Graduation recap!

May has been a whirlwind of a month, but it has finally calmed down enough for me to start lining up posts here. I thought I'd just share some fun pictures to recap my graduation from Chatham University. I earned my MFA in creative writing after two years in Pittsburgh. 

The evening before graduation, I participated in the department's final reading and read a snippet from my short story, "Halfway to Honduras." I was also honored as a finalist for the Best Thesis Award in fiction along with two of my friends. The award winner is a third wonderful friend of mine whose thesis I read and LOVED! It was a great evening of celebrating everyone. 

Here I am, an official graduate! Well, as official as you can be with an empty diploma holder. The actual diploma is coming in the mail sometime in June! 

Mom and Dad!

Taking an epic selfie with my ficton family!

And the result of that selfie struggle! These people (along with a couple others who are missing) were my light for two years. We supported each other 100 percent, and I hope that continues as we all go our separate ways. 

(Also, after this photo was taken we all burst into tears and it was pretty miserable.)

After all the crying, I comforted myself with an Oreo cookie milkshake at Red Robin!

That was my graduation in a nutshell! A wonderful (but sad) day. Now I'm excited for my next chapter (HAHA writing pun intended of course. Writing puns are always intended!), which involves lots and lots of writing! 

(Sidenote: I'm posting this from the Blogger app on my iPad, so I'm not sure how the formatting will turn out. Bear with me if it looks a little crazy!)

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!