BYAN & the MFA

I'm an advocate of MFAs, for many of the reasons well-articulated here by Julia Glassman. Time, money, institutional support, and if you're lucky, good teachers.

I went to the University of California, Irvine, and I came away strong in the conviction that there are specific, if finite, things a good teacher can teach about writing. These things have to do entirely with craft and nothing with invention or memory or empathy or curiosity or human understanding. But ... craft's important.

When Granta announced its new list of Best Young American Novelists, I was curious how many had MFAs. Here's what I came up with: fifteen of the 21, and one with a PhD in Comp Lit. I wonder how this contrasts with the first round of Granta BYAN announced in '96 (I'm too pooped right now to run those numbers).

Does the new list elevate the stature of MFA programs, or reinforce a low opinion? Please discuss in gross generalities.

Comments

[Jim Ruland]

I was going to say something pithy about not being able to abide insufferable inanity, but as a reader of blogs one could make the argument that I seek it out, so I will offer up as an antidote to Ms. Glassman's self-serving polemic this wonderful nugget from a Bookslut interview with Nick Mamatas, author of the excellent new satirical novel Under My Roof: “Being a student in an MFA program after having spent a decade selling your writing is like being in a burn ward and trying to dance with the patients, their skin scrubbed to the nerve. But, you know, if you want to teach, you need the magic letters, so there I am.”

[janitorman]

"I was going to say something pithy about not being able to abide insufferable inanity, but as a reader of blogs one could make the argument that I seek it out..."

I can't stand up from laughing. And so true, so true.

As for Glassman and Ferris, et al, I mean, let's not completely discount the value of academic programs, undergrad or grad, in writing or any other field (obviously it's required in some technical fields -- I taught myself thoracic surgery; sure my residency was a little messy, but I still think the state should have licensed me; would have cost them less than prosecuting me).

It's impossible to establish the value of MFAs from looking at any selected "best" group of writers, because in addition to learning "craft" in an MFA, you're forgetting "credibility" and the most important one, "contacts". It follows that in a world where credibility and contacts are paramount, those who have them in spades are going to climb higher, faster than others, even if their craft is only average.

I think you can at least say this about the name MFA writing programs: Can't hurt, might help. And it's almost certainly not an unpleasant way to spend a couple years if you have the time and means of financing. I'll even go so far as to declare that if you want to be a writer, and you have the money and marks to get into good undergrad and grad writing programs, you'd be best served by enrolling. My opinion, MFAs in writing aren't all they're cracked up to be, not by far, but that's how I'd advise a young person desiring to write fiction today.

Mamatas had the experience of the working man who goes back to high school ten years after dropping out to join the navy, so that he can now meet the requirements for promotion to shop foreman at the mill. (His oblique, nebulous simile for the experience doesn't do much for me, though.) Also, he's wrong about needing the alphabet soup after your name to teach. Cheever taught writing at the university level after having dropped out of formal education around age seventeen. Sure, those were the days, but give them someone today with the success, respect and prize count of a Cheever and of course almost all schools will wave those academic requirements. Mamatas just isn't known at the level that will get you a pass in the bona fides department should you wish to teach. Also, he could have earned a PhD focusing on, say, biochemistry or quantum mechanics and they would have let him teach writing instead. He didn't have to do that tortuous writing program. (Bookslut goes for the rebel-rebel-tore-your-dress demographic, and they're good at getting it, so from their material you're not going to get the most favorable opinion of MFAs.)

[Accidental Southern Belle]

Might I also point out that MFA's often illuminate to people that they DON'T like to write. I think this might be the dirty little secret of MFA programs that nobody ever talks about. There are lots of people who go to MFA programs, write a book, and then decide, oh, that's not for me. In this way as well, the programs are doing a great service. They give time to folks who want to learn how to write and then they also weed out the folks who think they want to write, but actually don't.

Further, I do think that two or three years concentrating on anything is inevitably going to make someone better at it, so why not do it while you're funded and having people pay attention to your work. Those of us who get to do it are supremely lucky! I'm totally baffled by the bias against MFA programs as it really is just a funded time to write. Why not be biased against Guggenheim fellowships?!

[Moonface]

I would never be one to dismiss the MFA system (could I, in any case?), though I found it interesting, perusing other blogs, how many of the eminent 21 began as bloggers, fairly recently. I read on one that young novelist Russell, for one, was once a blogger for nerve, and one need only look at the father of TEV, who recently signed a deal. I think blogs are just as viable, and perhaps more desirable, an avenue for writers to get their stuff out there.

[Shankweather]

MFA or no, any young author list lacking Chris Adrian's name has no merit. Jonathan Foer:Chris Adrian::Dave Eggers:Thomas Pynchon.

[janitorman]

Belle,

"I'm totally baffled by the bias against MFA programs as it really is just a funded time to write."

I like to drink. A lot. All the time. It's fun, it's even socially acceptable to a point, but it's not really a solid career choice. It's not a "real job." My parents or the government or a private institution or a bank offers to give me enough money to spend two or three years, drop everything and just drink all the time. Would it baffle you that people wouldn't like that?

Members of the general public who are biased against MFA programs think you should be doing something useful with your educational dollar, and writing, especially fiction, doesn't count. (They are thinking maybe accounting.) They believe writers are just things that pop out of the earth whole and writing books, and we already have enough of the pop-up variety, so we don't need any of you kids training yourselves to do it.

Writers who are biased against MFA programs are writers who, for whatever reasons, aren't able to enroll in them, or weren't able as youths. They are the kind of writers who work day jobs, night jobs, juggle kids, spousal demands and all that jazz, struggling to squeeze out a 1,000 words a week, knowing that is just not going to cut it if they are ever going to write, especially fiction, as a career.

Same old story: The haves vs. the have-nots.

[Shya]

Re: janitorman's claim that mfa programs can't hurt, I'll say that I'm currently in the fiction program at brown, and I've spoken to several people here for whom workshopping a piece kills it for them. Indeed, it's often the case for me as well - getting feedback from a variety of people who think they know what they're talking about can really signal a death knoll for highly personal or original work, resulting in a lowest-common-demoninator-type effect. Of course, it depends on the work you're presenting, and also on whether or not you listen to/heed the feedback (though it's quite difficult to completely shut it out, even if it seems far off the mark), but one this is certain – this dynamic distinctly differentiates mfa programs from writing grants. Brown is one of the most hands-off programs out there, requiring very little of us besides creative output, but the workshop element leaves an indelible impression on the creative process, and it's not always encouraging or good. It can dumb down the work, make you take fewer risks. That said, if the program is well-funded and you don’t have to work while attending, why not take your chances?

[janitorman]

Shya, that's part of the "can't hurt": Learning to tell people to take their sanctimonious bullshit straight to hell. That's not the easiest thing to learn directly post-adolescence, I admit. Not the easiest thing to learn, ever.

As a rule I hate workshopping and all that racket; I was speaking more to the dedicated time to write as if that's all you're supposed to be doing, and the exposure to faculty who have actual agents who know actual editors at actual publishing houses. Then there's that piece of paper they give you at the end that if it does nothing else certifies you to teach-to-eat, hopefully in some tenable if not ecstatic employment situation.

It's all kind of a toss up, isn't it? What influence will drive an individual in any given direction? As a child, from the age of about 10 or 11 and on up, I read Orwell, Huxley, some Nabokov, Lewis Thomas, whatever Oliver Sacks had written by that time, various other layman's science, Updike, Amis the elder, Twain, various one-off forays into "classics" authors, and a whole lot, every single novel published during my youth, of Stephen King. Upon reflection, it had to be all the others that taught me what a book could do as "fine art", but it was King that made me want to write, to *be* a writer, that put me in a chair at a typewriter and made me bang out loose ends of inconclusive prose and then later whole short stories.

[Sean Ferrell]

As for the "can't hurt" vs. "learn to tell them to go to hell" argument, it's exactly what I went through. I attended an MFA program and learned that my writing suffered greatly. I no longer wrote like myself, I wrote for a specific audience. It took me years to figure out how to get back to where I needed to be. It took a few years more to figure out what I got out of the MFA program (no contacts for me). What I got was a lesson in perseverence. So many of the people in the program talked about their MFA as a "teachers" degree. And you could tell, just smell it in the air, that most of them wouldn't write one piece after getting their degree. They'd have an MFA and wouldn't be writing at all. I hated that. I didn't want to teach, I wanted to write. Now I'm one of those "writers who work day jobs, night jobs, juggle kids, spousal demands and all that jazz, struggling to squeeze out a 1,000 words a week." At least when I write I feel like it's mine again.

[janitorman]

Sean, I didn't take an MFA and it took me years to figure out where I needed to be in writing, too.

"Now I'm one of those 'writers who work day jobs, night jobs, juggle kids, spousal demands and all that jazz, struggling to squeeze out a 1,000 words a week.'"

May the Lord God have mercy on these our tortured souls. It's a rough hack.

Ultimately all this MFA business is a product of the times. Not so, so long ago, in the arts, of any kind -- it's still somewhat more that way in the less technical aspects of film and theater -- you wanted to do something, you had at your option formal education, or the path of the autodidact, or some combination of both, and you just went and gave it your shot. Hell, it wasn't long ago at all, if you could pass a state's Bar exam, they'd license you to practice law, no educational requirements whatsoever. Now it is that if you want to do something, you take a degree in it, from writing to apparel merchandising to, well, anything. Of all the crazy things, most professional bloggers have bloody degrees in at least some generic liberal arts field. I think we can all agree that a rigorous formal education best serves everyone when sanctioning, say, medical doctors, but the contemporary system of higher education as mere certification to perform menial functions has broken the back of what learning is all about. Arbitrary hurdle-clearing now permeates our American system of education.

Here's the part where I cry, Revolt, youth: Smoke cigarettes, drink too much sometimes, sack groceries by day and scribble verse by night, live in 30-year-old buildings with faulty heating and dare not dream of in-ground swimming pools in brand new prefabricated suburban custom homes that are all "custom" in the exact same way. That is, if I thought it would do any good, which I don't.

[Matthew]

I don't know if I found the Glassman piece all that self-serving, Jim. But I'm in an MFA program. So it served me, too.

Oh, Shya. Your workshop is full of jackasses. Mine, too. And outside the workshop, I really like those jackasses. I've just learned to ignore them every time they say: Have you thought about doing this in third person?

I liked this post by Claire Light.

[BoBo the Clown]

That 96 list is fucking retarded. Not a single one of those authors has done anything interesting with language save maybe Lorrie Moore. Jonathan Franzen makes me want to tear my fucking eyes out. Where's Wallace? Where's Ben Marcus? Where? Where? Where?

[Richard]

MFA programs are a boon to society. They keep violent criminals off the streets for a couple of years.

[Dan]

If the time is right for you to just write with guidance I think an MFA program can be great. It has the problem of teaching young writers what kind of writing is sexy right now though, rather than bringing them out as writers to really develop their own sensibility.

[Dan]

If the time is right for you to just write with guidance I think an MFA program can be great. It has the problem of teaching young writers what kind of writing is sexy right now though, rather than bringing them out as writers to really develop their own sensibility.

[ed]

Re: MFAs. Why pay for the privilege of sitting on my ass when I can do it for free?

[Gwenda]

I suppose I should have responded here, but ended up posting a long comment at Callie's instead. Which I'm now reproducing here (if some of it seems to be responding to points made elsewhere, well, it is):

The thing that cracks me up is that I talk to my friends who are getting or who have visual arts MFAs or multimedia MFAs or music MFAs and no one raises the sorts of issues that you hear about writers getting them. It's somehow more acceptable in these other artforms to acknowledge that, yes, some things can be learned. I don't think I'll learn anything in my MFA program I wouldn't learn on my own given time, but I do believe that I'll learn it a helluva lot FASTER. The MFA is a hothouse, at least that's how I look at it.

And, dude, none of us has the money for this stuff. I'm financing mine completely with student loans that I'll be paying off for years, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

I think a lot of the negative impressions of MFA programs come from two things: 1)writers who choose a program that's not a good fit for them and 2)writers who choose to do an MFA for the wrong reasons (to network, to be praised, etc.). Those people are gonna be disgruntled, and there seem to be a lot of them. One reason I chose my program is because it's really THE program in the kind of writing I do (and automatically immune from many of the criticisms you hear, because there is no movement against voice or genre in YA/children's lit -- only toward those things), but also because I'm not a huge fan of the workshop and in a low res program it's a limited component.

Two years ago, I was as skeptical as anybody. One of the things I love about my advisor is that he flat-out told me that when they first approached him to come teach he said, "You can't teach writing! You learn on your own by writing and reading!" Then he decided to come and he says he's come around to the experience being valuable -- that the tutelage can give a writer the craft tools she needs and refine her process.

I'd also be lying if I didn't say the possibility of being able to teach at some point wasn't a benefit, but mainly I chose to do this because I wanted to get better and I did not feel it right to basically drag a free MFA out of my accomplished writer friends by asking them to be the ones constantly pushing me and critiquing me. There is also something about the time and financial commitment that makes me owe it to myself to do this in a way I never have before.

Anyway, bottom line is I agree completely with your conclusion. (Although I absolutely don't feel that anyone questions the credentials of writers without MFAs -- it seems to be wholly the other way round to me.) We as writers get to choose our own path. Make our own mistakes and have our own successes. My problem is with people railing against MFAs who seem to have no experience with them and who seem to do so in generalizations so broad as to be meaningless. Your path is right for you, not me, in other words.

Sorry for rambling!

[Jeff VanderMeer]

Like any generalization, being for or against MFAs is kind of silly. On a case-by-case basis, for each individual writer, it's going to be a different experience.

As for the Granta list--that just tells me that MFA programs are very useful for contacts and for conferring legitimacy. In addition to promoting talent.

JeffV

[Christopher]

...getting feedback from a variety of people who think they know what they're talking about can really signal a death knoll for highly personal or original work.

Wait, are we talking about workshops or the editorial process?

[Bort]

It's impossible to establish the value of MFAs from looking at any selected "best" group of writers, because in addition to learning "craft" in an MFA, you're forgetting "credibility" and the most important one, "contacts". It follows that in a world where credibility and contacts are paramount, those who have them in spades are going to climb higher, faster than others, even if their craft is only average.

I think you might have misread her essay, janitoran, because her list of authors was not used as evidence that MFA programs were valueable but as proof that the (ridiculous IMO) myth that MFA programs ruin unique voices and only produce repetitive robot writers is totally false.

And it is totally false. If I was going to make a list of the most unique writers that have started publishing the last ~20 years probably a majority of them would be MFA students.

Is it true that there is a lot of redundant and unoriginal writing in MFA programs? Sure, but that fact is MORE true for non-MFA writers or at the very least as true. I used to work as a fiction editor for a national magazine and while I got plenty of boring replayed material from MFA students almost all the non-MFAers work was drivel with no hint of originality.

Either way, if MFA programs are pumping out people like Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Ben Marcus, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link and Charles D'Ambrosio it is pretty silly to pretend that they only produce identical by the numbers writers.

[Bort]

...getting feedback from a variety of people who think they know what they're talking about can really signal a death knoll for highly personal or original work.

Wait, are we talking about workshops or the editorial process?

Posted by: Christopher | March 07, 2007 at 11:48 AM

Yes, this was my first thought to. Do the writers complaining about feedback think they are going to write in a vacuum with no one reading or giving htem advice and then get it published without anyone else commenting on the work?

Frankly I think that when work suffers from the workshop process it is almost always a problem of the WRITER in question, not the workshop. If you can't learn to assimalite the various comments and pick and choose what advice to follow or what needs to be changed, then that is really your own problem. You probably won't be a great writer unless you can learn to do this.

Personally I've never had the experience of people trying to stop other writers' styles or ever felt like I was writing "for an audience" (beyond feeling like I needed to turn in something that was really good to not waste my classmates time).

Anyway, even though I think it is quite easy to maintain your individuality and loner writing persona if you want, I'm not sure I buy the argument that having other writers you discuss your work with is a detrimental thing.

Most of the great artistic movements have come from groups of writers who get together and share ideas and techniques. I'm not saying that workshops are the equivelant of the lost generation, beat poets or surrealist writers, but my point is just that writing in isolation is hardly the only path towards unique writing.

[Christopher]

(This is one of those "me to" type comments.)

Bort makes excellent points, especially this.

If you can't learn to assimalite the various comments and pick and choose what advice to follow or what needs to be changed, then that is really your own problem.

That's all I got. Bort's points are that excellent.

[anonymous bitch]

dude, it's "death knell", and "me, too.". yikes, you're all writers?

[anonymous bitch]

dude, it's "death knell", and "me, too.". yikes, you're all writers?

[Miles Newbold Clark]

The most damaging aspect of the workshop experience has nothing to do with the commentary offered by a story's readers, but the opportunity the setting grants the writer to insert his own opinions and motives into the critical process. When I am standing in a bookstore the writer is not sitting next to me, looking at me anxiously as I offer my comments, unconsciously informing my judgment. If the MFA world was not so professionally-oriented, if it did not carry over so many of the ideas of academic propriety, this would be another thing. Okay, fine, chirographic pretension is breaking down; everyone's an archivist, you have to touch the people to whom you sell your books. Okay, we have pictures on book jackets. A cult of personality, marketing-driven, that literature can only embrace tangentially. Not the surface of screens. It could never be that. Writing is too anonymous, too agricultural to be an effective marketing tool in that fashion.

The issues surrounding one's comfort with the fundamental premises of MFA programs are not raised in other disciplines because the archival process (why else to we produce art, ethologically or otherwise, if not to be rememberd?) is linked differently in those instances. Art's link with an academy stems from a history of being viewed in only one place. Film is an elite collective venture, if only for the monetary cost. Music is something that can be mastered through pure abstraction and virtuosity, and requires years of contained practice. They're fundamentally different things, and confusing them with the process of learning fiction is simply a mistake. The staunchest purveyors (whether they confess to it or not) of MFA legitimacy - people like George Saunders - are extremely careful to use "innocent" vocabulary when praising their own. Two recent story collections he blurbed - both from U. of Iowa Press, both which had nearly identical cover imagery, both which had won U. of Iowa press-sponsored awards - contained the word "heart" in them.

Okay. Tobias Wolff has said, quite rightly, that the stated intentions of MFA programs is simply to give one time, and that can be a noble aim. But it doesn't explain why many programs require their grad students to teach for peanuts, hold down separate jobs and claw for increasingly-scarce academic positions. Even Wolff's Stegner program - tethered to a multibillion dollar university, and containing less than a baker's dozen canidates at any time - admits, on its website, that its two-year stipend is not a living wage for the area. An acquaintance of mine, who's finishing up the Stegner this year, has spent the last two months flying to disparate locales across the country in the hopes of securing a teaching job, post-fellowship. I don't know what this has to do with writing in the ivory tower, or exploring the world, or any program whose stated intention is to provide a room of one's own, and nothing more (not even offering a degree at the end of its two years). Although, perhaps with geological changes in the environment, the Air Conditioning Generation feels more comfortable supposing that its fiction is produced by people writing in boxes. People like Brigid Hughes (who are quoted as saying "I prefer publishing MFA candidates, because most people interested in fiction are in MFA programs) have capitalized on this, and it's no surprise that the fiction in their journals emphasizes "window" imagery. If the people looking out these windows weren't mostly looking at a loan recept and a resume, it might be worth it.

Those who think the MFA world is criticized most ardently by those outsed from the process should google "Columbia MFA program" - the largest such program in the country - and see what the search results produce, and why those results are produced.

And for those of you claiming that MFA fictionistas produce more (and more elegant) variations than their plebian counterparts: there is a soon-to-be-published collection of fiction that you should read before passing judgment.