The Grad School Blues

I’ve just recently found out that my applications to the creative writing programs at Brown University and UT Austin have been rejected. Disappointing news, no less so because it means I may be leaving Austin if either of the other two schools- Brooklyn College or UNC Wilmington- decides to accept me. It strikes me now as incredibly arrogant even to have applied to the nation’s absolute best writing programs, simply because I was a notable student at a private college few people outside Georgia have even heard of. And then I’m going to take their rejection personally? I guess, like many people, I have grown used to the idea of myself as exceptional; young talent with no limitations to speak of.

But such, I am convinced, is the path life inevitably takes: our smaller stories opening into larger ones, our relative sense of ourselves dismantling as the field of reference opens always wider and wider. I’m sure this procedure takes different courses with different people, but I suspect we all at some point must at least exchange our childish prides for adult ones; trade our obsession with being the Best, for being simply the best that we can be. For even if I were never challenged, even if I graduated high school the best wrestler in the state, left college the most promising writer of my generation and so was never forced to waver in my self-estimation, would I not be subjecting myself to a willful ignorance? Would I not, in effect, be allowing that smaller world to close around me, to constrict my movements, permitting what is but a small part of my Self to stand in place of the whole?

And anyway, it is probably wrong to think of writing, as I do, as solely a question of talent. Am I really so arrogant as to believe that some individual truths are more valuable than others? That after bludgeoning the barriers that keep one from expressing his/her deepest Self, only a few have something original, complex, and challenging to say? No, it’s not a question of talent, I don’t think, but of practice. Any individual that is willing to persevere—that is willing to challenge himself in the destruction of his inhibitions, the confrontation of his demons, the dissemination of his intellectual prejudices—I believe is capable of masterworks. Craft is a matter of practice. Style, a matter of wide reading and experimentation. So what is it to me if these schools caught me a little earlier on in the process? Talent, I’m now convinced, is an illusion upheld by our childish, egotistical selves, and so my recent disappointments are indications only that I’ve got some growing up to do.