Hope you guys are enjoying the guest blogger series. Here is the next installment from yet again another fellow writer and MFA Candidate from Fairfield University:

Brooke Law is pursuing her MFA degree through Fairfield University’s low residency program and is currently working on a novel.  She writes about her favorite books at Books Distilled, which is a TLC Book Tour featured blog.  She lives with her husband in Long Island, NY.

I got married last June and two weeks later my husband and I moved (from each of our parents’ houses and our apartments in Durham, NC) to Long Island, where he had been appointed head pastor of a small church.  I had never set foot on Long Island until the day we moved into our house.

I managed to land a job as a waitress a few weeks later so I had some income while I looked for a “real” job.  My background was in nonprofits, and specifically I wanted to work with a nonprofit focusing on education policy.  Opportunities were nonexistent, unless I was willing to make a 90-minute commute to and from NYC.  Being newly married and also fiercely protective of my personal time, I wasn’t.

So during my slow lunch shifts at the restaurant I daydreamed.  At first I wished we were still living in Durham (which surprised even me) and I wished I could go back to my old job.  I was bored.  I was resentful.

Slowly I accepted the fact that I couldn’t change where we were living. Instead of complaining in my head while I sat in the near-empty restaurant, I took a second order pad from the closet and began writing scenes for a novel I’d started after graduating from college but hadn’t touched in over a year.  Then I went home each afternoon and typed them up, trying to ignore the shouting in my mind that I was wasting my time.

That fall I read a book of short stories published by a kid I’d had a writing class with in college.  He had been a decent writer our sophomore year, but he had become an amazing writer in the intervening years.  I thought my usual thought when I read something beautiful: I will never be that good of a writer.  And there in the darkened, empty restaurant, something flared up inside me and I determined that I would work until I became that good of a writer.

A few days later I found an email I’d sent to myself the year before about a low-residency MFA program through Fairfield University.  I liked the structure of the program and I loved that the residency was based in Mystic, CT–I’d lived there for a semester during college and thought it was a beautiful town.

I emailed the director, Michael White, with a few questions, and he wrote back an hour later to tell me there were still spots open for the December residency.  I put together my application in two days, got recommendations, called Vassar for my transcript.  Four days after submitting my writing sample I received an email from Michael, noting that he was impressed with the first chapter of my novel and as long as all my other paperwork was in order, I could consider myself accepted.

I was thrilled.  I was going to be a writer! I signed the acceptance forms, quit my waitressing job, started looking for a full-time office job so I could pay for school.

And then panic set in.  I got my tuition bill in the mail and freaked out.  I was being foolish.  Following my dream in this way was much too expensive.  I was being selfish.  My husband and I already had a lot of school debt, and I was just adding to it for a profession that might never pay me a living wage.  I cried.

And then the storm passed.  I remembered that I’ve wanted to be a writer since I first learned to write my name. I had tried writing a novel on my own but knew I could do better if someone taught me. After facing the deluge of fear and standing firm, I felt at peace.

Now I wake up early each morning to spend an hour writing before I start my day.  Every morning I spend time getting to know my characters more deeply, learning more about setting and dialogue, and every morning that time is a blessing I never imagined I could have.  And once a month I get in-depth feedback from a wonderful faculty mentor, an accomplished writer in his own right.

I have always wanted to be a writer, and now I am.  That is the main thing that has changed: my mindset.  I’m not waiting around to become a writer, and I don’t have to get a book deal to become a writer.  I have become a writer already, in my sheer commitment to and love of this work.  I’m not published yet, but I will be someday. Sometimes it’s scary to spend so much time and energy on a process so deeply creative and vulnerable, but it’s a relief to be afraid I won’t make it as a writer–rather than being afraid of regretting my life because I never tried.

Good Morning Folks! I want to give a warm welcome to my fellow FUMFAer, Ann/AJ. Don’t forget to stop by her blog after you’re done reading and check out some of the other great stuff she has to say…

This fake front page is a farewell gift from my co-workers at The Boston Herald. The staff knew me as both Ann and A.J., and as you can see, two of the three stories on the "front page" are name-related. (In case you're wondering, that unfortunate picture was taken for some chiropractor story I was working on at the time.)

In the summer of 2000, I sat down across from one of my best friends at Fire & Ice Grill and Bar in Cambridge, Mass. and made a decision.

“I’m changing my name,” I told her.  “Well not legally. But my pen name. I’m changing that.”

“What are you changing it to?” She dipped into her freshly grilled whatever-it-was-that-she’d ordered.

“A.J. O’Connell. I’m going to write under A.J. O’Connell. Doesn’t that sound neat?”

She agreed that it did. We raised our frosty beverages and toasted the new name. And then we forgot all about it and dug into dinner.

It didn’t feel like a major decision at the time. I was still the same old Ann. I had simply chosen a pen name, but that moment turned out to be a big one. That moment reinvented me, or rather, that moment invented A.J.

I was 22 years old at the time, an editorial assistant at The Boston Herald and starting out in journalism with the sort of starry-eyed idealism that only recent college grads can muster.

The name change had been on my mind for weeks. I liked the ambiguity of it. I felt that a set of initials would make readers more likely to focus on my work, rather than my gender. As a young reader of fiction, I’d always liked reading authors represented by initials – J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, C.S. Lewis  – because I didn’t make any assumptions about them based on their names. And besides, I liked the sound of “A.J. O’Connell.” It sounded newsy. It sounded tough. It was a cool name. But it was just a pen name. It was just a byline. People would still call me Ann. I’d just be A.J. to my readers.

A couple weeks later, my union rep called me A.J. in a room filled with colleagues. I wondered who A.J. was. When I realized he was talking to me, I corrected him: “Call me Ann.”

“But your name is A.J.,” he said.

He was right. It was on my union card.

At my next job, I gave up trying to go by two names and interviewed as A.J. I figured, fine. All the people I work with will call me A.J. and all my friends will call me Ann. Somehow I failed to account for the fact that co-workers tend to become friends. After a decade, I now have very close friends who know me as A.J. They’ve occasionally, at family functions, attempted to refer to me as Ann. It always sounds funny.

It’s a strange thing to go by two names. It makes you realize that Shakespeare had no idea what he was talking about when he wrote his famous lines about names and roses.

I found that people who called me A.J. treated me differently than the people who called me Ann, and I responded to them differently.

I got tougher, smarter, ruthless, ambitious. A.J. was the kind of person who liked to yell things like “I’m the one asking the questions.” A.J. was always wearing her game face. A.J. did some things that Ann could not have done.

Ann was a person to whom things happened. A.J. was a person who made things happen.

Maybe a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but an A.J. by any other name would not be a very good reporter.

My decision, 11 years ago, to assume a pen name has had all sorts of unintended consequences. When I was reporting, sometimes readers (obviously deeply unfamiliar with the state of the industry) assumed I was my own secretary: “Sweetheart, can you tell me if Mr. O’Connell is in? I tell ya, I’m gonna give that guy a piece of my mind about that story he wrote.”*

My pen name was also part of the reason I didn’t change my last name when I got married. If I kept my byline, but changed my last name, I’d have two completely different names: A.J. O’Connell and Ann Davis. That was a little too Superman/Clark Kent for me, so I kept my name. Things were confusing enough.

When I quit my job as a reporter last June to finish my MFA and write my novel, I didn’t know what to do with A.J. I didn’t know how to introduce myself to people at my MFA program’s residencies. Am I Ann? I’m not here as a reporter. Am I A.J.? I’m here as a writer.

It also took me some time to reconcile the two different parts of my personalities that I’d been thinking of as Ann and A.J. The schism between the two had gotten a little ridiculous. Each was turning into a way of evading responsibility for certain things. For example, Ann has a hard time being proactive. Compassion ain’t A.J.’s strong suit.

It took a few months of going through life without my reporting job, and with friends who both knew me as Ann and as A.J., to start bringing the two halves together.

The rift between the two may never be completely resolved. Recently I started freelancing for a local paper. When I got to my first assignment, pen and notebook in hand, I found myself in top A.J. form. It was like I’d let A.J. off a leash. I joyfully reported and photographed for two hours. Then I went home, called my mom and was calmly Ann.

*Although it was tempting, I never once pretended to be my own secretary.