MFAin’t

In which Katie tries to make peace with a slew of rejection letters

As those of you who are not my current employer may know, I recently applied to graduate programs in creative writing. At the cost of hundreds of dollars and a few buckets of anxiety, I applied to seven programs, all in fiction. The goal was to earn the MFA, the Master of Fine Arts. That sounds so appealing, doesn’t it? With this degree, gentle readers, I would be able to master the arts!

The results were less than flattering. I was rejected outright from my top three choices, “denied” by one that was out of my league anyway, wait-listed in a place where it snows too much, and completely ignored by one snotty school from which I am forced to assume rejection. I had to turn down the one program that accepted me, simply because the heavy workload / low funding balance was less than compelling.

As you might expect, my feelings about the process are mixed. On one hand, I’m deeply disappointed the admissions committees didn’t preemptively nominate me for a Pulitzer Prize or, at the very least, offer me fully-funded spots in their programs. On the other hand, though, I’m secretly relieved that I won’t have to move away from boyfriend, family, and steady paycheck to re-assume the grovel-ready status of graduate student.

Of course, I tell myself, in any competition there are those who don’t win. To enter the game is to risk losing. But as I’ve scoured the internet for tidbits of acceptance/rejection information, there’s been something mind-boggling about this year’s application season numbers that may – or may not – help me make peace with my rejections.

According to the official MFA blog and a cousin blog called Driftless House, many thousands (!!) of people were rejected from MFA programs, even though the number of programs has been climbing steadily over the last decade. At some of the most well-respected institutions, applications were up by 150%. Even the programs no one seems to hold in high esteem saw application hikes of 25%.

Personal insecurities aside, there’s a sociological corner of my brain left spinning over the numbers. Do thousands of people really think they can make a living writing books!? I mean, let’s be honest: there’s a statistical limit to the number of MFAs the world actually needs. Isn’t there?

Seth Abramson – a poet/attorney/statistician/lightning rod who is at least partially responsible for the craze in quantifying information about MFA programs – might disagree with me. Seth has speculated that funding for creative writing programs is likely to rise to the level of the GI bill funding after WWII. In an open letter to successful, elitist, non-degreed poets who hate MFA programs (and possibly him too), he even says that increasing the number of people with creative writing degrees is a good thing.

But let’s do this: Assume that all newly-minted MFAs are infinitely talented and equally well-connected. All of them have passion and compassion and life experience. They’ve all passed rigorous admissions standards and, just by virtue of being accepted into a writing program, are already in the top 1% of talented writers in the universe.

How many of these infinitely talented people can actually share the contents page of The New Yorker? How many can win the National Book Award, assuming there’s only one winner per year? How many can Barnes and Noble review and recommend and ask us to pre-order? How many can dance on the head of a pen?

For a bit of guidance, I refer us to the advice of a true expert: Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor earned a graduate degree from Seth’s alma mater, the venerable Iowa Writers Workshop, which, for half a century now, has been the Holy Grail of creative writing programs. (Incidentally, Iowa was also one of the programs that rejected me.) O’Connor wrote over 30 soul-wrenching short stories and 2 novels. If she didn’t win awards in her lifetime, she now has a whole slew of them named for her, and is (trust me) one of the most respected and frequently anthologized writers in intro to lit courses. She was also quite insightful about the vocation of writing in a general sense. In an essay titled “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” she said:

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

(Take that, Seth!)

A bit earlier in the same essay, she drew a contrast between the technical ability instilled by writing programs and the certain je ne sais quois that often outweighs it: “…so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.”

As a very recent case in point, consider the New York Times review of English novelist Ian McEwan’s newest book, Solar. It’s so perfect it’s bad, the reviewer, Walter Kirn, writes. “Instead of being awful yet absorbing, it’s impeccable yet numbing, achieving the sort of superbly wrought inertia of a Romanesque cathedral…It’s impressive to behold but something of a virtuous pain to read.”

In contrast to McEwan, allow me to present someone perhaps closer to the “awful yet absorbing” end of the spectrum: Philip K. Dick. His style is considerably more loosey-goosey than Ian McEwan’s (or Seth Abramson’s, for that matter), but there’s just something about his stories that makes them delicious and hard as hell to put down. Admittedly, his style reminds me somehow of Kilgore Trout, Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional writer of novels so terrible they can only be published in porn magazines. But the ideas in Dick’s stories have been sticking with me and, more often than not, fusing with things already floating in my brain.

Last night, for example, I read a story called “Tony and the Beetles” about a human boy whose family is part of a centuries-old colonizing effort in a planetary system populated by a race of civilized beetles. Space opera, some might call it, but the issues in the story dovetail perfectly with the concerns over French colonialism in Algeria in the background of an Albert Camus story, “The Guest,” that I taught last week in World Lit.  The other night I also read “Strange Eden,” a story about a beautiful woman on a mostly-unpopulated planet who, when she has sex with human men, accelerates their evolution in ways they don’t expect. That one bounced against memories of high school biology class, On the Origin of Species, and not a few episodes of Doctor Who.

You might also have heard of some of the movies based on PKD’s stories: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly.  Sure, the scripts for these movies have sometimes been so heavily adapted that they bear little resemblance to the original stories. But that may just be proof that Dick is still around because of his vision, not his grammatical-structural competence.

It remains an open question and hotly-debated question whether MFA programs prioritize competence over vision. Spend very much time researching them and you’ll find just as many writers who swear by the technical skills they instill as who spit whenever they hear the vision-squeezing letters M-F-A. In all honesty, I imagine that most writers, like me, struggle for both.

What I can say with confidence is this: due to forces partly in and partly beyond my control, I won’t be part of a full-time MFA program next fall. I am not currently an MFA-hopeful. I have joined the throngs of thousands in the ranks of the MFAin’t.

Of course, the first part of dealing with that disappointing news was accepting the fact that I wasn’t among the best of the best in the sea of applications. But a bigger and perhaps more important part of it has been deciding what to do next.

It seems to me that the most important thing about writing — whether it’s a novel or a short story or an essay or a Christmas card — is the act of creation. It’s whatever happens in those few moments when writers and readers alike get caught up in something bigger and more lasting than themselves. It’s making something new in a world that, more often than not, seems ready to fall apart. As Philip K. Dick’s career and Flannery O’Connor’s remarks help me believe, that’s as possible from outside an MFA program as from within it.

So my best response to the bad news: keep writing. As for whether or not there’s room for me in The New Yorker or on the bestseller lists – well, as Scarlett says, I’ll worry about that tomorrow.

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