First Week at OSU

By Tory Adkisson

Hey friends,

I can now stand among you (well, sit and blog anyway) as one of the few, the proud, the first workshopped! I have finished my first week at the Ohio State MFA and I am so pleased with the way everything went I could dip myself in butterscotch! Let me just breakdown what happened.

First off, we started school this week on Wednesday, so I have not yet had a full week yet--I doubt, though, that that will have any appreciable effect on my experience next week, and anyway, I need to tell you about what happened this week since it was, for me, the first foot dipping into this whole grad school enterprise. *Phew* anyway...

The first thing I did was teach my English 110 class. My lovely roommates made breakfast that morning, so I had a bite of something before running off to Denney Hall. I showed my friend how to make double-sided copies, printed off the most updated version of my syllabus then rushed off to the computer classroom I teach in on Wednesdays. This Monday I will be in a normal classroom. Our program is really invested in teaching new media and using technology in the classroom. Anyway, I was fine but became very frazzled when I had problems getting the technology to work. Luckily that fright subsided and the class and I began to sync as I found a comfortable footing as their teacher. They were enthusiastic about the topic I chose for the class ("Writing about Reality Television) and very receptive to discussion. Not all of them talked, but it was the first day, so I am not too concerned. I am very happy with my class so far and look forward to working with these kids and watching them grow!

My first class is a graduate level English class which is an introduction to film and film theory. The professor, Ryan Freidman, is a very nice and very cool guy, and the bevy of readings and films we will be discussing in class had got me percolating with glee. I love film theory and the idea of becoming more cultured though film is fantastic (right now we are watching Umberto D.) and exactly the kind of thing I hoped to take as a grad student. The class is themed around the notion of the decline of film and subsequent rise of digital cinema, and the implications that has for study of film as a discipline. Pretty cool, right? I love talking about the decline of things...it makes me feel so "in the know."

As far as workshop is concerned (remember why were here friends?) it was great. Kathy Fagan teaches the fall workshop, while Andrew Hudgins teaches it in the winter and Henri Cole (!!!) teaches it in the spring. Kathy assigned us the dubious task of writing a poem about finality (essentially a kind of death poem) after reading Frost's "Directive" and Yeats' "The Circus Animals' Desertion". It ended up being her birthday on our first day of workshop, so we got her a cake and sang the celebratory song to her as she blushed and thanked us for being so sweet. After that Kathy workshopped us in alphabetical order and, being gifted with a last name starting with "A," I was the first one up on the chopping block. I have to say it was great and an eye-opening experience--sure there was some requisite praise (about my sounds, use of meter, my ending lines) but the class addressed issues I hadn't considered such as the nature of the speaker's relationship to the you, and whether some of the imagery in the poem was useful considering its ultimate trajectory. It reminded me, after several weeks of TA training, that I came to OSU for my writing, and if the first workshop is indicative of what experience at OSU will be, then I am glad to be along for the wild ride.

Additionally, I have been reading slush for The Journal and will soon be reading poetry manuscripts for the The Journal's Wheeler Prize (judged this year by Andrew Hudgins!); I can hardly believe the way my life is going. I am really pleased with everything I have been exposed to so far! Here's to a wonderful year, and a great MFA program (my program) at OSU!

Tory Adkisson (Ohio State University, 2012)

Hello there friends! Reading all of these splendid introductions causes me to take pause and consider the amazing community I, as an MFA candidate, have now become a part of. If anything, reading about the people blogging on this site has only intensified my desire to fast forward through summer and start getting down to business—luckily, I only have three weeks left.

My name is Tory Adkisson, and I am delighted to report that I will be an MFA candidate in poetry this fall at Ohio State University. Like many of my colleagues here on The MFA Chronicles, I am a tart cocktail of excitement and anxiety, with just a touch of salt along the rim of the glass for good measure.

So, here's a little bit about me: I am twenty-two years old (in November) and a native of Southern California. (Note that I am not, nor ever have been, a cast member of The Hills.) I was born and raised in the small desert towns that dot the freeways leading to Las Vegas, tiny settlements that serve as little more than glorified rest stops for weekend tourists. I am the oldest of three boys, raised by a single Mom, and am of mixed ethnicity—I am 1/4 Mexican and 3/4 Eastern European (Russian/Polish mostly), as well as an Ashkenazi Jew on my Mother’s side. I was raised in a pretty secular environment though. I am also gay, and have been living openly since I first started college four years ago. I just graduated from UCLA last spring with a BA in English and a concentration in creative writing, and have worked a variety of temp jobs during that time, most recently as an office assistant (a job I hated) and composition tutor for college students that come from historically underrepresented backgrounds (a job I loved). I am a night owl who enjoys cats, baking, quoting TV shows, irony, scarves, kvetching about nearly everything, and tripping over my own feet.

I chose Ohio State University for a few very important reasons: their excellent faculty, their excellent funding, and (most importantly) the strong sense of community that exists between the students in the program. I also really like that it is a three year program, reasonably small, and will give me plenty of teaching experience. I am excited to be teaching one composition class a quarter, though worried about how I am going to get my students to see me as someone of authority rather than someone who is only marginally older than they are and still looks like a fifteen year old. Nonetheless, I am excited to move to Columbus because I will get to have a white winter (something I see as romantic despite the warnings others have given me about the cold), and because rents are exponentially cheaper than what I am currently paying in LA. It doesn’t hurt that Columbus is a gay friendly city too, ensuring that, at the very least, I have no excuse for living a celibate life for the next three years. Important, since male sexual desire features heavily in my poetry.

Okay, enough about me. If you are interested to know more, please feel free to check out my blog, Neurotica Exotica, where I blog about everything from my MFA application experience to my self-destructive sex life—always, of course, in an amusing light. I am very happy to be a part of The MFA Chronicles family and look forward to reading about everyone’s struggles and successes. Until then, ciao babies.