My easel and palette are in the “laundry room” of my new house. I’ve been working on a painting of the long hallway that leads to the front door of our shot gun Victorian.

My partner shares my “studio” space, which would have been the parlor, or dining room, before our home was divided into a duplex. I have a desk on one side of the room, facing the window. His easel and palette are on the opposite wall of the room, the wall that shares the door to the hallway. We have a pocket door that separates the “studio” from the “living room”. It is open most of the time, allowing us to converse while we work on our computers.

For some reason I am unable to think of any element of our new house without putting quotation marks around it. In fact, I kind of think of it as our new “house”. Our actual home feels like it exists elsewhere. As such, my studio doesn’t really exist here either. I’ve been thinking about the pluses and minuses of this.

In graduate school I had a studio. It had tall ceilings, ventilation, peers to interact with. It was place I could go to, close the door, and artistically brood. It was also a place I could leave, work and all.

After grad school, I rented a garage space, which had a handful of issues, but I liked it anyway. I could go there make work and go home. Again, leaving the work behind. For some reason I put this feature in the category of “plus”.

None of the spaces I work in right now are dedicated. Right now all rooms that I occupy in my life, bedroom, laundry room, studio, coffee shop, and classroom, have become my studio. When you think of it, this is kind of ideal. Sure, I don’t have the ability to close the door and artistically brood in the same way, but I now am on the path to integrating my work with my life.

Since my work is no longer isolated, it’s become more active and has steered towards being about my observations, as opposed to about a concept. I know this a direct result of me trying to understand a new city, but I know this new working environment is a contributing factor.

It’s unrealistic to think I can sustain this eagerness to understand my new home/city after it becomes old hat. My wish is to remember what it feels like to have this primal need to understand where I am, at the forefront of my mind. If I can engage and apply this feeling to my work in the future, it will help me remember why making things is instrumental to my experience.

Over pints, a writer friend of mine confessed his plans to apply to law schools. He said, “I’ve realized writing is the least important thing I do” and went on to remind me that everyone is reading blogs (ahem) instead of books anyway. I wanted to scream “You traitor!” but instead I sank back in the booth, sipped my beer, and muttered “Really?”

And there are more things I wanted to say but didn’t:

Won’t you miss out on discovering what it is you will say? (Writers often don’t know, until it’s on the page.)

Won’t the rest of us miss out on discovering what you will say?

Certainly you weren’t in it for the money, right?

Don’t you feel a part of you withers with each month you don’t make time to jot down a few lines?

Aren’t you afraid this is soul suicide?

I didn’t ask because these are the questions I was busily asking myself. In this precarious position of trying to make a life of art, it is easy to adopt others’ cynicism as our own, and it can be tempting to give up. We wonder, is this all just self-serving? Would I be better off with a desk job and a therapist? Wouldn’t I eliminate a whole file in my cabinet of things to worry about if I were no longer fretting over Time to Create? How dare I be so selfish as to spend time “creating”! People are starving. People are killing each other.

If I dwell on the starving and killing long enough, I’m liable to end it all here and now. So what can I do? How can I help? How can I write and help? I won’t admit any great wisdom on the subject. What I do know is that art has and does change perspectives, inform policy, expose the underexposed, and help people to feel less alone. These are not nothing. Also, art keeps those of us with the compulsion to make it from withering. Surely we are better citizens when all our synapses are firing with vibrant energy and when our bodies feel nurtured and intact.

Another reason I didn’t bombard my friend with the list of questions about quitting is because, in the moment, I was ashamed to think of myself as actively pursuing a writing career. He had unintentionally shot me down. It was a reminder to me that whenever we express thoughts of trying something else, it’s important to have a little sensitivity to those still trying to make a go of art.

And what of my friend? Should I have tried to convince him to “stay”? It’s a little silly, these lines we draw. One doesn’t stick with or leave the art world like a club. The idea of a departure has much more to do with identity than with the reality (which is that, for a lot of us, sometimes we spend lots of time making art and sometimes we do other things—make money, be with family, whatever). We come and we go; there are no official dues. In hindsight, I think I should have reminded my friend that his fiction has made me cry. I should have told him to do what makes sense now. I should have said that the departure need not be forever.

The story my literature class was reading referenced the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, so on a sunny afternoon after jotting down a lesson plan, I wandered to the public library and picked up a box set of Parker’s music. Teaching, as I’ve come to understand it, requires asking incessantly What will help illustrate? What in the world will the students be excited about? The hard part, though likely inevitable as a first year teacher, is the failure. How cool! I think, popping disk 1 into my stereo, and listening to the ways in which the music could speak volumes about the character in the story. I’m not a music theorist, but I’m emotionally attuned to music enough to be able to say that a certain rhythm is persistent or a melody moves from smooth to angular and to think about how that could represent the character’s persistence or moodiness. It’s not a lecture class, so I didn’t prepare a great speech on how the intricacies of a particular song mirror the quirks and trials of the character; it’s a discussion class. The students, I figured, would carry their weight in making connections between the jazz and the story.

The lesson I continue to be smacked with goes something like this: Teach: Guess whose music I brought in today? Students: (Silence) Teach: It’s someone mentioned in the story. His nickname is Bird. Students: (Silence) Teach: It’s Charlie Parker. I’m going to put on a Parker song so we can listen to the kind of music Sonny [the character in the story] wants to play and eventually masters. Students: (Silence, some smirks). The music plays, and some of the students start giggling, likely embarrassed by the awkward feeling of sitting in an English class, staring forward at a teacher who is clearly excited about the outside media she’s brought in to illustrate the text but is now pacing around at the front of the room to jazz, trying to perfect the volume level and praying the students will find something useful or interesting in the exercise. The first song finishes and another one starts, and the teacher can sense that the giggling, shifting-in-their-seats students are done with Charlie Parker and feel sorry for the lost soul at the front of the room who thought this might be “cool.” The silence after the music is far heavier than any silence that comes after “Will someone read x out loud?” or “Does anyone have an idea about y?” It is the silence of pedagogical flailing. The students know it, and the teacher, with all of her good intentions knows it, too. Slowly, painfully, the teacher asks a few students for their reactions to the music, and when the answers fail to penetrate the level of “yep, it’s jazz,” the teacher steers the conversation back toward the comfort zone—the routine—discussions of plot, character, and theme.

But maybe I’m a little hard on myself. Not all learning happens in the classroom. I’ve experienced as a student how something my prof. said or did clicked weeks or months later. And maybe there is value in being pushed a little out of the comfort zone, departing from the usual let’s get in a circle and talk about the reading routine. The lesson in the moment of flailing, as I understand it, is a simple one: teaching is hard. Teaching something you love has its own peculiar challenges. I’ve never brought music to my composition classes because the material never plucked at my soul the way fiction does, begging to be discussed and presented in ways that can, with hope, encourage students to find intrigue and value in narrative. And maybe the crux of the problem is that I’m expecting students to find that intrigue in the same ways I do, without doing much explaining regarding my pedagogical choices.

Like making and, maybe more so, revising art, teaching requires a keen understanding of one’s purpose as well as an open mindedness toward purpose and meaning that comes to mind (both teacher’s and students’) in the moment, in the classroom. I know that the dreaded questions are the most vague and often feel rhetorical: What did you think? What does it mean? So??? But I ask them anyway. And my hope is that, as I gain confidence in myself as a teacher and my ability to impart wisdom about the material at hand, I’ll continue to ask those questions, but I’ll have a few specific and interesting back up plans. I’ll know exactly why I had them listen to jazz, besides the obvious reference in the story, and I’ll be able to talk about it with grace. Until then, I’ll flail, but I’ll pay close attention in the process.

Last Thursday, June 12, 2008 I officially became a Master of Fine Arts. All hail the master! Um….er…right. One nervous breakdown, a few grant proposals, and 3 temp jobs later I am finally comfortable in my new school-less lot in life. I wasn’t expecting fireworks or balloons even, but the anti-climactic post-graduation experience shocked me to the core.

The Monday after Pomp and Circumstance, I took a walk through my neighborhood pretending everything was the same. The Online Coffee Company was the same Online Coffee Company I’d written many research papers in, the Hot House Spa was the same Hot House Spa I’d spent many hours soaking with my girlfriends in. But there was something different about the way I was experiencing these places. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

I realized that nothing was the same and that I’d been living in this city as a ghost resident for two years staying dry under the umbrella of graduate school. Though I made a consistent effort to make friends outside of the program and stay plugged in to the goings on in the city, I didn’t get the “real” taste of what it means to be a true Seattlite; graduate school is a very sheltered, private, introspective experience.

Over the last two years I learned to be with myself. I’ve always been a bit of a loner, a bit of an independent, but I think most of the privacy I’ve required can be chalked up to protecting myself from heartbreak, loneliness, and disappointment. I would try on different personalities, jobs, and hobbies, people even, but never really see any of them through to completion. In graduate school I didn’t have a choice. It was sink or float. I came face to face with my needs, habits, and insecurities as well as my joys and my cares. Alone in my studio or installation space I was faced with self-imposed challenges that I had to complete or at least investigate. These explorations became so much more than just work – the ways I dealt with the highs and lows of painting became a metaphor for the way I function in my daily life.

From my studio practice I learned that I hate not knowing whether or not the thing I’m pursuing will result in success. Ironically, this very struggle is the impetus for creating in the first place. If there were no struggle, no uncertainty to the outcome, no room for error, painting would be dead. It is my firm belief that an artist’s pursuit comes out of intense curiosity and a desire for surprise. There’s also a daredevil aspect to making art: you set up a scenario that guarantees excitement, dread, confusion, and disorientation and willingly surrender to it. You don’t know if you’ll make it out alive, but the thrill of the experience outweighs this minor concern.

This is where the metaphor for life part comes in. I live because I am curious, because I want to surprise and be surprised. It’s so enlightening to peel off my grad school goggles and see my city through fresh eyes. Everything feels comfortable, yet new. Like in my painting practice, I have moved through the oh-my-god-i-suck-that’ll-never-work phase and into the there-that’s-not-so-bad-opportunities-abound phase. By being patient and submitting to the nebulous nature of my situation I’ve been offered a few opportunities to show my work and have even started applying for grants and jobs. Like in my studio when I’m struggling with a painting, I accept that I don’t know how my new life will pan out. And I’m ok with that. Or at least I am right at this moment. I know this feeling will wax and wane as it does in and out of my studio.

This isn’t one of those “good things come to those who wait” stories because that would be sickening. Rather it’s one about a freshly crowned MFA coming to terms with herself, her practice, and her role in her new/old city.