I passed!

A successful oral examination (thesis defense) was completed yesterday...in the hot seat from 3:00-4:00 p.m. Celebrated with friends afterwards at The Steam Plant Grill. I've been overloaded with reading, skimming, and reviewing my thesis list of poetry books, making notecard notes (which I didn't even really refer to during my defense). I used tons of little post-it flags to mark poems in each book that I would discuss, as needed during the course of the discussion. I definitely over-prepared in ways that weren't necessary, ultimately...but there was no way to know what I would be asked to recall, respond to, etc. I was hoping to talk more about Richard Hugo and James Wright, but ended up focusing on Halliday (his sincerity), Kasdorf (her subject matter, and construction of her book), with some Franz Wright (his sincerity vs. Halliday's) and Jack Gilbert (one of his lyric poems, vs. his narrative)...and then finally, some Malena Morling and discussion of her as a lyric poet.

Now that the major part is finished, I just have to polish up the manuscript, make a few changes (one title change, some possible rearranging of the order of poems), a few typos to fix (mainly hyphen additions and spacing issues)--then copy a nice laser-printed draft onto the thesis paper and take those 4 copies into the EWU Graduate Studies office in Cheney by 5pm on June 10th.

But until then...I still have a final for my nonfiction form/theory class to complete. Then, THEN...the blissful feeling of MFA completion will fully come!

P.S. Best part of preparing for my defense: reading Richard Hugo along the East Fork of the Bull River in Montana while camping with Emerson and my fiance for a few days over Memorial Weekend. A lovely time!