Finals week is upon us.

[flickr id=”11217415105″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”original” group=”” align=”none”]

Thinking back, at this time last year, I was staying up late, working feverishly on my grad school application materials in Orlando. By day I was a cubicle-dweller, and by night I was editing and revising essays and finalizing my self-assessment essay. I was exhausted but determined. I didn’t know that I would be living in Chicago in a mere eight months.

Right now, I’m taking a break from my final projects (a teaching portfolio for Composition Theory and Praxis and a critical/creative essay for History of the Essay) and wondering just how late I’m going to be staying up tonight. It’s a battle between biological needs and sheer will (perhaps that part hasn’t changed quite so much).

Remembering December of last year, how badly I wanted to be back in school, how much I hoped that I would be accepted into the program, how much I wondered if I was going to make the cut, I can recall how anxious I was. And I suppose some of the feelings are the same today—the excitement, the anxiety, the drive to stay up and write late into the night–even if their reasons are completely different.

[flickr id=”11217411064″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”original” group=”” align=”none”]

In the past year, a lot of things have changed—I quit my job, I’m living in new city, I’ve gotten engaged, and most importantly I’m not the same writer that I was when I left Orlando. My writing is growing, I am growing. We (the writing and I) are moving to braver, more exciting places than ever before. To quote Natalia Ginzburg

Only my vocation remained unchanged, but it is profoundly misleading to say that even that was unchanged—the tools were still the same but the way I used them had altered.

[flickr id=”11217370984″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”original” group=”” align=”none”]

By the time this is posted, I will have exactly two days left in my first semester of grad school. Wish me luck, and don’t forget that application deadlines for the MFA in Creative Writing–Nonfiction are approaching! Applications are due January 15, 2014!