Rachel Drouillard

Some thoughts on a late night after fighting for my life with WordPress

This isn’t the first website I’ve created. Now, this is the first time I’m using WordPress and that in itself has been quite the adventure. But from the ages of 17-22, I kept a couple of blogs. Back then, I had a sense that what I had to say was important. I had about ten devoted readers, all of whom were at least thirty years older than me, and I gave those readers my all. They commented encouraging messages when I’d share my posts on Facebook.

For a little while, I lost that belief that my words mattered. It’s funny how that happened. I went off to graduate school for creative writing, and I’ve written a lot in that time. But there’s just something about the confidence you have in those first few years of adulthood that is hard to reconnect with once you realize just how little about the world you really understand. I wrote confidently of things that I no longer believe in. I also wrote many things that I do still believe, but I marvel at the unquestioning confidence of younger me in saying it. I may never have that confidence again. But I have replaced it by a different kind of confidence: that I can write what I know now, and an older, wiser version of me can correct me later if I am wrong.

I have learned that my first drafts sometimes need to be messy. I’ve learned that if I’m writing as much as I need to be, some of what I write will ultimately be discarded. Not everything I write is perfect, or good, or even has potential. But all of it is valuable and worthy of writing. I am more than someone who writes something good every once in awhile. I am a writer. I’ve come back to it often enough to know that this is a stable part of my identity.

Okay, I’ve written some inspiring thoughts. Now, for what I’m up to…

As of writing, the date is March 11, 2026. I sent my MFA thesis off to my committee a little over a week ago, and I’ll be defending it March 31. I expect that the defense will go well. At my institution, no one actually fails their defense. It’s intended to be more of a celebration of the writer’s work and completion of the program than a true examination. Assuming I pass my defense, I’ll graduate from with my MFA in Creative Writing in May. I’m also currently doing PocketMFA in the Winter 2026 cohort. This program has been an incredible resource and has offered a lot of the support I’ve lacked in my graduate program.

I’ve been working on my current novel project (working title Walk: see the Works in Progress page for details!) for the past year and a half. I finished the draft in January, and I’m now in the thick of revisions (my MFA thesis is the second half of that novel, so I tidied up that section first. But the first half needs a lot of work yet). This isn’t the first novel I’ve drafted (it’s actually my third completed novel draft), but it is the first novel I’ve believed in enough yet to revise. My other two may have some promise, but they’ll require a much more skilled second-drafter to fix up, so I’m saving them for future Rachel to work with.

I have a few other projects up in the air, but I’ll have to update about those in a future post. It’s been a long day of trying to re-connect with whatever website-design prowess I’d accessed first at the age of seventeen.

If you’re here, thank you for visiting this website to see what I’m about!