A Week from Tomorrow
A close read of my MFA statement of purpose, after Brandon Taylor
On July 5 I’m flying to Paris for my first residency with NYU’s MFA program. For the uninitiated (a.k.a me, six months ago) a low-residency Master of Fine Arts is designed for those who can’t or for myriad reasons don’t want to pick up their lives and move to a different city to attend graduate school for creative writing.
Because I don’t expect to be raking in the big bucks with my writing career any time soon, it was important to me when thinking about grad school to simultaneously be able to hold a full-time job. I have too much financial anxiety to drop out of the earning pool for two to three years, even with the rare boon of a fully funded program. And because I had finally started enjoying my life in Austin for the first time since I moved here for college in 2019, I wasn’t eager to start over in a new place.
But I am ready to level up, as we’ve been calling a similar period of growth at the bookstore: If I want to call myself a writer and eventually turn that vocation into a lifelong profession, I need to make space to take my writing life more seriously. I’m not saying this necessarily requires graduate education; the debate over whether an MFA is “worth it” has been going on long before me and will long outlive me. But the ability to earn a good living, work closely with expert mentors, and meet early-career writers from all over the world—plus the excuse to visit my favorite city in the world twice a year for the next two years—it all felt like the perfect fit.
My scholarship to UT meant I graduated with no student loan debt, so I had even more reason to wait until the right program came along before paying for more education. I am privileged to have support from my family in paying for tuition—and I’m also proud to have contributed 50% of the cost so far from my own salary and savings. (To paraphrase my friend Abigail Rosenthal, financial anxiety pays!) I will still be living and working in Austin, while spending the months between biannual residencies in July and January under thesis-style mentorship with a different faculty member each semester.
Before buying plane tickets and making travel plans, however, I had to figure out what the hell a statement of purpose is. This is the MFA equivalent of the Common App personal essay, an articulation of your goals for your creative career as well as your reason for pursuing the degree. It’s a unique genre of writing that one never really looks at again after one is admitted. In trying to orient myself to the challenge, I found this Substack post from Brandon Taylor, one of my favorite working writers and a member of the NYU Paris faculty, in fact. I was also very lucky to have my friend Bradley Trumpfheller—a Michener poet and altogether brilliant and generous person, who is surely laughing at me for mentioning my admiration for Brandon Taylor again and on repeat—read and revise my statement, as well as encourage me throughout the process.
Maybe after a few years’ distance I’ll be able to look back with Taylor’s clarity on my statement of purpose. For today, I’m simply going to republish the piece here. I’m really proud of myself for being brave enough to apply—which, again, I doubt I would have been without the encouragement of those around me—and immensely grateful for the opportunity.
I’m also terrified! With rare exception, I’ve never really been challenged academically, but I’m about to be learning from and working with writers at the tippity-tops of their craft. I’m eager to receive criticism and also already bracing for impact. Turning back to what I articulated to apply helps me screw my courage to the sticking place.
Statement of Purpose
As a chronic perfectionist, I return to writing because it humbles me. It reminds me that life will constantly put me on my back, whether out of awe or inadequacy. I am seeking a Master of Fine Arts because I believe this humility makes me a better person, not just a better writer. I’m motivated by the revelation, both my own and shared with a reader, of finding the truest expression of an experience or opinion. With a background in journalism (I currently1 manage a magazine with more than 200,000 readers across platforms), I will bring the rigor and curiosity that define my work to New York University’s low-residency MFA program.
I grew up in an evangelical Christian household. I met my best friends to this day because our families went to church together, but we accessed another world through the pop cultural references we shared. When Jia Tolentino started writing on a national scale about the enduring influence of her Houston childhood (she attended the richer, preppier Second Baptist, while I was a scholarship student at the much smaller First Baptist for middle school), I discovered a new way to write about one’s life. Soon I transferred to the public performing arts magnet for high school, a culture shock that looked a lot like relief. So much that had been demonized to me—queerness, political resistance, the Hunger Games series, Halloween—existed there with freedom and joy. My English teacher introduced me to Joan Didion, and I saw in her writing the kind of bold, unapologetic femininity that I also newly recognized in my mom, who was leaving our church and divorcing my father even as she battled a breast cancer diagnosis.
Through theatre and obsessive reading, I tried to catch up on all I had missed. This instinct to fill gaps in my knowledge still drives my habits of creation and consumption. I’m entranced by the way Carmen Maria Machado and Mary Gaitskill confront the fallible nature of language and memory. Because of my race and class, I know I write about my upbringing—the dominant culture that raised me and seeks to reshape our country—from a position of power. Writing into these blind spots, the spaces between objective fact and subjective position, feels truest to life. I’m not sure whether the memoirist’s impulse is wholly altruistic or even masochistic, as I worry over these pain points—and other defining forces in my childhood, including technology, addiction, and isolation—as if I am picking a scab.
Tolentino, Gaitskill, and Olivia Laing, another lodestar for me, also mediate much of their self-discovery through consideration of the art and artists that provoke them, a methodology I share. Together, the relentless attention paid by these writers to their own interiority and the forces that work upon them, pointed me toward creative nonfiction as a “big tent” for all of my interests. I understand creative nonfiction to be attention made manifest, which naturally has no regard for genre.
Brandon Taylor and Parul Sehgal, too, are producing expansive cultural criticism that people want to read because it invites them into deeper thought, rather than excludes or condescends. The NYU Paris faculty define my dream program. I’m also eager to return to the city where I lived for about a year during and after college. The beauty and history around every corner allowed for a yet unmatched period of growth, both personally and artistically, that I hope to find again within the added structure of residency.
When I’m not reading or writing, I work as a bookseller at First Light Books in Austin. Previously, I managed the Abbey Bookshop in Paris’ fifth arrondissement for two summers. Both bookstores have created around themselves vibrant literary communities that signify what I am looking for in a graduate program. A community of early-career writers, however, has been harder to come by. Homogenization and commodification on online platforms such as Substack2 have left me with an only more acute longing for true peers. I crave the immediate, earnest relationship of the workshop—the critique made and met in good faith. I’m motivated to contribute the same to NYU’s low-residency Writers Workshop in Paris.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
I have been trying to be very Cool Girl about the new Lorde album.
Ever since Midnights was so existentially disappointing—at a time in my life when I needed new Taylor Swift songs like a cardiac patient needs a defibrillator—I try not to get my hopes up about big releases. “What Was That,” an early single, for example, was perfectly suited to a certain time in one’s life, but not mine right now. I’m not taking MDMA in the back garden, if you know what I mean. Plus, the new HAIM album was so delicious, and to have another no skip album so soon felt gluttonous.
To everyone’s sheer delight, Virgin absolutely slaps. I think my favorites after a few initial listens are “Hammer” and “Current Affairs,” but I’m still metabolizing. Her lyrics are singular (“Clearblue,” come on!), and I’m so glad to have a new foundational text to parse.
I think I’m more likely to have a HAIM summer than a Virgin summer (a title choice that seems to me calibrated to disrupt the “X summer” linguistic formula, which I respect and appreciate). But this feels like an evolution of the pop girl phenomenon that has carried me through college and young adulthood. I’m 24 now, famously an insane age to be, and I need a new soundtrack to dull my intrusive thoughts. Thanks, Ella, for everything.
Also out today is the new Daisy the Great album, who I have been listening to probably since high school. The cover is lovely, and they’re the right mix of twee and indie rock to scratch a particular aural itch for me.
Recent five-star reads have been The Road to Tender Hearts (great in audiobook form) and Endling, a contender for my favorite book of the year. Maria Reva (another Michener grad!) weaves her own experience as a Ukrainian woman living in Canada watching from afar the Russian invasion affect her most obstinate loved ones, into a crackpot story involving a near-extinct snail species and the romance tour industry in her home country. It is just weird enough to shoehorn its way into your heart; then Reva starts manipulating the narrative form in a way that really blew my mind.
Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby earns an honorable mention as a four-star audiobook that I think could very easily be bumped to five stars with a re-read in print. The book is ambitious—a bourgeois comedy of manners, as one Goodreads reviewer wrote. “She had me in stitches the whole way through, even as I myself occasionally recoiled from just how much of our collective ass she was putting on display,” wrote another. I think I would have been better able to track with its ambitions, however, were I not listening while multitasking.
My boyfriend took this picture of me last night because I thought the beer can looked cool. He’s older than I am in a way that I can make fun of now that I’ve gotten over my family’s bitter disapproval. His thumb is in the frame! How elderly! I love him.
When I wrote this in February, and no longer true, of course.
The irony of publishing this on Substack does not escape me.