The Creative Writing MFA: Yes or No? Maybe.

Posted by David Duhr in Dos & Don'ts      19 comments

Apr
28

The MFA in writing: Some of us have it. Some of us want it. Some of us wouldn’t touch it with a pole. And some of us might be considering it, especially here at the end of a school year, when we stop partying for a moment and start thinking about our futures. For a moment.

I know some of you wonder if I did an MFA, and/or if I recommend doing it.

If you want the fun answer, listen to me and my podcast pals discuss it in this week’s episode of Yak Babies, “Is a Creative Writing MFA Worth It?”

If you want the quick one, it’s yes, no, maybe, and more. Or, in the words of my co-host Aaron Block, “The question is unanswerable, because it’s all possible answers.”

My Route

In 2006 I enrolled in an MFA program. I signed up for a workshop and a lit class. I dropped the lit class.

I went to the readings, I went to the department functions, and most importantly, I went to the campus bars. I met people and made friends.

The next semester, I signed up for a workshop and a lit class. I dropped the lit class.

I went to more readings, parties, bars. I met more people.

Then I dropped out.

Most of the time, I don’t regret a single one of these decisions. Here are three of the main reasons why:

I Found My Tribe

The people I met in the program have become many of the most important people in my life.

You know one of them; her name’s Justine. If not for our MFA, we wouldn’t have met and befriended and bemarried, much less started this crazy writers’ service. (Or crazy-writers’ service?)

Others include my Yak Babies co-hosts, Aaron, (the anonymous) Brick Road, and Nico, with whom I’ve not only podcasted but also worked and lived.

And even outside of this core four, there are another half a dozen with whom I keep in regular(ish) contact. For having taken only two classes, that’s a great friend haul. I took four years of high school classes and about five and a half years of undergrad classes at two different schools, and the amount of friends I retain from the two of those combined is… three.

I Gained Experience

And it’s through these MFA people that I gained the professional experience that has led directly to what I’m doing today, through WBN and the Texas Observer and my own writing.

For example: Nearly ten years ago, Brick, Nico, and a few others started a book reviewing website called ChamberFour. I wrote my first-ever reviews for that site. It allowed me room to learn and practice and experiment, and in a public way. And using that experience, and those reviews as clips, I started writing for heavier publications, until, a few years later, I was making something of a second (or, OK, maybe third or fourth) living as a freelance reviewer.

Around the same time, another MFA friend asked if I would become her assistant fiction editor at Fringe, an online lit journal founded at our school. The work entailed reading manuscripts by the hundreds, helping to choose the ones we would publish, working with the writers on edits, and promoting each issue after publication. Eventually I became Fringe’s fiction editor, and then its managing editor. You can imagine how this experience and these skills have come in handy ever since.

So it’s fair to say that if I hadn’t enrolled in that MFA program, the following things wouldn’t exist, at least not in their current form, which is a form I enjoy:

My marriage

My closest friendships

My business

My career

And because I quit so early, here’s a thing that doesn’t exist: My student debt.

$$$$$$$$$

It’s hard, and for many, impossible, to talk about an MFA without talking about the finances of the thing. After all, the average MFA in writing costs upwards of $20,000, and many will be a hell of a lot more than that.

During the podcast, Aaron and Brick Road, who both finished our program, discuss these implications:

Brick: “Most of my adult friends are somehow related to [the MFA program], and it certainly influenced who I became. But the whatever thousands of dollars that I spent on it I feel was pissed away.”

Aaron: “That’s the crux of it for me is that it’s a major financial hurdle, or a chain, in my life.”

Brick: “It’s a chain hanging around my neck that I’m gonna be paying for a very long time.”

Aaron: “Forever! I will die with that debt, I guarantee it.”

Brick: “So will I.”

Aaron: “And so that part makes it very hard to say it was worth it, because nothing is worth that.”

By dropping some classes and then quitting, I avoided spending all that money. In fact, I could have taken only one workshop and likely gotten the same results.

So it would be easy for me to say, “Take one MFA workshop and then quit!” Which is essentially what I do on the show. But how many of us can afford even one graduate-level class? I just checked out my school’s current rates—which have risen nearly 50 percent since my first tuition bill—and one workshop would cost nearly $4,000.

Indies

Toward the end of the show, Brick touches on the fact that we enrolled in this program nearly a dozen years ago, and so our experiences may be outdated.

“The [writing] world is different enough now that you have access to those things without going to an MFA program,” he says. “There’s communities you can join that you don’t have to pay to be a member of. Or just go out and start a writer’s club.”

He mentions Grub Street in Boston. Most cities have their own version or versions of Grub Street, which offers all sorts of workshops and events, and for much less money than an MFA.

(To browse such resources in your state, scroll to the bottom of our Resources page.)

There are also writing retreats, online writing-exchange communities, critique groups. There are many ways to get involved and mix with other writers, including going to readings and then hanging around afterwards to chat with people.

But! Those things, for the most part, lack the intensity, or at least the sustained drive, of an MFA program, in which you share a common goal with a group of people who you have class with again and again and again over the course of two or three years.

And your career goals may necessitate an MFA. Despite what Aaron says above about the financial burden, he also discusses how without the MFA he wouldn’t be teaching writing at the college level.

Timeout

In a lot of ways, grad school served as a timeout, a chance for me to catch my breath and reassess. Like I say on the show, “It gave me a reason to go do something else.” It gave me an excuse to leave behind everything and everybody I knew and move halfway across the country to a city I’d been fascinated with since childhood and meet new people. I needed that.

But then, like Aaron says, there are less expensive ways to escape your life than to go deep into student debt.

My thoughts on all of this are colored by hindsight and sentimentality. I probably romanticize that period of my life, as most of us do with days gone by.

I’ll close this with something else Aaron says on the show, which captures my feelings:

“The real answer to me is that I value those days and miss them in a lot of ways. I miss that time period … Nothing will be like that ever again. Good and bad, annoying and not, I miss those people and I miss those places and it’s all changed now.”

Should You Do It?

For so many reasons, I would never say either “Yes, you should get an MFA” or “No, you shouldn’t get an MFA.” It’s ridiculous to believe there is one answer that applies to everybody at once. Or that the answer for you can ever be so simple as a yes or a no.

I did not get one, and I’m glad I didn’t. But I did enroll in one and take some of its classes, and I’m glad I did.

That doesn’t mean your experience will match mine.

Your Turn

If you have an MFA, are you glad you did it, or do you regret it, or is your answer “all possible answers?” Please explain!

If you’re considering an MFA, what are you looking for and/or hoping for from the experience? And what is giving you pause?

Let us know below. You can use a pseudonym if you’re shy! But if you’d still rather talk about it in a private forum, you can email me at david[at]writebynight.net

WriteByNight co-founder David Duhr is copy editor and fiction editor at the Texas Observer and has written for books for the Dallas Morning News, the Iowa Review, Electric Literature, and others.

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