MFAin’t gonna skip it after all

In which Katie makes peace with an acceptance letter

As you may remember, gentle readers, a little over a year ago when this blog began, I had just received a slew of rejection letters from full time MFA programs, and I was processing my disappointment. These days, though, I’m in a bit of a different position.

Along about January of this year, I found myself once again pining for a community of writers and some structured feedback on my stories. I had kept my eye on low-residency programs for a couple of years, so on a whim I did a quick double-check of my options, chose the one I liked, and submitted my application in a flurry of deadline-defying activity. Lo and behold I was accepted at Spalding University.

So far preparing for the first semester, which begins this week, has been busy but satisfying. I’ve already polished up a short story that lay languishing in my home storage vault and sent it in for workshop #1. I’ve read the orientation materials and have begun thinking about my semester study plan. I’ve applied for and received a small scholarship. By all measures, things are going quite well.

And yet, even from the other side of the acceptance boundary, I still feel some ambivalence about writing programs in general. Will I be forced into a mold that makes me just like other writers? Will I be convinced that the way to success is to write fiction that is competent but bland?

Last year, I worked through some of my mixed feelings by pondering statistics connected to writing programs. Statistics like how the number of MFA programs in creative writing has skyrocketed in the last 30 years, from 79 in 1975 to 854 (!) today. And how the number of applicants last year alone was up 25-150%. I wondered, and still do, how many Masters of the Fine Arts this world actually needs. I mean, as a teacher of literature, I’ll be the first to admit that we need some new writers – but do we really need thousands per year?

To move forward with my own projects in the midst of such overwhelming numbers, I found it oddly necessary to hold two rather sticky positions: 1) much of what those other people write is crap, and 2) I can do better. (Neither of these, you understand, has been demonstrated by the scientific method. It’s simply that I found them necessary in order to not lose heart.)

Nay sayings

Yet, just as I was starting to feel comfortable with my sticky positions and carry contentedly on with the MFA prep, I ran across a couple of essays by Jenna Crispin, founder of Bookslut.com. She was like a voice crying in the back of my mind: ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ And ‘Prepare ye the paths of writing ruination.’

In a column called Central Booking, for example, she laments the many writers’ handbooks – and MFA students – that focus on marketing over writing, think of fellow writers as “contacts” rather than colleagues, and use more self-help buzzwords than literary terms. She clearly deplores a soulless, market-driven approach to writing. I do agree with her, but the tone of the piece seems to imply that all MFA programs are like this, and that has caused some unease.

In A Sea of Words, she argues that a deluge of self-published books and how-to writing manuals have flooded the market and created an environment in which new books – even good ones – are met with silence, simply because there are so many other voices competing for attention. Granted, she makes her living as a writer and reviewer, and she’s sent nearly 30 books a week by new, self-published writers, so I don’t blame her for feeling overwhelmed and even a little annoyed. “I feel bad for these writers,” she says, “and the years of effort and money they spent on a writing education, and all of that boundless optimism that had to be required to get to this point. I do not, however, feel bad enough to read their books.”

One of the things I like about this article, I think, is that Crispin reminds me so much of my dearly departed grandfather. He missed the golden days before everyone and their children had an automobile, and he hated dealing with traffic. “Why don’t some of you people just go home?” he would say.

Remnants of a hundred billion bottles

I admit to having the same feeling now, in a different context, when I think about the publishing field. In fact, I often feel like the singer in that old Police song, Message in a Bottle. He’s a lonely guy, “an island lost at sea,” reaching out to stave off despair. He sends his “S.O.S. to the world,” hoping someone will hear him – then a year later a hundred billion bottles, full of other people’s notes, wash up on his beach. “Seems I’m not alone in being alone,” he says. A bit of an understatement, perhaps, but not at all inaccurate.

To me, at least, it seems that writing these days is very much like that.  So many people are writing – and self-publishing – that it’s not even possible to keep up with everything that’s there. Perhaps it never was, but it does seem that social media, ereaders, and blogs (yes, like this one) make it even more challenging.

But back to Jenna Crispin for a moment. She suggests that writing programs exist (or believe they exist) in order to rescue new writers and help them cut through the din. “Storytelling may be instinctive,” she says, “but book writing — whether novel or memoir — is not, and because everyone is now invited to be a writer, we have an industry built up to teach writing to the masses.” And yet, she is not optimistic about their intentions. Notice that she calls the network of programs an “industry”; in the next sentence she calls it “predatory.”

Crispin says: An MFA costs tens of thousands of dollars (true), it’s impractical (there’s certainly no guarantee of book deal or job), and it hurts the quality of American letters (but don’t Dan Brown and Glenn Beck do the same, without the MFA scapegoat?) Crispin gets in an unmistakable dig against predatory programs toward the end: “Those taking [MFA students’] money aren’t going to do much to question their motives, or clue them in to all the other ways to go about things.” Ouch.

If I may mix Crispin’s metaphor with mine, an MFA program is like a rescue boat that demands your bank account number before lifting your bottle out of the water, floating it along ten yards, then flinging it onto the shore where another hundred billion lie hot and useless in the sun.

Much to my chagrin (and oddly, somehow, to my delight), there are plenty of people who agree with her. Elif Batuman, for example, had an intriguing piece in the London Review of Books called Get a real degree, itself a review of a nearly 500-page (and award-winning) book on the rise of writing programs. She deplores the fact that work produced in creative writing programs, which she calls “programme fiction,” is hopelessly disconnected from literary tradition. At best, this writing is bland; at worst, it’s actively harmful to English-language letters and intellectual life.

And remember, Flannery O’Connor expressed the same sentiment quite well, years ago, before the ballooning of programs: “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.”

Keeping calm and carrying on

And yet, in spite of the legitimate dangers, there are good reasons for me to do this program.

I’m in it, obviously, to learn more about writing as craft. There’s the chance that something someone says in a lecture or workshop will change the way I think about writing – or, more likely, about one particular story – so completely that other knotty details will simply fall into place.

I’m in it to see my bad habits more clearly, to annoy some readers now so I can learn how not to be annoying later in my writing life. For any writer, specific feedback on specific pieces, paragraphs, sentences – even if the feedback is negative – is often far more useful than a brilliant lecture, and specificity is what the MFA is set up to provide.

I’m in it to meet other writers, to make connections with people who do their thinking with a pen in hand. Although I’ve met many writers, including a handful interesting, talented ones, since I’ve been in Birmingham, none of the connections have been strong enough for me to apply the word “community” – and community is exactly what I’m looking for. Because, although writing is in one mode a solitary activity, all texts seek to build bridges between minds. A text with no one to read it is, truly, a bridge to nowhere.

So I’m in it, frankly, for an audience – because, even though what I’ll be doing will technically be homework, somebody will be asking to see my stories, asking for my feedback and ideas. Something bigger than me will be getting done and, in my mind at least, that’s powerful motivation.

I’m not expecting to spend four semesters in the MFA pipeline and magically come out the other side with a superagent, a book deal, a million dollars, or a National Book Award. Those things would be nice, of course, but I don’t expect Spalding to hand them over with my diploma.

In fact, if things were to happen too quickly, I would probably feel like I did traveling cross-country with my dad, when I would wake up to find him standing over my bed at 7 am, already full of his second pot of coffee, keys in hand, asking if I was ready to go yet.

Stone pinecone with vines, at home of artist Andy Goldsworthy.

I’m more apt to work in what I would call the “slow art” movement. Like Rilke said, “It means everything to carry for the full time and then bring forth.” So what if my best work isn’t ready until I’m 50? I want to know I got it right, and that I said something worth hearing.

This MFA thing is just the next step. And, somehow, I’m in the same place I was last year, dealing with those rejection letters. Remedy for rejection: keep writing. Remedy for success: keep writing.

So thanks for the warnings, Jenna Crispin. I’ll do all in my power to learn what I can, to practice what I can, without being absorbed into an MFA-hive mind. I’ll plan to drink their whiskey without drinking their Kool-Aid.  And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to write my own happy ending.