Whew!

I arrived yesterday at the Portland Airport a little after two o'clock. My plane was slightly delayed, so I immediately went to the Starbucks kiosk in the baggage claim to find the shuttle driver with the MFA Pacific University sign. I managed to arrive before either of the faculty writers whom I would be riding back with. I was a little fearful because Amber had said, "Faculty writers don't like to wait."

All three of us eventually got our luggage and got onto the van with James, the intern driving the shuttle. As I mentioned earlier, the writers were Pattiann Rogers and Ellen Bass. I had made myself slightly starstruck by looking them up on Amazon.com before I left home and having seen how much they had published, I knew enough to be impressed. I had also found a snippet of Ms. Bass's work, a poem from Mules of Love, which touched me. Written very simply, yet resonating with some innate craving to ritualize in higher language that most profound of human emotions, love.

So, I spent the next hour in a van with them. They had not met before, but knew each other's work. So it was interesting to just hear them talk to each other. There was a whole conversation about having no sense of direction, which always makes me feel right at home! They were both very nice and funny, with easy senses of humor. I felt their collective wisdom in a way that surprised me and made me teary a few times. Maybe now I understand how, in old film footage I have seen, girls waiting in the crowd when the Beatles came to America started bawling when the musicians finally got off the plane. Maybe there is something about meeting someone who you know to be successful in a way that you really admire that makes you more emotionally vulnerable.

But I digress...

Last night was just a student potluck and then there was a meet and greet. I also, met all my roommates. We are in a quad, four bedrooms and two bathrooms along with a little living area, complete kitchen. We went grocery shopping together. It's pretty much like college.

My roommates are Abby, Linda, and Debi. They are from Alaska, Oregon, and Hawaii and are all first semester students. One in poetry, one non-ficdtion, and another one is fiction. Linda, the fiction roomie, is also in my workshop group. I reread her work this morning and it is really good. We are all getting along really well. It's fun. Three of us are in our forties and Abby is 24

I stayed awake for 21 straight hours yesterday, going to bed at midnight (which is 3 am at home.) Obviously, that is not my normal sleep schedule, and yet I set my alarm for 5:58 thinking that it's almost 9 am at home and actually got up after 5 hours of sleep. So today has been both interesting and challenging.

This morning we heard a craft talk by Marvin Bell, a poet who also teaching at the University of Oregon. It was entitled What I Do in the Dark. Apparently, he writes at night. He talked about process and how each poet has a different process. Then he read some specific poems and talked about the process he had gone through in writing them. He also talked a lot about his views of the war in Iraq and war in general. I came out of the craft talk wanting to write poetry and even got an idea for a poem while I was there. I was not familiar with his poetry before the talk and I'm not sure it was immediately interesting to me, but by the end, I liked it. He also made a point of saying that poets need to be free to write bad poetry. Things like this I felt applied to all writers. He also said that on some days he would feel like saying, I am not a poet. I can't write. Everything I have ever written is crap. I will never be able to write a poem.... And all of this resonated with me, as someone who periodically feels like I can't write at all. But it always comes back, and I expect it is the same with other writers. You just can' t let the fear rule you. (OK, this is not a paragraph. I'm functioning on not enough sleep. What do you want from me?)

There were many other activities today, a lot of them orienting us to school, graduation requirements, and each other. Tomorrow we start our workshops. I know that my work will not be workshopped tomorrow, but I need to reread the works of the two writers whose work will be done in my group.

There are two poetry workshop groups and three prose groups. Fiction and non-fiction are mixed together. I'm excited to see what it's like.

So, I have to eat dinner now and then we are going to a reading by two faculty members. I'll write more tomorrow. Hope I haven't bored you senseless. Fatigue is not the best writing companion. I'll try to catch up on sleep a little tonight so that I'll be a better blogger tomorrow.