personally, i would like to make a statement.

so i got accepted to grad school on friday. two of them, including spu, my top choice of the schools i applied to. so, that's what i'll be up to come march. i'd like to sit and speculate about how life will look for me and stuff, but i'm too excited, almost ditzy, with the freshness of it: everything is so dope; this smirk on my face won't go away. (i am chilling at the club in my b-boy stance; i have my hoodie pulled up, and my cock in my pants. i'm fresh. i'm fresh.) you know that feeling? it is very nearly a spontaneity-loving, break-into-song type of thing. but, here in my own post-ironic idaho, we prefer things to be a little more subdued, so we break-into-smirk.

with nothing else really to add, i'll instead include some clips from the personal statement i wrote for the spu application -

***

Not until later, when I was talking to my friend Brian, did I realize how lame it sounded. He asked me to repeat myself. “She said it was a ‘two-week break,’” I said again. “During that time we will not talk or write or see each other. No contact at all.”

Brian nodded. “A two-week break.” He took a sip of his coffee. “You realize what that is. It’s a trial breakup.”

And he was right. As he almost always is when it comes to matters of my life, my best and oldest friend was right. My girlfriend had decided to give me a two-week-long opportunity to sit quietly and reflect on how much she meant to me before she ended things between us. Following that morning coffee session with Brian, what I decided to do was to switch things up. Nearly every aspect of my life felt stale or incomplete or both. At the age of 25, making significant life change is an undertaking that is drastic at the same time that it is completely plausible; as such, I decided to move, to remove myself from the distractions I found irresistible. I’d had the relative good fortune to be advanced to the telecommuting team at Amazon.com, and, after confirming that I could live anywhere in the 206 area code and still dial into the server, I spread out a map of Seattle and looked to see how far away I could get. The next morning I took the ferry to Vashon Island to look for a place to live.

For most of my college career, writing had been a latent interest. At the end of my junior year, I enrolled in a creative writing class because A) it seemed cultured, B) it sounded easy, and C) I had a tremendous crush on the professor. But I took to the work. The task of writing down my thoughts instead of my reaction to the thoughts of others presented a unique puzzle, one that was entirely different from any sort of problem solving I had engaged in. During an office visit my professor drew a comparison between the first story I’d written and the lyrics of Beck. At the time, Beck resided just below Johnny Cash and above Paul Simon in the uppermost reaches of the Artists Who Sing Directly To Me pantheon, and by the time I left her office I had decided to dedicate my life to writing (or craft, as I immediately began to call it). But I had little idea what I was doing, and I was lost the moment the semester ended and I no longer had due dates to push against.

In the years following college I had small adventures in beautiful places and was compelled to write about them only at times that were inconvenient. When my girlfriend enacted the trial breakup I had only recently voiced (to Brian, naturally) the concern that maybe I liked saying I was a writer more than actually being a writer. Above all else, my move to the rolling greens and blues of Vashon Island was about quieting my life and myself enough to figure out whether or not I had a native impulse to write things down. Whether or not I had any chops.

Speaking of chops, the first place I felt immediately at home on Vashon was a diner that served the most amazing pork. I would work for a few hours, take a walk, and then drive down to the Stray Dog diner to eat and write a scene, often a more-interesting version of something that had very nearly been interesting all on its own. This was a terrifically leisurely mode in which to operate, and it suited me. I began to write letters to old friends that I never had any intention to send. It was for the sake of knowing my audience that I began each session with the words Dear Brian or Dear Whomever, and followed this by relating imagined nights and adventures and conversations we might have shared.

Around this time I struck up a friendship with the Alternative music editor at Amazon.com and, after a minimum of pleading, got my first paid writing work as a freelance music editor. He said to me, “You know jack for music but you do know how to write,” and placed me as an editor in the “Miscellaneous” genre. It was a terribly fun thing, to receive a CD in the mail, listen to it a couple of times, and then write down my 250-word reaction to it. My life was more slow and measured and salient than it had ever been when, on the evening of the summer solstice, I took my brand-new skateboard to bomb the hill behind my house, fell, and landed on my head.

...In these last years, both my creative and freelance writing endeavors have developed in fits and starts. Professionally this has a lot to do with my not being a particularly avid salesman. I have found that sustaining my fiction pursuits calls for a bull-headedness that is not entirely dissimilar: A writing routine requires the savvy of a cold-call salesman, a willingness to dial my own number each morning and blindly assure myself that, Yes, this will be worth it. And, like any salesman, some sales periods have been kinder to me than others. This quarter I am responding well to my own sales pitches, and consequently confidence is high. While it is impossible to trace my recent progress as a writer as cleanly as I would chart out sales results, I am able to say that my ability to navigate the language, and my love for the fiction form, have grown with a strength that I cannot immediately account for.

...By moving to Vashon I had slowed my life as much as I could, and in so doing found that some of the things I liked in theory – long walks, Russian literature, naps – I also liked in practice. Among those, writing was foremost for the way it transitioned from interest to passion so easily – almost without my noticing. The word “passion” has been rather dulled by use, I think; generally I think of it as either as an overstated affinity (I had a neighbor who was “passionate” about making soup) or as something that is pursued with fiery eyes and a tightly set jaw. For me, neither description fits. My passion for writing, though, can only truly be described as just that, a passion. How the creative process works is a mystery to me, but I know that if I show up at the same time each day, then pretty regularly it will work. Writing is a passion, but also it is a kind of faith: What I believe to be true is far more than what I am able to explain. Whenever I close my notebook and come back from a moment of having lost myself in the writing process, I do so with a mind that is tranquil and an eye that is curious. That wants to look at the world.