Gauri Awasthi — McNeese State University

[Music] hello and thank you for stopping by for another episode of MFA writers I'm Jared McCormick and I'm super happy to be back with a new episode today this one was requested by shelen Singh thanks chelini for reaching out so while I was hard at work finishing my thesis these last couple weeks some of you were deciding on which MFA program to attend the decision date is traditionally April 15th so pretty much everyone at this point should know if they're attending a program and if so where so congratulations to all of you for making it through the MFA application season we've heard from a few listeners who said this podcast was a great help in putting together their applications and gaining a better understanding of the MFA experience in general and I have to say it really makes my day every time I get one of these emails or DMs so thank you all so much for listening you can find mfar writers on Instagram and Twitter as well as mfar riders.com we love to hear from listeners so feel free to shoot us a direct message on one of those platforms or an email at mfar Riders podcast gmail.com and if you have a minute to rate or review the show the best place to do that is on Apple podcast doing so will help boost our podcast as we try to boost these amazing writers also if you or someone you know would like to be be a guest on the show you can apply at mfar riders.com finally as always thank you for listening and we hope you enjoy the [Music] episode welcome to MFA writers the podcast where we talk to creative writing MFA students about their program their process and a piece they're working on I'm your host Jared McCormick today I'm with gory awasti gory is an Indian poet and environmental who recently graduated with an MFA in poetry from MCN State University she has won awards from sundress Academy for the Arts Louisiana office of cultural development breadloaf writers conference and kundan her writing has been published in quarterly West Notre Dame review The Wire BuzzFeed and others and she teaches the decolonizing Poetry workshop at catapult today gory has three poems to read for us all the poems I'm reading are from my manuscript titled the mother wound and this is the title poem the mother wound the trouble is I remember all of it your head split open the one time your eye was black as goddess Cari the time you ran Barefoot on our unpaved street and he said look what happens to women like that they run naked I remember it all the time I asked you what happened and you tore each inch of your shirt and howled and howled and howled the time I found myself in your room telling him your husband my father to stop and he did the trouble is what came after will always be smaller than what happened first someone must have a word in a language I can read but not speak some answers I look for in the golden trees around our once home some in every woman I meet some in buildings wisdom with dust sometimes I even turn to Gods now after now I turn to them and their smallness stifles me like mine this next poem is titled gazel after barari Masjid what gets into us when we tear down stone walls with stones chanting for the want of a Our God sleep peacefully in Blood Washed blankets erasing the remains of a Masjid do we not know what happens when we burn a leaf in the forest a funeral p is lit inside every Mand we pray in languages we don't love in shouting incantations digging deep for a Masjid how many incense sticks burn to cleanse us of ourselves every firecracker in the sky blazes a m the flowers edged on the pillars and domes shrivel beneath each was planted another Masjid and the kafia today and tomorrow the kafir who will you call to worship your empty walls we killed us all for a Mand this next one is called sister Sonet on sharat Pima next falls from the Moon tonight we stand under the pink ban mulas draping every crossstitch of the cage where our dog lived and died quiet so our thin limbs don't convulse the many faces of the Moon God we are in The Veranda to collect droplets of the Divine liquid freeze it and read the pearl necklace we smile knowing this will be a gift for ma who makes us believe umit rains from the sky to night waiting we bust like flimsy moths under the silver light stretching our arms towards the gray sky to catch just a few drops waiting we bust like flimsy moths under the silver light stretching our arms towards the gray sky to catch just a few drops some maidens swallow these tiny tears tonight for good Grooms with clasped hands as each Global gathers on the tip of their right tongues the first drop plunges and corrodes our skin this is how we learn to drink Mercury thank you gory I really loved hearing you read that and I'm really excited to talk to you thanks for coming thank you for having me when I read these poems I loved all three of them but when I read that first one the mother wound and then when I heard you read it again there was this line that got me both times I mean the speaker describing this trauma that she went through in her mother went through and then there's this line someone must have a word in a language I can read but not speak and both times it just oh gosh it like hit me right in the heart so I don't have a question for that I just wanted you to know that I really love that thank you I always think that when I'm written something and someone says that I'm like did I write that I get that sensation too sometimes I write something and I read it later or someone else reads it and mentions a line and I'm like it almost feels like outof body experience it almost feels like the words have gone through me and that they didn't actually come from me they came from another place yeah that's like totally how I feel about most of especially that one poem I feel like that about a lot I'm like why and when did I write this it's so interesting and it's kind of it's kind of magical and beautiful and um one of the reasons I keep coming back to writing but I want to talk to you a bit about writing poetry in forms um which isn't something you see a ton of these days I'm currently taking a form poetry class that's um kind of kicking my butt a little bit so I want to hear your perspective on it cuz the first poem the mother wound is not in form that I can tell but the second two poems are in form one is a guzzle and another is a sonnet so is form something you turn to often in your poetry I think not um I came to form really late in after I moved to the United States for my MS I think I was like intuitively maybe using a lot of repetition and like trying to engage with form but because I didn't have the technique or like the skill to like understand form at that point it was something that felt like occurred a lot in my work but I couldn't like maybe chisel it in the way that I wanted it to so I think that in the 3 years of my M program I realized how how much form helps like that whole cliche of form extending to the content it really like works for me and I see that happening more and more in my work maybe because I come from a place where I was so far away from it for a long time I did read like a lot of sonnets growing up and I listen to a lot of guzzles so I think my understanding of sound or like language in poetry was repetitive and maybe Guided intuitively by those forms so when I learned how to like um play with forms and sort of understand structure I kind of became obsessed with it and then it just sort of has been my experience that sometimes I write a poem like and I play to see if it is falling in a form because I can now like notice repetitions that I feel like oh can be better Guided by a form so often times it's not intentional like this guzzle I wrote um the guzzle I just read Gaz bab Masjid I had been thinking about the demolition of the Masjid by the rightwing in India and the Hindu groups and I had been thinking of how a place of worship like the fact that Masjid means mosque and Mand means Temple and I kept thinking of like growing up it meant like both of them meant the same thing to me as in like being a place of worship which like I was always around in the area grew up in so I kind of like was fixated on that repetition and when I started writing about it I realized that I was was using those words and the sequence in which they occurred like it was happening in the poem two times and I think I took it to Workshop actually and people were like this is a guzzle and I think that's what had like made me realize that a lot of them have like an intuitive form and they are not necessarily like the pure or form or they don't exactly follow the rif or like the kafia but they have like all the um other qualities of it even the Sonet so I think that I really love like learning all the forms and then like dismantling them to how I want to use them because that's what language is for well I was going to ask about that actually because before taking this class that I'm in I thought forms were really strict like you had to very closely adhere to the rules or count but that's not really the case right like the poems you read break from the traditional rhyme structure a bit so how do you decide when to stick to the form and when to break the rules um I think that mostly I try to be really respectful of the form in the sense that I I think that a lot of like when I teach decolonizing poetry and I think this might be like tying into some of the other things we wanted to talk about but when I looked at forms I think that a lot of people feel and rightly so like a lot of push back against traditional forms because they have this history of Oppression and being extremely like white and also being like the kind of poetry that is accepted and I think that when I came to form I came to form from the perspective of looking at nonwestern forms because I was not raised in this environment so I understand like the push back that is felt with like these bombs but then I realized that if you can break these structures and in how like they're adapted differently in the west or like what happens to a form when it travels and is adapted by someone another part of the world I think those were questions that motivated me to like break the form and I think that I feel obviously I feel more like comfortable in Breaking the GLE because it feels like my own form as opposed to like maybe breaking from a high bun and I think that what I really try to think of is that if I am like doing disservice to the form in the original language and that's something like I really try to be mindful of if I'm like using I think a guzzle to maybe write a poem that is colonizing I feel like that's disservice to the form but I feel like if you're doing the work of the subject matter like communicating something important in the sense that it is aiding the form or the culture or like not basically like appropriating it I feel like that you have the leeway to play with it and the form allows you to play with it really comfortably and make a point so I think that's basically like how I feel comfortable doing it and how I decide how much I want to play with it is honestly like when I see it on the page if it's even necessary well you mentioned that you were introduced some to some non-western forms of writing and poetry and songs at a young age you were born and raised in India and you told me that your grandmother introduced you to Bajan religious hymns couplets and bakti poetry which helped Aid in your craft years later so what was your grandmother like and how influential was she to your writing I think that um I all my grandparents have been like super influential in like shaping the kind of work I do my um maternal grandmother is the only grandparent I have alive she's my Nani that's the word for maternal grandmother in Hindi and my grandma my paternal Grandma passed away really recently in January growing up with her like my paternal grandmother and my paternal grandfather was a really blessed experience in the sense that they were just religious enough to the point where they would not like impose their teachings on you but you were told a lot of stories so growing up with my grandmother in particular was really I didn't realize consciously that it was guiding so much of like how I see the world but she read a lot of like um poets like meaai and who writes to Krishna which is one of the Hindu gods about like laugh poems and being a devotee and then she also introduced me to Kabir and my uncle used to listen to a lot of tapes of Kabir who I like write about a lot also in my thesis because he's the in between I guess and more accepted even in the like religious divide between Hindus and Muslims in India and there are like uh conflicts about what religion he totally belongs to and I think that growing up with in with her in that environment where she introduced me to those poets or Saints as they're like thought of and listening to like epics of like um Raman Mahabharat and like looking at like characters from the perspective of like storytelling and like her just telling basically like a lot of stories to me before bedtime and sort of sharing songs about like devotion really like created a sense of Rhythm I also listen to a lot of guzzles with her but I would definitely say that bti poetry like a lot of songs written to gods and goddesses and which I think kind of is like the tradition of what is it an OD and I think that I now when I look at OD as a form I think oh this definitely exists in my culture too or I've always heard like ODS to Kings but I just didn't have the language to it so I or ODS to gods or to the water because a lot of um inanimate objects are like woried in the culture all of those things like sort of created a world for me which was very alive in some ways and I think she helped like create that well you told me before the interview that bakti poetry uh involves writing love poems to the Divine so that kind of sounds like what you're talking about here so you told me that you still draw upon that today when in your words you write poems to love and document the hauntings of your memory so I was curious if you could tell us a bit about bakti poetry and how you see it manifesting in your work today so um like I said bti poetry is writing poems to gods and a lot of loved ones and I think that because I learned classical dancing growing up it also became like sort of where it came from to me and a lot of the songs in that are sort of bti songs which are like singing Praise of the Divine and are almost looking at the Divine as like a lover and um I'm honestly writing all poems I think that I had a lot of maybe Shame about writing love poems as a child because I think I came to poetry as like writing poems for my crushes which I think a lot of us do are like scribbling like um secret diary notes to like a crush would probably never read that but I think that I think that um that's how it started for me too I cannot deny it and I was really embarrassed about it for a really long time like this is how I came to poetry and I came to it from space of love and I think I still feel that way in that night and if I'm writing I I didn't actually think about like who I'm writing towards or where I'm writing to but I think that um I think it was a Diana kwen Workshop I did and she made me like really rethink who I'm writing towards and who I'm writing for and I think that when I look back at my manuscript now or the work I created during my MFA I feel like I'm writing to my mother sometimes I feel like that makes all of the work love poems in a sense because I'm telling her things I probably can't say to her or don't have the language to tell her in a way that would not hurt her so I think that all of it has definitely manifested and even when I'm writing like a poem to a friend or if I'm contemplating even if an poems that I'm contemplating violence or dealing with violence I do think that most of them come from a place of wanting love or wanting to be loved I'm curious about um you know you mentioned that you got into poetry writing love poems like a lot of us did um but like did did you write a lot of poetry when you were younger is that something you were encouraged to do like how did you first get into poetry and what was it like writing poetry in India I think that um I remember my mom really encouraging me to write poetry but I like my first distinct memory of writing a poem is like when I was in grade three and there was like a poetry writing competition and I wrote a poem about like India and like how different cultures it had very a very bad rhyme scheme that I still remember and I think that that is like my first experience of like thinking or like consciously saying I'm writing a poem and then I continue to like write from like that age and I think a lot of it was just like personal which I think a lot of poetry or like poets start writing for themselves and I think even though like that competition pushed me to write like a first poem it was not like on display or anything and it was mostly like an IND process so I like wrote for myself in a diary for a really long time like until all through school basically and a lot of it was love poems and really cheesy but um I think it wasn't it in in India there was no like creative writing degree there still isn't like there are one or two schools which have like an undergrad creative writing and I want to say that English is not encouraged to be studied because because it's not something that will pay you that much money and you're trying to like break out of a system which is in which you like just trying to sustain so it was not encouraged so I basically studied um I did my I finished my schooling was writing poetry but I didn't know about mfas at the time and I didn't know I could study creative writing so I just wanted to study English ended up studying journalism and then I studied journalism for 3 years and it was my professor in the journalism program he was my department head Dr sudhakar Solomon Raj he helped me um look at mfas and he really encouraged me to like continue writing because I wrote for like the school magazine and things like that which I think really like made me realize that I wanted to pursue and I think like having a mentor that having mentors like all through undergrad and in the MFA has really like helped me I don't think I would have been able to find the direction in where I was because I didn't have access to it I didn't know it was something I could do and I started like looking up um some writers I really loved who were Indian like I started I know I remember like Googling thean Doshi and G tile and being like I want to see what they studied and a lot of them were like MFA I remember G tile being like MF S Lawrence and I was like okay this is the degree I can do to maybe get here and then I sort of just looked at like funded programs and applied so after moving to the states how did you see your poetry changing like in in what ways did you find your poetry evolving once you mooved to the United States I think that um what really happened is I was like so strange that you asked me that I was recently talking to a friend about it and she's a visual artist and I I was thinking that so much of my work before I moved was so external like it was always looking out and I was always like watching something in my imate environment and when I moved and I had so much distance from my homeland like thousands of miles I just looked inwards it just became like it was just like the opposite in so many ways and I feel like I don't know what like to toine that because I I'm I'm sure I like have the distance to look at myself as an outsider now because I'm so far away from my home place but I think that's the DraStic change that I noticed that a lot of the works like even if I was writing about war or like love I was writing about seeing it and not experiencing it and when I moved I started writing about my own experience so I think what it gave me like moving to the United states which I'm very grateful for gave me like a super safe distance to look at my S critically and my environment and what I want to change about it or what I want to write about and maybe talk about the grief it has caused me without it like hurting anyone in my immedate environment so I think that it really gave me a really a lot of distance in the work and distance which helped me look inwards which wasn't like I'm noticing and writing about like seeing outward only right well in 2021 you graduated with an MFA in poetry from MCN State University which is home to the oldest MFA program in Louisiana it's a three-year program and they also offer track a track in fiction you told me that pursuing the MFA was your reason to leave India and move to the United States which just takes an immense amount of Courage so I wanted to hear you talk about that and I'm sure it wasn't easy to move here and attend that program but um maybe you could talk about that experience a little bit yeah um I think that because I was so clear that this was like the only thing I wanted to do it was very matter of fact like I have to do this there's no other thing I see myself doing and I wanted to like spend 3 years like just what I thought of as like working on my craft and when mech's offered it felt like a dream to be honest to be like in a space where I can just work on the craft and not think about many things so I was happy to move and relieved to move because I really needed to move and I think that when I came to Lake Charles I know a lot of my peers were like I remember to a a friend who was in the summer he was also in the program and he was visiting India for the summer has some family there and I remember meeting him and he was like it's such a small town and I met him in Mumbai which is like one of the biggest Indian cities and he was like like Charles is a really small town and you might not like enjoy it and things like that and I was like not moved at all and I was like I don't care I just want to like study and work on the craft so I'm going to go and I I think that in the program for like I think it when you move from another country it takes you a long time to like understand the city and like the culture so and yeah I I I don't think I can deny that it was difficult it was difficult in the sense that I think I mentioned to you that we we were I remember going to the international office and the international office adviser being like you're the first students who are international to be in this program and we were like wow so then it was like a bit of a wow moment but and it was hard like to um maybe adjust to that environment immediately I also think that it helped that I had another student in the fiction program with me and because she was from another country to it sort of became like we can figure this together at moments when we had like international student affair issues so it was a and I I also think that I almost always turned to Amy for like most of the problems I had and she always helped me so I think that what really helped was that it was a small department and a small program because me and another poet were the two poets that year and there were two fiction writers that year so the class size was so small that it was really accessible like I could reach out to my professor and they would go like Beyond to help me if I even needed to like figure out maybe groceries in the city which I don't think they needed to do at all and I don't know how many professors do that but I remember them like driving me to the airport if I have to go home so I think that the program and the chair made the program like really feel like home for me and it really like guided my experience of being there I think that if I didn't have like a supportive faculty I wouldn't have felt the same way but because they were so nice and so willing to help and go out of their way to help you it made the experience like really fulfilling yeah it it definitely makes a huge difference having the support of the faculty and your cohort and the program um I'm also curious about you know we've talked about forums already but I'm curious how your background and non-western forums and pedagogy affected your transition to the MFA program and um what it was like to taking classes in the US compared to India um I remember like a big shift in terms of American literature to sorry like British literature to American Literature because I think that I was more exposed I'm for I was for sure more exposed to British literature than I was to American Literature uh when I came here I learned a lot of American literature and I was introduced to Tony Morrison and Alice walker and a lot of really beautiful Southern writers and I think that experience I really valued I think that the shift at first was a bit disorienting in like learning newly about American literature and almost daunting because I was also doing the ma so I was like learning a lot of literary theory in my first semester which I had not done before because my background was also in journalism there were students who like had studied um English literature in undergrad and had like that sort of experience but I think that over like after my first semester I had a better hang of like understanding Theory which sort of like helped and also I had no experience I don't know like if this is I feel like in American schools they teach you APA and MLA and in undergrad and I didn't have that experience either so I think those formatting and Theory things were like hard for me as an international student because I didn't have that experience before but um in the first year of the MFA program at meches you work at The Writing Center and you do not teach so that experience helped me in learning MLA and APA and sort of transitioning into life format in theory because I was working on it like on an individual basis and tutoring students so I sort of learned it then so I think that helped me and I feel like um initially like when I was studying I had some really good courses like one of the courses I had was in my first semester was mothering in American literature that was Tau by Dr Wendy Wellen and she basically curated a wonderful list of novels which were talking about mothering and and I think that really like even helped guide my thesis later she was one of my thesis advisers and so I think that the courses were really like helpful I did feel like a lack of of world literature courses and I bought it up with the department and we talked about like how doing an individual case study because there wasn't a South Asian studies faculty at that point in at the University so I because I wanted to like study Indian literature only or like literature from South Asia and my department head was good about like uh doing um an individual credit course with me solely and I know that one of my colleagues who was a Nigerian student did like an independent study with her professor on Nigerian authors only so I think that when I did feel a lack um I was able to like get an individual course which helped me like work on what I wanted to what I think is is or can be frustrating is like not having that option or like wanting a course and not having that like discussion there's been a lot of needed dialogue recently about how the workshop model is made by and for white writers craf in the real world by Matthew sesis um came out recently and the anti-racist writing Workshop by Felisa Rose Chavis is a great book that I encourage people to read we had her on the show last year and you're currently teaching a decolonizing poetry workshop with catapult so I was wondering if you could talk about your experience workshopping at MCN and the ways in which you hope to see the workshop model evolve um I definitely think about the workshop model a lot and I think one of the reasons I wanted to teach a decolonizing poetry Workshop was because I wanted the experience of being in a writing space which in which I was not really being like necessarily like edited on a line level based on the I guess understanding of the other person of my work or like solely based on like the preconceived perception they have about work from a certain part of the world or they have someone else's understanding of their Style and what they prefer so I think that in my first few years workshopping at mnes I when I felt like I'm still figuring my voice I did have like a few experiences in Workshop where I felt like and it was mostly feedbacked by I want to say white men which was like not comfortable which makes you feel like you don't know what you're doing and I feel like there is a lack because I also like am from a different part of the world I feel like there was a lot of expectation to explain things or like italicized Words which don't make sense in your language or don't make sense in English and I think that I didn't realize the need to like push back against them or like how essential it would be in like finding my own voice to like keep it that way until I actually read a lot of um poets writing in Spanish who like were qu switching at the time and I remember like I think it was my first a awp and I met a poet who's written the book Heart Like a window mouth like a river and she said to me that you should never have the um sort of responsibility of explaining yourself in a poem all the time and it's not like the right resp responsibility to have and we were talking about like a particular poem that I had shown her and I think that experience like really at the end of like my first year really made me realize that I didn't need to do that in my work I also think that when I went back to workshop and I expressed that this is not something I'm wanting to do in my work it was taken well and I was really conscious of like not performing my country or culture I didn't want to like do a poem or like make poems about like teas or snakes and like you know those things which are like stereotypical to the image of India or like yoga and I didn't and I think that those were like cons like that that kind of Consciousness was built by like talking and writing with more people who came from different backgrounds more people of color and who felt the same way in workshops and I think in my second year my workshop was I want to say 50% people of color and I think they were all also writing from different backgrounds like the person in my cohort I was writing with who's also a brilliant poet Megan Gonzalez she was writing about being in Mexican being a Mexican amican and I think that sort of like interacting with the work of people in my cohort who were doing similar work really helped me and I think in my first year I just felt like unsure and uncomfortable with the fact that I was doing it and because of like some of the feedback I received but um I did think that my whenever I went back to my thesis guide about those things she was supportive and we could have like a conversation about it that would at least help me think about it I think that that experience was important I do think that the model is still like made for a specific audience I do think that how it's um looked at in the sense of like especially like looking at like tough workshops I don't think that sort of practice helps anyone and that's why like I wanted to create I remember talking to my thesis adviser and telling her that I really want to take a workshop with a woman of color and that year like after I graduated when I got bread loaf and I did tin house I did breadloaf with bely red girl and I did tin house with um Diana kwen and that experience also like felt so different in terms of like how the workshop was structured because I remember they both had like a sort of Salo model which was like you read the work so sort of like you know how we're talking you read the work and you like tell them where it's coming from because you understand that this poet is basically showing you a part of the work and this is an ongoing work which I think a lot of workshops lack that they don't acknowledge the fact that this is just a part of someone's work it's not like this is representative of a small part of their whole body of work and it has to be in sync with maybe the other writing or like the other tone they have as you would maybe do in a fiction manuscript but in poetry I think the expectation is that this poem should exist um in the I don't know Realms of the perfect poem which often is understood as like has like I think there's certain understanding of it being following like this certain tradition of like poetry and I think that that like really imposes I think it creates a bad workshop model and I really think that having a model where you can read your work you can speak and you can talk about like what's working what's not working how you're feeling really helps the um poet feel scene I think there's an expectation in workshops to like dissociate yourself from the work completely coming in and like not taking anything personally but I don't think that acknowledges the silence people face in their everyday lives and how personal truly personal poetry is so in the decolonizing PO poetry Workshop I when we study a lot of Poets of color we mostly study poets who are um writing about non-white experiences and writing about marginalization we also study poets from other parts of the world and sort of look at forms in their original languages even when we can't translate to just understand line structures and things like that and that um guides the workshop which then also is based on a Model where people read their work and then I tell them to like um bring three questions they have about the work so we can specifically give the writer what they want because sometimes I think we spend a lot of time meditating on like a question mark in a workshop and are like after it and maybe that's not the poet's concern and maybe that's not what they want out of their workshop and time maybe that is something they can resolve on their own and I think that it is beneficial for both a reader and a poet to have that sort of guiding experience I think it makes me a better reader when I know I'm able to give the poet what sort of feedback they want so that that is how like the decolonizing Poetry Workshop runs but it's been like so such a great experience like learning experience for me to teach that Workshop because I've um met so many people who have like whove written like beautiful questions which have made me think about like my work in a different way so I think that I think that the workshop model like traditionally also doesn't allow that exchange of information because you're like not talking during the time you're being workshopped and then you're not you're not supposed to like defend your work which I understand but I think it becomes like there is no conversation there is no Nuance in those like discussions they just become like this is right and this is not and then the class is sort of divided and now I think with modern poetry there's so much like leeway to be wrong all the time well I I imagine being an international student coming to the states having to deal with all that culture shock transition if you didn't have a program and a faculty that was super supportive it would make it even more difficult so I'm really glad that like you had that support of the faculty and it sounds like that was a big help and I wanted to talk a bit about funding at MCN in general being a fully funded MFA program means that all students admitted get a full tuition waiver and a stipend either through a fellowship or a teaching assistantship according to MC's website everyone in the program gets a teaching assistantship and a partial tuition waiver so I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that how much money were you paying each semester after funding I think um I was paying around $1,500 a semester after funding and my sipon was around 4 k a semester because I was an international student if you're um an American student you can also like you have more hours to work I'm only allowed to work 20 hours on campus as an international student so I can't like work a library job at the same time which I understand is not ideal if you're doing an MFA but a lot of students did uh work pick like the rest 10 hours in the library and things like that and late Charles the thing was that it was really cheap as a city so so it was livable but not comfortably livable to be honest like it would have helped to have more stien for sure to make it more comfortable but it was just like making ends meet at that point for me and and you were also teaching right what kinds of classes do students teach in the MFA program the first year we're not teaching like I mentioned we're working at The Writing Center and I think that is really good I really appreciated having that experience I did not want to be thrown into teaching my first year of like moving into a new country and sort of like transitioning and I also like learned a lot through that tutoring experiences and became like really com comfortable with like students and campus which like helped me I think do well in my first semester of teaching I felt like I was doing a good job so I think that that second the second and the third year are when you're teaching and you basically teach 101 and 102 so the basic English level courses composition writing and you can work with the Poetry workshop for undergrad with your professor or like the fiction Workshop if you want to in your third year well one unique thing about MCN is they allow students to obtain an Ma and English at the same time as the MFA so how does that program work that I think was a very great experience maybe like the one thing I recommend everyone at magnes to do I think most students at meches end up doing the ma if they don't already have it it it's basically like you can take extra courses in the first and the second seme you can even take them until your third year like it's a three-year program and the third year is mostly like a thesis year so you can take take like thesis credits but if you want to finish the ma in 3 years that's fine too you can just like take extra credits to meet the ma and it's not like a lot of extra credits a lot of credits in the ma and MFA overlap if I wanted to finish in 2 years which I did I finished my ma in 2 years so I just had the last year for my thesis but then the pandemic happened on the Hurricanes so it didn't like give me a lot of great time but I think that the intent most people do that so they have like a lot of time in their third year to just work on the thes thesis and teach like two classes the ma is really nice because I think it has been great to like learn and read about like writers from different parts of the world in like a critical theory review type uh perspective and then like come back to your own writing in a creative writing class in an MFA and like think about how those Works interact or what they mean to your own work and sort of like I think that building your own sort of I want to say lineage of writers is what happens if you study if you're doing the MFA alongside because you come across work because you're reading so much for the ma and you sort of bring that experience into your writing so I thought it was really important for me to do like both degrees at the same time I'm curious about other opportunities at MCN as well so it looks like there's a visiting writer series and a chance to work on the MCN review and perhaps potential funding to attend writing conferences around the country so can you tell us a bit about those opportunities and any that you took advantage of in your time at MCN yeah um I went to all the awps and it was fully funded and they funded our travel and the hotel and meals so that was really nice when I did the I really enjoyed my aw because of magnes and I also did like two literature conferences I did scmla during my time at mnes and that was also reimbursed by the university and because I was doing the ma so I did like a literature conference sort of thing and it was also funded by mches I did work on the meches review and I think that what I do currently in terms of editorial work was greatly determined by that because I had worked in like editorial before but it wasn't like such a detail experience I started as a poetry reader for the meches review my first year and then I transitioned to being the Poetry editor in my third year and it was a great experience to learn with um the professor who was the editor and chief of the meches review at the time was Chris low he's a great editor and it just was a really good experience because also we edited the issue through like the pandemic and the hurricanes and it was still like something that could come together and it was really nice to like learn how to read and and sort of go through like a submission queue and sort of pick work and interact with people take uh I guess like get feedback from everybody on the team and it was a very nice collaborative experience and then I had fun soliciting work too which I had not done before on the editorial level and it was a nice experience because I could like reach out to people and they would send work it was it was a really nice experience and I think that pushed me to like sort of explore publishing more and I when I was in my last year I applied to be a poetry reader at the offing where I'm now the editorial assistant and I think mck's review like prepared me for those things because I learned how to like manage timetables create a timeline so and and I love the offing so I still do that editorial work and you know you've mentioned a couple times during this conversation Lake Charles Louisiana what's it like living there and I'm curious if there a strong sense of community in the city and within the program I think that there is definitely a strong sense of community within the program and it feels very like the professors are very warm and they make you feel at home I do think that most people feel strange about Lake Charles because it is a strange and small City and there isn't much to do but I just always tell people to be very honest that it was great for me because it was extremely quiet and I think I needed no distraction to finish my thesis and you literally have nothing else sometimes so you have to write and I think a lot of my uh colleagues or like classmates agreed that this is the place to write but probably like hard to live in because it's so quiet yeah it was it was great for me and I also think that there were like two local students at the time that I was at mnes so I I think they helped me see the community around Lake Charles like lafette there were poetry readings at University of Louisiana lafi at U ul and some in Nola and I think because if the community was interwoven and it was small like there were only so many poets in those universities and like MFA programs so it helped to like was nice to like go to those readings and have that sort of experience and I think UL especially as a program ul and mes do like a lot of stuff together and laugh yet so there are those opportunities but it's definitely small they also had like the school has their independent reading series which happens at a cafe in Lake Charles which is also sweet but I do think that those opportunities are like lesser and I don't know how much I think play plays a role in like sort of your work and writing for me I needed the choir so it worked out really well but maybe for someone who's looking for more um social experience it might not be the best place to be in well I'm not going to lie I had to look up Lake Charles on Google Maps to see exactly where it was cuz I wasn't sure I don't blame you I think I remember showing my father like the first time that this is this SCH I got the invite from and he was like I don't think this is a real play how like it is well he's been I I told him multiple times that aren't you so grateful that you know I ended up here because I am and my younger brother goes to school there now for his undergrad so now he has no complaints that's great well like I mentioned you graduated last May 2021 so what have you been up to since graduating I hear you're teaching a workshop this August through the Nebraska poetry Society yeah I have um I'm on an OPD because I'm an international student so I'm on a training period Visa which ends in July and I have since I have also been working at a literary agency and I'm working as an editorial assistant where I sort of it's more like mostly non-fiction oriented so it's very different from the work I was doing in terms of like poetry and what I do with catapult or what I do in the teaching workshop but it's nice because it has like the same kind of editorial experience I got from mech's review and what I do at the offing so that's what I do for a living and at I teach the Catapult Workshop it happens like every semester I'm going to um probably teach it again in the summer and I'm teaching the Nebraska poetry Workshop which is just a one day workshop that is a workshop I have not taught before so I'm excited to teach that Workshop I'm going to um basically teach Eco poetry and I have always like that was one of the um topics of interest to me I've been interested in plant Humanities and how what role poetry plays in like plant Humanities basically about South Asian poets writing about like nature or plants but in a way that calls for um a curent climate Consciousness and I think that I'm excited to reach that Workshop because I'm going to be like reading some of those works with people who are interested in the same issues and also like just talking about what role the climate crisis plays in writing about the environment now because a lot of poets are constantly like calling attention to those issues and it has become such a primary concern I also think that the um so-called Global South has experienced climate change for like the largest time without it going unnoticed and I and I think that I want to like sort of evaluate those things in that workshop and sort of like see what it means to like write about the climate and the environment in a dime like this well that's great and uh we'll be sure to put a link to that on our website mfar writers.com so listeners can find it before we go I want to give you the last word on MCN the thing I ask every guess when they come on is what is one thing you think the program does really well and one way in which you think they can improve uh I think the one thing that the program does really well is that they give you a lot of resources to sort of spend time with your writing in the sense that the faculty will really support your growth and I think that is very essential for any writing program I think that having great faculty for me meant that I am a to write and I'm able to ask questions without like feeling like I don't know anything and I think that accessibility in terms of like having a writing Community really like shaped my understanding of poetry in the in this part of the world and I Now understand like the importance of having that community so I think that mcnees does a really good job because of their faculty one thing that they could do better on would probably be like opening up more literature type teaching courses I think that teaching 101 and 102 is great experience for maybe like the second year but I do think that in the third year students should probably be teaching like lit courses so that they have that experience when they go away from the program and also because I think when you're already like studying literature and both like creative writing I think you have the sort of like equipment or skill to like apply it and I think it would be great it would be great for like a student to like sort of see what they've learned and apply it in a classroom setting and I think if that happened it would automatically mean like it would make like the thesis year more exciting for a lot of students because they're writing and then just teaching literature which feels more in sync than teaching literature and writing and teaching like composition you know so not to Dishon composition but it gets boring and it's structured it's structured in a certain way because there are like so many rules you have to follow well Glory it's been really nice talking to you thanks so much for stopping by thank you so much for having me I'm super grateful [Music]