Tag Archives: SFSU

on money and class oog

Good morning, good morning. It’s an early morning — well, not as early as I’d hoped, but still.

Things are changing, changing, changing. Next week is the last one before classes begin. I have a group today and a group on Saturday, the last Writing the Flood in our Oakland space on Madison (in early September, I’ll be moving into a different home, and Writing the Flood will be moving back to San Francisco).

I’m thinking a lot about money and class these days — noticing the places where my class consciousness clashes with my class reality. I keep noticing that I have some embarassment when I tell people where I’m going to school:  The voice in my head says, All this time you waited to go for your MFA, and you’re just going to State? All this writing and work you’ve been doing, and you couldn’t even get into a good school? I have this idea in my head that this is what people are thinking when I tell them that I’ve chosen to enroll in the MFA program at SF State. Yikes, right? But I think this has nothing, really, to do with the MFA program at any particular school, and everything to do with my idea of what “good” means, what “successful” means, and how much both of those are tied to money and expense, even after all of these years of trying to get away from our money=worth culture in the US.

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