The last year of the MFA program went fast. I wrote more poems than I'd ever written in my life, and I sent them out, and some of them were published and some of them weren't. I taught an undergraduate workshop and discovered that I loved teaching, that I loved watching other people find their voices. I made friends, real friends, the kind who didn't come as a package deal with anyone else.
I kept the apartment near the river. I kept the job at the bookstore. I kept the cat, Dickens, who slept on my pillow and knocked things off the counter and made me laugh. I was happy. Not every day, not all the time, but enough.
In the spring, I got a letter from a literary magazine in New York. They wanted to publish a chapbook of my poems. They wanted to pay me for it, a small amount, but a real am
