Claire Light has a great post regarding MFA programs, and life while enrolled in MFA programs, to which I would like to respond here. She discusses how she’d complained about the uselessness of workshop, but here’s a point that I think lot of hardcore anti-MFA’ers seem to miss: when enrolled in a MFA program, we arrange our lives around it. We set aside all kinds of other important things in our lives in order to write; we do this because we are in the process of earning a degree. We spend so much time writing, every available moment on the train or bus, during work breaks, before going to sleep. I remember this: constantly and energetically writing in my Moleskine when waiting in a bar of cafe for someone, or while having a cup of coffee before seminar or before meeting a professor. My writing mind was always on, and if I was not writing, I was reading, and thinking about how what I was reading would find its way into my writing. Even with the TV on at home, language was seeping into my notebooks. Certainly, not everything in my notebooks became a poem, but I realize that how I was sifting through information became quite honed, and the energy I was investing in all of this writing also contributed to the honing of my poetic writing.
It reached the point that conversations with anyone could potentially become poetic fodder; folks became a little wary of hanging out with me for this reason and told me I was a scary girl, if only because my brain was on all the time, soaking up their language and the ways in which people could be ironic. Not everyone likes to become material for published work.
So that’s the thing; we talk about having this stretch of two or three years in a MFA program as the time we were allowed to write. I very much agree, but I think we need to think about what is happening to us as writers during this time that we are allowed to write, during this time that we are actively arranging our lives around writing, and reading, and talking about writing, how we sharpen ourselves, how we motivate ourselves to find other writers and artists with whom to discuss writing and reading and process. Additionally, this is also a time in our lives where it’s allowed for us to spend our “spare” time at literary events (in all kinds of places, not just inside the university) hearing other writers, or at arts events viewing the work of other aritsts. In other words, we energetically participate in artistic cross-pollination, hence, forming communities this way. As a result of writing so much poetry and always being at arts and literary events, I also had a ton of reading and performance gigs in cafes, community arts spaces, and bookstores, and this was always an opportunity to try something new with voice and with collaboration, to interact and exchange with audiences and readers, many of whom were writers and artists themselves.
Back to workshop, which is the core of the MFA requirement, even if our colleagues are whack, even if our professors don’t “get” us, we are required to produce volumes of work, and we are required to discuss it. Even when discussions are going awry, we find ourselves in the process of, again, sharpening our writing process or our ability to articulate that process. We defend our work, and we learn to sort out what comments are helpful from what is a waste of our time, or what criticism is constructive versus what is pure and simple hateration.
Can you tell I spent my three years in my MFA program utterly caffeinated and always switched on? Shit, I wrote two books of poetry while in my MFA program, found much journal and anthology publication, performed with classical flautists and viola players, slam poets, folk and modern dancers, actors stripped and slathered in olive oil, scrapped a lot of poetry in the process and wrote more, produced two poetry chapbooks which I gave away for free, taught writing workshop at KSW, and I started writing Diwata after I’d submitted my thesis. I was very swiftly making decisions about starting poetic projects, outlining my source materials and parameters for these projects; I also made swift decisions about language, code switching, and translation in my writing. I engaged in various poetic experiments just to see what would happen. If I didn’t like the results, I’d just try something else.
All this created a writer of heightened productivity and sharpened poetic skills out of me, an actual writer living a writing life, writing and talking about writing, publishing, performing, reading. So it’s not just MFA program itself, but the writing lives we make for ourselves. You get what you give. If folks can maintain this level of input and concrete sharpened output without MFA program, then I think that’s awesome. And you’ve saved money.
I’ll tell you what else; I am glad that the USF Philippine Studies Department could find a working Filipina American artist they deem qualified to teach workshops at the university level. In fact, the previous professor of the course I’ve picked up was also a Filipina American artist with a MFA (in Visual Arts). That is, without the degree, there would have been no stepping anywhere near the door, and all I’d be able to do would be to bitch about the system ignoring me, despite my being the dope poet I think I am.
This conversation is absolutely necessary. So, thank you. I have had a few post-MFA years to exorcise the damaging workshop voices from my brain and thus I feel I have an obligation to speak/write on it, it being this. I have always (even pre-MFA) framed the trajectory of my writing life within the context of late modern capitalism. I’m interested in its effect on publication, on the discourses of literature, on literary criticism, on the practices of literature, and on the popular discourses of the writer-life. It has become so increasingly popular for MFA programs to exist that even proprietary (for-profit) institutions such as National University offer MFA Creative Writing Programs at incredibly high tuition fees. Whenever we take on the role of being a writer, actually, whenever we try to make a living through writing, especially in a capitalist society full of market-driven ideologies and buyers and sellers and not necessarily readers and writers, we become susceptible to all side effects and aftermaths of The Hustle. Now, since we know that in some spheres education has become big business, a tool for the dominant class to build up, as Dead Prez would call it, THEY SHIT (read: THEIR EMPIRE), then we know that housing our purist and idealist and activist writer sensibilities in an educational institution is dangerous. The sudden hyper-popularity and flood of MFA programs across the country is a result of market-consciousness (turning intellectual and for some spiritual discipline into career path) and market-driven education (pumping out mass-produced workshop clones so publishers can mass produce their marketable mass-produced workshopped narratives [note: If you believe in your work, and your vision, this is not for you]). So, market avenue to market avenue, the dangers of capitalism’s subtle epistemic assaults on your MFA-writer-dome are inevitable. The whole process of getting an MFA can be read as a capitalistic enterprise. We live in a product-driven world. Despite our righteous mantra that it’s more about the process than the product we lose sight of that because this capitalist shit is that vicious, that fucking invasive. We want product. When work doesn’t yield us a product, we find it useless. I agree with Barbara that the MFA Years are about learning your writing life and studying writing as a unique discipline. This, I think is the most we can ask for. What use value are we getting in the MFA writing workshop? An easy response: It could very well be that nobody up in that piece is your audience. Not even the published professor. What you mind find: you toughen your skin, you hear how your work is received, you have conversations with people because they might not have the conversation ever in their lives if it weren’t for your necessary presence, you learn to un-listen to those who never planned on listening to you anyway. Am I that much of a self-determinationist? Yes. Do I play the game and try to go the traditional publishing route? Hell yes. I was raised by traditional authors and I am a devout self-criticizer of my transgressions. I sat in a fiction workshop with Junot Diaz at VONA and he said that many people were overly concerned with feeling safe in an MFA program. He basically said: I immigrated here, that was unsafe. Noted. Audre Lorde says we were never meant to survive. I’ll add: not even through our literature. The best we can do, is survive, and write. Credentialed or not.
Dear Barbara, / I do apologize for taking up so much space. I just kept going. Feel free to delete any or all parts of it. I was simply engaged. Needed to process. Hope you are well. / J
No problem Jason, you say a lot of really good things here.
I like what you say re: product, and if the MFA does not yield not just product, but highly prized product, then we consider the MFA useless. I want to go a step further and say that perhaps a lot folks who do the MFA are competent writers, or pretty good writers. To paraphrase Oscar paraphrasing Stephen King’s book on writing, some competent writers can bust their asses and become competent copy writers or editors. I wonder if a lot of writers have the expectation that consenting to have the MFA program process them through it will make them all into great Pulitzer Prize winning authors or something memorable and great. You know, like magic.
This is a ridiculous expectation, and ultimately, a MFA program is just another course of study that yields a degree and teaches us how to write and generate writing and maybe even teach writing. It’s like a MD, right? Not every doctor gets to discover a cure for AIDS or cancer and wins a Nobel Prize, you know? Most doctors just practice, i.e. what they studied and were trained to do, and that is remarkable already.
Finally, I like what you say Junot Diaz said at VONA, about folks feeling concerned about their safety in MFA program, when for sure, our immigrating here, our living here, was/is never “safe.” You’re totally right. I never felt “safe,” in my MFA program, but that wasn’t the point, and/or that shouldn’t be what we look for there, because if we do, then we won’t allow ourselves to be challenged, criticized, scrutinized, fail and made to try again. So I did get my ass kicked a lot in my program, but to be perfectly clear, I was the one kicking my own ass.
Everything you say makes perfect sense, as usual. I think the problem arises when a post-graduate degree is seen as a necessary qualification for a writer, or for a job in the writing industry. The fact that are so expensive to get, all that time away from paying employment, disenfranchises a huge section of the population. This results is a dearth of different voices. I have no objection to anyone getting post-graduate degree, I do object to it being seen as a qualification to write or to be able to tell good writing from bad.
Hi Paul, thanks for this comment. Again, the MFA is only of many “qualifications” to be a writer. As I’ve blogged, if people can become writers outside of MFA program, if people can put in/sustain intensive work at writing, revising, editing, and discussing writing, and find readers, audience, community, publication without MFA, then I think that’s awesome. And I believe it happens.
As for teaching at the college level in any field, a post-graduate degree is the way in. But not all writing teachers want to teach at the college level.
I see what you mean about MFA being cost prohibitive and therefore the possibility of the dearth of different voices out there. Perhaps it’s because I am in the SF Bay Area, but I am not seeing this happening. I did my MFA on financial aid. There are many of us who don’t get funding, but we’d prioritized going that route because of where we wanted to go next with our writing.
I really needed to read this, just weeks away from MFA II, the Return to the Dream. I’m entering into a small, relatively new, not-very-well-known MFA program for just one reason – I can’t do this stuff alone anymore. I need the push-pull of workshops and mentors, and yes, the excuse to fall truly, madly, deeply into writing again. The program is the process, not the goal, and I know even a finished “something” isn’t a so much a goal, but a happy possibility that may come of the journey.
I need to remember it’s about voice and theme and all the things I want my writing to be, as well the opportunity to practice advocating my work while advocating other writer’s processes.
If I focus on being just one more puppy in the puppy mill, I’ll likely lose sight of the Snoopy in me (**blink** LOL).
Thank you for your thoughtful take on this contentious topic.
Hey Bec,
re: “I can’t do this stuff alone anymore.” Amen! I was going to say though, that we have writers’ communities outside of MFA school. I want to ask you how that compares to what you think you get from MFA? Is there a difference? If so, what is it?
Best of luck in your new program! I am sure you will thrive there.
RE: Communities – well, since I haven’t found a local writing community that was mutually sustaining, I imagine my experience will be different than the ‘norm.’
There are wonderful writers in my area and a workshop I attend on occasion, but nothing that replicates the kind of intensity I found in my MA workshops and classes. I’ve piggy-backed on a couple of blogs and writing books, but still there’s that human contact I’m needing, and a kind of writing proficiency that goes beyond “Oh that’s so nice what you wrote there,” nice comments that don’t help me get deeper into what I’ve already written.
Honestly, though, the results of diving back into MFA studies are theoretical at this point – I have no idea if I’m going to ‘get’ what I hope to. MFA I was difficult for so many reasons and I’m very nervous about MFA II. I’ve rearranged a bunch of factors to hopefully minimize a repeat of MFA I, but still… yah… I won’t know until long about November if the theory is proving out.
If it doesn’t, honestly, I don’t know what I’ll do. I know I have to strengthen my inner disciplines no matter what. But going solo isn’t very attractive, even for a hermitish writer like me.
Hi Barbara,
I wrote poetry for twenty years before I started the MFA program. My MFA experience was entirely positive. I feel strongly that it benefited me as a writer. Most of the objections to MFA programs that I’ve heard were not born out by my experience. Like Paul, I am concerned about the cost and who it may exclude, but I have to point out that I paid my way through the SFSU MFA program on a gardener’s salary with my wife working only half-time, making less than me, while supporting our two teenage children, driving 80 miles to class, paying bridge toll, etc.–the MFA is certainly within reach of anyone who has been able to get a BA. But it isn’t worth it unless you really want it, and the economic benefits of an MFA are dubious (people who want to make money, get the MBA instead). Honestly, I’m a little surprised that the Creative Writing MFA is such an issue. Do they have these debates among painters, sculptors, or filmmakers regarding their MFAs? It’s just a degree like any other. You don’t have to have one to be a writer, to receive royalties, or to get published (though it might help with some editors). If you want to teach CrWr you might need the degree–just like in any other field.
Hi Brian, I do remember hearing that you were coming from somewhere on the other side of the GG Bridge every evening. I know a lot of us were working full time and attending workshops til 10 pm, then commuting home, which made me think that we had to be pretty committed to this thing for our writing.
Anyway, I also wonder if this issue is so contentious with other artists. I feel like this is another one of those ways in which people are dismissive of poets and poetry, which we know is the popular USAmerican perception of poets and poetry. (And here I specify USAmerican, because clearly South Americans appear to highly value their poets, as do Mexicanos and other North American and Central American societies.)
With other arts, I am pretty sure people know that filmmakers, for example, need to learn specific skills, which they may or may not do in universities. I am sure there are “self-taught” filmmakers, though they have to learn how to use cameras, how to frame shots and utilize lighting, cut and edit film, and write properly formatted scripts somewhere which may or may not be “film school.” Still, when we hear of folks like Spike Lee, George Lucas, Spielberg, or Coppola having come from “film school,” we acknowledge that as a place where they were exposed to technical, historical, etc aspects of film, were exposed to Kurosawa and other great filmmakers, had mentors (i.e. professors), had practice at making films for their class projects, got criticism from their colleagues and mentors, probably found the beginnings of their production companies among their colleagues there. And we acknowledge that as the legit start of their legit careers.
The other day, one of the Pinay poets on the panel I moderated stated that with schooling and practice, over time, she was able to discern or differentiate poems from those random bits of insight and anxiety she’d scrawled in her notebooks. And then eventually she got to the point that those individual poems were starting to comprise a manuscript, as she identified more clearly the tensions of place and self in her work. So again, whether “schooling” means MFA, or whether it means workshops in other places, it should entail consistency, discipline, rigor.