Last night, I taught the last college writing class I will teach for a long time. It's true: I sold out to the man and got a desk job at a Law School that resembles Hogwart’s. Staring out of my lovely office window today, I thought about sitting in another office four years ago. Only this wasn’t a lovely office, but rather a sad, shabby cubicle. It was early February 2008. I was copyediting an article on Nam June Paik, one of the first video artists (and, incidentally, a Korean American). I was fresh out of college and slogging through the editorial rotation of a fancy Smithsonian internship. But I had no delight in the work. No passion. (Which was pathetic, seeing that I was two feet away from Joseph Cornell's magnificent archive. And yes, looking back, I want to slap my ungrateful self.) I remember correcting a few comma splices and some botched footnotes. Part of me was excited. Like, "Wow, I'm actually using something I learned in college. Fancy that!" But a larger part of me was dying: Cubicles. Florescent lights. Water cooler chitchat. I was a bonafide Dilbert, filing cabinets and all.
And I was bored. I remember minimizing the Paik article and opening my Gmail. Of course, I had done this about twenty times in the previous five minutes, hoping for something magical to grace my inbox. Since I had no such luck the previous twenty times, I don't know exactly what I was expecting.
I barely registered the new message from an unknown sender. I was about to log out when my eyes skimmed the subject line, which said something far too simple, like, "NWP Acceptance." It was impossible. I had just submitted the application. In fact, I nearly missed the deadline. Trish and I had been frantically applying to graduate programs all over the country. I applied to Iowa on a whim, at the very last second, and only because a kind mentor couldn’t find the letter of recommendation he swore he had written on my behalf for the program. When I informed him I wasn’t applying he said, in so many words, that I would be an idiot not to. I'm sad to say that this was the first ballsy chance I had taken in my life, applying to a top-notch writing program even though I was pretty sub par and had a moonbeam's chance of getting in. Every decision previous to this was based on some alternative motivation: boyfriends, friends, fear of failure, guilt, etc.
After reading the acceptance email several times to ensure that it was real, I proceeded to Full On Silent Scream in my cubicle. To prevent hyperventilating, I stepped into the hallway, immediately ran into my boss, and blurted out the news. She started real-screaming, wrapped her arms around me, and jumped up and down with me enclosed. I think we went out for Thai to celebrate but everything after that is kind of fuzzy.
Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program was, miraculously, my first acceptance to graduate school. Looking back on it now, it seems so utterly improbable but so impossibly logical because I honestly cannot imagine my life without this program. This is not to say that it was perfect, far from it actually. But it was there that I met my people, those strange mythical creatures known as writers. We climbed trees together, made elaborate dinners for each other, sang terrible karaoke duets. What would my writing be without them? Without the loads of unstructured time dedicated to teaching, writing, reading, and watching bad tween movies? In the thick of it, I often complained about how I never wrote. How I felt stagnant as a writer, brain dead. Everyone was better than me. Everyone was smarter than me. I was clearly a good for nothing hack. An imposter.
Now I understand that this was the whole point of Iowa, or of any graduate writing program for that matter: you go to be surrounded by smarter, better writers because that is how one becomes a smarter, better writer. You go because a small part of you believes that you are not a hack, not an imposter, no matter how hard the critics in your head try to drown out that tiny flame of self worth. You go because you want to write and maybe, in some distant future, to eventually become a writer.
I look back on that time in my life with rosy nostalgia, but I think it's an earned rosy nostalgia. In graduate school, I learned a great deal about what I was capable of doing, not merely in terms of writing. Being so far flung out of my comfort zone, I was forced to adapt, which forced me to grow. You could say this about any great chance you take. I think I love Iowa so much because of how many times I failed there. I fell so hard, so many times, that it started not to faze me. Water off a duck’s back, as they say. Iowa taught me not to fear failure, which was what held me back from doing so much in my life before. I don’t love failure, but—and not to get all motivational speaker on you—now I respect it. Failure should be a requirement before any true success.
So. On a breezy April Tax Day four years ago, two months after first reading that acceptance email in my cubicle (I don't know why it took me so long to decide), I finally said yes to something that scared me. Saying yes to something that scared me has helped me to say yes to many other things that have come my way since then. So this is really a super long way of saying that I am glad I went to Iowa. And I’m glad that I spent the last four years of my life teaching sometimes-truculent and sometimes-wonderful college students how to be better, smarter writers. And I will miss them, and teaching, a lot.
