There is no such thing as an MFA
The mythical secret of writerly success
Depending on whom you ask, MFAs are either the cause of all the ills of contemporary American fiction, or an embarrassing interlude akin to having tried and failed to start a cupcake shop. It should be more common for writers who have an MFA to say in print, ‘Yeah it was fine; it was good to have my work read closely and critiqued. I made some friends and connections and moved on to the next thing.’ That this is exactly how it goes for most people who attend an MFA makes it that much less satisfying of a yarn.
Most MFA discourse is, to borrow a favorite term from the study of writing, overwrought1. Discussion of MFAs is draped on all sides—among MFA-havers and not-havers—with shame, resentment, and other bold-faced emotions that are popular on the Internet. The endeavor of writing fiction is going to involve plenty of pathos without conjuring it up where it doesn’t belong. So I’m here to say that, while there is such a thing as a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing, there is no such thing as an ‘MFA’ in the totemic2 sense that seems to recur in discourse about American letters.
To give you a sense of what I’m writing against, here’s Brandon Taylor outlining a common form of MFA discourse in a recent piece about Ross Barkan’s Glass Century:
What I will say about this is that, one, MFA programs are not aesthetically programmatic. There is no MFA style. There is no unifying aesthetic vision of MFA fiction because MFA programs are not confederated or organized. They do not belong to an aesthetic program. Much of what people complain about when they complain about “MFA fiction” is merely literary realism as it has unfolded in the Anglophone world post-2015. Your beef is not with MFA programs. Your beef is with mimetic realism. Take it up with Auerbach. …
Once again, the MFA is being made a scapegoat for something totally unrelated because people do not know their fucking terms or because one of their teachers once told them to write some realism. Like, grow up.
Taylor nails it: MFAs often get blamed for things that are either implausible or impossible for a collection of disparate graduate programs to have brought into being. To take a pet example, MFAs certainly aren’t solely or perhaps even primarily responsible for the stripped-down, machine-tooled prose you see so often now in literary fiction. I’d argue that’s more the fault of commercial publishers and their abject terror at the thought of a reader having to look at a sentence twice (or even, it sometimes seems, once).
Though this piece isn’t intended as a defense of MFAs so much as a meditation on what they are and how they get discussed, I’ll admit to being biased. I have an MFA from the University of Montana. My beloved mother is one of the founding faculty of a very good MFA at the University of Wyoming. I’ve known whole regiments of MFA-holders and MFA instructors, from programs famous and obscure. I’ve talked to them at length about their experiences studying and teaching at MFAs. Talking about all the ins and outs of being a fiction writer could even be called one of my hobbies.
What I’ve taken away from years of conversations about MFAs is that there’s always a process of dealing with disappointment. The hope when you arrive at an MFA is that someone will show you exactly how to be the writer you aspire to be, and that you will then write fantastic books and be rewarded with money, fame, adulation. Even if you know going in that this is impossible, that there’s no secret to be imparted, there tends to be at least some deflation when you emerge after a few years without having been initiated into the mysteries. Is this all there is3? You get your writing critiqued, hope to get a bit better, and then you just have to keep writing and see if anyone ever cares to read it?
Yes, that’s all there is. No, it’s not at all satisfying to admit.
Which is where those who get MFAs and those who fulminate against them from the outside are often exactly aligned: Both groups want there to be a secret4. There has to be some discrete lever that’s being turned inside writing programs to make literary careers happen. Whether you’re pursuing an MFA or trying to tear down the idol of the MFA (or both), the MFA has to be a labyrinth that, once it’s been explored and mapped, will reveal a comfortingly tangible truth. The truth of how to write a really good book and be rewarded in kind (if you have high hopes for your MFA), or the truth of how to publish something pallid and trendy and be rewarded even though you don’t deserve it (if you hate MFAs).
That this process of revelation-leading-to-reward isn’t how it works for the vast majority of writers who get MFAs, even the ones who eventually go on to great success, hasn’t stopped the folktales from enduring. Consider the myth of Iowa. A few times a year, I hear or read someone who seems to imply that everyone who goes to the Iowa Writers Workshop is lavished with a nice publishing deal before they even leave campus.
I’ve known quite a few Iowa grads, across three generations. Some of them are old enough to have been in class with Denis Johnson. Not a single one of them—not the ones with long writerly CVs, nor the ones who have never published a book—would ever claim that everyone who goes to Iowa becomes some kind of literary grandee. It may happen at a higher rate there than at perhaps any other program, but there are at least hundreds of living Iowa grads doing something other than being a successful writer.
So why do we keep saying these things, about Iowa or about MFAs in general? Because it’s reassuring to believe that, somewhere out there, the path to success is charted and replicable. It can be reassuring to believe we could also walk that path. It can also be reassuring to believe our nemeses walked that path, and the invitation to take that journey is the only reason anything good happened to them. Maybe the path is a treacherous labyrinth, and maybe there’s a minotaur at the center of it all, but at least the minotaur can be named.
It’s a lot scarier to admit that, whether you attend a graduate writing program or not, it’s very hard to become good enough to write a worthy book, harder still to actually write the book, and that the fate of the book in the marketplace and in the culture is largely (if not entirely) up to luck. And it’s even more maddening to recognize that the success of those we believe to be undeserving might just be due to an even sillier kind of luck. So we imagine the mythical ‘MFA’ that will cohere whatever narrative we need, minotaurs and all, rather than parsing the relative mundanity of the MFA that actually exists.
You can become a phenomenal fiction writer with or without any kind of degree. MFAs are, by some distance, the most over-discussed academic qualification that our society grants. You’re fortunate if you have the ability to take time out of the rest of your life to attend an MFA, but they’re neither as salvific nor as diabolical as we often hear. I’m sure I’ll end up talking about this more, since it comes up over and over in literary discourse. But probably the best thing that could happen to MFA discourse would be no one using the term ‘MFA’ in public for a year. Then we could invent codenames and sleights-of-hand, and really have some fun, because we’d finally have a secret.
Calvin and Hobbes Corner
We are the odd man out:
This strip displays Calvin’s trademark (and characteristic of boys his age) sexism. It also shows his obliviousness; he’s absolutely the kind of kid who would be lost in his imagination at recess and fail to notice what anyone else was doing. That I was like that at his age is yet another reason, I’m realizing, that I found him relatable. On the other hand, in contrast to Calvin, I really liked hanging out with girls and had a lot of female friends in elementary school.
The punchline gets me because, as we all know, generic ‘stupidity,’ as Susie aptly puts it, would now be much less likely to take the form of mock concern about not being vaccinated. The 2025 version of Calvin would be too young, we can hope, to listen to pseudo-scientific podcasts. And Calvin’s parents would, now as then, seem to tend towards being sensible. But you know what I’m getting at.
A Poem
Janet Holmes is batting away nouns.
That’s not to say there’s no such thing as an incisive critique of what it’s meant to have widespread graduate programs for writers, something that after all is a fairly recent development. I’m arguing that, while MFAs of course have significance—they’re two to three years of a student’s life, after all—there’s one particular set of myths that don’t hold up. As for the Batuman piece linked here, I don’t necessarily agree with everything argued by either her or McGurl, but they’re at least working on worthwhile critical terrain.
I actually like many aspects of this piece by Erik Hoel, to take an example of the ‘totemic’ treatment. But I believe he overstates the specific impact of MFAs versus more varied cultural and commercial currents. He mentions the popularity of fairly flimsy autofiction, for instance, which seems to me to have emerged more from the many fears of publishers (what if someone objects to a writer writing about someone different from them??) than from writing programs. Though I realize this wasn’t exactly what Hoel meant, it seems significant that I’ve never heard of anyone being pushed to write autofiction in an MFA workshop.
There’s also networking, of course, even if it’s just with your classmates and instructors. Sometimes MFA networking leads directly to a star agent or something similarly brag-worthy, but that’s rare, even at top programs.
If there’s a ‘secret’ to getting a nice deal from a major publisher, you’ll have a hard time finding it at an MFA. It might be found by, I dunno, trying to discern the current trends and writing your book very fast so you can ride that wave before it crests. Or maybe the secret, if you’re still in your twenties, is to try to write a louche novel of contemporary youth culture, with lots of sex and drugs—that’s one of the evergreen novel trends. I really wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t know because I’ve lived my life in the shadow of provincial MFAs and among writers whose focus is on how to write something interesting, rather than on how to squeeze money out of publishers. Insofar as there’s ever a secret to market success as a writer, it exists inside the publishing industry, since they are of course the ones who literally make careers. MFAs attempt to teach people to write, which is a different thing entirely.
I don't have an MFA and am unlikely to get one, so I can only go by my feel as a spectator, but it's felt for a long time as though a lot of MFA discourse is just a way to displace literary marketplace discourse. In other words: whatever gets trotted out as an example of 'MFA style' (which itself can vary wildly from minimalist realism to maximalist postmodernism) is almost always, at most, an example of how MFA's respond to market demands (either the market of sales or the market of prizes). The MFA seems like a psychologically satisfying answer to the question of 'Why do books I don't like get published/get big advances/win awards?' if you'd rather see it as an intentional conspiracy. But I tend to think that if the MFA had its way the path to becoming a successful writer would probably still run through a debut story collection.
I also think this sort of discourse just kinda happens as an industry that hasn't required academic accreditation professionalizes itself by normalizing it, and anxieties around professionalization and accreditation manifest themselves. I remember a lot of discussion around film school near the turn of the century as American directors became increasingly likely to have attended it, and culinary degrees in professional kitchens were also subject to some debate as they became a much more likely path to success. Given both of those discourses have died down I'd expect MFA discourse to follow the same route, though obviously both chefs and directors are less likely to write posts, essays, or articles than professional writers, so it may take longer.
"Is this all there is³? You get your writing critiqued, hope to get a bit better, and then you just have to keep writing and see if anyone ever cares to read it?" -- spot on. About halfway through my, ahem, MFA, someone suggested that I view the experience as an apprenticeship. Which proved useful, then and now.