Sophie van Waardenberg: sonnets and squirrels

In 2019, a few months after I’d completed my BA (Hons) in English and History at the University of Auckland, I moved to the United States to begin a three-year Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Syracuse University.

Syracuse is a city in upstate New York, around the size of Hamilton, a little bit like Hamilton, even, but with snowdrifts and groundhogs and diners, and I spend my days here writing poetry, reading a whole lot, and attempting to source good coffee. It’s an embarrassingly good life.

I’m on a generous fellowship offered to everyone in the MFA programme, and I’ve been lucky in myriad ways with the creative writing programme here, but what really gives this degree its worth is the face-to-face, shorthand critique and support from the other writers and classmates we’ve grown to know so well.

Through the period of non-contact learning, we tried to preserve that experience – video calling, sharing of materials online, chat boxes, incessant emails – but there’s only so much a community can do to survive and to offer comfort when physical interaction is off limits. The 30 of us across the three years of the degree were used to sitting in ergonomic swivel chairs next to each other every day in fluorescent classrooms.

But next, like so many students and faculty across the world, we wouldn’t be back on campus for a long while, and those squinty classrooms took on a dreamy haze.

It was also a lonely experience being so far from home at a time like this. I’m incredibly fortunate to have a safe and comfortable place to live, where I can go about my quiet life quite easily, but at times I feel as though I’d give my last cup of flour to be at home in Auckland with the people I love, or to be in New York City where my partner is cooped up away from the chaos.

For now, though, I’m writing claustrophobic sonnets, photographing squirrels and looking forward to some day in the future, maybe a warm one, when I can sit on the stoop and have a terrible cheap beer with my friends.