Patrick Duggan

"You're not as great as you think you are, but you can't begin to know how great you will be."

If the old me asked the current me about my experience at CCA, that's what I'd tell him.

I came to San Francisco after several years in the Boston poetry-slam scene, wrapped in the traditions of New England surrealism and prose poetry. I thought I'd mastered my craft, when, come to find out, I'd just been writing in and from a small comfortable niche. CCA threw me in with a dozen poets of a dozen different styles and approaches, forcing all of us out of our comfort zones and making us better because of it.

I came to CCA a bar of soap, which studying a hundred movements, schools, and theories helped sculpt. I left with the greatest community of poets I've yet to know.

In fact, I have friends who did MFAs at San Francisco State, Mills, Sarah Lawrence, Syracuse, Emerson, USF, the list goes on, but I had the best experience of all of them. So if you're trying to decide, and you ask me, go to CCA. And wear sunscreen. The long-term benefits of sunscreen are too numerous to list.

Patrick graduated in 2006.