THE GREAT CHEAPENING, Part II: Defining the shortcomings of an MFA
“Every year you stay in school, you drive the knife deeper.”
—Jorge Luis Borges, University of Minnesota, 1984
The consensus—amongst my friends who hadn’t earned an MFA—was that we’d missed out on a crucial discussion of craft. We didn’t speak the language of criticism. We hadn’t sat through three workshops a week for two years talking about arc and character development. And without that experience to draw upon, we felt handicapped.
On the other hand, those of my acquaintances who’d attended programs had to refill the coffers, both financial and emotional, that my friends in the undereducated camp had kept full. Most of my MFA buddies were looking for work to pay off their loans, and a number of them seemed to feel they’d written so much during their studies, and had suffered such imposing deadlines, that they were exhausted. In other words, they’d just paid to learn how to write, and now they weren’t writing. Maybe this was because they’d burnt out on fiction, or maybe just the pressure of being in debt had forced them to take jobs that had nothing to do with writing. Regardless, two of my closest friends finished their MFAs at good schools, discovered that they couldn’t get full-time teaching jobs without published books (and weren’t sure they wanted to teach were they published), and were going back to college to get degrees in accounting and business respectively. Of nine friends, all of whom had graduated from writing programs ranked amongst the top 25 in the U.S., only one took a job in academia (another had been offered two teaching positions, but neither carried an annual salary of more than $17,000).
My friend Joshua—who did get a teaching gig, and whom I’ve known since high school—graduated from USC with a Ph.D. in fiction and literature. This should have been the ultimate boon. But now he’s an adjunct faculty member at a community college, teaching composition.
Early last year I sent Joshua some of my work for review. A week later he emailed me back. “Together,” he said “we’d make the perfect writer. I’ve honed my craft, and you’ve got the stories.” After graduating and starting to teach, Joshua had found himself consistently setting his stories on and around college campuses. Then last fall, after losing patience, he wrote to me and said that he was strongly considering selling everything he owned and trying to walk to Chile if, for no other reason, to give himself something to write about. The problem, of course, was that his coveted junior college job wouldn’t wait for him to return, nor would his loans stop accruing interest during his unpaid sabbatical.
About the time Joshua found himself at wit’s end, I was at a west coast university preparing to give a talk on the publishing industry to a group of undergraduate and graduate writing students. Before the lecture I was chatting with the program’s director. If you can imagine, we’d gotten on the subject of studying writing at the graduate level, and I’d asked him bluntly what he thought the value of an MFA was. His response was technically off the record, hence the anonymity. “The value of an MFA?” he asked rhetorically. “Well, it certainly won’t guarantee you a job anymore. Not that it ever would, really, but much less so now.” And then he echoed what I’d been told two years earlier when I’d started inquiring about getting the degree: “I would say to someone, if you maintain a rigorous writing schedule and have an experienced mentor, then save the money. The problem is, most can’t. Most can’t write well. But, who am I to judge good art from bad art? You can grade on technical aspects, but not really art. I mean, no one flunks out of an MFA.”
So, inspired by that little bit of cynicism, let’s recap the problems that keep rearing their heads: Just because you get an MFA doesn’t mean you’ll get a job teaching at a university; if you do get a job in academia, you may lose your most valuable resource—compelling life experience; and though you might learn something about craft in grad school, an MFA does not make the artist. Yet without an MFA, it’s tough to know how to criticize your own work objectively because developing your critical aptitude usually requires a community of critics, and grad school is one of the only place that assembles that community.
Now, friends, let’s talk solutions.
(Next week: Elijah Jenkins makes some bold proposals, guaranteed, we imagine, to bruise some egos. Read Part 1 if you missed it, and catch up.)
March 12th, 2009 at 11:10 am
“it’s tough to know how to criticize your own work objectively because developing your critical aptitude usually requires a community of critics, and grad school is really the only place that assembles that community.”
I don’t fully agree with this. How did Chekov, Hemingway, Shakespeare, etc. learn to scrutinize their own work? They didn’t get MFAs. They probably read a lot. They probably had a few close, trusted friends (or not) to share their work with. I mean, I think you can be your own critic, especially if you give yourself time away from the work to come back to it with some distance.
I think workshopping can get sticky anyway – - sometimes too many hands in the soup make for dirty soup. What if Jackson Pollock had brought his paintings to a workshop and someone said, “hey, you should get more right angles in there.” Maybe the comment was made by some big shot. Now Jackson leaves his own instincts to mimic the big shot. Workshopping can take you away from your own artistic vision.
As you can tell, I don’t have an MFA, though I do have two novels, a collection of short stories, and a collection of poetry (all from small presses, though not vanity presses). One can learn to write without an MFA, that is for certain.
March 12th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
I was a teacher before I got my MA in writing (after I graduated, the program changed it to an MFA). Now I’m teaching writing at a writing salon along with teaching creative writing and English at a high school. I don’t have as much time to write, but I love teaching. I don’t have a book published but have many short stories published and have been a finalist and semifinalist for contests from time to time. It’s been my experience that it helps to find one or two good editors whose opinions you trust. Or take classes outside of MFA programs, but make sure your teacher challenges you and is willing to “confront” you on craft issues that are particular to your flaws or strengths. Perhaps a teacher who is willing to find articles and essays, suggest book titles that deal with whatever craft issue you have problems with. I value my MA and my time spent in the program. Yes, I have the bills to show for it. That’s life. I had a good teacher in the program who said, “Do you want to be a teacher or do you want to be a writer?” At the time, I said, “Writer.” Now, I say both because I’m learning how to be a better writer from teaching. Becoming a writer means making it an integral part of your life. It’s a full-time job.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
I do not have an MFA and share Elijah’s secret wish (per his bio) to have studied in such a program. I would like to have the time for disciplined focus on craft. In my forties and having lived overseas and worked many careers, I also feel I have the life experience requirement down. My work would be much less informed were it not for these years of just plain living.
At the same time, I take exception to the pervading professionalization of creative writing. Writing poetry and fiction are not the law, are not physical sciences, are not medicine. Is it not becoming a sort of Amway scheme, with programs creating MFAs who go on to staff ever more programs that produce ever more MFAs?
And where are the results? With all these programs, we should be awash in Hemingways and Kerouacs, Keseys and the Pynchons. Where are they? Why is publishing in such a crisis?
Everyone generally acknowledges that an MFA program does not provide the talent that makes for good writing, it only offers a chance for existing talent to develop. Let’s face it. We’ve all seen crappy writing from MFAs and brilliant writing from non-MFAs.
Maybe the problem is that too many students see the MFA to be a job qualification. As one post indicated, maybe they should ask themselves whether they want to be a writer or a teacher.
When I was a young man (tell us about it, Grandpa Andy), if you wanted to be a writer, you didn’t think about grad school. You thought about travel, about taking a weird job on a freighter or a ranch, or getting a gig in advertising, but only so you could write Cheever-esque soul rippers.
Kerouac ended the first chapter of On the Road with these lines:
“I was a young writer and I wanted to take off. Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”
That was all the instruction I ever needed.
March 13th, 2009 at 11:08 am
Well, just to throw another opinion out there, I think you have to go get that MFA for the right reasons–it’s not a simple question of whether all MFAs are or are not worth getting.
MFA programs do not all try to brainwash the young writers of America into writing the same shit. I’ve gone through one and none of us wrote similarly, and our profs weren’t trying to get us to. Neither does the degree guarantee a job after graduation. It’s fairly worthless itself–unless one counts getting a low paying adjunct position valuable–and everyone applying should know that.
But there are still good reasons to get an MFA these days. I’m damn glad I got mine. I met people I became good friends with, professors and students, and learned how to correct and spot some of my habitual story errors and device crutches. I also wrote a hell of a lot in a single year–over 350 pages between short stories and a novella, and I learned I could produce 6,000 words a day. Writer’s block is utter shit. And those are lessons very hard to learn except through experience. MFAs are also great for building connections that will help you get your stuff published in the future. We met agents and successful authors who had gone through the very same program we were in.
So here’s what little I’ll offer prospective MFA fiction writers:
* Don’t go to a program that lasts over two years, because pretty much all MFAs, whether one-, two-, or three-year programs, require their students to produce the same volume of work. The extra time will hurt you more than help you.
* Avoid fabulously expensive programs that give little or no aid. The debt is not worth it. Sarah Lawrence, for example, gives very little aid and one of their own faculty told me as an undergrad that it’d be stupid to pay that kind of money for an MFA–but he didn’t tell me don’t get an MFA. Apply to schools that won’t put you in more debt than you can handle, or better yet ones that will pay you to attend, such as Cornell or UT Austen, etc.
*Go to the program where you feel you have the most to learn. Some schools have profs who want to “nurture” young writers but offer little criticism, some schools want writers who explore more “experimental” fiction, some prefer writers who care more about entertaining the reader above all else. But this doesn’t mean that if you write experimental stuff you should go to the experimental school, or if you write traditional stories go to the traditional school. Be aware of what’s out there, and be determined to learn as much as you can.
*Don’t go to an MFA program straight out of college with nothing to write about but the collegiate experience. Take at least a year off and do something outside of academia. I waited tables, gardened, fucked around, and traveled a lot of the Northeast before going for mine, and the experiences I gained formed the basis for much of my material. Stories about other writers and college tend be boring.
March 16th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Read the bios of every widely anthologized author in this country, and you will find that most of them earned a master’s of some kind. Could this be coincidence? If you think that MFA programs produce bad writers, take a moment to consider the volume of terrible writers who are not in such programs. Writing is a discipline, requiring life experience and study and dedication. In a program or not, you either have the drive to keep working at your shortcomings or you don’t. Being part of an MFA environment helps. But the rest is up to you. Bottom line, you’ll never know if an MFA program is right for you unless you try it yourself. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. As is vey clear, we all harbor biases and prejudces, regardless of how little sense they make. Good luck to everyone.
March 16th, 2009 at 11:53 am
also i would very much like it if you guyz would talk more about your credenshalls (sp) and how many stories you published b/c its hilarious that you think any one gives a he*ll
March 16th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
lol censorship
March 18th, 2009 at 8:36 am
I agree with Mickey. If you find a program you don’t have to pay for, and go in with some life experience behind you, and are serious about writing, then an MFA is worth its weight in gold. I wouldn’t trade mine for the world. I met fabulous people and lots of wonderful writers, which comes in handy now that I (like you) edit a magazine.
Of course it’s true that a writer doesn’t need an MFA. And as someone noted above, you need a book in order to get a good job. But I know that getting an MFA improved the quality of my writing. And that’s the bottom line, isn’t it?
March 18th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
ema straub, your post feels so real… it feels like a… piledriver would you care to talk more about it over a big mack asl?
March 21st, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Thank you, everyone, for all the comments. This was exactly the type of conversation I was hoping to the article would start.
March 21st, 2009 at 1:30 pm
you wellcome