Edit

After getting good and drunk on Friday night and staying up 'til 5 am, I spent the whole of yesterday recovering. My original plan had been to study for the GRE. At some point, I remembered that the GRE doesn't count for shit in terms of MFA programs and so I changed course. Friends keep asking me where I'm applying for grad school and I realized that it was getting toward ridiculous that I didn't have a better answer for them than "uhh, definitely Texas, Michigan, and VCU..." Applications begin to be due in just over a month. It's high time that I know where I'm applying.

So I got up this morning at 9 am, climbed into pilot position at my computer, and diligently sifted through the 23 pages of MFA application forum at the Poets & Writers site. In that time, I have crossed off two programs that were absolutely in my top 7 schools. Through reading the ongoing conversation, I realized how important it is to me to 1) have creative nonfiction workshops open to me, 2) go somewhere with community outreach, 3) have the ability to work for a top-notch lit mag, and 4) not be in more debt. I thought that the schools I had narrowed down would not put me in more debt, but my research was obviously not thorough enough. The other thing I'm finding is that there are a couple of schools whose reputations/faculties have really taken nosedives in the last couple of years. So, goodbye Oregon and goodbye Utah. Washington? Probably not.

The other thing that occurs to me more and more is that I really am a city girl at heart. Not a New York City girl, but I'd definitely prefer to be places where I can hang out in awesome coffee shops, restaurants, and bars to de-stress or study when the going gets tough or the faculty get crazy. So many of the schools that fit into my little keep-me-from-going-into-debt requirement fail the place-I'd-like-to-live requirement, so those too are getting scratched (Purdue, Notre Dame, SIUC). There are a few places in the South that are smaller but seem quirky enough that I can handle their smallness: UNC-Greensboro, Ole Miss, and Arkansas among them. I think I've finally gotten down to about 13 contenders. Final list coming up.