My thesis (or, The Reason I've Been Gone So Long)

For the past two years, I've been working toward my MFA at Chatham University. As of April 15th, my short story collection, LIKE GLASS, has been approved! I passed my defense and submitted my bound copies (see pictures below!) to the university.

My collection explores coming-of-age moments within families, particularly focused on children. Currently there are eleven stories in the collection. The title story, "Like Glass," was published in Crack The Spine literary magazine, if you're interested in reading it!

Basically, I have 135 pages of stories to show for my time in grad school, and I'm pretty proud of that!

My thesis alone is not enough for a whole book. I'll have to almost double the wordcount before I start looking into publication options, not to mention all the revisions I'll have to do on my current stories. Because that's the tricky thing about a creative thesis: even after it's printed and bound, it's not necessarily done.

My thesis board members gave me TONS of revision ideas during my defense that I want to explore in the future. I only had to make line edits before printing my thesis, but they talked a lot about the future of my collection and elements I could add. Afterward, I had an evening or two of anxiety because I had ALL OF THE IDEAS but no time for major revisions. And I had to learn to be okay with that.

I'm excited to be leaving my MFA program with even more ideas than I entered with. I have a direction now, managable goals I can check off, and lots of submitting to look forward to.

Here's to the next phase of my writing life!