Residency #1 - the initial download
Having partaken of three full meals in one day and having slept about 10 hours last night, I feel rejuvenated enough to start downloading about residency. I don't know if this will proceed logically because my brain has yet to process all my experiences, but here we go.
First, the location: Pine Manor College is a small (500 undergrads) liberal arts college for women located on a former ritzy estate. And by ritzy I mean holy crap everything in the Ferry building (which used to be the main house) is carved and there's a pipe organ in one room (a rather large and ornate room with a double staircase, lots of wood and carving...and did I mention the pipe organ??). The rest of the campus has been built over the last few decades. It's a mish-mash of buildings on lovely, wooded grounds, about 60 acres. I would go to www.pmc.edu for pictures. There is a resident pair of hawks who spend the day chatting with each other from the treetops. I don't know what kind they are, but they are HUGE and gorgeous. The rest of the campus hosts a ton of chipmunks, squirrels, bunnies and, unfortunately, bugs. All in all, the campus is lovely.
Dorms: Well, here's another thing we can count on other than death and taxes...dorm rooms do not change. I swear I had the same furniture in my dorm in the 80s. My bed happened to be really comfortable because I got one of the foam mattresses, but the rest of them were the cheap spring type mattresses and they sucked. However, being a women's college, there were THREE huge closets in each room...none of which contained a hot tub, much to my chagrin. I was lulled to sleep each night (or early morning) by the drone of cicadas and teenagers (the college hosts an English Language Institute for foreign teens each summer, so we had to content with herds of chain smoking European and Asian teens who ignored us until they figured out that some of us spoke German, Spanish, Italian, French and Japanese. Once you are chewed out in your native tongue when you think no one can understand you, you tend to become more circumspect in your actions.
Food: Well, it was cafeteria food. I actually lost 5 pounds between the salads I ate and the walking I did. I will give them this: they make everything fresh, no canned. The salad bar was fantastic.
My typical day: Rise at 7:00 for a shower, etc and be at the dining hall sometime after 8. Workshop from 9-12 and lunch from 12-1:15. Class from 1:15-4:45 or 5:15 (not always straight through), dinner, socializing and bonding until 7:30, and then a mandatory attendance reading from 7:30 to 9:30. After that, back to the dorm for homework. We did have two nights where we wandered down to the local VERY expensive bar to bond over VERY expensive martinis and cosmos, but even after that I had homework. I got to bed generally around 1:30-2am.
Highlights of classes: We can take classes in any genre and must take at least 4 Craft, Criticism and Theory (CC&T) classes and 3 Elective Seminars and Studies (ES&S) classes. I ended up also auditing many other classes just for fun. We also had to attend classes taught by graduating students based on their theses. I think my favorite graduate student lecture was on augmented fiction, or fiction where reality is overlaid with the fantastic and that fantastic is just accepted as part of reality (think Who Framed Roger Rabbit). My favorite CC&T class was definitely the one on Oulipo, or Potential Literature. It's too hard to explain here, but if you like puzzles, you should look up Oulipo and read about it. Better yet, the instructor for that class just got a tenured position at UW Bothell and we have a lunch date in the fall. I also really enjoyed having discussion with a bunch of writing geeks who not only got excited about just the right word but also got all my obscure references. My brain is definitely full.
My mentor: What can I say about Laure-Anne Bosselaar? She's enthusiastic, she's supportive, she's truthful even when it hurts, she's a terrific poet...and she reminds me of a Belgian version of my MIL. I
My semester plan: my first packet, which needs to have 6 new poems, 6 revised poems and 12 pages of craft analysis, is due 8/13. I start in earnest tomorrow. I already have the topic for my first craft analysis. For those of you enthusiastic about poetry, I will be examining how use of indentation of lines versus left justification affects the pacing and tone of a poem. Yep, we MFA students are just that geeky.
So, that's all my brain can handle for now. Ask questions, though, if you have them. I'm pretty enthusiastic about sharing.
First, the location: Pine Manor College is a small (500 undergrads) liberal arts college for women located on a former ritzy estate. And by ritzy I mean holy crap everything in the Ferry building (which used to be the main house) is carved and there's a pipe organ in one room (a rather large and ornate room with a double staircase, lots of wood and carving...and did I mention the pipe organ??). The rest of the campus has been built over the last few decades. It's a mish-mash of buildings on lovely, wooded grounds, about 60 acres. I would go to www.pmc.edu for pictures. There is a resident pair of hawks who spend the day chatting with each other from the treetops. I don't know what kind they are, but they are HUGE and gorgeous. The rest of the campus hosts a ton of chipmunks, squirrels, bunnies and, unfortunately, bugs. All in all, the campus is lovely.
Dorms: Well, here's another thing we can count on other than death and taxes...dorm rooms do not change. I swear I had the same furniture in my dorm in the 80s. My bed happened to be really comfortable because I got one of the foam mattresses, but the rest of them were the cheap spring type mattresses and they sucked. However, being a women's college, there were THREE huge closets in each room...none of which contained a hot tub, much to my chagrin. I was lulled to sleep each night (or early morning) by the drone of cicadas and teenagers (the college hosts an English Language Institute for foreign teens each summer, so we had to content with herds of chain smoking European and Asian teens who ignored us until they figured out that some of us spoke German, Spanish, Italian, French and Japanese. Once you are chewed out in your native tongue when you think no one can understand you, you tend to become more circumspect in your actions.
Food: Well, it was cafeteria food. I actually lost 5 pounds between the salads I ate and the walking I did. I will give them this: they make everything fresh, no canned. The salad bar was fantastic.
My typical day: Rise at 7:00 for a shower, etc and be at the dining hall sometime after 8. Workshop from 9-12 and lunch from 12-1:15. Class from 1:15-4:45 or 5:15 (not always straight through), dinner, socializing and bonding until 7:30, and then a mandatory attendance reading from 7:30 to 9:30. After that, back to the dorm for homework. We did have two nights where we wandered down to the local VERY expensive bar to bond over VERY expensive martinis and cosmos, but even after that I had homework. I got to bed generally around 1:30-2am.
Highlights of classes: We can take classes in any genre and must take at least 4 Craft, Criticism and Theory (CC&T) classes and 3 Elective Seminars and Studies (ES&S) classes. I ended up also auditing many other classes just for fun. We also had to attend classes taught by graduating students based on their theses. I think my favorite graduate student lecture was on augmented fiction, or fiction where reality is overlaid with the fantastic and that fantastic is just accepted as part of reality (think Who Framed Roger Rabbit). My favorite CC&T class was definitely the one on Oulipo, or Potential Literature. It's too hard to explain here, but if you like puzzles, you should look up Oulipo and read about it. Better yet, the instructor for that class just got a tenured position at UW Bothell and we have a lunch date in the fall. I also really enjoyed having discussion with a bunch of writing geeks who not only got excited about just the right word but also got all my obscure references. My brain is definitely full.
My mentor: What can I say about Laure-Anne Bosselaar? She's enthusiastic, she's supportive, she's truthful even when it hurts, she's a terrific poet...and she reminds me of a Belgian version of my MIL. I
My semester plan: my first packet, which needs to have 6 new poems, 6 revised poems and 12 pages of craft analysis, is due 8/13. I start in earnest tomorrow. I already have the topic for my first craft analysis. For those of you enthusiastic about poetry, I will be examining how use of indentation of lines versus left justification affects the pacing and tone of a poem. Yep, we MFA students are just that geeky.
So, that's all my brain can handle for now. Ask questions, though, if you have them. I'm pretty enthusiastic about sharing.