'The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.'

(quote: William Saroyan , video: Hard Time Killing Floor Blues)

Yesterday I recieved notice that I have been accepted to the MFA program at The New School University in New York City. Of the programs I applied to, this one was for me the most interesting, exciting, and attractive. The school is enmeshed with the writing community of NYC and the emphasis is heavily on writing. In the last semester you do not attend class. You simply write and talk about your writing with your advisor. This program in particular looks to provide the greatest degree of freedom. I can truly thrive in this environment.

And it came about as late as it could. I was beginning to get a bit whiny and dejected. 10+ rejections had shown up in my various mailboxes. Copies of the manuscripts I sent sat glowing in the corner, heckling me with their inconsistencies and chunkiness and shortcomings. I began to make plans to move to Istanbul for a year, intending to apply again. Creeping hints of failure assembled in this little pile of quality, off-white stationary. The familiar artistic questions emerge, enlarge, take on a severity they never had. The time-stamped question of "did I do that right?" stretches out over the last three years. And you think for just a moment that you went at it all wrong. That the way to do this wasn't simply working your ass off. It wasn't losing sleep to catch those last drunken thoughts as you drifted into the kaliedoscope. It wasn't soaking yourself with narrative, with exuberance and depression and anxiety. It was something you didn't get. And as a writer you shouldn't have nudged that line, or advocated the tribal philosophy that I did in that work. Expectation was to be honored. And then came the believing in the work and thinking, like Saroyan: "One of us is obviously mistaken". But this acceptance is that slightest of validations, that noteeth smile given by someone you respect. It feels like a punctuation in these long few years, like when I wake up tomorrow morning I can take a deep breath and look around without feeling as though time is wasting.

Moving to New York City is part of the American mythos. Children from the Midwest go alienated in the sterility and shrug off their lineage and descend into it. For the artist, the thing is rite-of-passage and crucible. A place so vast and chaotic any end-result is possible. You may emerge at the other end differently named, battered by a whole new arrangement of affectations and illnesses and habits. New York City is the surreal tragicomedy writ large. So, while I doubt I will spend the rest of my life there, going there is this instinctive pilgrimage. It is a visionquest.

My good friend Dale Eisinger will be attending CUNY for Journalism during the same period I would be attending the New School. This is one of those coincidences that make people believe in god. If I could take any one thing from Boise when I leave, it would be this young man. I look forward to the whole mess we shall shortly find ourselves in.