8.

This is a close-up of a letter I have on my wall, pinned to the left of me.  Here’s also a shot of it from far away.  Couple with the mess/no mess from the earlier photos, you can get an idea of my “workspace.”  Incidentally, Cassie (Adam’s “shorty”) calls it my “office.”  I generally call it “the depression chamber.”  But going on,

I keep this letter pinned to the wall.  It’s from when I was still working at MerchDirect.  Two years in a row, I submitted applications to graduate MFA programs for fiction writing.  The first round I was waitlisted at George Mason and somewhere else I can’t remember.  The second time around, I was waitlisted at Brown University (yes, that Brown University.)

I never got fully in, unfortunately.  The way these programs work - first of all, the ones I applied to were fully funded.  That means:  free ride + stipend.  Secondly, all of the schools for Creative Writing generally accept 6-12 people out of a pool of ~800-1200 applicants.

But I keep this on my wall as a reminder.  Not as a failure, even though sometimes you feel like a total shit-head.  You feel talentless, worthless, empty and without meaning.  And friends can tell you “No, you’re good, don’t be foolish.”  But it really doesn’t make much difference when they say it.

I keep it as a reminder that someone in Virginia, and even someone in Rhode Island, in an Ivy League school, was rooting for me to get into their writing program.  Someone who has never met me, never seen my face, never drank a beer with me, picked my stuff out of a slush pile of countless stories, and said, “This guy deserves to be here.”

I kind of needed to remind myself of this.  So I’m glad I wrote it out.