(Hi, folks! For the time being, some, most, or all of the fol­low­ing links will still revert back to the orig­i­nal Writ­ing About Writ­ing web­page over on Blog­ger. This is not a mis­take. It just takes a long time to move thou­sands of arti­cles. Thank you for your patience as we nav­i­gate this tran­si­tion.)

Assaulting the Ivory Tower

I remem­ber exact­ly where I was when I decid­ed there was no way in hell I was going to pur­sue a tra­di­tion­al MFA pro­gram*. I was sit­ting in Sat­urn Cafe in Berke­ley cel­e­brat­ing a friend’s birth­day and dis­cussing Cre­ative Writ­ing and the gap­ing flaws in the MFA system—how it had begun to look like Ponzi scheme, and their par­tic­u­lar antag­o­nism towards any­thing genre (as defined of course, by them).  Still, I admit­ted that there still might be a chance that I would still get a tra­di­tion­al MFA from a respect­ed school because I love teach­ing, and it would be amaz­ing to get to teach cre­ative writing—even if I had to teach pre­ten­tious under­grads who all want­ed to be Stephen King.

That’s when I heard the hor­ri­ble truth.  A truth so hor­ri­ble, I had to run home and look it up on Google to con­firm its hor­ri­ble­ness.  But it was indeed not only hor­ri­ble, but also true.

He told me MFA’s were no longer the ter­mi­nus degree of Cre­ative Writ­ing.  Now there are PhD’s as well, and it won’t be long before teach­ing CW at the col­lege lev­el will require a doc­tor­ate.

And that dashed it. That was it for me.  I was­n’t going to spend years of effort, tens of thou­sands of dol­lars (prob­a­bly of debt), com­pete with hun­dreds of oth­er MFA stu­dents for the same cou­ple of dozen oppor­tu­ni­ties, be con­trite with a snob­by fac­ul­ty about their vision of “what is art,” and lose my sense of what actu­al­ly appeals to wide bod­ies of read­ers (and gen­er­al­ly what actu­al­ly tends to become an impor­tant work of lit­er­a­ture) in favor of the Avant Garde self-con­grat­u­la­to­ry world of lit­er­ary “high art”… and THEN, after all that, have to deal with the fact that aca­d­e­m­ic infla­tion had made my fine arts degree even more use­less and unmar­ketable unless I spent anoth­er half decade doing the same.

No thanks.

Don’t get me wrong, I sing the prais­es of high­er edu­ca­tion, and I know a lot of MFA stu­dents (cur­rent and grad­u­ates) who value(d) their expe­ri­ence.  But there are huge prob­lems with the cur­rent MFA sys­tem in Cre­ative Writ­ing.  Some are shared by the whole fine arts/MFA sys­tem in gen­er­al, but many are unique to the new­er cre­ative writ­ing pro­grams and their more recent explo­sion of pop­u­lar­i­ty.  None of these issues would be solved by a PhD pro­gram, and in fact I can’t think of one that would­n’t be exac­er­bat­ed.

So at the risk of enrag­ing my more edu­cat­ed friends, I assault the Ivory Tow­er with a mir­ror shield in hand.

“Rea­sons” (not) to get an MFA in Cre­ative Writ­ing
The Big Changes ARE Hap­pen­ing in Lit­er­a­ture, You N00bs.
The Mail­box: Are you jeal­ous of the “real writ­ers” in the MFA pro­grams?
Bioshock Infi­nite: Your Argu­ment is Invalid


*I haven’t ruled out an advanced degree alto­geth­er.  I may do a MA in Lit or a non-tra­di­tion­al MFA pro­gram.  But it would have to be some­thing I real­ly want­ed to do for its own sake–not a means to an end.

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