Well, that's done: On getting a MFA and other stuff.

As I wrote flippantly on Facebook: "With the MFA obtained, now it's time for other dreams. Pastry chef/tambourine girl, here I come, baby!"

In reality, it's a bit more sobering and indeed you'd find me muddy and deep in the wallowing if I hadn't come right out of graduation back into deadlines. This is something to hate and to be probably a little bit thankful for. Sure, sure, it sucks not to work directly and immediately on my craft and into dreams of the next life chapter (teaching, grants, fellowships, et al.), degree safely tucked under my belt, but coming right back into the world, and into a job, has its own comforts. As many of my comrades have reminded me.

In other news, I am really frustrated because the hubby's job is still jerking us around regarding the move. First it was March, then May, then June/July, then fall, then after fall, and now ... indefinitely or never. Great. So I'm in the same boat as the rest of my newly minted MFA classmates, then: having to summon the courage to dream my own dreams and make them come true. Well, damn. I thought maybe D's job could just tell us where we had to move and we could shape the rest around that. Instead, it's all wide the fuck open.

I've been doing small snippets of writing, though, mostly via a wonderful online writing group I joined earlier this year. Prompts are given to us daily, and we see where whim and five minutes take us. A recent prompt (" I've come to see my life as ____________.") prompted nothing in me, but I put pen to paper anyway and came out with something that approaches a truth, and it's with this I will leave you as I suck back into the black hole of deadlines...

I’ve come to see my life as a tree, acquiring its rings. I can’t anticipate a long winter, or a late-spring frost, won’t see a logger coming till his blade begins to cut. I can glance inward, though, and consider the etchings of the years. Two rings close together bring up past droughts I wince to remember; a wide margin recalls the moist, expansive growth of other times. A thick barked trunk holds my life firm in its grasp, but in every direction my life reaches ecstatically outward, yearning towards sky, water, other trees, its sap surging with certainty only that it wants more of most everything.

Ayelet Waldman on where she gets her ideas.

This long quotation about inspiration--I'm still too far under deadline to actually post here--goes out to all my fellow VCFA Summer 2010 grads ...

The Q I loath and despise, the Q every single writer I know loathes and despises, is this one:

Where, the reader asks, do you get your ideas?

It’s a simple question, and my usual response is a kind of helpless, "I don’t know." But I do know. I’m just embarrassed to tell you. I get my ideas from you, or from your mother, or from someone else I run across to whom something bizarre or sad has happened, someone whose life is miserable, but in an interesting way. "Write What You Know," goes the old adage, but once you’ve written about what an unloved geek and freak you were in high school (and every writer I know claims to have been the most unhappy teenager who ever lived. Where were these people when I was sitting alone at the lunch table at George Washington Jr. High? I’d like to know. Couldn’t we have been sitting together?), once you’ve mined the exciting tale of your grandmother/grandfather’s immigration to America from Russia/Italy/China/Vietnam, once you’ve spent an entire novel complaining about how much it sucks to have to wake up in the middle of the night with the baby, then what?

I’ll tell you what. Other people’s misfortune. That’s where we get those ideas that inspire us (and, we hope, you). Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, Aha, here is the story.

My new novel, Red Hook Road, began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper. A bride and a groom (or was it the groom and the best man?) were killed on their way from the church to the reception, when a speeding car smashed into their limousine. The horror of that happening on that day, at that moment, when you are about to embark on a completely new life, where everything is possible and the future is all that is on your mind... that stuck with me for years. I’d think of it time and again, as anyone would.

A normal person thinks about that tragedy, and maybe gets sad all over again. A writer thinks of it and wonders, "Can I use this?"

Until one day, you can, and you do. --Ayelet Waldman