You are an English major because you don’t know what you want to do with your life, and reading and writing are like breathing to you, the easiest paths to sure As. \u00c2\u00a0You haven’t particularly devoted yourself to them. \u00c2\u00a0They just are what you do without much effort. \u00c2\u00a0Your mother read to you a lot. \u00c2\u00a0You acquired an ear for language so naturally it almost came out looking like talent. \u00c2\u00a0 Yet talent is something to be practiced and honed. \u00c2\u00a0You just are. \u00c2\u00a0You don’t know what you want. \u00c2\u00a0You keep reading and writing not as effort but as existence.<\/p>\n
Then one day a terrible thing happens. \u00c2\u00a0You graduate. \u00c2\u00a0You can’t put if off. \u00c2\u00a0You have a double major by now in English and journalism because in those classes all you need to exchange for grades are words. \u00c2\u00a0Yet the university offers a finite number of English and journalism classes. \u00c2\u00a0You’ve run out of new offerings.<\/p>\n
You contemplate starting over. \u00c2\u00a0You could probably write a lot in history and philosophy classes as well. \u00c2\u00a0But you’d just graduate again, and still you’d have no particular marketable skill.<\/p>\n
You start taking graduate classes in literature because to do anything else would mean you’d have to look for a job, get a new apartment, start paying your own insurance. \u00c2\u00a0You think about going to work at the post office, but it’s so much easier to read Derrida and Virginia Woolf and sling out words about them on demand.<\/p>\n
Too soon you are told your thesis has passed. \u00c2\u00a0You sit disconsolate on the steps of College Hall rambling about taking the Civil Service exam. \u00c2\u00a0The man who should have given you a harder time about your thesis, made it last a little longer, sits beside you. \u00c2\u00a0“There is a PhD program in poetry,” he says, “that you might be interested in. \u00c2\u00a0I know someone who teaches there.”<\/p>\n
You decide your feet get too sore too easily to go for the Air Force, so you pack up your Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney books, find a new apartment in a new state, and decide for the first time to make pretense at calling yourself a writer.<\/p>\n
You are here because they did not have an application fee, and nothing would have been lost if they had not wanted you. \u00c2\u00a0You are here because someone made a phone call on your behalf based on the slim evidence of one folder of poems and a thesis you wrote quickly, inattentively. \u00c2\u00a0You know you are an impostor from the start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You are an English major because you don’t know what<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poet-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}