I have some exciting news!
I was just admitted to grad school, and though I won’t be starting until January 2014, I am so eager to pursue my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. It is a low-residency program, which means that I will still live in Minnesota, stay working at Northwestern, and do much of my program online and through correspondence, but once each semester I will travel out to Montpelier for an intense 10-day residency full of lectures, workshops, and meeting with an advisor.
You might remember that, at the start of the year, I was saying how my life is different than I’d imagined it would be at 31, and that I’d always expected to have an advanced degree by now. The thought wouldn’t leave me, so I started to investigate graduate programs around the country. I was drawn to VCFA for its low-residency format and how it is project-based and because it is one of only a few schools that has an MFA specific to YA writing. Also, this is the school where Jandy Nelson, author of the incredible The Sky is Everywhere, attended! The idea kept taking root, and when my friend Hannah asked me, “Would you go if it was free?” and I answered, “Yes!” without a moment’s hesitation, my true desires were revealed to me.
So I applied right after I got home from the writing workshop in California, sending them the newly revised first 25 pages of my manuscript, along with a critical essay, and a personal essay, and I’ve been pretty quiet about it on my blog because I didn’t want to have to reveal to the world wide web that I’d been rejected if that’s what happened.
But it didn’t!
I’m so thrilled. I chose to defer to the January semester because of my roommate Desiree’s wedding this summer and so that I would have until the end of the year to polish and finish the novel I am writing now (which you all see snippets of here and there and everywhere). I wanted to start grad school with a blank slate so that I wouldn’t be pining away for an unfinished project the whole time.
So, there’s my news! I’m doing cartwheels of joy!
JACKIE LEA SOMMERS 
Congrats! This is exciting! I was looking at that program too…I always thought I wanted an advanced degree, and if I ever go back, it will be for writing! Good luck!
Thanks KE!!!
Congratulations and good luck.
Thank you so much!
Congratulations!! Sounds like an amazing opportunity 🙂
Thanks Jen! I’m so excited to get started!
Congratulations!! Sounds perfect! Can’t wait to see all your books on the shelves…….
Thanks Janet! Sigh … that’s the dream … someday!
Congratulations JACKIE! I am so proud of you and can’t wait to see where your writing career takes you!
Awwww, thanks, AJ!! You’re so kind!
Congratulations!!! I’m so happy for you! If I could do cartwheels, I’d do one for you! I know wonderful things are going to come from this. 🙂
I hope so, Tina! I so desperately want to be the very best writer I can be!
Yay! Congratulations! 🙂
Thank you!! 🙂
Congratulations!!!!! You must be so excited. Very proud of you!!
Thanks Sunny! I really am! So VERY excited! January will be here in the blink of an eye. (Not that I’m wishing away spring, summer, and fall, haha!)
So so happy for you! That’s tremendously exciting. 🙂 It sounds like a perfect fit.
Thank you! I’m so pumped!
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