Why I Never Ended Up Doing an MFA
Saying "no" to a town where every house sells chickens
I mostly write nonfiction about science, faith, and culture here, but I was a creative writing major in college. My senior thesis was a novel I never published. As an undergraduate, I lived a writerly life: served as a poetry editor for the Madison Review, hung out with bohemian writers, published poems in undergraduate literary journals. I considered an MFA program after graduating, but in the end I went a different direction, pursuing a PhD in religion and cognitive science instead. My first grown-up publications ended up being theories and study results, not poems or short stories.
Why did I jump ship from literature?
It’s a strange move at first blush. I’ve always loved reading. I wanted to be a writer from my earliest childhood. (Or a wizard or King Arthur, but these turn out to be even less realistic career options.) It was a no-brainer to declare an English major once I got to college, and to pursue the creative writing track.
But the world of academic poetry and fiction that emerged from MFA programs fed my enthusiasm through a sloppy meat grinder. Little of my initial joy survived intact after graduation.
Even 20 years ago, the vast majority of literary writing in the MFA world already seemed frustratingly shallow and self-referential, a kind of endless irony game rather than the fearless engagement with the living fury of reality one finds in truly great literature. It was exactly the sort of poetry and fiction that would be concocted by cautious, credentialed, status-jockeying professionals, not people who’ve been riding the rails with hobos or mixing with fishermen in pubs.
Just open any issue of the New Yorker to see what I mean.
The Unbearable Smallness of Poems
A recent poem published in that august periodical by someone with an MFA (who I’m sure is a lovely person, so I apologize for using this poem at random to illustrate my point, sort of) is entitled “Are We Going to Leave the Reception or What.”1 Its first lines are
I really wish people
would dance at receptions.
And later on the author laments that
I’m trying to remember if I ever
had a good time at a reception.
The poem crawls through the uncharitable inner monologue of a socially anxious introvert at a wedding party, along the way illustrating many of the reasons I developed such a reflexive distaste for MFA literature as a younger man. As with most contemporary poetry, a painful self-consciousness, even self-obsession, pervades the poem. Ruminating circularly about her own discomfort with wedding receptions, the author gets in her own head, digs in, and stays there. The poem is so private it feels like eavesdropping, but not in a dangerous-thrill way.
To make matters worse, the relatively flat, unmusical language won’t play with high register to elevate the rumination into something universal, but instead embarrassingly appropriates the diction of teenage vernacular (starting with the title). The mood of the poem remains vulgar but not folky, low but not humble. Just, like, careless. No rhyme or meter provides any structure to trellis the poem’s progress, because Serious Poets no longer use form, which is for fascists.
So it’s confessional, free-verse lyric poetry all the way down. This is pretty much all MFA holders write.
But above all, the poem, like almost all contemporary literary poetry, is small. And the smallness is toxic to the imagination.
I don’t mean that its subject matter is ordinary. Keats wrote a famous ode to a bird.2 Auden wrote a long series of poems about the different rooms in his house. Humble subject matter can inspire flights of fancy that are nevertheless grand and bold.
But imaginative boldness is precisely what’s usually missing in MFA literature. The imagination is forced to submissively cower before the flat metaphysics of the 21st century. All subjects are psychologized, reduced to therapeutic tropes, while reality itself remains just a series of objects or (usually pedestrian) situations. Symbols, when there are any, remain private, insubstantial, and vapid. High narrative — in the mold of, say, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King — is unthinkable.
MFA writing in the 21st century, in other words, is literature for a world utterly without magic.
Grazed Over by Excellent Sheep
Many of the problem’s roots are in the professionalization of writing. Somewhere along the line, literature transformed into a credentialed discipline open only to status-seeking university graduates. Great 20th-century writers like Jack London (a self-made journalist-adventurer who started at but never graduated from Berkeley) or Ernest Hemingway (likewise a non–college graduate with a penchant for machismo and violence) would never, ever make it through the carefully curated, socially constrained gauntlet of MFA workshops at a good university today.
Instead, the ranks of MFA programs are largely filled with a subpopulation of the “excellent sheep” former Princeton professor William Deresiewicz wrote about in 2015. In his book, Deresiewicz argued that Ivy League and other elite schools select their students not for boldness, vision, or creativity, but for conformity and the ability to regurgitate teachers’ preferred answers on command.
These aren’t just my observations. A few years ago, the brain researcher and novelist Erik Hoel complained that
a majority of people under the age of 50 successful in publishing today literally got A+s. They all raised their hands at the right time, did everything they needed to get into Harvard or Amherst or Williams or wherever, then jumped through all the necessary hoops to make it to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop or Columbia University, etc.
(But)…Faulkner didn’t finish high school, recent research shows Woolf took some classes in the classics and literature but was mostly homeschooled, Dostoevsky had a degree in engineering. …Not one of these great writers would now be accepted to any MFA in the country.
In other words, elite higher education in literature today selects not for genius, but for being a teacher’s pet. But many of the great writers of the past have very much not been teacher’s pets. They were weirdoes and adventurers, misfits and passionate misanthropes. Geniuses, yes. Tame, no.
Sure, the subpopulation of excellent sheep who end up in creative writing MFA programs may look and act slightly more eccentric and bohemian than the more straightlaced finance or neuroscience majors. But don’t be fooled. They’re teacher’s pets. None of their indulgences exceed an unspoken but carefully patrolled upper bound for actual weirdness. Septum piercings are fine. But having failed a class in undergrad (the horror!) or done a stint in jail for narcotics possession will probably disqualify you from admission to Iowa.3
And because, as Hoel noted, “literature and the MFA program have become effectively identical,” failing to get into that MFA program means the end of your literary career before it starts. You’ve got to be an excellent sheep, a teacher’s pet, to get the credentials that open the door to the professional literary world: contests, awards, name recognition, buzz, teaching positions, introductions to agents at parties.
The MFA, in other words, isn’t a gymnasium to build writerly disciplines. It’s a career pipeline.
Cowardly Would-Be Lions
Development of this regulated career pipeline over the past two or three generations has been great news for the small proportion of writers who possess the requisite combination of discipline and docility to secure the golden ticket of the MFA world: a position teaching writing to other MFA aspirants. But Hoel and other critics are right to complain that it’s been terrible for literature.
Teacher’s pets are known for conscientiousness, but not boldness, courage, or candor. They want school to last forever, since pleasing teachers is their major marketable skill. The real world of business, earning a living, and — most of all, as Deresiewicz points out, of making mistakes — frequently terrifies them.4 When teacher’s pets take over a field or discipline, risky behavior starts to disappear, and adventurous or cantankerous souls are slowly (and then quickly, to borrow from Hemingway) banished.
The MFA world greatly exacerbates these quirks by providing a setting in which the primary source of critical feedback is other would-be writers. Because they’re fellow competitors in a ruthless scramble for teaching roles and publishing deals, other MFA students are not always necessarily 100% motivated to encourage and support you. In fact, they’d often love to find a fatal weakness, some imperfection they could leverage to get you out of the way:
So, as Erik Hoel complained, professionalized MFA programs inadvertently train you to write about little things in little ways so that you open yourself to the least amount of criticism possible from other workshop participants. Boldness and imagination, Hoel argues, offer a big “attack surface” for others to critique. To minimize that attack surface, you don’t write epic verse about tragedy and war. You don’t scribble earnest Petrarchan love sonnets. You definitely don’t write about faith, except to deconstruct or critique it.
Instead, you write weensy little poems or stories about small daily experiences and disappointments. You cultivate a kind of gentile cowardice. Occasionally, you might dare a world-weary observation about some irksome upper–middle-class social foible or, in a moment of reckless daring, offer a cynical take on a failed romance. These literary nuggets will typically take on an introspective, confessional mode, as if your entire horizon were circumscribed by the walls of your workshop, or your own skull.5
The Death of the Audience
In other words, the discipline of writing itself becomes, under the MFA regime, a kind of ouroboros, a snake forever eating its own tail. This self-referentiality is a direct function of literature’s professionalization, which ironically renders a paying readership increasingly irrelevant.
Of course, you need a few people to buy your books so that publishers will keep up their interest. You have to publish something for prizes and reviews to come your way. But the real currency of the 21st-century literary profession is teaching gigs, foundation grants, and fellowships — prizes to which other MFA writers mostly hold the keys. So the habit of writing for other writers only intensifies after your MFA graduation.
Ironically, then, the credentialed career pipeline seems to have broken the longstanding relationship with an audience that ought by rights to be the bread and butter of literary life. Without the need to directly court a large paying readership, MFA writers are free to pursue the small, unmagical, frequently politically radical (but in entirely predictable ways) boutique craft for which their professional education has prepared them.
Trying to articulate this problem, one of my undergraduate poetry professors described modern poetry as a tiny town with four houses, each trying to sell chickens. Two decades later, the problem hasn’t abated. Only around 10% of the American population reads poetry — about the same as when I graduated from from college. In the 2010s, about 6% of Americans admitted to writing creatively at home. There’s surely a lot of overlap between those groups.
By contrast, great poets and writers in the earlier decades of the 20th century often made their livings selling their work to actual, paying audiences. Robert Frost in his day was a genuine celebrity.6 Tom Wolfe pursued first-rate journalism when he wasn’t writing bestselling novels. Faulkner, who was maybe a bit too experimental, never quite made a fully comfortable living from his novels, but he made up for it by working as a screenwriter. Marianne Moore supplemented her income by editing a prominent magazine for up-and-coming Modernist poets.
Going even further back, Shakespeare was an outsider in literary Elizabethan London. Unlike playwriting rivals such as Christopher Marlowe, he never graduated from university and didn’t enjoy the prestige of educated social circles. Nor does he seem to have had family money as a cushion. He needed to earn money from his plays.
The fruit of his pecuniary motives is one of the — no, probably the — greatest body of literary work in the history of the English language. Because he had to appeal to a wide audience, he wrote about themes and used language that normal Londoners could relate to. His plays are peppered with bawdy jokes and coarse, larger-than-life characters. But because he was a genius, he also elevated his speeches with immortal flights of eloquence, beauty, and insight.
Shakespeare, too, would fail to make it through the MFA gauntlet today.
Back to Magic?
So this is why I didn’t get an MFA. I’m not the next Shakespeare, but I didn’t want to get socialized into a small and unmagical career — or life.
I’m also not arguing that graduate training in the arts is bad, full stop. Elizabeth Bishop, one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, taught creative writing at Harvard. If I could time-travel and take a class from her, I’d do it in a heartbeat. As an undergraduate in Wisconsin, I learned some important skills from my time in writing workshops. I had some great teachers, too.
But writing isn’t supposed to be a tame, credentialed profession. It’s a dangerous pursuit for odd people, obsessives with an ear for linguistic music and — to tie my thoughts together — a belief in magic.
Writers don’t need to be religious. But they do need to be able to confront the biggest questions and themes of life without trying to shrink them down to fit in a technocrat’s file folder. They need, in other words, to be fantastically bold. To have vision. To be unafraid of the deep symbols and meanings that swim beneath the surface of life, the shadows that lend substance to reality.
With rare exceptions, cautious professional aspirants cannot do these things. Even Wallace Stevens, the consummate professional–cum–poet-on-the-side, wasn’t an academic careerist. An insurance executive, he enjoyed an income and status that gave him freedom to compose strange and beautiful poems without any of the social anxieties that plague MFA aspirants today.
In the final analysis, the MFA career track as we currently know it isn’t really about literature at all. It’s about taming literature. It’s about making literature, like everything else, subject to the expert, dispassionate managerialism that has been the real animating principle for the postwar age — and which is the sworn enemy of magic.
Writers like Hemingway or Norman Mailer were wild magic.7 They were hard to control. That was kind of their shtick. That’s why their kind couldn’t make it in the MFA era. Its managerial mindset needs things to be controllable, rational. Macho and gonzo writers had to go. The MFA-ification of literature was the means to that end.
But the postwar era is loping toward its close. Technocratic expertise — of the sort that led America through the Cold War and sent men to the moon — has had a really, really bad few years. Universities and the credentialing industry are facing existential crises for good reasons. Rationalist globalization is over.
Donald Trump’s return to the presidency of the United States — and the ongoing rise of weird populist leaders everywhere — surely augurs many things, from good to bad to incredibly tacky. Among the good, though, just might be the lasting defeat of the managerial mindset and its death grip on Western culture. Call it anti-intellectualism if you want. But one way or another, master’s degrees are getting a lot less valuable.
Amid all the chaos we’re about to live through, it’s entirely possible that a more honest, fierce, and untamed literary era will emerge through the smoke and wreckage. Stakes for everything — life, career, art itself — seemed pretty low from the vantage point of well-educated Westerners for the past couple of decades. Well, stakes are about to get higher again. And high-stakes, high-risk eras don’t reward cautious careerists. They reward high rollers, risk takers, goons, freaks — and magicians.
Note: this version of this post has been updated to correct a few typos in the original.
I chose this poem by the rigorous and exhaustive research method of clicking on the first poem title I saw at the New Yorker website when I started this post a couple of months ago. This method will reliably produce comparable results.
Which, true to form, was actually about death.
From a NYTimes article on the MFA: “‘We read the personal statement closely,’ says Ellen Tremper, chairwoman of Brooklyn College’s English department. ‘We try to see if a person seems rational and, frankly, unneurotic, because if you get someone with a screw loose, it can be disruptive to the group.’”
I know all this because I am, myself, a kind of teacher’s pet. Why do you think I got a PhD? Because I was a well-adjusted family man? As Dave Barry says, in college “you memorize…things, then write them down in little exam books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them, you become a professor and have to stay in college for the rest of your life.”
I happen, though, to also have just enough rebel or whatever in me to ensure that, eventually, I couldn’t keep putting up with the nonsense. This goes for both literature and academia generally. I was slowly, uncourageously, and against my will driven to the point where I had to say (to quote another great poet) “there is some sh** I will not eat.”
Of course, many MFA programs tolerate and even encourage left-wing political expressions, up to and including radical calls for upheaval against dominant groups. But in the context of elite universities, these are extremely socially safe positions to take. They’re what Tom Wolfe called radical chic — conspicuously playing around with leftist revolutionary tropes to curry favor with bourgeois humanities professors. In other words, being a good teacher’s pet at the university level often means paying at least public obeisance to left-wing radicalism. This by no means requires real courage. And the political propaganda such writers produce (by the bushel) usually makes terrible literature.
Not coincidentally, he tended to write formal, rhyming poetry, thereby appealing to normal humans, who are the major audience for poetry in saner literary epochs than our own.
I’m not somehow condoning the boorish and sometimes homicidal real-life behavior of either of these literary titans, you understand. I’m just pointing out that they didn’t draw in the lines.
The first online "flame war" I every experienced was in 1993 or 94, in an AOL chatroom where I (much less eloquently than you have here) expressed this same view. I said the MFA route was silly, expensive, and damaging to American literature. I would not subject myself to the groupthink of never-ending workshops, to kowtow to a literary elite, even if it meant I would never get their stamp of approval, never be published by other MFA graduates now running the publishing world. In AOL, this was met with anger, disdain, and more ad hominem arguments than you can shake a stick at ("You're just not good enough to get an MFA!")
Well, here we are decades later, and what has American literature become? Both poetry and prose are firmly in what you describe as a "managerial" mindset, with no great authors, but "competent" pieces praised by the "lit fic club." Love your ouroboros description--that's right on: the snake is eating its own tail.
Well said, sir.
Hi Connor, thanks for sharing. Agree with everything here. I personally find that modern poetry is actually very materialistic - very focused on form, and on sounding - ironically - like “poetry”. In contrast, I think the best poetry captures essence, something somewhat elusive, but real - like beauty. Keats’ odes are great for this. Other romantic poets also. It’s the distinction between inspired poetry and uninspired poetry, frankly. I’m at a loss as to how to explain this to people - and poets - who frankly probably don’t really know what real inspiration is. They get titillated, slightly and briefly curious about things; but that’s not inspiration. Thoughts?