So You Want to Get an MFA?: An Open Letter to My Students

Over at the Huffington Post, Stephanie Vanderslice lops off some valuable advice for potential M.F.A. in Creative Writing students:

"Do I believe the Masters of Fine Arts degree in writing can help writers? Absolutely. I better; I'm directing a brand-new program, the Arkansas Writers MFA Workshop at the University of Central Arkansas, that will welcome its first class in Fall 2012. And I've spent the last ten years researching these programs in the U.S. and abroad, ultimately writing a book, Rethinking Creative Writing Programs: Programs and Practices That Work. I'm also a big fan of the work of Mark McGurl, whose book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing revealed that the emergence of these programs had a significant effect on the growth of American literature in the last seventy-odd years. Finally, I have the degree myself, from George Mason University, with a specialization in fiction writing.

"For proof that the Master of Fine Arts in writing is a degree that has been hotly debated for decades, we need look no further than Iowa Writer's Workshop alum Flannery O'Connor's famous remark "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them." After over a decade studying what has been written about the degree, I've concluded that there will always be those who say that creative writing can't or shouldn't be taught, that the programs are rife with teachers who promote generic McStories and McPoems and who lack an understanding of the publishing world, and that the classes themselves are filled with mawkish students interested only in the therapeutic value of self-expression. It's simply too easy an accusation to make and the writers/teachers in the programs are often too busy teaching and writing to defend themselves. I do think there's room for improvement, that's what my book is about, but I also think that we're starting to see programs evolve beyond a curriculum that revolves completely around the workshop. In other words, to quote Sam Cooke, "It's been a long, a long time coming/But I know a change gonna come."

But back to the MFA itself. Here's what I tell my students: . . ." [Read the rest of this article here]