A New Day

It has been over a week since graduation and I took those days to relax, bask in some warm feelings of accomplishment, and reacquaint myself with my wife and child. It's been great.

But, today the work begins.

The MFA program is a nice comfort to have for two years. There's the camaraderie of your fellow classmates, invigorating lectures and presentations, and a built in editor with all of your professors and advisers. The reason I chose a low-residency program is because I felt I would be better served learning to write as my life was in progress, instead of halting everything and submersing myself into another purely academic environment. I needed to learn how to incorporate writing into my daily routine, in between the money-making work, wife, child, etc. I believe I have done that over the course of the last two years.

Now, I'm sitting in the hospital cafeteria where I wrote during that time and I'm facing the first day of writing without that support structure. In a way, it is kind of liberating. There are no deadlines facing me. I do not hear the voices of my adviser's guiding my writing. I am free to have my own distinct and original voice. Not that they were heavy-handed in guiding my voice, but I always found my stories to more closely resemble the writing of my current advisor than it had been before they got their hands on it. It's nice to know that it is just me out here, working away, ready for the next project to begin.

I've been reading two very distinct memoirs over the last week, Traplines by John Rember and The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer, and it has piqued my interest into the venue of personal essay. I have had a couple of ideas for personal essays bouncing in my head for a couple of months and I believe I am going to try my hand at one tonight.

Wish me good journey. Everything from here on out is new territory and I'm sure I'll be up to my ears before I know it.