Happy Thanksgiving and to MFA or NYC: flaws in the logic

Happy post-Thanksgiving everyone! Hope you all had a wonderful holiday weekend. I had to start a class (on the 22nd – I know! Crazy timing for a new quarter!) but other than that Glenn and I managed to have a pretty fun time despite being far from our families this year and getting snowed into our little neighborhood – we had four or five straight days of snow and ice here in the wooded outskirts of Seattle, which definitely put us in the Christmas spirit. We drank hot chocolate and watched holiday movies (Brigit Jones, the Holiday, About a Boy, When Harry Met Sally – total chick flick fest.) We got to go out and see the Christmas lights at Bellevue Botanical Gardens and are planning an outing to go out to the Tacoma zoo for some more holiday lights plus tiger cubs! (One of the tiger cubs has been struggling for her life but she’s on the mend – how do I know this? I keep track of all baby tigers in the news.)

What does all this have to do with poetry? Nothing! So let’s talk about writing. I went to see a poet friend yesterday and spent a couple of hours talking about his book manuscript, about publishing, about poetry in general. It was so much fun! I hope some publisher snatches up his book soon. We talked about going to the publishers with open submissions and query systems rather than waiting around and going the contest route, which can feel very much like a beauty pageant circuit, one we have no control over and is often fixed anyway. (See this post for more on that…)
There was a crazy article in Slate about being a writer, something about the “MFA versus NYC.” I can guarantee you neither of these things guarantees that you will become a writer. If you both get an MFA and move to NYC, you could still totally not be a writer. You could also never get an MFA and never move to NYC or even visit and still be a great writer. There are lots of examples. This is something my engineer father would call “a false dichotomy.” Anyway, Kelli (here) and Charles (here) have already made some very good comments about the article. I was even moved to comment on the article myself at Slate, to say that hey, maybe the Internets have changed some things about publishing and networking and maybe that fact should have been included in the article. But what do I know?
Also it reminded me that writers sure like writing about themselves and their problems, don’t they?
So besides the “not mentioning the internet revolution and its impact on publishing,” which I’d say is a pretty large omission, this article fails to state what I have observed at both the program I attended and the program I currently teach in. Which is, many of the students who go to MFA programs are not going to become “professional writers” as a career. Many of my MFA students are already high school teachers, or they teach at the community college level, and they get their MFA to both learn more about poetry or fiction or whatever but also because it benefits them in the form of raises and promotions to get that MFA. Many of them aren’t that interested in even publishing a book themselves. They just want the education (and the raises.) Others go just to learn. My decision to get the MFA wasn’t motivated by the thought of getting a job as much as the desire to start taking myself seriously as a writer. All an MFA really does is buy you time and space (and a motivating mentor/teacher/advisor or two) to write. It does not guarantee anything, it does not make you a literary star and it certainly doesn’t provide an automatic entry to tenure-track teaching. I think most MFA students know that.
As someone who, like most Americans, doesn’t live in NYC and doesn’t go to publishing parties on a regular basis, I know they are important but I question if they’re as important as this article might indicate. I hope not, because that would not be healthy for American literature. Or maybe that’s why there are so many boring books about NYC! Geez, people, there are like a million other interesting cities out there – and I’ve lived in a lot of them – LA, Seattle, San Francisco, New Haven, Knoxville, Richmond, Napa – go out and live in one!