As a child, everyone thought I would be the homebody of my siblings. I existed almost exclusively with my nose in a book or competing in some sort of local sporting event. The worst punishment for childhood mischief that I could imagine was losing reading privileges. (Often, what I was getting in trouble for was reading—when I ought to have been sleeping.) I preferred climbing trees and hanging out with the horses to social commitments and struggled to fit in with my peers. When I heard on the radio that my favorite author had passed away, I was so distraught that my father turned around and took me back home that day instead of taking me to school.
It came as a shock, then, when I spent eighth grade obsessing over scholarship applications for a boarding high school 3,000 miles away from home. California to New Hampshire at fourteen. I had never been further east than Billings, Montana. I became rather gifted at sleeping on airplanes.
That began a habit of travel, exploration, and collecting experiences. A summer program in Virginia. A summer working in Montana. Books were always my escape, but I learned to appreciate this incredible world we inhabit as well. My undergraduate years took me to Maryland, England, Czechia, back to California, and Montana again. Graduate school to Illinois. I realized just last week that my cat turns three this 4th of July, and has already moved with me four times, across multiple state lines. No different countries for him though (yet).
A dream that has stayed with me through all of this is to someday provide the little kid sitting behind the classroom at recess with a book half as big as they are in their lap the same solace I found—and still find—in the written word. The dream has morphed, reshaped, softened, and solidified over the years, but has never felt so real and attainable as in the last two years. Achieving my MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing was so much more than getting a degree. It was validation, was a step in the door, was a glorious capitulation and commitment to my craft. I feel like I am standing on a precipice of opportunity now. No longer chasing it, but arrived, teetering, on the edge.
These next few months, my internship here at Sundress Publications will be accompanied by applying to PhD programs and residencies, and editing the novel I wrote for my thesis.
Nic Job is a queer writer with their MFA from DePaul University and a constant curiosity for the world—cultures, places, people, and themself. They are a human who loves humans, and all of their tangled-up ordinariness. Their fiction, non-fiction, and poetry is published in Club Plum, Defunct Magazine, Spare Parts Literary, and other magazines.
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