Today was a big day in our household for two reasons:
First, Kolby mailed in his acceptance to the Seattle Pacific MFA program. Here's an excerpt from the program's website to give you an idea of what it's all about:
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The low-residency MFA at SPU is a creative writing program for writers who not only want to pursue excellence in the craft of writing but also place their work within the larger context of the Judeo-Christian tradition of faith.
The spiritual dimension of this program is not intended to produce didactic, sectarian, or sentimental literature. Nor is this MFA intended to produce writers of “Christian fiction.” Far from it.
This program seeks to extend the tradition of Christian writing in which the highest levels of art, an open-eyed exploration of human experience, and a respect for transcendent mystery are all held in a proper balance.
Our models are Augustine and Dante, the Pearl poet and Sor Juana de la Cruz, George Herbert and John Milton, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Fyodor Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot and Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy and Annie Dillard.
We believe that our program will appeal to writers for whom matters of faith are central. We also intend to cultivate reading and writing as spiritual disciplines.
We are convinced that writers flourish best when they engage in a sustained dialogue with the great literature that has gone before them. Therefore, our program maintains a strong emphasis on reading classic works from the Judeo-Christian tradition and responding to them in a series of critical papers.
What distinguishes our program from other MFA programs, then, is its focus on the relationship between literature and faith, its integration of the spiritual disciplines, and the reading of literary classics of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the curriculum.
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If you know Kolby well, you can easily see why he's so pumped about getting to enroll in such a fitting program. It suits him perfectly and it is the only faith-based program, which is ideal. The low-residency model involves sending packets of completed material and receiving detailed feedback from professor mentors. It allows students to maintain their current locations and only requires two intensive 10-day residency periods per year. The summer residency is in July/August in Santa Fe, NM and the winter residency is in March and takes place on Whidbey Island, just off Washington state. The program will take two years of coursework and a third year of writing a graduate manuscript. So that's the scoop!
Second, I submitted the final copy of my thesis today. It was the biggest accomplishment of my life thus far. I spent a full year working on the econometrical analysis that I used to obtain the results used to write my paper. I used the statistical software program, STATA, to merge and clean the data as well as run regressions, and the statistical code that I had to write to do this turned out to be over 60 pages long. C-R-A-Z-Y. It was a whole lot of work, to say the least. Then I moved on to the write-up, which luckily only took about 2 months and ended up just under 60 pages. Thank goodness that is all behind me now! Most of you know already that my thesis was on the topic of micro-credit; specifically, how micro-credit impacts household productivity. This post is getting too long already, but when I get some time in the near future I'll share my findings.
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In other news, I had a round of job interviews at a great organization in **** on Wednesday. Everything went well but I won't hear anything for a couple of weeks. I'll keep you posted.
