My Thesis

Today I turned in my thesis. Kind of bitter sweet. I'm going to miss my MFA program but having an MFA has been really helpful and so I can only hope that it will be more helpful later on. The trick is to know how to use your MFA, how to get the most out of it. Because if you're not going to get the most out of something then what's the point? Do you really want to spend thousands of dollars on school only to get...what, a degree? Is that really all you're paying for? I see it so often with my students who sit in the back and don't speak. What I want to say to them, though I don't, is that I know right now who is going to have the corner office and who is going to be stuck in the cubicle their entire life. It's right there on their faces, baring some sort of invisible genius that might creep up.

But my thesis is finished and turned in and that's great. Though I think at the end of the day, my thesis, an IRA novel about three boys growing up near Belfast during the Troubles in the early 1980's, is really just about how much I have a crush on the brother of the main character in my novel.

"He smells like Ireland. Not frilly waterfalls and the Blarney Stone, not those high, stone castles and all that pasture land, hills tumbling over each other untouched and uncertain since the year 1547 like you see in postcards. But the dirt behind the garbage bins near the pubs, dead end streets made of crumbled stone you can barely drive on and the siding falling off the houses in the poorer sections of Belfast where dirty concrete foundations meet mud and sewer water. That is what he smelled like and that is what he looked like, and that is what he felt like. And that was what he was. It was a terrible beauty he had."

Yep. I think that means I'm crushing on him.