Getting There

In my attempts to become a visible part of the literary/poetry community, I sent out a seminar proposal to the BGSU Winter Wheat Literary Festival. I've been anxiously awaiting the day when people can sign up for my session, and that day is finally here! Check out the Winter Wheat seminars and workshops schedule to see my session (I'm in the 1:00 section).

Now, if I could just start getting good news in those SASEs...

And now, my first official mindful rambling:

I've been thinking a lot today about academia and my place within it. When I first started my MFA, I thought that I would want to go on for a PhD, then, for a while, I convinced myself I didn't. Over the weekend, I started thinking about it again, and now I'm not so sure what I will do come December '07, when I have a completed thesis and a diploma in my hand.

Before I started the NEOMFA, I did a year in the U of Akron's comp MA program. I had just lost my first "grown up" job at an insurance company and decided instead of looking for another job, I would apply to grad school. Unfortuantely, this happened in May, and I had missed most of the deadlines already, except for Akron's, which is where I got my BA. I knew I didn't want to study lit for two more years, especially with the same professors that I had studied under before (not that they weren't wonderful, but I thought I might end up studying the same stuff over again), so I signed up for the comp track, not exactly knowing what I was getting into.

For the next nine months, my brain was overloaded with Berlin, Foucault, Shaughnessy, and the like. I had a lot of trouble doing well in my comp classes and was even brought to tears one night while trying to prepare a presentation on "Power/Knowledge". You can imagine my relief and excitement when I found out that Akron was about to become part of the NEOMFA. I immediately applied, waited for my acceptace letter, and signed up for two workshops and a lit course for my first semester in the program.

Since then, I've had some minor encounters with deconstruction, new criticism, etc., and have found myself twitching all over again. I write pretty straight-forward, narrative poetry and sometimes struggle with finding the relevance of this heavy, intellectual stuff in my own writing. Which is why I decided a PhD wasn't in my future.

Nevertheless, the possibility has returned to my thoughts and won't let go. I once had a professor tell me I was intellectually lazy, and I think he may have been right. I have friends working on PhD's and I've heard the horror stories: massive amounts of reading, seemingly impossible amounts of writing, zero social life or down time. Do I want to make that kind of commitment? Will my creative writing have to take a back-burner to my academic writing? Can I handle the pressure?

On the other hand, I'm envious of people who can carry on a thoughtful conversation about lit crit or rhetoric as easily as they can talk about the weather. I would love to be one of those people. I want to spend more time immersing myself in the books I haven't read yet, I want to understand why people are obsessed with Nietzsche and Derrida, I want to be able to deconstruct a text and not make a mess out of it. Hopefully, these would all be aspects of my life as a PhD candidate. And I won't deny that the prestige and respect of being Dr. Tracey would be pretty darn nice.

It all boils down to this: will I be ready in 14 months to take on the job market? I have found over the last two months that I love teaching and hopefully will continue to love teaching. I'm aware that the market is not good for PhD's or MFA's, so wouldn't it be better if I spent more time reading, writing, and learning before I put myself out there? Or will I be setting myself up for failure (or, possibly, some success at the cost of my sanity)?

I'm curious how folks out there with MFA's and PhD's made the decision to do both. Any thoughts?