Kissing: A Personal Statement of Expectations, Goals, and Desires

Below is the essay I submitted with my application for Goucher College's MFA in Creative Nonfiction.

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My first kiss from a real boy came in third grade social studies during a game of spin the ruler. It was much wetter than kisses returned by my pillow and the back of my own hand. Most of the girls thought he was cute and that I was lucky, but I thought Andrew Barilla looked like a monkey. I imagined he kissed like one, too.

But it didn't keep me from kissing lots of other boys.

Likewise, bad as it was, my first poem, written when I was six ("I sent a letter to my love / And he sent me a beautiful white dove / It set sail across the sea / My love sent it just for me") didn't keep me from writing hundreds more.

And while practice doesn't make perfect, it makes pretty damned good.

So I have spent my life becoming an excellent kisser and a pretty damned good writer. I have practiced writing for pay and for play. I have practiced poetry for some nice literary magazines and journals (even did a stint as poetry editor for Baltimore's City Paper and The Pearl) and in my own journal. I have practiced non-fiction writing for national and international magazines and textbooks, as well as for my own blog. I write every day. Though it is often without discipline, it is always without fail.

Today, at 42, I have been many things, among them writer, girl, woman, student, teacher, artist, daughter, mother, wife, singer, mosaicist, runner, and kisser. And though the list is disordered, writer is always first. It came at the very moment of daughter and will follow me, heaven willing, through crone.

Why, then, at 42, should I want to become a student again? I was a student of creative writing at Towson for the first half of the eighties (when I was also a punk rock singer, an oxymoron). I was a student again by accident at the end of the eighties. (A poster collector, I felt uneasy about asking for University of Baltimore's Poe poster without also asking for a course catalog, which I read one night weeks later in the bathtub and discovered, to my delight, a program combining writing and design.)

Maybe my desire to return to school has to do with a folder full of essays written this year—essays on cake, lists, blankets, poop, grief, defining moments, spiders. Maybe it's because of the unfinished essays on trophies and felling and the history of the kiss. Perhaps it is because the history of a kiss is surely a book (it seems only one has been written, and it is out of print), as is this: Things That Were Fun When You Were Young (But That Hurt When You're Old), which includes essays on camping, amusement parks, running, and tree climbing.

Perhaps, just as people pay therapists to evaluate the content of their thoughts and make them well, I want to pay someone to evaluate the quality of mine and to make me better.

On Thanksgiving morning, I wrote for five hours. I got up at 5:00 a.m., and I put 2,500 words into a novel that now has 10,000, and I began an essay on lists. Two days later, I wrote for eight hours. How, my husband wanted to know, could I justify spending an entire day doing unpaid work, doing writing on spec? Without a doubt, graduate school will justify that.

I would like to be a student again for the terminal degree. After having been an adjunct faculty member at University of Baltimore for fourteen years, I realize that I will never get a real teaching job without scads of publishing credits and a terminal degree. Graduate school will certainly give me the latter, and Goucher will help me with the former—a chance to meet with publishers, two years to learn better the business end of nonfiction writing, to hone my craft.

I expect Goucher's creative nonfiction program to help me with all these things and to further my goals as both a writer and a teacher. I will finish a book. I will be eligible for at least a part-time teaching gig at one of our fine colleges and universities, a huge step up from adjunct slavery. I expect to find my niche in this relatively new arena, possibly discover it is out of the comfort zone of the personal essay and in my own uncharted territory of immersion journalism (though I imagine, like Barbara Ehrenreich, I may be too old to become a homeless fry cook). I expect, too, that my husband likely will still look at me askance when I sit for hours at a time thinking and typing, which will now, rather than simply not pay, cost money!

I do not expect for Goucher to make me a better kisser. But you never know. Smart is sexy, so smarter must be sexier.

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Yesterday, I got a call from Patsy Sims to say that I was accepted.

To be continued.