Contained

A book I made a long time ago

A long time ago, I was a graduate student pursuing an MFA in fiction writing. Those two years were the highlight of my academic career. I was in the first academic setting in my life that felt like a good fit for me. I loved the writing program, my professors, my thesis advisor, the other MFA candidates, every word we wrote and read.

I loved the campus with its stone buildings and ivy. I loved living in suburban New York, a 30 minute train ride from Grand Central, but away from the city where I could watch trees move against the sky and walk park trails that connected one village to another.

MFA candidates were required to take one elective in another department. This was a good requirement. It stretched us out of the writing department and also out of the graduate studies building. In my electives, I had the opportunity to study with undergraduates. I chose the art department. Printmaking.

I wasn’t great at pulling prints. In fact, I was pretty bad at it, but I loved that class. I loved the professor and I loved those undergrads and the big sunny studio. I loved that printmaking was physical and gave me a change of venue from typing paper and glowing screens.

Our final project in the printmaking class was to create a handmade book. I compiled a book of poems and prints. We also created handmade boxes and pulled one print for each member of the class, so that we each had a box of one another’s work. I still have both of these, just as I still have the bound copy of my master’s thesis and my diploma - which perhaps means absolutely nothing to anyone but me, but means a great deal to me, and that counts for something.

This morning, I was preparing for a Zoom meeting and noticed that my heart was fluttering, as it sometimes does, and I thought about the book I made in printmaking class all those lifetimes ago. I pulled it off the shelf. The prints and the poems were worse than I remembered and yet I felt so much love for the work, the work itself, the energy of it.

I felt such a love for the person I was, the hope and desire that had led me to that place. So much gratitude for the opportunity I was given, the chance to be there, in that program and that place.

When I look back at that time in my life, there are so many things I would do differently. There was so much available to me that I didn’t explore because of self-doubt and fear. So many relationships I didn’t develop because of my own self-criticism. When I look back at the book I made, I wonder why I chose poems and not a short story. I wonder why I didn’t push the images harder.

In the end, of course, none of it matters.

Except that it does. To me. The me I am now and the me I was then.

Here’s a print from the book, one in an edition of five, that I titled Containment but would title Contained if I had it to do over, which I do not. I’m sharing it with you as a reminder to myself. We don’t get do-overs, but we can remember and in memory, we can find ourselves. Over and over. As many times as it takes.