One semester into Goddard's MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts

I have completed my first semester. It was a rough, but illuminating ride.

I had not planned well for how to add a fulltime graduate program to my already over-full life; so in the middle of my first semester, I fell blazingly sick, until I figured out how to interweave the two.

The Goddard MFA is pretty consistently a 5-semester practice of increasing clarification. What people come out with is always related to what they come in wanting -- but it is distilled, purified, shifted in some way.

I entered my MFA with a focus on high-performant ensembles and the Core Protocols; but found in the first semester that my connection to theatre had deepened while dormant. I have shifted.

My current two areas of focus are Theatre Directing/Devising and Writing; the high-performant team work is a topic of much of the writing.

All of this sits, like a jewel in a rich and glorious setting, in the ever-fertile, ever-changing software laboratory of my dreams, which is the DigiPen Institute of Technology, and the software programmers and game teams I teach.

There is a line, in the Brad Pitt movie, "Legends of the Fall," after all the drama of the first couple acts is done, and before the drama of the final climax has begun -- which goes: Then Tristan entered into the sweet heart of his life.

That is how I feel. I am in the sweet heart of my life. If I were to stay here for 30 or 40 years, it would feel like an extremely short time. The rounds of the DigiPen year are as deep and orderly as at a monastery, and the personal practice is as intense; it feels like the Odin; it feels like me. I find that the longer I work here, the deeper I blossom.

I have found that most rare of things, a true rich creative home.