News Flash: My prose poem “Phillips Head” has been accepted by “Third Wednesday”.

Now back to our regularly scheduled post.

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In three days I begin my fourth residency at Whidbey.  Technically I might qualify as an old hand at them by now – the program only requires five for graduation – but I still feel anticipation bouncing around the pit of my stomach, twitching its way down the skin of my arms, lurking just over my shoulder.

Some of this comes from the obvious, the chance to socialize with a group of friends I only get to see a couple of times a year.  It doesn’t stop there though.  The anticipation is as much for the eight hours of daily classes, the evening readings, the new aspects of my craft I will learn.

Seriously.  I’m getting childhood holiday symptoms over the opportunity to study.

If you’ve ever wondered whether an MFA program, especially a low-residency MFA program, would be right for you, consider it this way: how excited are you to study writing?  Because I can tell you that if you love it as much as I do, the program can be a dream come true.  If not, well, I suggest you remember that it will be a lot of work – and I mean a lot of work – and if it feels like work to you then it might grind you into a fine powder.

Part of the excitement for me this time comes from the subject I’ll be picking up: poetry.  I’ve touched on poetry in high school and undergraduate work, but it was always cursory.  I’ve been through the basics of structure and word choice, for example, but nothing in-depth.  I could tell a trochee from an iamb, but not a dactyl from an anapest.  All right, I might have thought that “anapestic” was a type of pasta.  As for forms, I could recognize a sonnet, but wouldn’t know a villanelle from a sestina.

Why yes, I have been reading ahead a bit.  Given what I wrote above, is that really a surprise?

In other news, I feel like I’m giving my thesis a root canal.  I’ll talk about that in another post though.  Speaking of which, I will be running silent, as usual, during the residency.  I hope to post again by around the 25^th, but will not be posting before then.

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Submissions update:  Since the last time I posted, I have submitted pieces to Jabberwocky and Shock Totem.

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