Uren Blog 6

To hell with Jamie. That guy came to an MFA program to study fiction writing and he identifies as a writer first and a student, scholar, teacher, and collaborator only after (in that order, it seems). I knew I was going to say in this post that I wish I could identify as a writer first, since that’s primarily what I’m supposed to be doing here. Three years to write, right? But while all the real writers take workshops and, you know, write, I don’t. Here’s why I’m not a writer, but a student or scholar or teacher.

It’s because I’ve already given up the hope that my paying career will have anything to do with writing fiction. So even though I’m here to write and I’ll write some creative thing for my thesis, my head’s not in it because I am scheming for the future. My future is scholarship and teaching. In just two years, I’ll need to have the most stellar scholarly writing sample possible; probably it would be good if I’ve published or at least presented papers in my proposed field by then. You have to go to the best place—in fact, I’ve picked my favorite (a whole freakin’ center for psychoanalytic studies, folks)—and that means stiff competition. There’s just a lot of work to do if I’m going to get where I’m trying to go, and not much of that work has to do with creative writing.

Creative writing is where I am. And I’ve never been good at living in the here and now, to coin a phrase. Or maybe I am, because right this weekend I’m designing a freshman writing course and I might identify as a teacher first. In a couple of weeks, as I dig through texts and write a short paper on Marxism (or something), I’ll probably feel like a scholar. And next semester, if I can stick to my plan of mostly setting aside the future and immersing myself in the creative work and the creative community that I’ll largely—if temporarily—leave behind in 2014, I’ll probably feel like a writer, too. Maybe I can join Jamie, after all. Although, there’s one more reason that I might refract my identity away from “writer”: it’s too scary, too uncertain.