While I was endeavoring to give good advice to someone applying to San Jose State University’s MFA program, I managed to find my own statement of purpose. I thought I’d post it with the thoughts about why I wrote it the way I did.
Statement of Purpose:
The Shoulders of Giants
by Jennifer de GuzmanShe has pondered the words “Statement of Purpose” for so long that the words have ceased to have real meaning; it is written on the paper in front of her, traced over three times, curlicues framing it, a sketch of her hand beside it and, beside that, the words “all the works and days of hands.” Her pen has rolled from the drafting table, for a curious cat to bat away. She has three more just like it in her bag; she pulls one out.
She does not want to write anything so simultaneously earnest and precious as “I feel it is my purpose in life to write fiction.” She writes it anyway, then crosses it out with a series of uneven lines. What she wants to write will tell who ever reads it how the years that she has spent studying literature have exalted her, exhausted her, fortified her and frustrated her. It will tell them how she has learned that in the quiet, cold hours of the morning, when she has studied too long and too hard, Proserpina is just another girl longing for independence and fearing it at the same time; how she has seen how the love of beauty and pleasure can transform into decadence, and how a writer might translate thought and feeling and perception into words. She will tell them how she has witnessed death in Venice, life among the ruins and love in the time of cholera.
And then she will show how she was writing all the while, finding in Proserpina the inspiration for a new telling of her abduction, finding in the love of excess in Swinburne and Wilde the basis of a society in which death and art converge; and in Woolf’s modern fiction the courage to depict life as a luminous halo, to cast off the trappings of the materialist writer, even if only for 2000 words. “Writing fiction is no different from science in this regard:” she writes, “just like Newton, we have seen as far as we have because we have stood on the shoulders of giants.”
But, she thinks, I’ve only been riding piggy-back. She smiles, and the pen that she had taken from her bag rolls to the floor. All this time she has been peeking over the shoulders of giants, gaining what knowledge she could and writing stories that grew from that knowledge and her imagination. And she realizes her true purpose for striving for admission into the creative writing master’s program. So she retrieves one of her pens from the floor, resettles herself in her chair and writes:
I want to stand on the shoulders of giants.
So, yes, it is a bit overwrought, but it got me in. I worked in a lot of literary allusions because I wanted to give the committee an idea of my literary tastes, but also because there’s nothing like a shared feeling of “Yeah, we’re learned!” to endear yourself to academics. I had a 4.0 GPA as an undergrad and had been working professionally as an editor for three years when I wrote this, but what I wanted to impress on them was not “I want to be a writer” but “I am a writer.” It was about show — I am showing you what kind of student I will be, how passionate I am, not telling you.
I have no idea if this statement of purpose (along with my academic creds) would have gotten me in to Iowa or Columbia. It shows that my taste is fairly old-fashioned; most of the literature I allude to is Victorian and high modernist. But, having come from the SJSU English department, I knew that the department’s focus isn’t so much on contemporary literature and strong theory, but on the kind of works I reference. (Though later the head of the department would say to me, when I expressed an interest in Swinburne, “Isn’t he kind of awful?”)
There’s something kind of embarrassingly effusive about this short essay, but I remember writing it (I probably still have the notebooks with my scribbling and doodling in them — I wasn’t making that up for narrative effect) in a heady, late-night session and feeling every word of it. So it’s authentic, if nothing else.
