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!
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
Karen J. Weyant
I read all the MFA articles on blogs with great interest — not because I think there is some great battle between those with MFA’s and those without, but because I often debate about whether or not to get an MFA. Money comes into play, of course, and it has been the big reason that I don’t move foreward. But for me, I always thought that those with some MFAs had some magical knowledge about poetry that I don’t have — like what makes a good line break, or how to incorporate more lyrical language into a line.
Jeannine
Dear Karen,
I remember reading posts before getting my MFA too, trying to decide if it was worth the hardship and cost to attend.
The weird thing is, you probably only get out of your MFA experience what you put in. As far as credentials go, it’s fine, but there are no magic answers. I got to work with four tremendous poets I respect, and all of them had different ideas about what made a good poem, a good line break, etc. Talking about it with other students, and with many different faculty, you start to fuse ideas together and find out what works for you. I did lots of reading of poetics during that time as well, and discovered there is no one path/one answer to create good writing. The best things about the MFA: getting feedback on your work, talking about the things you care about in writing, working with other writers and being exposed to new work – you can create all of those experiences outside of the MFA program too, I think, though it takes a bit of effort.