Central Pennsylvania without serious detriment to my sanity). It’s crazy to think about having a book manuscript done by May, but it’s exciting as well. I turned in about 35 pages of poems to my thesis advisor at the end of spring semester, got her comments back over the summer, and then proceeded to not write very much at all…. In my defense, I did a lot of reading, and I did do some writing; but I traveled a fair amount (spent two wonderful weeks in California – half in San Francisco, where my new picture was taken, and half in Berkeley – and also spent a couple of long weekends back in Columbus), I also taught a summer class, and I took an intensive Spanish class, so for six weeks I was on campus eight hours a day, five days a week. Not too conducive to getting a lot of writing done.

However, I feel like I have a solid idea for my manuscript and good direction for the revisions on what I’ve already given my advisor so I only need another 15 pages or so. Totally doable, right?

So, for those of you who are starting, or preparing to start Year Two, how do you feel? I’m a lot more comfortable than I was a year ago, but also feeling an increased pressure to “perform”, i.e. publish, get into a PhD program, get a job, or something.

Good luck to everyone this fall, at whatever stage you currently find yourselves!

Visiting Writers and New Recruits

by Emily May Anderson

This past week, George Saunders was our Writer-in-Residence here at Penn State. He gave a public reading on Thursday night (well-attended, and very entertaining), and met with various classes and groups of students, as well as having individual conferences with all of our fiction MFAs. I’m a poet so I only got to interact with him at the poets breakfast yesterday morning, the general MFA lunch, and the final party that Bill, our program director, hosted last night. In all of those situations, he was friendly, down to earth, and much less cynical than I had expected based on his work. He runs the MFA program at Syracuse, so he was very interested in our feelings about how our program is run, and at breakfast yesterday, we were discussing ways to approach workshop outside the normal format, and ended up generating the idea of multi-program workshops (i.e. either through email or video conferencing, allowing Penn State students and Syracuse students to workshop together). I have no idea if that will ever happen, or what the necessary logistics would be, but it was just so cool to hear another perspective and to see someone else who really wants to think outside the box and find ways of doing things that will give the students good feedback; his attitude toward the whole MFA thing was really really great, and the whole writer-in-residence thing was excellent.

The program also announced a partial list of readings for next year, including Jane Hirshfield, Jonathon Lethem, and the 2011 Writer-in-Residence Susan Orlean. I’m a little disappointed that we won’t have a poet in residence next year either, but it’s just the timing of a two year program with three genres – someone’s going to miss out.

The other interesting thing going on, which overlapped slightly with the Saunders visit, was Recruitment. I think I posted a little bit about my experience as a recruit last year (in a post about how I chose my program) and I posted more about it on my blog last March, but the short version is all the admitted MFA and MA students in English are invited to campus for a sort of group visit. It was so interesting and fun to be on the other side of it this year! The MFA recruits got to come to the party for George Saunders last night, so we all met them there, then we took them to an MFA reading, where all the MA recruits also ended up. They had a breakfast with the graduate director and some other folks this morning, then I don’t know what the MAs did, but the MFA recruits went to lunch with six of us current MFA students, then we gave them a brief campus tour, then they got to go meet with faculty and do other things. They all seem cool, and I’d be happy to have all of them come join us next year (Hello, Denise, and any of the others who read this!!!!) It was a lot of fun to meet them, and it was cool to reflect that a year ago, I was in their shoes - getting shepherded around campus, meeting a ton of people, telling the same introductory story to everyone, answering the same questions (name, genre, where are you from?), till my brain was full of names and faces and there was no amount of coffee that could help me concentrate.

I actually felt that way a bit myself today. Thursday and Friday had both been long, full days, what with my regular schedule plus all the extra stuff, then this morning I had training for my summer teaching assignment before our lunch. But I’ve managed to be pretty productive in the time I’ve had today, and I look forward to an even more productive day tomorrow. Six more weeks of the semester! Yikes!

First Semester Wrap-Up

by Emily May Anderson


While I still have 24 freshman research papers to read and final grades to calculate, my first semester as an MFA student is pretty much over. I’ve been pretty absent from this blog recently, but let me try to recap the semester.

Since I’ve already mentioned teaching, I’ll start there. I taught one section of freshman composition, and I loved it. I enjoyed teaching, I felt like I was able to present the material in ways that made sense to them, and their writing did, in most cases, improve throughout the semester. I also really liked my group of students. I taught at 4:40-5:30pm MWF this semester; I thought I would hate the time slot, but I got used to it and really didn’t mind the lateness at all. My students were very active and energetic and talkative and informal – in both constructive and distracted ways – so I had to try to harness and direct their energy by being equally energetic and sometimes irreverent. It’s not at all how I planned or expected to approach the classroom; I thought I would be much more formal, but I realized very quickly that if I wanted to connect with this group, I’d have to sort of meet them where they were. There were a few days where I felt like I had very little control over them, but in general, they were good and they were invested in the class; they came to office hours, they submitted rough drafts early, they even brought me apples on the day my teaching mentor came to observe the class! She (my mentor) commented to me after class that I’ll probably never have another group of students this active, which is okay with me – they were exhausting sometimes – but they were really fun, and I’m really happy with my first teaching experience. I want to tweak the departmentally-provided syllabus a little bit before next semester, but overall, teaching was a success.

In addition to teaching, I also took three grad classes. The first was the infamous English 501: Intro to Graduate Study. It was, if nothing else, a bonding experience for all the first year students, MFAs and MAs together. We read a lot of critical theory and a lot of articles about the professions of both writing and academia. We also did a wide range of assignments, from textual analysis to writing abstracts for papers to researching potential publication venues (the most useful assignment by far!)

I also took The Writer in the Community, a hands-on “service learning” type of course. In addition to weekly class meetings with reading assignments, presentations, journals, etc, I also with two of my classmates started a creative writing group for international women in the community. Other groups of students in the class worked with middle school students in an afterschool program at a local youth center and with high school aged students at a youth shelter in town. This was a really great experience, and I learned a lot about teaching, writing, communication, and what it means to build community in a classroom-like setting. I wrote my term paper on the role of personal narrative writing, in terms of identity formation, building community, and literacy development. Even writing the 15 page paper was a really good experience. We (my two classmates and I) opted to continue running the group next semester, even though we won’t be getting course credit for it, but we’ve really grown to enjoy the company of the women who attend the group, and we see a very real benefit to what we’re doing.

And finally, my poetry workshop! Robin Becker conducted this fall’s workshop with a chapbook focus. I read, over the course of the semester, twenty-five chapbooks. Some I loved (Charles Wright’s The Wrong End of the Rainbow and Richard McCann’s Nights of 1990, though very different, both completely rocked my world and had me in tears), some I didn’t; but it was interesting to see the different ways people approached the short chapbook form. In addition to reading and commenting on chapbooks, I also wrote a poem a week for workshop, commented on my peer’s poems, drafted and revised a proposal for my own chapbook, researched and presented on a chapbook contest, and at the end of the semester submitted to Robin a preliminary sequence of fifteen revised poems that could potentially comprise a chapbook. Ten of the poems were from this semester; the other five predated grad school but fit the theme and arc of my collection. Visiting poets who read this semester were Elizabeth Alexander, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno. The first two I only met after their readings, but Bonanno sat in on our class and we had lunch with her the next day. We also had three newer poets who’ve recently published chapbooks visit our class: Rebecca Foust and Penn State MFA alums Shanna Powlus Wheeler and Katherine Bode-Lang. Katherine, in particular, is really amazing!

I also attended events with fiction writer Rick Bass (who has a very dry sense of humor), nonfiction writer David Quammen (a very smart, very nice guy) – other fiction and NF writers were on campus, but I skipped some of those events. George Saunders is our Writer in Residence in the spring.

So, what else? I wrote a lot, I made friends, I fell in love (much to my surprise), and I know with every ounce of certainty that coming here was the right decision and that I want to write and teach for the rest of my life! (Sappy? Perhaps, but that’s me.) Oh, and this past Friday was the traditional end of semester MFA Variety Show – a very casual, humorous “reading” at which a group of us first-years performed a skit about writing an MFA Manifesto. Other people read found poems composed entirely of English department member’s facebook status updates, fake letters requesting advice, bitter MFA bumper sticker slogans, one-man plays, and much other craziness. 

Has It Really Been Six Weeks?

by Emily May Anderson

On one hand, it feels like time has flown by, like just a few days ago I was moving into this apartment and meeting my peers for the first time. On the other hand, it also feels like I’ve been here forever, like I can’t remember being anywhere else and not knowing these people that I’ve come to know so intimately.

I just got back from an MFA party at a professor’s house. Her home was lovely, and all the MFAs, and their assorted hangers-on, are so nice! There were kids at the party, and cats, and husbands and sisters and boyfriends. And there was rather a lot of food, all of it very good. Those creative types can cook! I made an apple crisp and brought a bottle of Spanish Quarter red. It was actually rather funny – I stopped at the wine shop on the way to the party, got my bottle and got in line and noticed one of my professors in line a couple people ahead of me. As I was chatting with her, a guy from workshop came in, all of us buying wine for the party.

It was a nice time, and now I am home, and planning to do some work. Tomorrow I need to go for a long run, do some work, clean my apartment, and I’m trying to organize some of the first years into meeting for a few drinks tomorrow night.

I have been through six weeks of classes and am rapidly approaching the halfway point on this first semester. Each week is so busy that it seems to fly by. I know it will be November before I realize it, then Thanksgiving, then the end of the semester and Christmas. I can hardly believe my first semester is going so fast.

MFA Readings

by Emily May Anderson

(Apologies in advance for any spelling and grammar errors, or a general lack of sense. I only slept for three hours.)

I’m wondering if anyone else has had an MFA reading yet. Here at Penn State, the first one of the school year was last night. For some (probably sadistic) reason, the readers for the first two readings of the year are always the first-year students, and I got to read last night along with a first year fiction writer and a first year CNF writer. It was a lot of fun! I was nervous, but in a good way, and everyone was very supportive. There was a surprisingly good turnout considering that the weather was disgusting – cold and rainy – and the reading was held at the same time as the big Iowa game. A few of the 2nd and 3rd year MFAs went to the game instead of the reading, and the general consensus among the rest of us was that it was really not okay for them to do that, but there are no “rules” about it; it’s more just a social convention. However, a lot of MA/PhD students came out, especially our fellow first years, and I really appreciated that. I kept hugging people later and saying I was so glad they were there.

An explanation of the hugging, and a corollary to the lack of rules, has to do with the very informal nature of the readings here. They are organized by MFA students, held in a really cool campus building,
in this crazy basement room with red carpeted walls (couldn't find a good picture of the room, sorry), and there is beer. Rather a lot of beer actually. No faculty members attend, only students. The introductions are very funny. The beginning of the intro my friend Daniel, a 2nd year MFA, wrote: “Various theories have been offered regarding the origins of Emily May Anderson. One story states that Dylan Thomas, king of the gods, awoke one morning with a splitting headache, and asked William Carlos Williams to strike him with a hammer. Williams did so, and Emily emerged from Thomas’s head, fully formed and carrying the notebook of wisdom and the pen of truth.” And it goes on in that vein.

So, yeah, the MFA reading series is surprisingly informal (at BG, where I did my undergrad, they’re very different) and intoxication is encouraged. Most of us went to a bar after the reading and then there was more socializing after that, hence my three hours of sleep, and my probable lack of sense here. It was a great experience though, and I look forward to the next reading.

Questions to the other MFAs: have you read yet? how do you feel about reading? and how formal or informal are MFA readings in your program?

The Things I Never Expected

by Emily May Anderson

I was teaching class this afternoon, and about halfway through the class period, I heard a helicopter fly over. Then again, and again, circling low and slow and very loud. I couldn't talk over it, so I stopped for a moment, then when I could make my voice heard, I said "What is going on?" I thought it was a rhetorical question, but the students (or most of them at least) already knew. A freshman student had disappeared on Saturday night/Sunday morning after leaving a fraternity party; the campus police, and other law enforcement officers were looking for him. Apparently the university has an emergency warning system for things like this, and most all of my students had received either email or text messages about it. So the helicopters were circling, and there were a lot of police officers outside (we could see them through the window); it was really rather disturbing. I found out tonight that maintenance people found his body today, two buildings away from where we have class, apparently dead from a head injury sustained in a fall. Here is a link to an article. It sounds like it's really just a tragic accident, but it's really sad, and one of those things that I know I'm going to have to discuss on Wednesday and I don't know exactly how to handle it. A couple of the students today were freaked out, and I really don't know what, if anything, I need to say to them on Wednesday......

In Praise Of My Cubicle

by Emily May Anderson

When I visited Penn State in March, some of the MFAs gave us an unofficial tour of the Burrowes Building, home of the English Department. They showed us some of the seminar rooms where we’d have classes, the library of lit mags and previous student theses, the big poster listing all the student publications, and they showed us the GTA offices. All the MFAs have their offices in a large basement room divided into shared cubicles. It’s fluorescently lit, cluttered, and feels like…well, cubicles in a basement.

I was a little put off. My disappointment was probably because I had the good fortune to be an undergrad a couple of years after the English Department had moved into a brand new building and the grad students at BG had real offices – two (or maybe three) people might share a room, a real room with a door, and they’d each have a desk – on the 3rd or 4th floor, with windows. Those little basement cubes were just depressing!

At the beginning of this semester, it was a little bit annoying to have to schedule my time in the office in cooperation with my cube-mate; there’s only one desk and one computer so we can’t both be in there at the same time. And the temperature regulation in the basement is not the best; it tends to be hot, so people open windows, so then it gets cold. I’ve learned to leave a sweater in my cabinet.

In spite of the fun that I’ve had here in State College, I’ve still felt pretty isolated, particularly during the week. My “previous life” in Columbus was very social: I had a lot of friends, I might go to trivia on a Monday, karaoke on a Wednesday, or just meet someone for coffee or a drink or dinner any day of the week. I seldom went more than a couple days without some sort of social interaction. And here it’s not like that. We are all buried in our work during the week (some people stay buried on weekends) and I might talk to the people in my classes, I might talk to my roommate for 5 minutes here and there, but then I go home and work.

Enter my cubicle. For a few different reasons, I ended up spending more time in my cube this week, and I realized that I would not want a separate office somewhere. I really like seeing people walk by; sometimes they just wave and say “Hi, how are you?” and a few times this week I actually had real conversations with some of my fellow students. It was nice! Just taking a few minutes out of the work day to chat with someone was surprisingly refreshing, and I realized that I love my cubicle. I would imagine the set-up was just designed because of the lack of available space, but it functions to foster community and to help people feel connected to each other.

So, do you have your own office? Do you have a cubicle? Do you feel like you get enough social interaction during the week? Etc?

What I Learned From My First Graduate Workshop

by Emily May Anderson

1. It wasn't as scary as I'd thought. I was a nervous wreck the night before my first poetry workshop in over 9 years. I even sent a copy of my poem to one of my poet friends in Columbus before workshop. But it was not that bad. Robin Becker's approach to graduate workshop is not to "fix" the poems, but to read them, paraphrase them, question them, and try to understand them, and to ask questions about how they might be improved. It was very constructive!

2. I need to read more carefully. I mentioned before I think that the focus of our workshop this semester is on chapbooks. Each week we will read a chapbook or two and respond to them. I read the ones assigned for this week and thought I made pretty intelligent comments, but the people in the class were deep and really seemed to have studied the books a lot more than I had. I felt like I was understanding them better through the discussion, and like if I would have read them sooner and more repeatedly that I would have been better equipped to discuss them.

3. This will be a lot of work. The eight of us are each workshopping a poem each week, plus reading and responding to chapbooks. We critique each other's work in class only, so that does not add to the workload out of class, but it makes for an intensely focused three hours.

4. I am glad to be here and to be doing this. And that's the most important part.

Oh, and if you want to read the first piece I workshopped, I posted it on my blog tonight. (My name links to the blog. It's the newest post.)

Week 1 Update

by Emily May Anderson

So, I made it through my first week. It went a little something like this:

Monday, English 501: Intro to Graduate Study at 9:05am. Intimidating as heck, but encouraging too. That sounds weird, but that’s the only way I can describe it. I don’t feel at all prepared for this class, but I think that’s the point; by the time we’re done with the class, we will be prepared for the rest of our graduate study. We’re getting a crash course in theory, research methods, and how to write seminar papers. I’ve heard a nasty rumor that one of the professors (it’s co-taught by the MFA director and an older, very smart, very professorial medievalist) kind of has an issue with the MFAs in the class, like he doesn’t think we belong there or are “worthy” to be in his class with the MAs. Now I know I am as smart as anyone there so I’m taking it as a personal challenge to do really well in the class and prove him wrong. So, anyway, that was Monday morning. We got out a little bit early, so I got lunch with a couple people, then stayed on campus, did a lot of reading, then taught my first class at 4:40. It went okay; I felt nervous and I think I talked too fast, but it went fine, and I let them out about ten minutes early.

Tuesday, went to campus at 10:30, since I supposedly had Office Hours 10:30-11:30. I read the writing that my freshman had done in class the day before and was really impressed, then heated up my lunch, then went to The Writer in the Community. I didn’t know really what to expect with this class, but I am now really excited about it. We’d had an assignment before the first class to type up a page or so about our ideas of community and teaching writing in non-academic communities, so after the instructor introduced the class and went over the syllabus, each of us read and/or explained what we’d written, and we talked about them, then we decided what kind of projects we wanted to work on this semester and broke up into little groups and started talking about that. I wrote a bit more about the class on my blog earlier this week. That was my only class, so I went back home afterward, went for a nice 4 mile run, and then did some course planning for Wednesday and Friday.

Wednesday my class was Poetry Workshop with Robin Becker. Robin is scary but really great. There are 8 of us in the workshop, including two people I hadn’t met before. We talked extensively about the syllabus, then talked about our respective backgrounds and writing interests, got our assignments and then let out early. Sarah, the other first year poetry MFA, and I went and had lunch, then I putzed around my office for awhile before teaching again at 4:40. It went well, and I was much less nervous than I had been on Monday. The lecturing/writing on the chalkboard thing went well, and a few of the students seemed genuinely excited and interested when I told them that Elizabeth Alexander is going to be reading here in September. The Poetry Workshop has a chapbook focus; we’ll be reading a lot of chapbooks and we’ll be putting our own together in the second half of the semester. Each week in the first half we’ll read and respond to a chapbook, or chapbooks, in two ways: we’ll write a prose response/review and we’ll write a poem in some way inspired by a piece in the chapbook, either formally or in terms of subject or etc. Each person theoretically should get to workshop each week. I read the first chapbook and started my prose response that night.

Thursday I packed my lunch and met my neighbor Nicolette and an MA named Grace for lunch around noon, then we went to our Teaching Seminar. Talked about how the first two days had gone, got a few ideas for Friday and the first major assignment, then Grace and I walked over to check out the rec center. It’s not included in our student fees, but it’s super cheap to join as a student: $99 for the whole year and that covers multiple locations on campus, all the classes, pools, etc so I want to do it. But oh yeah, I had no money (this had been a theme of the week – I was still waiting on my student loan money so that I could buy books and groceries and pay bills and pretty much have a life). I was supposed to come home and go running again, but it was chilly and damp and I was feeling exhausted and disgruntled, so I didn’t. I think I drank some more coffee and tried to write.

Friday I spent the day carefully reading and taking notes on all the articles for 501 that were online (there were a lot of them – they made me feel stupid – I did not like them, but then again, I was grouchy anyway). I went to campus, in the pouring rain, just to teach class, but it went very well; the students were talking and interacting, and the time went super fast. That night Enru (my roommate), Nicolette, and I went up to Grace’s apartment and just chilled and watched a movie.

Today, I borrowed the books for our intro class from Enru and did that reading (not as bad as the articles, thankfully!), then we ended up having four of the girls over for dinner, so I frantically cleaned and cooked and showered. We had a nice time though, and one of the girls mentioned that she’d already gotten her paycheck direct deposited (we officially get paid the last day of the month) so I checked my bank account after they left and saw that not only had I received my paycheck but I’d also received the loan money. So, I paid a bunch of bills, and I get to buy books tomorrow!

Oh, and I also wrote the poem for Wednesday :) I’d tried to do it before and come up with something finished but very bad, so I started over tonight and it just worked.

So, in summary: it was a busy week. I’m only IN class for 12 hours a week, but there is a very definite balancing act I’m going to have to master of prepping to teach, reading/writing for my academic classes, reading/writing for workshop, AND still managing to run and have some sort of social life. I feel good about it though; I feel like I can do it, and I feel (after only a week) that I definitely belong here, I don’t doubt that for an instant, not even when I’m waiting for a bus in the pouring rain or sitting at my table glaring at an article about the Affective Fallacy.

Ready As I’ll Ever Be

by Emily May Anderson

Tomorrow, at 9:05am, I will attend my first graduate class. Tomorrow at 4:40pm, I will teach my first English 15 class.

This is so exciting and scary!

Last week was very busy. I got on the bus at 8:36 every morning and orientation started at 9:00. We were mainly in one particular room; the location of the building was convenient but the desks/chairs in the room were horribly uncomfortable. Not just not comfortable, but truly painful. We had lectures about the Composition program and English department policy, we got course syllabi and rosters and schedules and keys and lesson plans and all sorts of information. We heard from faculty and current graduate teachers about how exactly they conduct the first week of classes. We graded some practice papers and spent a whole morning discussing them - by the far the most fun and helpful morning of the week. We had people come in and speak to us about diversity issues, sexual harassment, the Writing Center, the Counseling Center, the Women’s Center. We got a tour of the library and free lunch that day. We spent one morning and a separate afternoon in a computer lab learning about all sorts of technology issues. It was exhausting, mentally and physically.

But we socialized too. Except for the day the library gave us lunch, we were on our own for an hour to an hour and a half, so we got to eat with our classmates, or run errands with them, and just talk and get to know people. Thursday night, two of the other new MFAs and I walked over to the milk and cookie party. All the new MFAs were there and quite a few of the returning ones. We chatted and ate cookies and it was nice and relaxing. Friday night, my roommate and I and our neighbor drove out to a party at one of the faculty member’s houses; there was very good food, and I think all of the new students were there, along with a few returning students and a few other faculty people. Some wine was drunk by me, and much fun was had. Maybe 1/3 of us new folks convened at Mad Mex downtown after the party wound down and enjoyed some more laidback talking and drinking. Saturday was the EGO party. N cooked dinner for my roommate and I, then we went to the party. It was packed and hot and loud and crazy, but less so than the last time I’d been to that house (same house that hosted the first party of recruitment weekend). I got to talk with a few of the older students I’d either not met, or not spoken much with, before; and got to bond with a few of my fellow newbies. Some people got drunker than I had yet seen them, and I got drunker than I had been since moving here, but not too drunk. Four of us were singing along to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” in the car on the way home though. Fun stuff!

Everyone here, from the new students to the returning students to the faculty and staff, really is ridiculously nice, and, for a group of academic people, remarkably social. A handful of folks skipped the party last night, but most attended, and I think everyone there had a good time.

Today, I finished prepping to teach for the first week – I have outlines for each day, and I wrote out a full script for Monday and Wednesday, though I may not even refer to them; it was just helpful to write it. And I cooked a big pot of soup so I can eat leftovers this week, and I picked out an outfit to wear for my first day of teaching. I am as ready as I’m gonna get, and I am excited to get started and see how it goes!

I was thinking yesterday that I feel a little bit like I have lost sight of being a student this past week and just thought about being a teacher, but since our orientation was for teaching, that makes sense. I know that things will balance out, but since teaching is so new to me, I’ve wanted to/felt like I had to put in a lot of effort to feel prepared. Once I get through the first week and see how things go, I’ll have a better idea of how my time will distribute itself. Oh, I just can hardly wait to get started!

On Getting Oriented, Part 1 - The Numbers

by Emily May Anderson

So, after two days of orientation, I must say that I feel much more prepared to teach than I did last time I posted. I promise to come back and reflect more fully on the orientation process over the weekend (in other words, when the orientation process is complete), but for now, here is an overview of Penn State’s orientation for graduate instructors…

22 – MA/PhD track students in orientation
6 – MFA students in orientation
0 – difference in how we are treated

1 – section/course of freshman comp we will teach this first semester
24 – max number of students in the course we will be teaching

15 – hours spent in orientation over the first two days
22 – hours scheduled for orientation later this week
3 – books to be used in the class (a rhet comp text, a grammar manual, and a PSU-specific collection of student writing)
484 – pages in the instructor binder of helpful material
2 – types of syllabi provided to us (1 ready to give students, 1 fully annotated for instructors with suggestions for exercises, and references to the binder, etc.)

1 – full week of orientation
1 – credit hour class that will guide us through teaching this whole semester
4 – new students per “teaching mentor” (an upper level PhD student who’s been successful as a graduate instructor and will meet with us once every couple weeks and answer any questions we have)

Those are all the number I can come up with right now, but suffice it to say, that orientation is a LOT of information, but that the support/training we have as instructors is multi-layered and will be ongoing throughout the semester. It seems pretty comprehensive.

We got our keys, office assignments, and course schedules yesterday so I got to see where I’ll be teaching and where my office is. We grade our first sample papers tomorrow. Exciting stuff! Oh, and I'm teaching on MWF from 4:40-5:30pm, kind of an odd time frame, but we'll see how it goes, I guess.

Anyway, I’ll report back again after the week is over. My brain is a bit full right now. Hope everyone is having good luck with their preparations, moving, settling, orientations, classes, or wherever you are in the process!!!!

How did you choose your MFA program, or did it choose you?

by Emily May Anderson

When it comes to deciding on an MFA program, there are a lot of factors to consider: location, funding, faculty, course offerings, reputation, alumni, etc. Today I want to share how I chose the schools to which I applied and how I ended up at Penn State.

About a year ago, more or less, I started researching MFA programs on the internet. I found the old U.S. News rankings, and I found the blogs and statistics and rankings put together by Tom Keeley, and Seth Abramson. I got Tom’s book and read his advice on the topic and read the summaries of all the programs. Then I started making a list. I went state by state through all the programs listed in the book and wrote down the ones in locations I could see myself living; I think I had 20 or 30 to start with. Then I looked at the statistics for each of those programs, eliminated the ones that didn’t offer much funding or that just didn't appeal to me for one reason or another. I then had a list of about 15. Some people apply to that many programs, but I knew I did not have the money for more than ten, so then I went directly to the program websites. I read what the programs said about themselves, what the students said about them, and I read between the lines, trying to get the programs vibe from the way they presented themselves online. Some websites turned me off because they were so difficult to navigate or because they didn’t have much information; other websites (University of Wisconsin, West Virginia University, and University of Alabama, in particular) really gave me a good vibe. I eliminated a few more schools by logical means, and then made my final cuts through pure intuition, and ended up with a list of 9 schools. I couldn't have explained to you how one school beat another and made it onto the final list.

I applied to one top ten program, five mid-tier programs, two lesser-known programs, and one very new one. Seven of the nine were in what I consider the Midwest though only one was in Ohio, and the list was about evenly split between schools in urban areas vs. smaller towns, as I’m equally comfortable in both. When the results were in, I’d been accepted at three programs, waitlisted at one, and rejected by the top tier program, three of the mid-tier programs, and one of the lesser-knowns. I eliminated the school at which I was waitlisted, because the more I thought about it, the more I didn’t think I would be happy in the location.

So, how did Penn State come out on top? Several reasons. They notified me early, they offered me full funding, and basically they made me feel wanted. I went out to visit for their English department recruitment weekend in mid-March, before some schools had even notified their acceptances. That March visit was the clincher for me. As I learned more about the program, I felt like it really was the perfect program for me, in ways I hadn’t even been aware of when I applied. See, as much as I love the creative aspect of writing, the expression of it, the ART of it, I also love the study of literature and the academic aspects of it all.

Penn State has a large, very well-respected English Department and a very small MFA program. A fellow MFA acceptee and I were discussing things before the visit, and we shared our fears that the MFA program might be overlooked a bit, might tend to fall through the cracks of the larger English program. But during the visit, I got the sense that it most definitely was not so. MA/PhD students and MFAs all seemed to socialize and study together, and the faculty members were equally attentive to the MFA candidates and those who’d been accepted for the MA/PhD track. The MFA at Penn State is currently transitioning from a 3 year “terminal degree” to a 2 year program that will still offer the terminal MFA but is also designed to correspond to the MA and to prepare students who wish to go on for a PhD. And I do want to do that. I wasn’t sure of it when I was applying, but it was something I was considering, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt I wanted to do it. I also connected really well with several of the faculty members during my visit, both the poetry faculty and some of the literature and theory faculty as well. And I was very impressed with the current students; they seemed smart and friendly and, even more important, truly happy with the program. I know people say that campus visits aren’t necessarily the best way to get a good feel for a program or its people, but the weekend was long enough, and filled with enough opportunities to talk in large groups, small groups, and one on one, that I think I could get a feel for how people really felt about the program and how they interacted with each other.

So anyway, I really got the sense that Penn State was a program where I would fit, and where I was wanted, and where I would be valued. In a certain way, I felt as though the people who’d read my application and chosen me for the program knew more about me than I knew about myself at the time I’d submitted it, like they saw my potential and what I was really suited for in ways I didn’t. I got a lovely email from the MFA director after the weekend, and I let my thoughts settle for a couple of days, then I accepted my offer at Penn State, and was absolutely thrilled. I really do feel like it’s where I’m meant to be.

And now, I am here. I moved into my apartment over the weekend. My roommate, an MA student, moved in on Tuesday, and I’m slowly getting settled and learning my way around. I am feeling desperately poor and a little lost, but I also looking forward to orientation next week when I will learn about my teaching assignment and start getting to know the rest of the new students. I am looking forward even more to the following week when I start classes.

If anyone has read this immensely long and self-indulgent post, here is my advice about applying to MFA programs: Do your research (the blogs I linked to earlier are excellent resources, as is Tom’s book, but also spend some time on the websites of programs you’re looking at) and make your final list with a good mixture of logic and intuition. I would also strongly recommend that you spread your choices out among the top, middle, and lower ranked programs; it’s such a subjective process, and you never know where you will really fit. Just submit your best application possible, and trust. Trust yourself, your writing, your statement, your choices. And trust the process, trust the people at the programs. They know what they are looking for, and in the best cases they know better than you do whether you fit at their program or not. It might sound goofy, but I believe that if we put ourselves out there and ask the universe for something, that we’ll get what we need. I didn’t get into my top choices, but I got into a place that I really think is perfect for me. And that is all the wisdom I can offer.

Emily May Anderson (Penn State, Class of 2011)

Hello, everyone! My name is Emily, and I’m a poet. I’ll be starting my MFA at Penn State on August 24th.

I currently live in Columbus, Ohio. I’ve lived here for over six years, and I love my life here, so it’s hard to leave. I have great friends, a real sense of being part of communities (the poetic community and the queer community and my neighborhood community), I had a job I didn’t hate, a hilarious dog and a beautiful cat and an apartment whose windows show the skyline. In less than a week, I will be packing some of the contents of that apartment, the dog, and the cat, and driving to the middle of Pennsylvania to start a new chapter of my life.

As terrifying as it is to relocate and start a new chapter, I know that I am doing what I truly want to do with my life. I have a BFA in creative writing from Bowling Green State University. I graduated in 2000, so I’m 31 years old now, and I’ve always wanted to go to grad school, but life got in the way and kept me from applying until this past year. I am nervous about being back in the classroom again after being out of school for so long, but I am looking forward to it, and I feel very strongly that this is what I’m meant to be doing.

I'm a vegetarian, a runner, and basically a big nerd. I love black coffee and red wine and being outside in the sunshine. I blog about poetry, books, and life in general at Rice in the Cupboard, and I’m also on twitter with the username emander.

I don’t know what else to say in terms of introduction right now, but I am happy to be part of the MFA Chronicles, and I look forward to hearing about everyone’s experiences this year. It is an exciting time for all of us!