Cover art for Nick’s Ba/Ma thesis by Kyle Dawson

Nick Miller, not to be confused with this Nick Miller, is a Ba/Ma class of 2014 graduate, and a current Michener fellow. To the Ba/Ma class of 2015, he is a good friend, an irreplaceable presence in workshop, an intimidatingly talented brotherly-teacherly figure inside and outside of the classroom, and a purveyor of the inadvisable-to-consume Uncle Runkle’s.

First, some good news: by most metrics, there is life post-Ba/Ma, though I admit those blood- pressure fractions have always confused me. In my case, life post-Ba/Ma is in Austin, Texas. Before the prodigious James A. Michener died, he used his estate to fund artists, to build museums, to establish the National Poetry Series(*1), and to design an MFA program in his name. Oddly enough, Michener and I hail from the same sleepy, small-potatoes Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I have followed Mr. Michener to Texas, to the James A. Michener Center for Writers, where I’m a first year fiction fellow, writing stories and screenplays.

There is a fretful, unifying moment: a cohort of weirdos show up for the first day of graduate school. In each of our minds, we know ourselves to be horrible phonies. We hope to keep this a secret, at least until we can cobble together our first book manuscript. Then, Elizabeth McCracken(*2) (or some iteration of Elizabeth McCracken), enters and stands before the seminar table. She says, “Rule one. Stop asking yourselves whether or not you are writers. The word write is a verb. Are you a doer of that verb? Do you write? If not, sorry, you are not a writer. If so, congratulations! Your psychological torment ends today!”(*3)

This advice wrenched me. As I drive over the sparkly Colorado River and look down, I see rowers. Are they rowers by profession? Are they rowers because they’ve won rowing awards? Do their peers, when reviewing the rowers’ skills, deliver unto them only compliments? Is that what makes them rowers? No! They are rowers because, um, they’re rowing. I am a writer not because I was hand-selected by Minerva, nor because Toni Jensen cracked my heart like an egg over Brady Udall’s stories(*4). I am a writer because I write(*5). I am a doer of that verb. And so are you. I’m sorry if this seems painfully obvious, but it’s the utter simplicity that I find so empowering.

One more takeaway that recently sucker-punched me. Have y’all(*6) seen Whiplash yet? What an alive story of the artist’s growth, suffering for craft, the true and false rewards of self-criticism. There are these great sequences when J.K. Simmons (a malevolent jazz instructor) and Miles Teller (his young drumming student) are face-to-face, sometimes in a shot-reverse-shot series of close-ups, and sometimes sharing a single frame. Simmons’ face is heavily creased, and wormlike veins decorate his bald skull. Teller is nineteen years-old, almost cherubically full-faced, with scars that belie his innocence. A viewer can’t help but think: why is this young person torturing himself? Why is he turning his face into the face of the beleaguered, older man? The antithesis the film presents itself: to be great, the young artist must torture himself, must sweat out ability to achieve greatness. Of course, this is too easy to be true.