Remember when I wrote fifty pages of fiction in March and April to apply to a fiction thesis program?
Just got my entirely too detailed rejection letter. Am I just being overly emotional, or is this complete and total bullshit?
Becky, hello,
I am sad to be the bearer of complex news. The Creative Writing Committee, for which I am speaking, read your work with great interest and had a long and spirited discussion of your application.
We believe that you are a competent writer, with a writerly sensibility and the capacity to produce work. You are exuberant, insightful, cheerful, and a wonderfully perceptive reader. Your teachers feel that your work has matured and developed, that you have good instincts for structure and for writing scenes, building suspense, for making things happen and taking risks. However, you also still appear to remain outside of your stories, looking at them from a distance. While your fiction is heavy on plot, the subtler skills of fleshing out characters in resonant tension with each other is missing. Taking into consideration your time of study in Japan, which will prevent you from further studying these rigorous aspects of fictional craft in workshop settings, we believe it would be a disservice to your art to ask of it the intense narrowing of focus that is the work of a book, a thesis, at this point.
In choosing students for the thesis option, we look for candidates whose work is at an exceptionally advanced stage and who appear to be ready for intense independent study. While we admire your insight and talent, we agree that your writing would best be served by continuing to study in the more structured environment of workshops, and the greater flexibility the general major offers for growing your skills in many directions without the pressure and time constraints of the thesis option.
I hope you will not be discouraged in any but the most temporal and transitory way.
Warmly,
Olga
It's ridiculous. I don't know why they decided to shut me out, but it's completely fucking ridiculous and I can't believe I'm crying so much over something that's completely not true. And the fact that the person who sent it is my poetry teacher, who was the one who discouraged me from applying to poetry thesis by telling me my entire style was flawed, just makes this even better!
I said I'd be fine if this happened, and I will be. Tomorrow. Tomorrow sounds good. I was going to go job hunting today, but to be honest, I can't really handle talking to people right now, let alone being charming and hire-able.
Here I was thinking that the awfulness of the past few weeks was saving up some good karma for thesis!
UGH. I'm sorry for this angst post. Jesus Christ.
