Dropping out of my MFA, moving back to Canada, & the future of this Substack

Gossip & gasps & the good life

I’m finally starting to feel like a real person again. I can finally say I’m happy, I’m excited, the long road ahead feels alive with the brownie-sundae sugar-buzz of possibility and goodness.

These last two months though have been a whirlwind. And before that, the last two decades also.

I don’t quite know how to update you any of it. I don’t even think I need to. I doubt any of you have been waiting to hear from me. I promise I don’t say that like your borderline college girlfriend (jk not jk), but just in earnest. We are all of us too busy now in our modern lives in the West to truly await another’s letters. Long, long gone are the days when we sought companionship in the form of distant lovers and friends. Now, despite being liberated of those pesky N95 masks, we wear masks of our own making and despite there being no legal ramifications to it, we look down upon the popping of our ephemeral bubbles.

It’s not a bad thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s just a thing thing. And before you come out with your daggers of “hey hey Shannan used the it’s not x it’s y AI phrasing”, let me call you into my little lair here and give you a hug and say, shhh, child, why do you let them tell you what you can and can’t say, still, after ALL THAT!?

In any case, I checked my Substack Dashboard today for kicks and saw there were almost 7000 of you! When I was a loner in middle school sitting on the portable steps during recess reading Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf and listening to Michael Jackson and Damien Rice and Bright Eyes, I’d have never thunk so many strangers on the internet would willingly sign up to listen to my ramblings, but here we are.

In the spirit of this meandering comeback letter, I’ll share some highlights (and lowlights?) of how the last couple months have been and what I think the next might/ought to look like. Here goes.

• I dropped out of my MFA program because it fucking sucked

• I probably shouldn’t say so because in this industry you’re supposed to stay on cordial terms with everyone and pretend to like something even if you don’t and make a lot of superficial friends and get along and go to usually bad readings and get drunk and enjoy the romantic idea of being a writer more than being a writer but I just can’t so there, yes, I dropped out of my MFA program because it fucking sucked

• If you’re reading this and you know which program I’m talking about and you had a great time or are having a great time at that program, I’m genuinely happy for you because it’s a good thing to have a great time at your MFA program and I’m all for good things

• If you’re reading this and you are a part of the faculty of that MFA program then let me say that I respect you for what you do, and alongside that I think just as much as a student ought to learn from a teacher, so ought a teacher to learn from a student, and my one cent is that y’all have a fair bit to learn (so do I but let me reiterate, so do you)

• I am not anti MFAs, I think they are the way forward for many artists and I think lots and lots of funding should go to them alongside lots and lots of direction and guidance to help utilize that funding in a legitimate way

• I think MFAs today focus far too much on your background and culture and race and politics than your craft sensibilities and just, you know, learning to read and write

• I do think politics is inextricable from art

• I think a classroom ought to be a space where experiment is encouraged as much as if not more than experience

• Where you come from matters, who you are matters, our identities matter, but ultimately they are all MATTER, they are not us… we are humans, beyond the purview of this material world, we are all of us spiritual beings, and in forgetting that, we lose something intrinsic to the practice of art

• Nuance could be a cool name for a pet, it sounds like a fat French cat

• Part of the reason I dropped out has nothing to do with how horrible my experience was at the MFA program and a lot to do with how horrible my experience was living in Trump’s USA

• Fuck Trump so fucking much

• So glad I can say that now that I’m in Canada

• Seriously, fuck that dude

• And honestly fuck the people who didn’t do everything they could to keep him out of office

• The harm he’s caused reverberates torrentially across the world each and every second

• Sometimes the lesser of two evils is a temporary good

• All evil is evil, but some evil is less evil

• All good is good, and true good towards one is as powerful as true good towards all

• As my husband, the fucking magnificent poet Karan Kapoor once wrote, THE UNIVERSE IS A KINGDOM OF KINDNESS

• I believe that in every possible way

• It hurts me day in day out to witness the suffering of others and because of this I refuse to read the news

• I’m a coward, but this is how I go on

• I try to put everything I have into raising a beautiful child in all her being, giving her the childhood I never had, and putting as much good into the world as I can through poetry and art, and this is how I go on

• Moving to Canada has been a fucking relief, did I mention that?

• I ran away from home at 17 from a violent and abusive home and came back years later to discover that my father had racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt on my credit card (credit cards I’d never created, but that he had using my social insurance number with forged signatures)

• It took me over half a decade to fix my credit (still not fully there), put myself through my undergrad, raise my kid as a single mom, pay for my divorce from an abusive arranged first marriage, and finally feel free in some way

• Now, at 31, I am happy and it is good, capital G-good even, and I am grateful I can say that I saw…I see what a beautiful life is, or at least how to make one

• When I was 11 and then again at 14, I tried to end my life and routinely between 10-16 I spent many waking hours dreaming up ways to die

• At the time I felt like a coward for not going through with it but now I feel like a fucking superhero for continuing to stay alive, no matter how hard it got

• To write about darkness when you’re in the light is a beautiful, gentle, tender thing

• You get to appreciate all the ways in which the darkness is formed, and how it looks from the outside, how you reach in from this space of bright light and can almost touch and smell what it was once like, and yet, miraculously, you’re safe and cradled in the light

• I’m meditating again and starting yoga again

• I was a trained yoga instructor in a last life (which is to say a decade ago)

• I think an MFA that involved yoga and meditation might have been so cool

• If no one ever reads my poetry and novel, it’ll be okay

• Whether or not any of you are believers, all creativity comes from and is meant for God. You can sub out the word God for Universe or the local McDonalds, but the essence remains the same.

• This is not ours, it never was, life is a gift to be given back, art is a gift to be given back, joy is a gift to be given back

• Seriously though the MFA sucked a lot of life out of me. And so did living in the US during an insane fucking time

• Revolutions don’t need to overthrow empires

• Many revolutions are themselves manufactured by empire

• One’s work is one’s duty is one’s life force is of utmost importance

• I keep thinking about this part of an interview of Leonard Cohen’s where he says: “It's hard work. I think everybody, or most people, work hard and I've always been happy to be employed... I think that the real poison, if there is one, it's unemployment, even for the people who have jobs, there are so many people I know who have jobs but they aren't really employed, they don't feel they can really throw themselves into their work and I've had the privilege in my life to have been able to throw myself into my work.”

• As for the future of Beautiful Losers, I don’t know, but I don’t think it will be conventional. I think I want to write whatever I want, as always, but I don’t want to sound like all the thousands of Substacks out there.

• So maybe next time I’ll tell you about the time I joined a cult in New Zealand.

• Or I’ll share some more of my poetry curriculum

Love,

Shannan