I read the email a few times, until it starts to sink in. I stare at my computer monitor, blink, rub my eyes. The words on the screen don’t change. I didn’t imagine it.
Dear Ellen,
We are pleased to offer you placement in the Optional Residency Creative Writing Master of Fine Arts program at the University of British Columbia.
The message goes on to give details about the program, explains how to register for classes, outlines important dates for the fall semester and when tuition is due. There is also information about the summer residency portion of the program.
I’m sitting in the quiet of my home office. It’s too early to wake my partner. I know my father will be awake, though. He’s always up by five a.m.
“Guess what, Dad?” I say over the phone.
“What’s that?”
“I got in. I’ve been accepted to the MFA creative writing program at UBC. I’m going to grad school for writing.”
“Oh, that’s excellent,“ he says. “Congratulations!”
His words don’t fully express what I sense beneath them, the things he and I both know, but he can’t quite say—that he’s proud of me, that Mom would have been, too. I feel his pride through the chuckle of delight that follows his congratulations.
He asks me about the program, when classes start, which ones I’ll take, if I will go to school from Edmonton or if I’ll have to move to Vancouver.
“I can go to school from here. I’m in the optional residency program,” I say. “The classes are all online during the school year, but they host summer residencies on the UBC campus that we can attend. Those are basically a three-credit class in two weeks.”
He lets out a quiet whistle at the amount of work the residencies would be. We chat for a while longer until he has to leave for work, offering a final congratulations before saying good-bye.
I lean back in my chair, letting the news settle over me.
I’ve done it. I’m in. I’m one step closer to my lifelong dream of becoming a writer.
It’s the opening night Meet and Greet at the beginning of the summer residency. I’m taking Nonfiction Writing with Wayne Grady. My fellow classmates and I sit together at a table in a bustling dining hall, introducing ourselves and sharing some of our writing history. Around me are journalists and fiction authors, people much more versed in prose writing. I am out of place with my background almost exclusively in poetry. I’d decided to try a summer class in nonfiction to see if I was a hopeless case for prose entirely.
It’s my turn to speak.
“Uh… My name is Ellen,” I say, then remember I have a last name. “Kartz. I’m from Edmonton, Alberta. I’m heading into my third year of the program. I’ve been taking it part-time. This is my second summer residency, but my first nonfiction class. I’ve been focusing on poetry mostly. That’s my background.”
I chance a glance around the table, waiting for the giant Vaudeville hook to drag me away.
“You know,” Wayne says, “poetry is nonfiction.”
Something instantly unlocks in my mind, the hourglass inverts. I am pulled backward out of my body, stretched in every direction before being shoved back in, leaving my jaw hanging open.
“I can’t believe I never thought of it that way before,” I say.
I begin to imagine ways to expand poetry into prose, how to break sentences down into images, how to build images into sentences. There is pure joy in considering the fertile ground of the meeting place between genres.
Wayne grins behind his beard, watching the gears whirl in my mind. Year before, a former creative writing teacher at Mount Royal University had called it, “The thrill of the word.”
After dinner, I call my partner back in Edmonton to tell her how the first night had gone.
“It blew my mind,” I say. “I had no idea I’ve been writing nonfiction this whole time.”
She listens to my excitement, offering small words of encouragement when I pause to take a breath.
“Sounds like you’re home,” she says.
“Yeah,” I reply, “I am. I’m going to love this class.”
I seal the UPS envelope containing a CD with an electronic copy, and the 300 pages of the hard copy of my creative writing MFA thesis. I take a photo of the envelope to share later on Facebook. Emotion wells inside, realizing that I’ve finished the program and will be graduating soon.
I think back over the past years. They rush through my mind in snapshots. What I’ve learned is going to continue to unfold in me for many more years.
I hand the envelope over to the UPS customer service rep.
“It’s my master’s thesis,” I tell her.
She looks back blankly, not knowing what she is supposed to say.
At home, I call my sister. I haven’t spoken with her for a few months. In the final semester of my thesis year, I withdrew from everyone and everything not related to my manuscript, unable to handle any distractions.
“Heyyyyyyyy!” she says, hearing my voice. “Welcome back!”
I laugh.
“I know! I feel like I’ve been on Mars or something.”
“It’s felt like you were on Mars,” she says. “So? How did it go?”
I tell her about the experience of writing my thesis, how it had turned into something of an obsession.
“The only thing I can equate it to is having an eating disorder,” I say.
Her silence is filled with questions.
“It was like how, for someone with anorexia, they can never be thin enough, and it takes over. For me, I felt like the writing could always go deeper. I kept digging and digging, thinking I could go farther. There were moments when I actually fell on my knees in the kitchen, trying to find the next layer in the story.”
“That sounds so intense,” she says, which could also be a kind word for “crazy.”
“It was. Yeah, it really was,” I pause. “But I wrote a book. I wrote a goddamn book.”
“Yeah, you did,” she says. “Congratulations.”
“It feels good to be back on Earth,” I say as she laughs through the phone.
A few years after completing my MFA, I landed a job with the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, as their communications and partnerships coordinator. I was at that job for almost nine years, where I learned what I often joked of as a “PhD in the Canadian Literary World.” Countless submission calls, contests, events, workshops, organizational contacts, passed through my WGA inbox in that time. I worked at the hub of a hub, on the very cusp of my own writing dream, in support of other writers, in service to the industry I’d so long dreamed of joining.
Finally, in the late fall of 2023, it was time to take the leap. I had saved enough money to support myself and my writing for a full year. It was time to put into practice the things I’d learned.
“I’m going to do it,” I told friends. “I’m going to step down from my job to focus on my writing.”
At my farewell lunch, surrounded by colleagues and friends who has supported me through the previous nine years, I scanned their expectant faces, not quite sure what to say.
“So, what’s next?” one of them asked.
“Sleep,” I joked, “then a whole lot of writing.”
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