Thank you for your letter...

For the past few weeks I’ve been agonizing over deciding between accepting Mizzou’s MA offer, waiting on Minnesota and Oregon State to ask me to the MFA Prom, or just chucking it all starting up my own dog grooming business because let’s face it, even in a bad economy dogs get dirty.  In all that time, I haven’t even considered those other schools I applied to.  Because I haven’t heard from them I’ve just assumed that they have rejected me and so I’ve moved on.  Well, I’m forced to guess their where-abouts no more, or at least for one of them, as Pittsburgh’s rejection letter arrived in the mail this week just to verify with physical evidence that I’m not good enough for them.

It’s a pretty standard rejection letter, I can just add it to my vast collection now, but for somereason I've become fixated on this one.  They just send out scads of these letters, equipped with the stamped, copied signature of an administrator who may have never even read my work, and though its arrival affects me so intimately, they’re ambivalent to it.  They could send out a hundred more and feel no differently.  How would they feel if they got one of these letters?  How would they like to open their mailboxes and find a letter telling them ‘no’?  And so I mailed them a letter of my own.

Now, this isn’t some gross over-simplification of the matter where I'm completely disregarding the truths of a competitive system that I knew well before entering.  No.  This is me avoiding a difficult decision by throwing myself full-heatedly into an unrelated project.  So enjoy! 

*Preface; this letter is made largely, largely possible through the assistance and inspiration of friend of the blog, Mark.  Thanks Mark!

Letter from Pitt to me.

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Letter from me to Pitt.