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Personal Statement of the Desperate Variety

Posted on January 28, 2008
Filed Under career, challenges, letter, milestones | 8 Comments

Dear Esteemed, Professional Writers Who Will Either Grant or Deny My Enrollment in the ‘08/’09 Creative Writer’s Workshop,

I am struggling with the task of writing a second personal statement. First there’s the issue of a title. Should I call it my Very Personal Statement? Maybe last year’s essay, titled just Personal Statement, was not revealing enough?

This whole follow-up application thing feels a bit like appearing before the American Idol judges for the second year in a row. I am the contestant who wore a Statue of Liberty costume and sang New York, New York the first time around. Now I can see that the gimmick was a mistake and have chosen a Dianne Van Furstenberg dress and knee high boots for this year’s audition. Surely, last year, it was the outfit and not the talent that inspired rejection. I will sing something by Mary J. Blige. Maybe Gonna Breakthrough. Mary J. – she’s a survivor, no stranger to adversity and the occasional kick in the pants.

And then there’s the issue of new writing samples. It’s hard to call what I’ve been working towards in the last year ‘new’. It’s more revision and continuation, a long slog towards novel completion, a bundling together of two story ideas into one that matters and makes sense and allows the writing to roll on. Reasonable Doubt is a double-helix, a braid, a marriage of Habeas Corpus and The Weight of Two. Words on the page have accumulated and it now reads 90 pages long.

In truth, after last year’s rejection, I stopped writing for awhile. I cast the whole habit aside.

Leslie Epstein’s kindly written and complimentary rejection arrived in April and, immediately after its receipt, I found myself feeling a little lazy about the mail. Days and days went by between visits to the box. The mailman patiently crammed in bills and catalogs until the whole thing was so completely backed up with unwanted correspondence that he was forced to drive the postal jeep up to the back door. He would toss fliers and tax forms and digital photography catalogs into the mudroom.

But it was the second rejection letter that really sent me into the ditch. Just when I began recovering from the first No Thank You,, I received another. One day in May, when I trudged to the street to unclog the box, I found a slim little envelope from BU’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, a sliver of hope there among Friday and Saturday and Monday’s mail. My heart leaped. I was overcome with a great jolt of adrenaline. I dropped the stack of mail on the driveway and tore open the slender letter. Could it be a correction to the previous rejection? Perhaps a notice that some other applicant had died? An invitation to to take their spot in next year’s graduate class. I slid trembling fingers beneath the envelope flap, all the while, practicing the joyful tone with which I would deliver the good news to my unsuspecting family, who had all grown weary of my lamenting the rejection.

But, I found no enclosed correction, no change of mind, instead I found another rejection letter. This time, the denial came from the head of the graduate school of Arts and Sciences. I guess Patricia Schiavoni, in her infinite wisdom as admissions personnel, decided that the rejection letter I received from the Creative Writing Department was not sufficient negative correspondence. Perhaps she likes to get a slam in whenever possible, following up all department-rejections with her own general dis. “Ya da ya da ya da…careful review… sorry to inform you… must deny admissions to even highly qualified candidates… regret that the decision was not favorable…”

I could have shouted, “Thanks for the echo, Patricia. It didn’t feel like REAL rejection until you followed up with your own official word on the situation.”

As if all this rejection weren’t bad enough, my e-mail delivered the cruelest blow. Just one day after receiving my second BU rejection, I found this little gem of an offer in my Inbox,

Dear CCE and her lovely and intelligent business partner,

Blaine from our Knoxville office forwarded me your info.
We are currently casting hosts for a new home improvement series for WEtv and are looking for a hip, attractive, accessible, charismatic, credible GARDENDER/LANDSCAPER. Production will take place in Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, FL in Spring/Summer/Fall 2007. Are you interested in being considered?

If you could get me video footage and pics and bios for each of you by the end of this week, that would be ideal.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Thank you,
Very Powerful Producer in New York

I wept remembering how cute I looked in those knee high rubber wellies and the great baby-tee with the company logo in orange splashed brightly across the chest. I wondered what had possibly possessed me to close the Landscape Design company I owned with a friend and move to suburban New England in order to macerate in my own suburban juices. I cursed the Gods who must have put it in my head that it would be a good idea to renovate an antique home by myself in the woods. I banged my head against walls papered in 80 year old damask and considered a move back to South Florida just to shoot this video, but I was New England-in-Winter pale and I’d forgotten the Latin names of all major palm varieties.

So I decided to pitch the powerful producers of WEtv another idea. I suggested their camera crew set-up here in my new town and follow me around my house while I type witty comments on writer’s blogs while wearing my bathrobe and occasionally put on yoga pants and walk the dog. I suggested that their audience might really enjoy the footage of me plunging our antique toilet for the tenth time in one week. I explained that this is something I can do one handed, while smiling and explaining the function of certain toilet parts like flush valves and O rings. I promised to make the show cute and light hearted. I even offered to get a new bathrobe. I promised to highlight my hair.

I dashed off a lovely e-mail pitching my ideas and waited for WEtv to get back to me, hoping that the life I’d chosen sounded as interesting as the life I once led – the one in which I had I catered to the elite and lunatic of Miami and drove a big white SUV I called the Bloom Beast to tropical nurseries and dragged back lovely matching Crinum Lilies the size of my dining room table for the illegal immigrant help to plant in the yards of a husband and wife team that were living in separate homes because, the year previous, he had taken up with the female tenant living in their carriage house.

And quietly, as I awaited WEtv’s response, I developed plant lists, an inventory of local providers and a stable of contractors who know their deciduous shrubs and how to lay a stone wall. But it was insufficient stab at self repair. While I familiarized myself with Zone 6 horticulture, the words kept coming. It’s something I couldn’t prevent from happening. Like Winter or the flu. It seemed beyond me. A new story about Faith Shepherd and her daughter Laura began to take shape. The garden I was hired to design for the Williams on Holt Avenue sort of languished, neglected and forgotten. There was no passion I could muster for the privet hedge we would plant along the eastern property line that could rival the need I felt to tell Faith and Laura’s story. It’s just wasn’t even close.

I felt guilt and concern for the characters I had left on the page, abandoned there without resolution. I returned to Habeas Corpus and The Weight of Two and could see how the two were obviously connected bits of the same story begging to be merged. Claire Bensley, her guilty father, the girl found dead in the road, all parts of a story that needed to be told. Screw the William’s and their privet hedge, I thought. This stuff cannot be suppressed.

And so here I am, a year later, doing what has to be done. It is quite beyond me, the need to write day after day. But still, I crave an audience. Nothing as glamorous as a television audience, only the company of like minded people consumed by the need to tell fictional tales. I thought I could adapt to the failure that was last year’s application in a way that conveniently disguised my initial intentions. But then it became obvious that this MFA is not a goal that I’ve ignored or abandoned, it’s more a goal that has ignored or abandoned me. And all the passivity of the previous phrase just doesn’t suit me.

So have another look. You may pass again on what you deem minor or trifling talent but, then again, you might see something that resembles a future. Here’s hoping.

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