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So, today I thought I would talk about two things, briefly. One, is that I missed the lecture of an amazing letterpress artist Dafi Kuhne this weekend because I was out of town. However, I don’t want to skip over showing you some of his work (see above and later). And two, because not a lot extra is going on around the department, I just wanted to touch briefly on the subject of how challenging grad school can be – and how great and hard that can be simultaneously.

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I came to grad school really needing a challenge. I had a pretty excellent technical foundation in book and paper but I felt like I had reached a dead-end working on my own. Last year I was definitely starting to feel the effects of intensive critiques and the demand that I create a cohesive body of work (this is a hard thing to do). But this year these challenges, these demands, have really set in and started doing their jobs. I feel really excited about what I’m making.

As excited as I am about the progress I feel that I am making, it is still hard to put yourself out there to the departmental universe again and again asking for judgment. The faculty’s job, sometimes, is to make you uncomfortable with something that you felt really sure was finished and awesome. I think that that may be my favorite moment, the one when I think I’m done with a project and one comment later I’m nearly back to square one. Building back up from that point is so, ultimately, satisfying. What you end up with is always so much better than the original you thought was complete and perfect.

One must persevere, really–you’ve just got to. The challenges that you encounter, the way that you are forced to work harder and justify your work more than you’ll ever have to again, make grad school awesome and then difficult, and then before you know it, awesome again.