Today was my first REAL thesis meeting with Marty. Since I’m on the two year track (already having a Master’s degree), I’m lucky enough to begin working on my thesis my first semester in Georgia College & State University’s MFA program. I LOVE this. As happy as I am with my MA thesis, it really came together at the last minute, and I know that as a “book” it still has a lot of revising that I need to do. Having the opportunity to at least think about my thesis from Day One is so awesome! Even if this is just a little voice in the back of my head, I am aware from the get go that I need to be working towards a bigger project.

I have poetry workshop this semester with Laura Newbern, and so I’m working with Marty on my thesis to 1) give the opportunity to work with two people, 2) give me the opportunity to figure out who I will work best with. So he isn’t my set in stone thesis advisor in case something happens, or even in case some shuffling around needs to be done in terms of balance. He is working with (I think) five thesis worker/people right now, four creative nonfiction and me.

The most important thing for me to do right now is generate work. I totally understand this, and we met and talked about it a couple weeks ago. I gave him a copy of my MA thesis, which he read, and this is what we discussed today. So Marty took the time to look at the bulk of my work, and he wrote me some really really useful and insightful comments (and we talked about all of these ideas for about an hour today) in terms of how I can get better during my MFA work.

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1) Teaching in the morning is much different than teaching around lunchtime or in the afternoon. My 9 o’clock students still seem sleepy. My 10 o’clock students have woken up. Maybe their energy will fade as the semester continues. I am not a morning person.

2) Freshmen are idealistic and delusional. I don’t want to kill their idealism or delusions, but I do worry about them. For example, yesterday I found out that there is a program where guys drive around in golf carts and pick up girls who are walking by themselves on campus. Don’t these poor cute Southern sorority girls realize that they can’t trust the guys in golf carts either?

3) I have to memorize two poems this semester. I’m going to try to complete one by mid-October and one by the end of the semester. The last class I memorized a poem for was a completely horrible fever-inducing mess. I worked SO hard on memorizing this awful little eight line poem as requested by my instructor. I showed up on the day assigned, ready to recite, and I was the only person in class who completed the assignment. I recited it okay, with a few messups, and the instructor said we’d come back to it next week when everyone else could recite it. We never came back to it.

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Haha! Maybe not exactly. I hope you appreciate my attempt at turning myself into one though.

This is something that I never quite noticed I did until fiction workshop a few semesters ago. I’d submitted this story, “H2O Intolerance,” for workshop. Someone pointed out that because I’m a woman they assumed the narrator was a woman and was surprised when they got to the second page and realized that the narrator was in fact a man.

I never realized that people normally write from the perspective of their own gender. It just never occurred to me. My story needed a male narrator, so I created one. Even my long neglected novel follows a male professor. I knew from the moment I started writing it that my hero was, in fact, a man.

Last night, in poetry workshop, we had an in class exercise. It wasn’t anything fancy, just write a 10 line poem in 10 minutes following a set of certain stipulations (use some sort of saying/adage/proverb that you’ve manipulated in some way, then use five from a list of eight words that Laura put up on the board). I wrote it the way I do any poem, and I didn’t have a hard time doing it.

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