This winter, I applied to the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine (Stonecoast). I picked USM on the recommendation of my Clarion West classmate Meghan...I was telling her how for the last couple of years, I'd been seriously thinking about applying to a low-residency MFA program, but I wasn't sure where specifically, and she mentioned that Stonecoast offers a 'Popular Fiction' specialization, and they have Kelly Link and James Patrick Kelly on their faculty, so they should be friendly to the kind of stuff I write. I did the actual application just before Winter Break, Maureen McHugh and Nalo Hopkinson (and, locally, the wonderful, repeatedly-Nebula-nominated Adam-Troy Castro, who's in my local crit group) very kindly agreed to write letters of recommendation and, true to character, I had all of my supporting materials (essays, writing sample) in the mail by about three days before the Feb. 1st deadline. Then came the waiting. Honestly, I was pretty sure I wouldn't get in, since given their faculty, they can afford to be selective, and my application essays were pretty rushed and showed it.

On March 7th, I got the phone call letting me know that I got in. (The woman on the other end said that Pop Fic students always sounded much happier on the phone than their Lit-Fic counterparts, which I thought was funny.) Then last Monday, I got another phone call, this one from Nancy Holder, who's on the faculty there, saying she'd recommended me for admission when she was on the committee and she really hoped I'd come....she liked my writing sample, she's on the board of Clarion out in San Diego, and she knows Adam & Nalo, so she's eager to get the Adam- and Nalo-recommended Clarion grad to come. In between, I got the actual letter, telling me that I had until March 24th to decide whether I was going to come. So, naturally....

Anyway, I'm going! The program looks fantastic, the next two years are the perfect time to do it (see FAQ, below), and after the number of Stephen King novels I've read over the years, I love the idea of going off to do writerly stuff in Maine. I may even go so far as to wear a tweed jacket when I fly off to my first residency this summer.

I'd even say that this is a situation where "woo"'s and "hoo"'s are called for in celebration.

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Meanwhile, a brief FAQ:

Q: What do you expect to get out of this?

A: Me want learn write better. Me want write good stories. Also, I enjoy teaching, and it would be nice to have the option to mix it up a bit and teach creative writing classes as well as Philo classes someday, if only as an occasional adjunct thing at a community college or whatnot.

Q: So, uh, you're dropping out of your PhD program?

A: No. It's a low-res MFA program...10 days a semester face to face, and the rest of it long-distance. The whole point is to be compatible with whatever your full-time day job is--in my case, being a Philo grad student and instructor.

Q: How are you paying for this? Aren't you broke all the time?

A: Well, the good news is that they have stuff like "financial aid" and "scholarships," and I'm applying for everything I can get my hands on. Also, I should be making a decent chunk of money this summer teaching at MDC, which is something that in the post-coursework, post-quals phase of things, I hope to be able to do more of. In fact, worst case scenario, my hope is that the amount of annual income I get from the MDC adjunct-ing will be about the annual cost of Stonecoast, so I can live on my UM assistantship, I should be OK. If I'm being overly optimistic financially, I can always drop out and finish the program when things are better, and that won't be the end of the world either. We'll see, of course, and there are open questions here, but I'm at least cautiously optimistic, hence my accepting a spot in the program.

Q: Wait wait wait. Are you *crazy?* You're going to try to finish your doctorate and get an MFA *at the same time?* You'll die.

A: Actually, not so much. First of all, keep in mind that the primary things you do in an MFA program are *write* and *crit,* and those are things I'd be doing anyway. As is, if I go more than a week without getting writing done, I get swamped with horrible irrational paranoia that It's All Done, the Tap Has Run Dry and the last couple years have been a flash in the pan. I know that's silly, but I can't help it. The vantage point from within my head is, I'll admit, a little weird, but I'll say that getting so wrapped up in paraconsistent logic that I stop putting words together for the purposes of fiction is not only depressing but literally terrifying to me, so the extra incentive to keep up with my writing is actually a deeply good thing from my perspective.

Q: But why not wait until you're done with your PhD first?

A: What, besides my desire to be done with school by the time I'm 30?

Q: Yeah, besides that.

A: OK, here's the thing. From a time management point of view, it makes exponentially more sense to do this while I'm in grad school than to try to do it while I'm a full-time prof. Professors are, in fact, much busier people than grad students, between the much bigger teaching load and the committee work and the research and publication expectations. There's a long tradition of advice given by crusty old academics to bright-eyed young things to get stuff done in grad school you'll have less time to do later. So if I'm going to get an MFA--and, y'know, I'd like to--this is the time to do it, short of dropping out of the day-job career all together, which is certainly not a decision I'm prepared to make at this stage of my life.

Q: Hmm...... Isn't there still a danger that you're increasing the chance that you won't wrap up your dissertation on time within the next two years?

A: Well, first of all, I'm touched by your confidence that I'll pass my qualifying exams, have my proposal approved, and all that, so that this question will even come up.

Q: No problem, kid. I believe in you.

A: Cool! But to answer your original question, yeah, I guess there is. I don't think it's inevitable, though--my friend Albert got his PhD written in six months of concerted effort, so I think two years of part-time effort should do it for me--but even if it is....well....lots of people end up spending a little extra time on their PhDs without getting low-res MFAs, and it's not the end of the world. The way I see it, if I'm going to be one of them, I should at least be getting something productive out of the time I'm not spending on the dissertation.

Q: OK, OK, you've convinced me. But why Maine? Haven't you ever read any Stephen King novels? Writerly types traveling through Maine always run into supernatural horrors.

A: Yeah, but it's cool, since I'm in the Popular Fiction track, so any apocalypse cults or vampires or anything I run into will actually be useful story material.

Q: Hmmm........