Advice for Post-MFA grads: How to Pay for Student Loans and Fancy Shoes

This post began with a dream I had, probably in anxiety over talking at my old MFA program Pacific, on an Alumni panel in a couple of weeks. The dream involved two petulant girls complaining to me, asking me how they were expected to pay for their fancy shoes and their student loans if they couldn’t get jobs as librarians and didn’t want to go to the temp agencies. In the dream, I was flummoxed on what to tell them. Kind of a funny, obvious dream, right? But one I think about a lot, especially given years of a down economy and increasing college prices. I got my first degree for free – with a National Merit Scholarship and an Honors scholarship on top of the free tuition because my father worked at the university – but my two graduate degrees I had to pay for – though I mostly had a grant cover the costs of my MA in English, and I worked full-time at AT&T as a technical writer the entire time I went to school – the MFA was pretty pricey, and I didn’t have a full-time job to offset the costs, just off-and-on contract and freelance writing.

When I got my MFA degree, it was after quitting work as a mid-level technical manager at the “world’s largest software company” and a mutual decision that my husband and I made after some severe health crises that I was going to become serious about my writing and really go for it rather than trying to sneak it into 90-hour-work weeks and very few vacation days.  We’ve never been well off enough to not worry about money, so for us, this meant knowing we’d have to put off buying a house or going on vacations for a few years (I got my MFA in 2007 – and we finally put a down-payment on a townhouse last year, in 2012, and of course we’re broke again because of it! No fancy vacations for us again, I guess.) We decided also to make some adjustments to our style of living – we thought the sacrifice would be worth it. The MFA was a symbolic change, yes, but I also put very real expectations on myself about what I would be trying to accomplish (to write a publishable book and build up a CV of published poems and reviews) My vision of getting an MFA meant really putting myself out into the world as a writer – taking my work seriously, treating it like a job, writing and submitting and reviewing and later, doing readings and promotions for my first book – over 40 hours a week, every week. I did not expect to get a teaching job or any job directly as a result of getting an MFA. My only expectation was time and space to write, and maybe some friendships with encouraging other writers, and maybe some mentors/advisors who would give me direction and advice as I went through those two years. Half-way through the MFA program, which was low-residency, I got sick and had to take a semester off – but this resulted in spending a lot of time sending out the MS of my first book (at the time called “A Thousand Tongues,” then I made a last minute switch to “Becoming the Villainess”) which I had been working on for five years and finished in the first semester of my program, and then getting the happy news that it would be published. I finished up the second year of the program with a good draft of my second book. Could it have happened differently? Of course. But to me, the MFA was both a motivator and an encouragement to strict discipline and practice of reading, revising, writing – in general, making space in my life for my work as a writer, which I had never really done in a dozen years of (somewhat lackadaisical, I see now) poem-writing and sending out.

But what to tell today’s MFA-about-to-be-or-recent graduates about how to make money after the MFA? Certainly I’ve had some luck after my MFA – some adjunct teaching work, a few paying writing assignments, a few decent monetary literary prizes, and my work as Poet Laureate of Redmond among them – but all that put together wouldn’t cover my student loans I took out for my final degree. And today’s economy is worse than it was in 2007. Tenure-track teaching jobs – something I’ve had in the back of my head since I was a child, what with my father being a tenured professor and my husband’s father the same – are disappearing and I don’t think that model is going to suddenly rise up and reassert itself in academia, somehow – though that would be lovely. Freelance writing jobs – paying writing assignments of any type – are harder to find as newspapers and magazines have folded. The publishing industry has been collapsing and consolidating so much I can’t keep track of it (thank goodness for the small but hearty independents.) It’s hard for any sensible person emerging with a graduate degree in the liberal arts not to feel a little anxious!

On Facebook, a ton of folks piped up – anxious MFA students among them – and offered advice, solace, and opinions. Neil Aitken, who left his job in the programming world to write, publish, and pursue a PhD, offers this: “Unfortunately there’s a glut of qualified would-be instructors out there, so not everyone ends up in a teaching gig  (and some that do, probably shouldn’t).  However, there are ways to make the transition into a non-teaching position.  Think of your skills not as being creative writing specific, but rather a set of tools and skills that can be adapted to many situations and fields.  Writing is done in many fields, for instance — if you have a knack for condensing and clarifying, you might make a good technical writer.  If you’re good at thinking outside the box and arriving at creative solutions, sell your creativity as an asset — and find ways to demonstrate how you have used it to create new solutions for existing problems.  If you’ve worked on a literary journal, you’ve become familiar with certain aspects of office work and the division of labor — depending on your specific roles, you may have gained experience in desktop publishing, web publishing, advertising, public relations, administration, marketing, sales, management, etc.” Professor (and magician!) Jim Brock makes some interesting points about advising students, which should start even before the MFA: “The advising of MFA students should begin well before they even apply to MFA programs.  I tell my students that if they think of pursuing an MFA is about getting a job or about even becoming a “real” writer that they are entering it for the wrong reason.  All an MFA is, at its best, is an artificial and often expensive opportunity to join a ready-made community of writers–and even then, there’s no guarantee that it’ll be a healthy community–and to have an opportunity to devote oneself to writing.  I routinely point out that there are other ways to have that community, and I remind them that if they are devoted to writing, they don’t need that degree.  Now, for some students, this artificial community and its often cool opportunities are worth it and are rewarding for their own sake, and for others, no, there are better and more sane ways to pursue their writerly aspirations.  I think this kind of advising is paramount so that you have fewer individuals who end up feeling betrayed.  My responsibility is to advise students for their interests, not for my self-serving or self-confirming interests.  My own MFA experience was a most happy, fortunate one, but I have to remember the cases where it wasn’t so good at all for some really good writers and friends.  I also have to look honestly at some of the phoniness that attends academia in general and the MFA degree in particular.  Let’s be honest to some of its pretensions and limitations, as well as its difficult rewards, be candid with our students, and not be so naïve when we advise them ourselves, just because we’ve had a little good fortune come our way and believe that others should follow our paths, just to affirm what we’ve done.” My friend, poet and publisher Kelli Russell Agodon, says “Tell them life or their degree doesn’t owe them anything.  And fancy shoes will give them blisters.  That will quiet down those imaginary students.  😉  (Or your kind self may say– buy your fancy shoes from a consignment shop, write well, and focus on what you *have* instead of what you don’t.) ” Jennifer Greshem, fellow Steel Toe Books author and founder or “Everyday Bright,” suggests an alternate path: “Start a business, that’s what you should tell them. Poets have HUGE advantages as entrepreneurs: they are good at observing the world around them, they have empathy, they can make brilliant use of metaphor (great for marketing).”

Anyway, whatever path you choose, to MFA or not, or whatever means you find to pay off those student loans and buy shoes, I say good luck to you. And drop any advice in the comments!