New Mexico State University, Department of English

Reviewer's Name:

A. West

Review Date

July 22, 2009

Year of Graduation:

2007

Review Title:

Yes.

Full Review of the Program:

I knew nothing. Nothing about poetry. Nothing about fiction. Nothing about teaching. In three years, I learned invaluable and permanent things about each of these, and in the meantime I wrote and wrote, read and read, listened and listened, stalled, bit my lips, wrung my hands, and — what do you know? — I wrote a book of poems. Just like that.

How amazing is it, really, to live in a city like Las Cruces, minutes away from how many hiking and running and biking trails in any of four different mountain ranges ("A" Mountain, the Organs, Robledos, Dona Anas, etc., etc.), minutes away from El Paso and Cd. Juarez, and to be able to see the delirious sunset every day in this sky, and know that you are being paid to teach young people how to be critical and how to think and know too that there are amazing writers who are better than you and smarter than you and who care about your work and want you to do well maybe even more than you know that you do?

Brief personal anecdote: Connie Voisine made this program work for me. She took me seriously when I was too shy and silly to take myself seriously. She showed me what I needed (and need) to write about, and I (literally?) internalized her poems and her lectures and her notes to me. In fact, she appeared in a new anxiety dream during each of my three years in the program, but the narrative of these dreams I think says something about the program:

1. I was chasing her through this weird open yard with a stack of pages and a marker and begging for her approval. I never caught up.

2. I was somehow inside or behind her eyeballs as she was editing my poems, and I was able to predict what edits she would make the moment before her pencil went to the page.

If you are not sold on NMSU yet, what is wrong with you? Besides being haunted by one's professors, we also have an amazing reading series, a Friday Basketball League, LOLA, a nonprofit arts organization, that does crucial work in the community (including a hunger-benefit reading every fall), and a Writers in the Schools program that besides being so much fun to do pays surprisingly well. And, if you are so inclined, we publish Puerto del Sol, a journal you can read for and edit.

So there.