The last week in May was my residency week at Queens University of Charlotte.

Queens University of Charlotte – this is my place, these are my people

 

It was my fourth residency which makes it my last real residency – I’ll graduate in January and grad residency is quite different. It was an exhilarating and exhausting week. It was a week filled with late nights – sitting in the common area of the dorm with my friends and fellow writers, working on critiques, talking, and consuming a beverage or two.

Hard at work

 

Hardly working

 

Every night we were up till at least midnight and because I’m me, I was up early the next morning to squeeze in a workout before the day’s classes/workshops/lectures/presentations began. By Saturday morning I had hit a wall and I drug myself through the last day of school.

This residency was bittersweet for me – a lot of my friends in the program graduated so they won’t be there in January when I return. It also means that now all the due dates they were stressing out about over the past few months – thesis deadlines, craft paper deadlines, rewrite deadlines – are now going to be mine to stress about. Mostly though, I’m a bit saddened by the idea of this program coming to an end for me.

My reasons for pursuing my MFA were varied: I wanted to improve my writing but I also wanted to find my community of writers, a group of people who would be supportive and encouraging and would understand what writing means to me. With the QU MFA community, I’ve found it.

Sita, my MFA wife – she keeps me sane

 

I’ve set some self-imposed deadlines over the summer. I’ll have my first draft of my thesis — a full manuscript of poetry — to my peer-reader by early August. I’m going to read all the books for my craft paper and write that this summer. And, of course, I’m going to read and write a ton of poetry. It’ll be a busy summer but I wouldn’t have it any other way.