Over the next month, I decided to ask Rick to be my chair since I wasn't sure how objective Stephen could be after my discovery that he was sleeping with my classmate. But before I got the chance to ask Rick to chair, the entire M.F.A. program was transported to Scotland for a summer study abroad program. That was when Rick made his move: He stood in the foyer of our sister school in Glasgow and shamed me or defending Stephen and Shirley's relationship. I was confused and upset, and now I didn't want either of them on my committee; but I had to pick one if I wanted to get my Master of Fine Arts in poetry. I reasoned that, even though I didn't trust either of them, the lesser of two evils seemed to be Stephen.

The second year of the program promised to be much better. The composition program director was offering a course in writing hypertext. And, although I had a dislike for the hypertext I had read, I was interested in it academically and thought the class would be an easy A. For my final project, I decided to write a hypertext poetry collection.

For a few weeks I struggled over what poems to write. We had been learning about native versus non-native hypertext. Native hypertext was more pure, so I thought, since it is written expressly for Web-based or electronic reading, and, therefore, could not have a print equivalent. Non-native hypertext is, on the other hand, intended to be published in print form first, then adapted for hypertext reading. I didn't want to convert print poems for the Web because it seemed like a waste of the potential of the electronic medium.