mistress of my domain

We just got home from a lovely trip to North Carolina, where I spent a final week hanging out with my fellow MFA pursuers and contemplating post-grad school life.

The Guy in the Boxers (spouse/consort)and our sweet little schmoopie (almost sweet 16)drove up on the weekend with the dog in tow in time for my graduation and tearful fare-thee-wells to my classmates.Then we high-tailed it to the Smokies for a few days of snowman-making and hot-toddie sipping and getting reacquainted. Our trip home was delayed by snow, which was a beautiful wonder to behold, most especially for my kid who has never seen it before. So there was a lot of perfunctory snow-eating, snowball flinging and angel-making.

One thing I know for certain is that education -- good education -- is well worth the money spent and the time devoted, which is usually precious and diverted from other needy areas of one's life and so it can be a sacrifice not only for the person in grad school, but that person's near and dear ones. So I feel fortunate to have had the resources to do this and the support of my tribe to go off for weeks at a time to work on my MFA. This was something I thought about a lot while in my final week of grad school, especially when engaging in conversation with my fellow grads. One woman told me that her husband had grudgingly supported her pursuit of an MFA, grudgingly because he had been teased relentlessly by his friends and family -- all techies and engineer types, she said -- for allowing her to selfishly indulge in a "useless" degree that was the basic equivalent of paying someone $20,000 to lock you in a room for two years while you write poems about dandelions (she got her MFA in poetry last week). As a writer of nonfiction, I feel a little less defensive about it, but still, I bristled when I heard her story.

So here I am, fresh MFA in hand. What's next? Who knows. But the possibilities seem limitless. And I have a publisher interested in my thesis. :)