Cornell College MFA application
-Bio
-My name is Madison Scott-Clary, and I am an author and layout designer living in the Pacific Northwest. While I work in software development for a living, I originally studied music composition in school and have been writing for long before that. I began writing seriously a decade back with the creative non-fiction project [adjective][species], a collection of essays investigating the furry subculture, then worked with the publisher Thurston Howl Publications to edit and produce the fiction anthology Arcana. From there, I published two collections of short stories, Rum and Coke and Restless Town, a collection of poetry called Eigengrau, a fictive memoir called ally, and a novel, Qoheleth.
-I also have complex thoughts on creativity.
-Creativity is a force akin to a river. It is a thing to be managed and guided but never completely controlled. Sometimes it floods and dikes must be constructed to guide it properly on its path. Sometimes the flow flags and one must lean on one’s reserves.
-Moving through life has been a continual process of defining and refining my relationship to this force that is creativity, constructing healthy boundaries, working with reserves. My time in undergrad was focused on this. My time since then, both working on my writing and in my work life, has involved plenty more. Even my transition and growth into a mature adult has involved shaping that flow as I strive to better myself and express what is most meaningful to me.
-With Restless Town, as a collection of short stories, I was able to address one topic at a time, explore it inside and out, and still maintain a satisfying arc throughout. With ally, I was able to explore how I got to where I am today, relying on creativity of form. With Qoheleth, I was able to interrogate concepts of self — both dissolution and multiplication thereof — that plague those moments of yearning for the void.
-I am the house beside that river, and my walls are strong. However, they could always be stronger, I can always strive to better both myself and my writing. I feel that this program will help me to better their construction, to allow my writing to mature, and to help me work all the more smoothly as I improve my skills. I look forward to learning and growing within the Cornell College MFA program.
-Academic writing sample
-Eliot Weinberger posits, “…every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life. As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes different — not merely another — reading. The same poem cannot be read twice.” (Weinberger, pg 46) Taking such into account, it makes sense that one be able to re-read the same poem again and again in order to catalog the interpretations and draw ever more from the text itself.
-Dwale, in its1 chapbook Face Down in the Leaves offers the poem “Dirt Garden” (Dwale, pg. 5), a fourteen-line poem of half-rhymes and mixed meter. The first half of the poem focuses on concrete imagery (“My garden of foxtails and milk-thistle”, “The scent of sap on scuffed and bloody hands”) and actions (“I killed them a little, / The crab-grass clumps, Datura and nettle”, “I ask and wonder”) which, when contrasted against the more hypothetical and contemplative second half, offers on second reading a sense of immediacy.
-Also on first read, one is confronted with the unwelcome nature of the real and the welcome nature of the hypothetical: these are weeds that must, according to some external source, be pulled, and yet in some perfect world, one might welcome them in. In both of these cases, the tension lies in the volta halfway through, where one imagines that the poet stands up from toil, a pile of vegetation at its feet, wipes the sweat from its brown, and asks for the hundredth time, “Time and time, I commit these small murders, / To whose benefit?”
-From the second read on, however, as the reader re-translates the work, we know that the “garden” in the first line is more than just a wistful statement, but a more active contrast from the external source. More than letting them grow wild, would the poet perhaps plant them intentionally? A thistle provides a beautiful purple blossom, and Datura white trumpets of its own; why not? Arctic foxes, by virtue of their diet, wind up planting gardens above their dens, scanty cold-weather flowers peeking through after winter.
-Even reading the poem top to bottom on repeat, one picks up subsequent layers one after another. Is the poet wishing for solitude? There is this rejection of external requests for someone’s imagined benefit and talk of hedging (perhaps literally) oneself in “with no need for reproof”. Is the poet musing on death when confronted with vegicide? An “earthen roof” has plain enough meaning.
-Weinberger continues his sentiment: “the poem continues in a state of restless change.” By virtue of the reader’s ever-shifting state of mind, they constantly re-translate otherwise static text, even from minute to minute, and build up a library of meaning from a single work.
-Works cited
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- Dwale. Face Down in the Leaves. Manvel, TX: Weasel Press, 2019. -
- Weinberger, Eliot and Paz, Octavio. Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: (With More Ways). New York, NY: New Directions, 2016. -
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The author uses it/its as its pronouns. ↩
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Cornell College MFA application personal statement
+My name is Madison Scott-Clary, and I am an author, editor, and layout designer living in the Pacific Northwest. While I work in software development for a living, I originally studied music composition in school and have been writing prose from long before that. I began writing seriously a decade back with the creative non-fiction project [adjective][species], a collection of essays investigating the furry subculture, then worked with the publisher Thurston Howl Publications to edit and produce the fiction anthology Arcana: A Tarot Anthology. From there, I published two collections of short stories, Rum and Coke: Three Short Stories from a Furry Convention and Restless Town, a collection of poetry called Eigengrau, a fictive memoir called ally, and a novel, Qoheleth.
+I have complex thoughts on creativity.
+Creativity is a force akin to a river. It is a thing to be managed and guided but never completely controlled. Sometimes it floods and dikes must be constructed to guide it properly on its path. Sometimes the flow ebbs and one must lean on one’s reserves. And if the river of creativity is carefully channeled and the foundation beneath is strong, one could easily build a house beside it.
+Moving through life has been a continual process of defining and refining my relationship to this force that is creativity, constructing healthy boundaries, working with reserves. My time in undergrad was focused on this. My time since then, both in writing and in my work life, has involved plenty more. Even my transition and growth into a mature adult has involved shaping that flow as I strive to better myself and express what is most meaningful to me.
+With Restless Town, as a collection of short stories, I was able to address one topic at a time, explore it inside and out, and still maintain a satisfying arc throughout. With ally, I was able to explore how I got to where I am today, relying on creativity of form. With Qoheleth, I was able to interrogate concepts of self — both dissolution and multiplication thereof — that plague those moments of yearning for the void.
+I am the house beside that river, and my walls are strong. However, they could always be stronger, the foundation always better reinforced. I can always strive to better both myself and my writing. I feel that this program will help me to better their construction, to allow my writing to mature, and to help me work all the more smoothly as I improve my skills. I look forward to learning and growing within the Cornell College MFA program.