“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think that university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”
—Flannery O’Connor, Iowa MFA grad
University of Iowa launched the first writers’ workshop in 1936. By 1972 there were seventy-three creative writing programs in the United States; by 2009, 822.1 Before the arrival of MFA programs, every serious writer was an autodidact. Some still are.
Had an MFA program been available, would Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Jack London, or any of the other high school dropouts have attended? Had they done so, would their work have been different, or better? Had O’Connor, Irving, Wallace, or any other noteworthy MFA graduates not attended, would their work have been as good or as celebrated?
The practical question for the 99 percent author is this: Like the original masters, shall I self-teach craft while attending the business school of hard knocks? Or, shall I spend $100K I don’t have and get an MFA?
More and more are deciding to go the second route. In the last two decades, 150,000 creative writing MFA diplomas have been issued.2 Competition has become increasingly keen. If nothing else, academia provides an early introduction to the one inevitability of the profession: rejection.
The national rejection rate for MFA programs averages 95 percent. At top universities, the rate is higher. Iowa receives 1,300 annual applications for fifty slots. Johns Hopkins had 260 applications for their two fiction openings in 2009.
Before winning the Pulitzer and selling more than 75 million books, James Michener was turned down by every writing program to which he applied. In the early nineties, he gave the University of Texas $20 million to start the Michener Center for Writers MFA program (which, in 2009, processed five hundred applicants for five openings, as did the University of Michigan and University of California at Irvine).3
Other highly competitive programs include those offered by Columbia, Boston University, Syracuse, NYU, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, Cornell, Brown, and Princeton. All tout the publishing successes of their alumni.
BU, for example, advertises that “our graduates have won every major award in each of their genres,” and that they release a novel or poetry collection with a major publisher every month. Moreover, they earn tenure-track professorships at noted universities. “We make, of course, no such assurances,” BU concludes. “Our only promise to those who join us is of a fair amount of time in that river-view room.”
Most programs weigh applicants according to four criteria: talent, ambition, teachability, and collegiality. So the selection process is subjective. Addressing ambition in their interview or written self-description, most aspiring authors will, without compromising the truth, make clear they are ready to sacrifice a limb for publication. This is important for the application committee to know since alumni deals and prizes propagate the program, no less than the literary stars on staff. The resident and visiting faculty roster at the best programs (many being alumni) reads like a PEN/Pulitzer Who’s Who.4
The dream MFA postgrad Affirmative Action career goes like this. He debuts with a story in a magazine where his professor publishes; he wins a magazine contest judged by said publisher or is included in a short fiction anthology edited by him.5 Next, represented by his mentor’s agent, he wins a debut fiction contract with the teacher’s publisher or an associated house. Then, on the merits of this title and sequels, he wins grants or awards overseen by his benefactor or a colleague. Such accomplishments win him a faculty position at his alma mater. Now, with the incest cycle coming full circle, he teaches and promotes the next generation of great American novelists.
Sometimes an MFA student will break into the market with material produced before graduation. Iowa profs John Cheever and Stanley Elkin placed their student Allen Gurganus’s short story “Minor Heroism” with The New Yorker and didn’t tell him about the submission until it was accepted. Alice Sebold started her debut autobiographical novel, Lucky, at Irvine. Michael Chabon’s advisor at Irvine, MacDonald Harris, sent the young man’s master’s thesis, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, to his agent, who soon landed a $155,000 advance from William Morrow for the coming-of-age novel.
Granted, most MFAs do not enjoy such good fortune. Some are undone by the competitive pressure. Rick Moody, now an NYU professor, complained of this in the Columbia writing program he attended in the eighties. His classmates would, he wrote, “eviscerate their enemies and lionize their friends. I was often among the eviscerated.”6
Still, the writer who perseveres and earns an MFA, as Moody did, has a leg up in the submission process. All other things being equal, an overworked editor or agent is naturally more apt to pick an MFA ms. from the slush pile over another GED, BA, or BS ms.
Some teachers today warn their students not to overestimate this advantage. Novelist Dani Shapiro, who has taught at Wesleyan, Columbia, and the New School, tells her students that a degree will “entitle them to nothing”—that, unlike law or med school, “writing school guarantees them little other than debt.” The Best New American Voices 2010 editor emphasizes this first lesson not to be “sadistic,” much less “unpopular,” but “because it’s the truth.”7
The caveats of other prominent MFA professors relate to a fundamental flaw in the educational approach itself.
E.L. Doctorow, who taught at Yale, Princeton, and NYU, told The Paris Review, “The great danger is that you are creating and training not just writers but teachers of writing … teachers of writing begetting teachers of writing, and that’s bad.”
When the magazine asked Wallace Stegner, namesake of the prestigious Stanford University fellowship, about the proliferation of MFA programs, the Iowa Workshop grad and Pulitzer Prize winner called it “dangerous” because the training is “all analytical, all critical. It’s all a reader’s training, not a writer’s training.”
Susan Sontag, who taught at Sarah Lawrence, found that the programs could be no less damaging to teachers than to students. “I’ve seen academic life destroy the best writers of my generation,” she told The Paris Review.
Many such Prestige writers don’t make enough on their novels and are obliged to teach. Few like it. Wages are low: The average nontenured professor earns between $8,000 and $15,000 per semester.8 Moreover, creative teaching approaches are often discouraged: When a loaded Barry Hannah packed a revolver to class to demonstrate the six movements of a short story, he was fired. But worst of all, the classroom takes the master away from his work and cuts his focus, and nothing is more intolerable to most artists. “When I did finally do some teaching, it completely ate me up,” said Jonathan Franzen.9 More than that, as pointed out by William Gass, who taught many years in spite of his choleric disposition, “Creative-writing teachers, poor souls, must immerse themselves in slop and even take it seriously.” But even more trying for him early in his career was his feeling that “I wrote far worse stuff than I see from my students.”10
In his 1991 title, On Writing,11 crime novelist and Boston University professor George V. Higgins echoed his colleague. He complained that most writing students recycle the same six stories: “Old man dies; old woman dies; why I hate my mother; why I hate my father; how I lost my virginity; how I tried to and failed. That’s it.”
Stephen King covered his share of this territory and far more. While some of his contemporaries were doing grad work, he worked at a motel laundromat by day and on shorts for men’s magazines by night. He believed that one learns to write by reading and that classrooms do little more than teach terminology and promote exclusivity. “The keepers of the idea of serious literature have a short list of authors who are going to be allowed inside,” he declared in his 2006 The Paris Review interview, “and too often that list is drawn from people who know people, who go to certain schools, who come up through certain channels of literature. And that’s a very bad idea—it’s constraining for the growth of literature.”
1 Louis Menand, “Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing be Taught?” New Yorker, June 8, 2009. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/06/08/090608crat_atlarge_menand?
2 Paul Vidich, “The Future of the Book -- Publish Or Perish: The Short Story,” The Millions, May 26, 2011.
3 Jessica Murphy Moo, “Writers in Training,” The Atlantic, July 2007.
4 For example, the Iowa Writing Program: Wallace Stegner, Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, John Gardner, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, Denis Johnson, Thom Jones, Charles Wright, Richard Bausch, T.C. Boyle, Allan Gurganus, Ron Hansen, Jayne Anne Phillips, Bob Shacochis, Curtis Sittenfeld.
5 MFA students who became teachers who became editors for The Best American Short Fiction series: Raymond Carver (Iowa), Gail Godwin (Iowa), Jane Smiley (Iowa), Ann Patchett (Iowa), Richard Ford (Irvine), Michael Chabon (Irvine), Alice Sebold (Irvine), Amy Tan (Irvine), Tobias Wolff (Stanford), Geraldine Brooks (Columbia), Louise Erdrich (Johns Hopkins), Lorrie Moore (Cornell), E.L. Doctorow (Columbia).
6 Rick Moody, “Writers and Mentors,” The Atlantic, August 2005.
7 Dani Shapiro, “A Writing Career Becomes Harder to Scale,” Los Angeles Times, February 2, 2010.
8 Matt McCue, “Because Writers Who Can Write, Teach,” New York Magazine, December 20, 2010. http://nymag.com/news/articles/reasonstoloveny/2010/70053/
9 David Amsden, “The Write Start,” New York Magazine, July 21, 2003.
10 Thomas LeClair, The Paris Review interview with William Gass, The Art of Fiction No. 65. July, 1976.
11 George V. Higgins, On Writing: Advice for Those Who Write to Publish (Or Would Like To), (New York: Henry Holt, 1991).