My journey to the MFA is convoluted, and intimately tied up in my personal history. You see, I’m almost 40, so I lived a lot of life before I decided to pursue an MFA. I grew up in Bloomington, Indiana, born to lower-class parents who had little understanding of college, in spite of the fact that we had a big, prestigious university in our backyard. Fresh out of high school, in 1992, I began attending Bible college in suburban St. Louis. I chose to attend this school mostly because it looked cheap, and I could get scholarships through the denomination I was in at the time. My freshman year coincided with the realization that I was gay. Suffice it to say that Bible college was a long, difficult, and ultimately fruitless struggle.