Happy Birthday, Pops!

My dad turns 50 today! He left Bulgaria at age twenty six, only a few months younger than I am now. This is a photo of us at Fashion Island in SoCal. My family’s not big on Thanksgiving, but I’m happy to be heading down south next week to spend the holiday with them.

Big swaths of my life are in transition right now. Last night Tomio introduced me to Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (I KNOW I’M LATE) and I loved Kimmy’s, “You can stand anything for 10 seconds.” Phew. Very much. Okay.

P.S. I most definitely did turn in my thesis last week. A few days after I submitted the manuscript, I went to the Humane Society to pet kittens. Then I found out that a portion of my thesis (#futurebook) is forthcoming in phoebe! Crazy wonderful.

P.P.S. Happy happy birthday, dad. So much of my writing would not be possible without you.

MFA Morning and the Man Booker Prize

This morning I had the pleasure of reading Lisa Allardice’s interview with Laura Burns, whose book, Milkman, just won the Man Booker prize. Burns is an unassuming author—my favorite kind and the kind I’d like to be—and her journey was both difficult and inspiring. Maybe I’ll eventually open The Artist’s Way. Maybe. News courtesy of LitHub.

Pictured below is my new borrowed printer, courtesy of the handsome and talented Tomio, with which I printed 108 pages this morning. Also pictured is my meditation cushion, the copy of BOMB I filched from the free pile at McSweeney’s last week, my IKEA rug, purple folder full of my mother’s old medical records which I would never throw away but have also never really written about, and an older draft of my thesis.

My thesis (approximately 65% of a book manuscript) is due (round 1, during which two of my professors will read and send back with comments) in two weeks.

MFA Morning Pt. 2

MFA Morning

I’m in my fourth semester at Goucher College, where I’m earning a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction. It’s a pretty unique program: nonfiction only, low-residency so professors come from many backgrounds/programs, a cohort of folks with every life experience you can think of, and it’s increasingly tuned in to wider social and political conversations.

The low-residency part means I also work full-time. Not everyone does, but I do. I sort of like it, because writing has to be prioritized. I also don’t like it, because I sleep less and don’t get as much done at a time as I’d like. Job or no job, I’ve found it’s impossible to do alone.

Yesterday my sister helped me out by printing my MFA thesis with my Goucher professor+mentor’s edits—in color, no less! Double thanks to Gabby and to my professor for edits. There are many, many more thank yous to come.

Stay tuned to see if I actually manage to graduate at the end of this semester! Stay tuned, too, for more MFA-related posts. (And feel free to reach out via the contact section if you’re considering an MFA and have questions.)

So the morning looked like this and tends to (try to) look like this. Progress one tiny bit at a time.

6:37 am on a Tuesday.