I think we can all agree that applying to college was stressful, with all of the application deadlines, fees, months of waiting and rejection notices.

Professor Shane Seely knows this feeling all too well. While trying to get his first manuscript published, he sent it into countless poetry competitions, complete with those pesky deadlines and fees, and over four years of waiting and denials.

Finally the years of patience paid off—Seely recently won the Philip Levine Poetry Prize through the Creative Writing Program at California State University, Fresno.

Seely’s award-winning manuscript, titled “Snowbound House,” will be released in November by Anhinga Press.

The book grew out of a thesis he wrote for his Master of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse, where he graduated in 2002, just one year before starting work at Washington University as a part-time faculty member.

After his graduation, he spent years adding more poetry to it, revising and rearranging what he had already written. With each rejection came more revisions.

“It got better every time,” Seely said.

Many of the poems in the book have a similar subject matter—houses and winters.

“I didn’t even realize I was doing that,” Seely said, “but it’s very compelling.” He believes these two subjects, combined with one another, are emblematic of the relationship between body and soul. “A house is all about the structure versus the interior, what’s inside,” he said.

Seely writes about whatever interests him at the time, and once he has a good collection of poems, he explores them to see how they can all fit together.

“Writing is the process of articulating significance,” Seely said, “which is why that kind of discovery in my poems is the most exciting part of writing for me.”

Some poets stand at a distance and write from the lens of another character, but Seely wants to have a presence in his own poetry. That is when he believes he gets the best results. “At the same time, I don’t want my poems to be diary entries. A poem should stand out on its own,” he said.

“Snowbound House” encourages readers to contemplate life’s most puzzling dichotomies, like the relationships between life and death, and past and present. Growing up, Seely lived in a very rural area of Pennsylvania, where he hunted, fished and worked on a dairy farm. “I was always surrounded by the ugly life and death,” he said.

He believes his poems are deeply influenced by his upbringing.

“I really value where I grew up,” Seely said. “I wouldn’t live there again for a million dollars, but it was beautiful and quiet. And there were stars and wildlife. It was a special place.”

But it was also small and limited and far away from everything. Seely felt constrained in the countryside. “There weren’t many opportunities,” he explained. “But I am in a position now where I can value that place and develop a new relationship with it.”

Seely was an only child. “I got good at being myself,” he said. Because he grew up in the quiet countryside, he had to rely on his imagination for entertainment.

He also took long walks through the woods and learned to observe and appreciate everything around him.

“After all,” he said, “in order to create, you have to know how to see things.” All of this shaped Seely’s personality and passions, leading him to writing.

“It’s scary to think of starting over now and writing something new,” Seely said. “It took me almost a decade to put this one together.”

But Seely admitted he is starting to envision a new project.