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In August of 1995, my friend Kate and I made the long drive from Atlanta to a small town in the foothills of the Ozarks, a journey that ended with nineteen miles of winding, two-lane country road called the Pig Trail. Kate drove a twenty-four-foot Ryder Truck, and I followed behind in my faithful Toyota. That night, we didn’t stop to sleep. Driving along the Pig Trail, which was enveloped in a kind of medieval mist and bore the stench of thousands of chicken coops, I began to question my sanity. Who leaves a decent job and a bustling city for a quiet hill town in the middle of nowhere, committing herself to four long years of writing? And who would be benevolent or naïve enough to hire me after this whole thing was over?

The Pig Trail seemed to go on forever. As dawn broke, sweetly dilapidated farmhouses began to take shape in the fog. We pulled into town at 5 A.M. on a Sunday morning, exhausted and disoriented. I parked the car on some anonymous street and joined Kate in the Ryder truck. We spent a fruitless hour driving around town looking for my apartment and ended up smashing into a giant oak on the outskirts of campus. The tree was barely injured, just a scar along the trunk and a single low-hanging limb detached. Everyone was asleep, the moon was still bright in the sky, it had been accidental, and we were uninsured; we determined that the tree would live and drove away without notifying the proper authorities. Later that day, after locating my apartment, I drove the Toyota into a ditch and was rescued by a couple of locals in a pickup truck, whom I paid off with a case of Guinness. I would later learn that (a) the going price for a rescue-op was a six-pack of canned Bud, and (b) the tree was registered as a national historical landmark. But that is beside the point.

The point is I should have realized that first day, as Kate and I stood examining the injured tree and later the battered car, that I had embarked upon a path of destruction that would be directed both inward and outward. A kind of creative destruction that I would come to remember as one of the most raucous and ill-advised periods of my life, a time that was both productive and maddening, marked by lots of sex and more alcohol and a few stories thrown in for good measure.

What I remember most vividly about my first year as an MFA candidate are the parties. First came the welcoming party at the home of a beloved bear of a professor, whose back-yard contained a little pond in the shade of some big green trees. That’s the first time I remember taking my clothes off as an MFA. There we were—a bunch of would-be Zeldas sans the fame and the old family money—frolicking in our underwear in a pond in the moonlight less than one week into our graduate school experience. Then there was a party in a dreary seventies-style housing complex, during which we all went outside and sat in an enormous circle and made out—girl on girl, boy on boy, boy on girl, depending on the way the bottle spun—until the neighbors came out and complained that we were threatening the moral integrity of their young children. There was the all-night brew-pub get-together during which I got deliciously smooched by a handsome professional golfer named Mandy, but I was not quite ready to be a lesbian so I never called her, and from there on out my friend Wade from Texas kept serenading me with the melancholy song “Oh Mandy, you kissed me and stopped me from shaking, but then I sent you away.”

I was far from an innocent bystander in all of this. I was, after all, responsible for the body-parts party, just three weeks into the semester, during which I took my guests one by one into my walk-in closet, swabbed a chosen body part with finger paint, and impressed their hands, breasts, thighs, and other anatomical delights onto a huge white sheet. I remember this party well because it was the first time I got a full frontal view of my future husband, a quiet San Franciscan with a disconcertingly beautiful head of hair who was so kind as to allow me to enrobe his most valuable part entirely in violet.

Lest you get the wrong idea, it was not all fun and frivolity. About halfway through the year, I sank into a funk from which I could not seem to recover. Instead of writing fiction, which is what I had joined the program for in the first place, I spent most of my time on the two composition classes I was teaching. Because I was new at teaching and terrified of making a fool of myself in front of a roomful of expectant freshmen, I overprepared and spent many hours each week grading papers. Most of us taught two classes of twenty-five or more students, who were required to write at least six papers per semester, plus revisions: You do the math. In addition to the teaching responsibilities, there was a rigorous required course on teaching composition and a form and theory course. The fiction workshop, which met once a week, tended to get the dregs of my energy, and I wasn’t the only one who fell into this pattern. I suppose I went into the MFA expecting some sort of kick-ass writing camp. I got my ass kicked all right, but not by writing. It was the unglamorous rigmarole of academia, combined with my own immature devotion to brew pubs and parties, that ultimately snowed me under.

By December, I had only written one new story, and I was turning in old material for workshop. It wasn’t the best way to approach the MFA, but I wasn’t alone. I’ve heard the MFA described as a sort of privileged existence, and while it may be true for those whose parents are footing the bill, it certainly isn’t true across the board. I will concede that taking three classes and teaching two is far preferable to working a regular office week, but it doesn’t leave much time for writing. Most people go into an MFA with a twofold desire: to become a better writer, and to write a book. While many achieve the first goal, the latter is far more difficult.

To add to the many distractions from writing, I had fallen in love with the San Franciscan—with his Elvis curl and his obscure taste in music and his alarmingly elegant hands—and I did not know how long he would continue to be tangentially involved with his previous girlfriend, who was still calling him daily from California. I was drinking too much, sleeping too little, and experimenting with sex toys I’d never contemplated before. It was in this small town in the foothills of the Ozarks that I discovered such accoutrements as the chastity belt, the cock ring, and the leather strap. I like to think all this added some edge to my writing that hadn’t been there before, but it is a common flaw of writers to rationalize everything we do or experience, claiming that it will make us better writers.

By the second semester, I decided that if something had to suffer, it would be teaching rather than writing. So I spent nights at an antique sewing table in my apartment on Garland Avenue, with the enormous gas heater blasting warmth into the rooms, drinking pots of coffee and typing stories on a Mac Duo-dock. My apartment was the top floor of a two-story house, and on several occasions my downstairs neighbor, also an MFA candidate, would come tromping up the stairs in the middle of the night, red-eyed and visibly annoyed, pleading with me in his thick Irish brogue, “Michelle, dear, you’ve got to take your shoes off.” I would glance down at my feet, only to realize with embarrassment that I’d been stomping across the hardwood floor in my clogs. On other occasions the same neighbor would show up in a state of drunken good humor and tell me long, rambling stories, or wash my dishes, or both, and it was on those nights that I felt I was coming pretty close to what a writer’s life really was—no glamour at all, no fame or fortune, just a vaguely satisfying sense of communing with other literary types who were as messed up as I was.

The stories I was writing during that time were rife with sex, perhaps because I had not yet learned to separate life from fiction. Once, another student had this to say about one of my stories: “People don’t have that much sex. It’s not realistic.” The night before I had watched a graying fiction writer who suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder perform cunnilingus on a young poet in my bed, while the poet’s boyfriend looked on. I considered mentioning that the student in question didn’t know much about what was going on after workshop, but it didn’t really need to be said, because there were only a couple of folks in the class of sixteen who hadn’t seen their colleagues in compromising positions.

I wasn’t the only one who brought my extracurricular escapades into the workshop in the guise of short stories. There is something very incestuous about the workshop experience, particularly in small towns where the students tend to spend a lot of time together. It’s rather disconcerting to sit around a table participating in a critique of someone else’s work, only to realize the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you’re a very likable character. Or to hear someone who isn’t part of a particular clique—writing programs are breeding grounds for cliques—say, “This could never happen,” when half of the people at the table were actually present when it did happen. (Which is not to say that “But it really happened” is ever an excuse for bad writing.) I remember submitting a story for workshop (it was called, I believe, “Telltale Signs of Love and Deception”) with the sole intent of suggesting to the fellow from San Francisco that I was into him for more than sex, that I might, in fact, be getting attached. He didn’t seem to get it, or at least he pretended not to; he has always been a master of subtlety.

Another interesting thing about workshops—more true perhaps of the older, more entrenched programs than their newer, more politically correct counterpart—is that newfangled notions about student-teacher boundaries tend to fall away. The workshop by its very nature requires that boundaries be overstepped, that students and teachers share themselves to a degree they’d never dream of doing in a traditional classroom. Which is why I wasn’t the least bit surprised when one afternoon, after I had arrived to class a bit late to find that there were no more chairs available, the professor suggested that I come over and sit on his lap. It was the sort of place where, if I had taken him up on his offer, it probably wouldn’t have caused much of a stir. Another professor used the occasion of a workshop to comment that I (not the story, but the author) was “98 percent sex.” To be honest I didn’t take offense at the time. I was twenty-four years old, adrift in a town that seemed like a step away from my real life, and in hindsight I can see that I very much played the part of the sexual ingenue. They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and I felt the same way about graduate school.

Now, however, as an adjunct professor at two MFA programs in San Francisco, where one plays strictly by the book in terms of “fraternizing” with students, I can see just how shocking such exchanges might seem to someone earning his or her writer’s stripes in the culturally censored atmosphere of the new millennium. The fact is that writing is a dirty, often torrid affair, and its practitioners are among the raunchiest, liveliest, least reverent of citizens—which is why writers and academia, particularly the proper, politically correct academia of the twenty-first century, make for a strange mix. Hemingway chasing bulls in Pamplona, Fitzgerald drinking himself to oblivion in New York, Oscar Wilde drafting long, revealing love letters from prison—these are personae who somehow match the place and the circumstance. But a forty-something truck driver-cum-writer, a shy housewife, and a tattoo artist (the composition of one of my workshops), cooling their heels in a college classroom, discussing character and theme, can be a pretty odd, if invigorating, spectacle.

Big personalities make for big conflict, especially in the lion’s den that is the writer’s workshop. While some programs take a kinder, gentler approach to criticism, the fact is that the timid just don’t fare well in most writing programs. Sitting around a table for an hour and a half while a roomful of writers—some friends, some enemies—tear one’s writing to shreds requires more than a thick skin; it requires an ardent and sometimes completely misplaced certitude that one is indeed a writer, to hell with them all. I remember one workshop during which a nice, dullish girl sat sobbing in her seat while the professor ranted about how she should have never been admitted to a writing program. Imagine applying the workshop system to real life. Once a week, you and your friends meet around a table to critique a chosen member of the group. You spend a few minutes mentioning the victim’s finer qualities, and then you launch into a large-scale attack on every little thing you don’t like about her. Once the three-hour bitch session is over, you’re supposed to go back to being friends.

The mishmash of passionate, narcissistic personalities of varying ages and professions, all of whom share an obsessive-compulsive inclination to write and a poorly hidden insecurity, is what makes MFA programs so interesting. It is also what makes one occasionally feel the desperate need to flee. I remember getting in my little red Toyota late one night, with just a credit card and a bag of Fritos, driving away from campus, and somehow ending up on Route 66. I kept driving until I got to Oklahoma, and when I could no longer stay awake I spent a scary night in a rat motel in an ugly section of Oklahoma City. I had no idea what I was doing there. I’d just felt desperate to get out of Dodge.

And get out I did. The next fall, I transferred to the University of Miami. The man with the Elvis curl had finally cut ties with the ex-girlfriend and was slated to transfer to Miami as well, but during the middle of the summer he accepted a gun-toting job with the government. So in the fall of 1996 I found myself alone in a strange and sprawling city, subletting a studio on the beach and driving twice a week into Coral Gables to attend class. I didn’t have many friends. I didn’t go to many parties. The university had offered me a generous James Michener Fellowship, which included a tuition waiver and a living stipend, so I had huge, uninterrupted chunks of time to write. Sex was an infrequent affair, as the boyfriend was living in New York City and I knew I had to clean my act up if this relationship was going to work out. That’s when I really started to write. I began a novel. It was a very bad novel, full of the supposedly clever asides and inauthentic characters that graduate students are famous for. My professor told me that the novel was bad and I should focus on my stories, but I wanted to sell a book, so I wouldn’t listen. Of course, it turned out my professor was correct, but it took two years of writing and several months of rejections for me to understand that.

Despite the lousy novel, I learned an important lesson in Miami: how to be a writer. In my studio apartment on the beach, I finally grew up and embraced a lifestyle which, until then, I had been unwilling to accept: a lifestyle of solitude. The idea of sitting alone in a dirty bathrobe with a cup of coffee late on a Friday night may not be appealing to the throng of hopeful writers crowding into MFA programs every year. Certainly, it is neither glamorous nor lucrative. But I believe that those nights alone with the computer, week after week, month after month, are essential if one wants to write a book.

You hear a lot about folks who go to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and are courted by agents and editors, the twenty-something chaps with big egos and bad facial hair who land a Stegner and a major book deal. What you don’t hear about are the thousands upon thousands of hopeful writers who go into lesser-known programs in Idaho and Florida, San Francisco and Oregon, Texas and LA and Alaska, and emerge two to four years later with no more to show for their hundreds of grueling writing hours than a largely unpublishable thesis of one or two hundred pages. Iowa and Stanford aside, the truth is that most MFA candidates will not be surrounded by agents and publishers eager to usher them into print. Most will place a story here, a poem there, in reputable journals with limited readership, journals that pay only in copies. And most will watch years, if not decades, pass between the time the degree is in hand and the first book is accepted for publication.

During grad school, much emphasis is placed on the thesis, but this tends to be an artificial construct; serious writers get better over time, and most folks who take an honest look, a few years down the road, at the work they did in grad school will find it rather sophomoric. The thesis itself is usually full of stories and poems that have been put through numerous revisions and repeated workshop sessions, and not always to the story’s benefit. Only two of the stories from my thesis actually made it into my first book; most of the stories were written after the MFA, while I was working odd jobs in Manhattan. No agents came knocking at my door until after my first book, a story collection called The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, was published. By then I had a novel to sell, but not one of the agents who contacted me was willing to represent a literary novel burdened by what they deemed to be the commercially undesirable theme of lesbianism. After my second book, Dream of the Blue Room, was released by a ballsy independent publisher who didn’t care that the book wasn’t commercial, it was easy to get an agent, but the ease factor ends there. I’ve never made enough money from writing to take a semester off from teaching, and because I can’t imagine living anywhere other than San Francisco—where tenure-track jobs are scarce and you can’t walk into a coffee shop without bumping into a published author—it is likely that I will continue to piece together teaching gigs from one semester to the next.

There wasn’t a single person with whom I went to school, who didn’t have big dreams: we would publish much-celebrated novels, we would win awards, our names would be remembered. A few of us decided that we would pool the proceeds from our first novels to buy some cheap land and a big house in the country, where we would live together and drink beer and write more books. Perhaps the most fantastical notion of all was that we would write full time. Now, ten years later, only a handful of the writers I knew in my two programs (from a list of several dozen) have published books. No one, to my knowledge, is actually making a living as a writer. Many are disappointed, some are visibly depressed, and some just don’t care, because the years have taught them that there are more important things in life than publishing. I suspect most of us remember the MFA as an amusing jaunt far removed from real life, one that didn’t really get us much closer to becoming writers. To be a writer you have to write—and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you.

So why get an MFA? One reason is the simple comfort of being around other writers in a setting in which writing is taken seriously. Among nonwriters, if you mention that you’re a writer, there are two likely responses: (1) “Would I be familiar with your books?” (2) “Oh, I’ve been thinking about writing a novel myself. What do you think of this idea?” If you answer the first question with something honest but embarrassing like, “Well, I haven’t actually published a book yet,” you’ll get nothing but blank stares from anyone who hasn’t been through the humbling experience of submitting work for publication. The second question is simply painful, because unless you can find a graceful way to extricate yourself, you’re going to spend the next hour listening to someone who hasn’t actually read a novel since high school explain why this one is going to be a best seller. MFA programs provide a cushion from the indifference of the masses, a dreamy albeit temporary barrier between those who are truly interested in literature and those who consider Chicken Soup for the Soul a valuable reading experience. Only in an MFA program will your friends and colleagues understand that a handwritten “not for us, but send again” from the editor of the Green Swamp Review is cause for celebration.

Some of the folks you meet in your MFA program will become longtime friends with whom you can discuss books and movies and the sadly commercial state of the publishing industry for years to come, and that in itself may be a fair trade-off for a couple of years in school. You might even end up marrying a fellow MFA, a phenomenon which occurs quite frequently. Take for example the guy with the Elvis curl, who is gainfully employed and sleeping permanently in my bed, preparing in his quiet, gracious way for fatherhood. He also happens to be my best reader, the one person who sees everything I write before I send it out.

In addition to providing a community of writers, an MFA program will give you deadlines. In a two-year program, you’re likely to take four workshops, during which you will be required to submit a minimum of eight short stories total. For poets, the numbers go up dramatically. All of this work will receive serious, thoughtful reading by a few, if not all, of your colleagues, as well as your professors. Eight stories in two years is a pretty good chunk of work, and if two or three of them are good enough to be published, then you’re on your way to something—probably not fame or money, but at least the vague satisfaction of knowing that somewhere inside that insecure, narcissistic, warped head of yours lurk the beginnings of a writer.

So do you need to go to school to become a writer? Probably not. What you do need to do is read and write and read some more. Revise, revise, revise; educate yourself about literary magazines and publishers; send your work out. Take at least one serious workshop in creative writing before plunging yourself into the MFA life. If you decide the MFA really is for you, look for a school that provides at least partial funding so you don’t have to mortgage your house or offer up your first-born as collateral. Then brush off your finger paints, put on your poker face, and get ready for a very weird ride.