How to Defend Your MFA: The Hairdresser’s Line of Inquiry

I was having my hair cut recently in my home town in the English countryside, enjoying a break from the perpetual motion machine of New York. Not a terribly interesting thing in itself, but when you’re in the summer bridging your two-year MFA program, with your thesis relentlessly vying for your attention, any moments in which you can sit and relax are worth noting. So there I was, happily trapped at the mercy of the hairdresser, trying to look uninteresting enough to avoid conversation, when:

“So what do you do?” she asks innocently.