The rumors of both the birth and death of MFA programs in the United States are greatly exaggerated. While academia continues adding new programs unchecked, large swathes of the “reading public” bemoan the sterility, uniformity, and lack of passion animating the work of writers who emerge from these programs. Haters hate, and lovers defend doggedly– “look at the tremendous variety of work coming out today,” “only those who experience life a la Hemingway deserve to write,” “more non-white, non-affluent, non-male writers are working today,” “institutionalizing Art is tantamount to killing it,” “Writing programs do not make writers; they merely provide a nurturing environment for those interested in learning the craft,” etc.
The truth, as it usually does, resides somewhere in the middle. Because I’m a graduate of an MFA program and am currently a Ph.D student in a creative-writing program, I bristle at the suggestion that writing programs signal the death of literature. This is partially because to accept this argument would mean invalidating every life decision I’ve made, but also because I truly think that MFA’s have worked in democratizing the writing industry, made it easier for people to learn the craft of writing, and imparted a New Critics style focus on close reading that (in my humble opinion) is peculiarly well-suited to writers.
However, while not espousing all the criticism levelled against writing programs, I do think there are certain fundamental flaws in how they operate. Not as regards the quality of writing, or the nature of it (both of which seem to draw the ire of critics and the public) but in how the MFA program views and positions itself, generally. There is a response, among MFA programs, to the persistent nagging on the nature of writers/ writing. As an industry, writing suffers from seeming to be easy. Almost every human can string words and narratives together—such is the nature of human communication—and there is a widespread notion that everybody is one three-month vacation away from composing the next Moby Dick, Dream Songs, or To Kill a Mockingbird. The truth of the matter is that good writing is very hard, great writing next to impossible. Because writing programs do not throw out 2000 Hemingways or Faulkners each year, they are castigated as somehow dimming the holy pursuit of Literature. The Romantic notion of writing being an art, an epic search for some great Truth, existing solely for its own sake, remaining pure only if it holds commodification far away, is the persistent bugbear of the writing program. Writing programs are therefore held up as villains because they make writing a learnable skill, something that improves with practise and study, the results of which no one is particularly pleased with. The argument against writing programs has been that it stifles genius, homogenizes talent into craft-oriented, “safe” work that exists solely in a circular, circumscribed economic system of literary journals and small presses.
Because of the idealistic notion that writing stems from some uncontrollable inner genius yearning to break free, writing programs find themselves forever in a state of conflict. Their existence is contingent on the idea that they have some knowledge to impart on the nature of writing, which is an unpopular notion. Therefore, they must continue existing while disavowing the view that institutionalizing writing will lead to the death of literature. To do so, writing programs have to organize themselves into an academic program designed in a non-academic way, which it has done by centralizing the workshop and marketing themselves as a place where writers are guided and nurtured while being allowed time to write, instead of as a degree that qualifies its graduates for something tangible. The result is a couple thousand freshly minted MFA’s each year, people who have left the workforce for two or three years, received what is disingenuously called a terminal degree akin to a PhD, and now find themselves unqualified for the positions their mentors hold, tenuously grasping some notion of having kept their artistic selves pure, and unable to teach any academic courses (usually) besides First-Year Composition (a field they know little about since the teaching of it cut into the three years they gave themselves to write). Unless a writer enters an MFA program with a completed manuscript, the time spent in the program is rarely enough to compose a manuscript, edit it, send it out, have it accepted, have it be published, and place onself on the academic job market.
The MFA program is thus designed to appeal to the writerly heart and soul, which is a noble pursuit, but unfortunately we live in a time when the “heart” and the “soul” are of absolutely no importance. I personally enjoyed my time as an MFA student—I loved my teachers, I liked my fellow writers (most of them), I enjoyed teaching Composition almost as much as I enjoyed whining about it, and I liked drinking copiously on Wednesday nights. But I did apply to enter a PhD program my final year in the MFA program—partially because my student visa would run out and no one wanted to employ me, and partially because, while I learned a lot about the craft of writing, I had not exactly written anything and wasn’t sure I would be able to. While my mentors were incredibly kind, wise, and wonderful, I felt that guidance was not all I needed before trying to become a professional writer, one who pays his bills by writing.
To continue to exist in academia, which is rapidly becoming a marketplace rather than a safe haven for intellectual fomentation, the writing program needs to prepare its graduates for more than “the writing life.” It needs to provide students with a firm and stable grounding in theory, the history of theory, the history of literature, and the way in which academia operates and works. The actual practice of writing should be expected of students, but it should not take up the majority of the academic side of the program. Too many MFA programs allow students to leave without grounding them in the history of their field or the theory of it. Too many students mistakenly believe that writing requires less reading than it actually does, and that understanding how scholars view pieces of literature somehow makes it harder to be a true writer. By making the writing program an actual academic program that focuses on a different manner of reading than a traditional literature class, the MFA program can fight off the charges levelled against it—that it is small-minded and unconcerned with the greater world, that it is training a generation of writers who do not read, that it is ruining literature by making it too similar. By marketing themselves as a place where writers are trained instead of “guided,” and as a part of academia that provides its students a real academic degree, the MFA program can explain itself to the world outside better while fixing a lot of the problems within. Because if they don’t the result is a lot of time and effort on the parts of talented, hardworking, well-meaning people being wasted while the world outside rages at them for being inefficient and insufficient at what they do.
You haven’t even come close to identifying my beef with MFA programs. My issue is that MFA programs have created a divide in the writing world, where too many lit mags, editors, and writers with MFAs, etc. seem to see “hobbyist” when encountering writing by someone with no MFA and “serious writer” when someone is pursuing the degree, possesses the degree, or has a teaching job thanks to the degree. But the truth is, until you write for years and years without the benefit of that “supportive, nurturing, environment of workshop,” and without benefit of the “contacts” made at the bloodfest of AWP, or even a single publication, you are only doing homework.
I’ve worked reading submissions for a little magazine for five years. We don’t read the cover letters. They’re for getting contact information from once you’ve decided you want the poems. I think a lot of magazines might be this way.
Ari, you’ve identified and clarified my primary academic/career concerns about enrolling in an MFA program. Lately I’ve been wondering if maybe I should get my MA in lit instead of or before pursuing an MFA, or if I should stay out of academia altogether for a few years and read what I want to read and write whatever I happen to write. Time, as you pointed out, is the real issue; unfortunately, there’s no way to know when or if I will ever have enough time (or energy) to do everything I want to do. “Everything I want to do” being, hmm. Mastering ALL THE LITERATURRRRRRE and writing some kick-ass books.
I don’t think that divide was created by MFA programs, Jennifer. It’s simply a different manifestation of the elitism of the literati and is no different than what used to exist for writers who didn’t go to school in the Northeast, were from the South, or were writing in a different style and tone than the mainstream.
I agree with the author’s points about theory and history, but I disagree that the majority of an MFA program should not be about the writing. In fact, the actual practice of writing, the years and years of homework you talk about, are the most important thing for any writer, whether they are in a program or not. But their has to be a balance to the approach in the MFA program that includes more theory and history and definitely more critical reading than is currently required. I’ve participated in programs that require tons of reading per semester, and critical and craft essays on those readings, in addition to reams of individually selected writing. Those programs have always seemed the best to me.
That said, the trend toward two things: homogenous voice in MFA programs, and the MFA as an academic degree rather than a Fine Arts degree, is what troubles me. Certain elements of craft should be universal (a full understanding and command of POV, understanding conflict and tension, and other technical items) but these should not be taught, as they often are, as the “correct” way to do something. The other thing that MFA programs, and students, need to grasp is that a Fine Arts degree is not something tangible unless you are determined to enter a marketplace and let others pick your topics for you, or possibly if your goal is to get a job teaching writing. If that is the goal, then many of the complaints are true because the pursuit is no longer the writing itself, but a means to an end; an end that is at its core a commodity-driven, mercantile view of what “writers” are supposed to be.
@Jennifer: While I understand your frustration, I must say that as a writer in possession of one degree and in pursuit of another, my writing often meets with the same rejections a non-degreed writer faces. Conversely, having worked at different literary journals, I can assure you that the degree or lack thereof does not affect how a story is read or its chances of publication. Promise! As for AWP, gosh, isn’t it stressful?
@Sara: The key I think is to read as much as possible and to put yourself in a situation where the reading can be most useful to you as a writer. What that is, I’m not sure.
@Wanda: Wise and well-considered words. I think my questioning of MFA programs rises from issues of craft sometimes being proffered as something close to “correct” because the nature of the degree actively resists writing being something that can be taught; which brings up the question– Why is it a degree then?
I look forward to continuing this discussion with all of you.
Perhaps I should clarify to say that the existence of so many MFA programs and so many writers with MFAs seem to have created or contributed to the divide I mentioned. When I finished undergrad, the path to success wasn’t assumed to go through the MFA; there was no reason to get one unless you wanted to teach. Now it seems the academic career is what gives you street cred as a writer. Latching onto Wanda’s point, it’s just another form of elitism. But because the people with the MFAs–perhaps from very specific schools or regions of the country–generally become part of that literary elite/create the literary elite, it feels like a chicken-or-the-egg question.
I used to work in academia. I was the writer and editorial director for a small college’s entire range of communications. I wrote all the recruitment, development, alumni, PR, marketing, and presidential publications, and the entire website, while also writing and submitting my short stories, for over a decade. I finally left that place a few years ago and now support myself as a freelancer, which includes writing features for the local arts and culture publication. Whenever I run into a professor from the college, every single time without fail I am told, in the most shocked yet complimenting tones, “I’ve been reading your stuff in ____. I had no idea you could write!” It is safe to say that I wrote features for the school magazine on each and every one of them (often about their personal work) and their departments/students at one time or another. Did they not read them? Or did the veneer of “marketing” force certain assumptions about what kind of person I must be?
I know that in terms of kinds of writing, I might be making a false equivalency, and I do get “high-level” rejections from journals almost without fail (and I do have a publication or two), but the combined experience has taught me that many people with advanced degrees are often flabbergasted that those without have working minds…and from what I can tell, the younger generation just out, now in, and soon to enter grad school has learned this attitude, because they have learned that to be taken seriously they must have that degree, that there are no other choices but an academic life. In the same breath, many seem to have forgotten the reader, or equate considering the reader with caring too much about commercial success, instead of understanding “the reader” as that phantom audience that wants to read interesting writing all the live-long day but has never taken a writing workshop and wouldn’t care to. What I meant about homework is that of course a workshop is supportive. Of course it’s nurturing. But it’s not exactly a struggle to receive feedback on your work since that’s what everyone is there for, and as a grad student or as faculty, your department often pays your way to AWP, conferences, etc. I’m not living like Hemmingway, out for adventure and “real” experience; I’m just someone trying to pay bills and have a creative life at the same time, without benefit of fellowships, residencies, etc., that kind of force you to abandon real life, just to write somewhere else for a while, something I quite literally cannot afford. I don’t think the choices used to be quite this black and white.
I agree with Jennifer. I am 58 and have worked as a writer most of my adult life, doing journalism and marketing copy. In my late thirties, I began writing fiction, starting with two screenplays and an aborted novel written in the second person POV, of which there were few examples published, and none that I was aware of, though I later discovered Bright Lights, Big City and Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas.) It was all beginner’s garbage, but it was an apprenticeship and it gave me the confidence to enroll in some adult education courses in creative writing to learn how I could do better.
I began a novel that everyone in the class enjoyed but considered a bit odd, unlike anything they’d ever read. When I first completed the manuscript I sent it out and found an agent (who charged $80 for copying.) He said he took it to New York, where people merely wanted to know what else I had done. Maybe he needed the “copying” charge, I don’t know, but he gave up on it after that. Another agent in Los Angeles said it was too “literary” but wanted to see some screenplay treatments. That was as far is it got. I’ve been working on it off and on for fifteen years now, and distilled a full life’s experience into it.
It rose to the top of Authonomy last year, and placed in the quarter-finals of the ABNA this year, but my efforts to find agents and publishers are still met with rejection. Every time I get one, I go back to see where it might have been lacking and attempt to raise my game. Increasingly, I see on agents’ websites that they won’t consider anything by an author without an MFA. The few places that publish fiction, such as Narrative, seldom publish anything without an MFA attached to the author’s name. The stuff these youngsters write is, well, the stuff that youngsters write, not very original and reflecting little knowledge of life, but it does get published because it is “pretty” and perhaps, because of their credentials.
The simple fact is, it is damned hard and I don’t expect it to be anything else. But credentials seem to matter far more than they ever didbefore, yet in terms of the work produced, the yield of the MFA programs does seem rather paltry.
I agree with Jennifer. I am 58 and have worked as a writer most of my adult life, doing journalism and marketing copy. In my late thirties, I began writing fiction, starting with two screenplays and an aborted novel written in the second person POV, of which there were few examples published, and none that I was aware of, though I later discovered Bright Lights, Big City and Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas.) It was all beginner’s garbage, but it was an apprenticeship and it gave me the impetus to enroll in some adult education courses in creative writing to learn how I could improve.
I began a novel that everyone enjoyed but considered a bit odd, unlike anything they’d ever read. When I first completed the manuscript I sent it out and found an agent (who charged $80 for copying.) He said he took it to New York, where people merely wanted to know what else I had done. Maybe he needed the “copying” charge, I don’t know, but he gave up on it after that. Another agent in Los Angeles said it was too “literary” but wanted to see some screenplay treatments. That was as far is it got. I’ve been working on it off and on for fifteen years now, and distilled a full life’s experience into it.
It rose to the top of Authonomy.com last year, and placed in the quarter-finals of the ABNA this year, but my efforts to find agents and publishers are still met with rejection. Every time I get one, I go back to see where it might have been lacking and attempt to raise my game. Increasingly, I see on agents’ websites that they won’t consider anything by an author without an MFA. The few places that publish fiction, such as Narrative, seldom publish anything without an MFA attached to the author’s name. The stuff these youngsters write is, well, the stuff that youngsters write, not very original and reflecting little knowledge of life, but it does get published because it is “pretty” and perhaps, because of their credentials.
The simple fact is, it is damned hard and I don’t expect it to be anything else. But credentials seem to matter far more than they ever did before, yet in terms of the work produced, the yield of the MFA programs does seem rather paltry.
The “few places that publish fiction,” Tim? At last check, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of venues currently publishing the stuff…though I do agree that Narrative in particular seems to be a bit “elitist.”
But as for my own career, I hardly ever mention my degrees in my cover letters, assuming (correctly, I think) that the editors would be far more interested in my prior publications. It seems to me that work gets published (or not) regardless of whether or not I mention that I’ve been going to school for fiction writing for 10+ years. In the end, it comes down to whether or not the piece is A. good, and B. reaches the right editor, at the right time. Degrees have nothing to do with it.