Today is the day off, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing because someone, and I won’t say who, was up until 4 AM carousing.

Workshops, which many people detest for one reason or another (often not at all connected to their egos), have been one of my favorite parts of this experience so far. I’m in a very talented group– which probably goes without saying, since everyone here is ridiculously good– that has been somewhat vocal. Not terribly vocal, mind you, as several folks try to make it through the session without saying anything. (As you can guess, I am not one of those several folks.)

The first day we worked with Steven Dobbyns and Brooks Haxton, which was sort of a fast-paced gabfest that got, in its most heated moments, close to contentious, but in a good way. We got an absolute treat yesterday with Dean Young and Michael Collier, who formed a tremendous team without, I think, either intending to or even knowing they were doing it– it was ridiculously instructive without turning into a faculty lecture on what the poems were doing. There are not many faculty I don’t want to work with here, and I find my list of people I want to work with growing so long that there will be no way to accomplish it during my enrollment. I will have to content myself with picking their brains every so often, instead.

My faculty advisor this semester is C. Dale Young, who is a somewhat awe-inspiring and intimidating poet/doctor/brain, despite the fact that he is easily the most approachable of all the faculty. I feel comfortable saying this in a blog, since I don’t believe that he’d be inclined to Google himself, and if he does, it probably is not out of any sort of vanity, but rather in an attempt to memorize the entire contents of the Internet, a feat which I believe he may be capable of achieving. We met yesterday at lunch to begin assembling my bibliography (which delights me), talk about the annotations (which still scare me, though not like they did when I arrived), and scheduling my packets for this semester (which has me thoroughly convinced that I might explode before November).

We had a par-tay last night, with Mac McIlvoy DJ’ing the event, an event I would characterize as “mad fun” despite the following:

• Many people went to bed by 11:30.
• The dancefloor was quite thin for much of the evening, a sparseness to which I happily contributed.
• The overwhelming majority of the students here are married, which has led to a distinct lack of riotous and scandalous behavior than one might expect at summer camp for writer-nerds.
• It rained.
• I drank all of the Newcastle available within an hour and a half, and all decent beer was gone by about 1:15, which led Dan, Tom, and me down the path to domestic light beer.

Once we’d cleaned up a little, a group of us began making rumblings about going down to the lake to go swimming. It was pitch-fucking-black on the way down there, as we were led through campus to an area that I was sure I would never be able to return from on my own, but which was, in fact, about thirty feet away from a pavillion I had passed several times, which is itself only thirty feet from a building we go into three times a day. So much for great mystery.

I resisted the lake for a short while, as most of the people who trekked down there did, but eventually couldn’t keep from taking a dip (if only to make sure Frederick would not be the only first-semester student to do so). It felt wonderful. There was a rope-swing out on the far side of the lake, in an area that was absolutely pitch black, so I attempted a couple of swings, one of which had some character and the other of which was completely sad. I do believe that there may have been skinny-dipping going on alongside me, but it was so dark that I cannot say for certain, and since I didn’t have my glasses on, would have had to be a lot closer than any skinnydipper would have liked in order to verify any nakedness. So, in order to make the story sound less tame than it was, I will in the future assume that everyone who I didn’t see emerge from the water was naked, since everyone I did see emerge from the water was, I think, clothed. But again, I didn’t have my glasses, and wasn’t going to ask, “Hey, Justin, is your wang wiggling freely, dude?” (Later iterations may have all who were assumed to be nude participating in a massive, mid-lake orgy.)

A squirrel just walked into the dormitory common area where I’m typing and Kevin is sleeping to escape a summer shower. Seriously, this Warren Wilson place is RIDIC.