End o' year thoughts

by: Raina Lauren Fields



Whew! What a semester! If you’re interested in reading about wrapping up: my first year of graduate school, my first semester of teaching, getting engaged, and what I think is in store in fall 2010, then read on!


CLASSES:
This semester, I took:

Poetry Workshop – Erika Meitner
Editing a Literary Magazine – Bob Hicok
Practicum – Matthew Vollmer
Modern African American Fiction – Virginia Fowler

Classes were stressful this semester. I took my first graduate literature course and felt in the dark, a lot of the class. It was a lesson into what I need to do to step my game up in these literature classes in the future. We read a lot of great literature – some of which I read before, but with a much more refined eye to the texts: Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, were just a few of the books we read during the semester.

Poetry workshop went smoothly and I felt like this semester was a breakthrough in my level of writing. Unfortunately, none of the pieces I produced this year were published in any literary magazines or journals, but I hope with some work and some love that I can place them somewhere in the future.

The literary magazine course I took involved reviving The Minnesota Review, a leading critical magazine’s work and bringing up the status of the literary work that is presented in the magazine. I read slush for the poetry section, along with several of my classmates. I also was involved in researching marketing and advertising opportunities. Next semester, I will act as the General Editor, providing support and guidance to the publication. In addition, my classmates and I have started an online literary magazine under the guidance of Bob Hicok. While it’s not formally affiliated with the MFA program (in that it’s not being funded by the university), it’s a great learning experience in the inner workings of a magazine.

TEACHING:

Teaching…is hard. For the spring semester, I taught one section of Virginia Tech’s ENGL 1106: Writing with Research. Side effects included student drama, continued feelings of overwhelm and fatigue, and dear God, what did I sign up for! Next semester, I will be teaching two sections of ENGL 1105: Introduction to College English. This summer, I’m spending some time to get together my syllabus, lesson plans, and researching different exercises and activities that are not only intellectual but fun.


PROFESSIONAL STUFF:

I went to AWP in Denver! I was a blast! Met a ton of great folks, including some of my poetry idols, Rita Dove, Allison Joseph, and Patricia Smith. I spent way too much money at the book fair, but the only consequence of that is being smarter! (Oh and a smaller wallet, but you win some and you lose some). I also was on a panel entitled “The 21st Century MFA student.”

I am back in VA after two weeks of the Callaloo Writer’s Workshop, which took place in College Station, TX – also known as Aggieland, also known as the town of Texas A&M. I’ve never experienced workshops like that ever before. Every day was emotional, every day was learning something new not only about your poetry but yourself. I am so thankful from that experience and am still decompressing and still writing.

Nest semester, I hope to get more involved in and out of the department by volunteering, tutoring, etc. I've also started the ground work for a professional certificate that I could complete by Spring 2012, but am playing with the idea of trying to design my own certificate in education. Not sure if the graduate school will buy it, but there's always trying!

Oh, there's that pesky thing called a thesis I'm starting to think about. And always mapping out what will happen in the future, once I've finished this darn MFA. But I'm trying this new thing called "living in the moment," so let's see how that goes.

PERSONAL LIFE:

For Spring Break, my boyfriend and I visited Paris and London. It was a great, romantic trip. We also got engaged in Paris! My fiancé, Ross, and I had been dealing the effects of a long distance relationship since I started my MFA program in the fall. (He’s in NJ, I’m in VA – an 8-hour distance). He also works full time, so seeing each other more than once a month, just isn’t an option. Methinks we will be getting married Summer 2012, though no date is set yet.

Ross recently got into the MFA program in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University with full funding! We are now going to be 3.5 hours apart, which is much better!

Hopefully, I’ll be spending the summer in NJ with Ross, though finding any semblance of a summer job is so difficult. I do need to keep up with my apartment and my car payments, so I’m praying something goes well. I have a few internship offers in NY, which I’m really grateful for, but they would be unpaid and it may not be practical to do something like that now.

So, we shall see!

Congrats to everyone who finished their first year! We did it!

Obligatory Winter Break/Semester Wrap-Up Post

I'm all Hokie'd out!

Hi Dudes and Dudettes,

Well I must admit it's been quite a while since I last updated, but I'd like to let you all know how things are going at Virginia Tech.

First, I must say this was a hard semester. I didn't think that an MFA program or grad school, in general, would be a breeze, but it was tougher than I expected. I think the hardest thing was the ever-present time management skills...or rather, lack of. Trying to balance social life with school and other commitments was rough. I didn't want to be viewed as anti-social, nor did I want people to stop extending their warm invitations to hang out, so I did sometimes neglect my work.

In addition, I forgot what it was like to just...write! I know it sounds a little silly, but I wasn't writing or concentrating on the things I wanted to do with my writing this semester. My two poetry classes - one a workshop and the other a form class, both focused on forms. I don't really get down with forms, but working with them this semester has been helpful. I just wish I was able to workshop what I wanted to, instead of focusing on villanelles and ghazals that are god-awful and will never see the light of day.

I ended up getting a 20-page teaching portfolio out of my "how to teach composition" course. Wrote a syllabus, three major assignments, as well as other classroom documents for my class that I'll be teaching in the Spring. In addition, I spent half of the semester, observing a PhD student teach the class I'll be teaching next Fall. Also, wrapped up a semester working at the Writing Center. Surprisingly, I felt that throughout the semester, I had an equal number of undergraduate and graduate students. I'm still playing with the idea of returning as a consultant next semester, even though it's not required.

My other classes went okay this semester. There were a few research classes and a New Media creative writing course where strangely, the work I was doing was prose. Ugh. <- Not to all you prose people out there, but why can't I do what I need to be doing!?! lol

In addition to all the classes and social stuff, I survived another few months of the dreaded long distance relationship with my boyfriend. He sent his MFA applications in [again :(] a little over a month ago. He's applying to schools near me, including WVU and UNC, so we'll see how it goes. I'm keeping my fingers, toes, hell, even my eyebrows crossed for him. He's an excellent poet and deserves some good news about school!

I am most excited about the classes I'm taking next semester:

Practicum
Black American Literature
Editing a Literary Journal [VT has recently acquired the Minnesota Review and the students will oversee the submissions].
Fiction Workshop
Poetry Workshop

I am also toying with the idea of adding another course. Possibly in another department. I am seriously considering working towards a certification in Nonprofit and Nongovernmental Management, as I see it as another option when I finish the MFA. I have a background in nonprofit management, working for several arts organizations and I can see myself returning if the teaching thang doesn't take off right away. The only disappointment in this certification is that it seems Virginia Tech has dissolved their Arts Management program, which upon many searches was active until a few years ago. Yet depending on who I contact, no one has information about it. This is what I was really interested in as a secondary study. And right now, there's only one course being offered in arts and cultural/nonprofit/policy studies. Maybe I'll create my own courses and do independent studies.

In addition to that, I am trying to figure out what I'm doing for the summer and am currently looking at various job opportunities. I am also thinking about what I was my commitments to be for the following semesters. I NEED TO FOCUS MORE ON WRITING. Obviously, that's what I'm in the program for. I just find it hard to focus when I have so many other interests and aspirations. I can't knock those important things out of my head, but I am seeing that it's all about balance.

Well, 2010 will bring a lot of exciting opportunities. I'm going to London and Paris [my first abroad trip] for Spring Break with the BF. I'm presenting at AWP in Denver. And I'm praying for great poetry and many acceptances to lit mags. I'll also be hoping the same for you! We gotta hang in there!

Thanks for reading. I hope you all had a wonderful semester. I'll try checking in a little more often next time!

Best.
xoxo,
Raina

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.