After 10 days in Swannanoa, I’m now a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Dealing with Humidity.  The most difficult part was probably the dealing with the humidity, rather than the creative writing.

My last residency at Warren Wilson College was the typical wormhole: in retrospect, it seems to have flown by in the blink of an eye, but while it was happening, it seemed like it went on forever.  The class I taught during the residency, Gravity Along the Space-Time Continuum: Position and Superposition in Poetry, dealt with how one might slow time in a poem (among other issues), but certainly the faculty and staff of the program did not need any instruction, as they already have significant experience with bending time.

I’m back at home, clearing out the inbox, catching up on correspondence, and trying to sort out some of my thoughts.  I awoke yesterday with an acuteness of thought: the graduate degree was the easy part, and the work required to be a functional poet in the world really begins now.  I think my plan for later today is to assemble eight to ten submissions and get them out into the world.

A number of my peers got weepy during their last residency, but I could never quite get there.  I’m enormously grateful for everything that the program has done for me, and I’m certainly sad to leave, but I’m actually delighted to finish.  I don’t really consider this an ending, and it doesn’t really occur to me that I won’t see these people again.  I suppose there are a few that will disappear from my life, but more than anything, I was reminded in my last residency that I have a number of friends and fellow writers with whom I’ll be conversing for years to come. Notes of congratulation came from all around the country, from people who graduated one, two, even three years ago. It was truly touching.

So, get ready to start seeing my work in print more frequently.  It’s on.