MFA Orientation @ SFSU
On Wednesday I had my orientation – on zoom – at San Francisco State University. I’m entering into their MFA program and specializing in Fiction. Exciting! The orientation was cool. I got to see a lot of the faces of folx I’ll be studying alongside, as well as the professors.
For this first semester, I’m taking 9 units:
- CW 880 – MFA Craft Tutorial – Voices within Voices: Interiority and Polyphony
- CW 809 – Directed Writing for Grad Students
- SXS 800 – Sociocultural foundations in Human Sexuality
The first one is a seminar on Voices is centered around two fundamental concepts related to voice : interiority and polyphony. I’m pretty excited to be delving into voice and those concepts because Voice is so crucial for me when I am reading and writing.
One of my fave books of 2019 was and still is Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo – who rightly won the Booker Prize for it alongside Atwood for The Testaments – not only for it’s (mostly) punctuation-less prose, but for the brilliant voices that stand on their own and as a whole. It’s phenomenal the way Evaristo created such distinct Black British voices, of womanhood, queerness, class, gender and race.
The Second is a chance for me to work 1 on 1 with a professor with original material, which is v.cool. I just want to dive right in with it! I’m a little nervous but mostly grateful to be at this stage in my life. I’ll send twenty pages every couple of weeks and we get together to go over it every three weeks. It wasn’t really advised for an incoming Grad student to take this one at the beginning, only if you have written work already to work on, which I do, so it’s worked out well.
The third is a correlative course – which just means a class that you believe is relevant to your studies – which I chose in Human Sexuality. I chose it because I’m super interested in Sexuality and know very little about it on a grander human scale ATM. and I want to change that. One of the books on the reading list is In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado which I’ve now read twice. I first read it earlier this year and devoured it in almost two sittings. It’s riveting. And oh so Gothic. Oh so Queer. Oh so Deep.
So my orientation went well. We were asked to go around the Zoom room and say what we hope to get out of the program, and what – if anything – have we been reading, watching, listening to that has inspired, captivated, shocked us lately. I did mention in In the Dream House and also Symptomatic by Danzy Senna. I also read her other two novels Caucasia and New People, and I was captivated by both.
