I read Walt Whitman’s iconic work Leaves of Grass just before I decided to withdraw from an MFA program in creative writing in the summer of 2022, after completing about one year. Whitman’s poetry confirmed my belief that reading and writing poetry has never really needed a formal education prerequisite. I became inspired by his argument for accessibility in poetry. He once wrote of his most famous work
Thanks for writing about your experience, Natalie. I love learning how others navigate the question of to MFA or not to MFA. Over the past few years I've embarked on a DIY MFA of sorts, and it's been amazing. I've attended dozens of literary events and workshops, read hundreds of books, published dozens of pieces, and written thousands of pages, all without debt and mostly without leaving my home. Instead of being relegated to particular professors or peers, I take workshops with writers I admire and meet so many cool people along the way. I'm with you on the point about community involvement—those connections are wonderful, and while an MFA cohort can be hit or miss with them, there's a whole wide world of writers beyond those programs. If I were to find a magical unicorn of a program out there, sure, I'd consider pursuing an actual MFA, but plenty of writers have done just fine without (including everyone pre-1936).
That said, who gets published? Who wins contests? People with MFAs get awards and published in more "top tier" lit mags than those without. If your goal is to become a better poet, the University of DIY is fine, it has worked for me much along the lines Natalie lays out. If your goal is to teach, probably in an MFA program, you need an MFA and can live with the salary you're likely to earn. Community is not a tangible reward, but whichever route you take, it is the best reward.
Thank you, Natalie. I so love that line you quote from Whitman: “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” Right out of law school I was considering getting an MFA so I called James Alan McPherson the great short story writer and alumnus of my law school who was teaching at Iowa. I don't remember exactly what he said, but what I recall was that an MFA was valuable but he couldn't say it made a real difference in his craft. I think he said its great value was in the time to focus on the reading and writing. In the end, I decided against getting an MFA because I thought I could do that reading and writing on my own. It's much harder while holding down a job, but it's doable. If folks can afford an MFA or find a fully funded one, great; if they can't, you can do it the old fashioned way -- reading, reading, reading, and writing, writing, writing.
Stanley you had an enviable mentor. I remember reading McPherson's introduction to the "Stories of Breece D.J. Pancake." Pancake was one of his students at UVA. He
Committed suicide and the way that McPherson deals with it in writing has never left me. Thanks so much for sharing your memory of your conversation with McPherson.
Just jumping in to say that introduction by McPherson has been stuck in my head for decades. I only wish McPherson had written more in his later years. What he did put down in print was absolutely brilliant.
The part of McPherson's intro I still recalled was his first meeting with Pancake, who he heard out in the hall shouting "I'm Jimmy Carter and I'm running for President."
He actually published under the name Breece D'J Pancake, the weird middle initials due to a printer's error at The Atlantic with his first story, which he left that way.
I haven't thought of Pancake in years, but one of the stories Taylor doesn't think much of, "Time and Again," has stuck in my head, so there's that. Should a writer be good or memorable? I kind of like memorable.
I never really thought of him as a mentor but I guess in terms of the impact the call on me he was a mentor even if the mentorship only lasted the length of the call. I love his stories and your note makes me want to read that introduction to Pancake's collection. Thank you for mentioning it.
amen. Many aspiring poets even ones who have been through MFA programs do not read enough. More than that, many are unaware of the poetry recvolution ( and to a large extent the fiction revolution), led by African American and Asian Americans in ,respectively, the organizatons and spiritual/cultural/job/network opportunities of CaveCanem and Kundiman. Cave Canem was formed in 1996 by established black poets ToiDerricote and Cornelius Eady. In a decade and change it now has at least three thousandd members each with at least one book of poetry and around 5000 it.It inspired the creation of Kundiman for Asian American and Pacific Islanders. Cave Canem had veteran writers as mentors- Lucille Clifton,Michael Harper, Elizabeth Alexander, Rita Dove, Marilyn Nelson,Yusef Koumanyakka and others. Pulitzer Prize winners like Natasha Tretheway, Tyehimba Jess, Greg Pardlo and others flourished in this program (( Jess is currently the head coordinator). At the same time, I have had many friends in MFA programs who I asked how many "writers of color" have you read? The answer was "not many"; and as Tracy K. Smith wrote a few years ago about the socalled
sudden onset of political poetry and many MFA's disdiain for it
I am finding too many poets who have not read much African American literature, or for that matter, any of the astounding newish poets from Cave Canem or Kundiman which includes such absolutely stunning writers as Patricia Smith,Evie Shockley, Douglas Kearney, Terence Hayes, Roland Young, Major Jackson, Mai Der Vang, Sarah Gambito, Franny Choi,Cathy Hong, Barbara Reyes,Nick Carbo, Patrick Rozal and other amazing writers such as DaBniel Boruztsky, Vanessa Villareal, Eduardo Corrall, Noor Hind, Phillip Mestres, and, last but not least,two of the most astounding surrealists poets of the last fifty years or more- Hyesoon Kim of South Korea, and the Vietnamese-American human cyclone- Vi Khi Nao, especially (of her over ten books!- A Brief History of Torture, Fish Carcasses, and Oh, God, Your Babies Are So Delicious which is definitely in the running for BEST POETRY BOOK TITLE of the 20th century although I personally think that Morgan Parker's second book also excels: There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, as does Tiana Clark's I Can't See The Trees For The Blood, right up there with the last book by the legendary Mahmoud Darwish - I Don't Want This Poem to end (written on his deathbed), It's much easier in fictio where there would be a tie between the pioneering short story collection The Corpse Exhibition by Hassan Blasim and, still, Haruki Murakami's The Hard-Boiled Wonderland At The Edge ofThe World.
We've come a llong way from Farewell to Arms,Hemmingway's disguised biography of Venus De Milo that many did not understand was a cut above the rest, or Hudson's Green Mansions which has recently been re-examined and declared by the Delmonte Reading Group the first vegan novel in English literature. See if your media center has THAT one.
Note: Tomorrow, January 30, Benito Mussolini's barmitzvah date, Senators Ted Cruz and Marjoie Green wlll announce both their pending marriage and their coauthorsshp of the new Federal Law that will retire the word LIBRARY and replace it with : MEDIA CENTER. The removal of millions of books, magaznes, and all forms of printed matter will create"thousands of jobs" per Cruz and Green.. The books will be immediately pulped so that Texas wll have heat for the month of February, and, hopefully, March.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. There is one way that the MFA is helpful- in getting published in certain magazines. I Have 4 degrees myself- including Hebrew Literature MA, Ordination, JD and psychology- but I attended a few sessions and decided that I couldn't lay out more money for something I could do in some short workshops. Now I read voraciously and teach English where poetry is a big part of my curriculum. I don't publish that much because I am working on my memoir.
I entered the then-number 3 MFA program for two reasons: I wanted to keep studying literature because I hoped to teach, and I wanted the experience of graduate-level workshops that would keep me producing on deadline, something that helped when I became a newspaper reviewer some years later.
I found my 2.5 years immensely rewarding. I read books and poems I never would have encountered on my own, like the work of Hart Crane and a whole raft of contemporary British authors. All of that was inspiring. Likewise the enthusiasm of fellow students who made me feel I was in a giant writing group. And there were tons of readings I went to.
My lit professors were actually the most influential, especially a Wharton scholar, since 3 of my 27 books are related to Wharton: Edith Wharton's Prisoners of Shame (biography/litcrit), The Edith Wharton Murders (mystery), and Rosedale in Love (a rewriting of The House of Mirth). The mystery scored me my first review in the New York Times.
There are many ways to move forward as a writer, so anyone contemplating an MFA program needs to know what their goals are and do due diligence about the program, the faculty, student praise and complaints--and how much financial aid they offer. The info is not hard to access.
Mine helped me immensely despite a jerk professor in one workshop. I won a prize that launched my career.
Hello. Thank you for sharing. Can something be better than nothing? A year of MFA is a whole lot of academic credit compared to say one undergraduate course or what I used to do, a monthly community workshop. I’m a poet and physician, child psychiatry.
Of course one can learn to write better through a variety of avenues, not only with the guidance of a graduate program. That said, I must note that the MFA degree, which is still considered a terminal degree and--generally speaking--required for university teaching, would be considered a "credential" (<in 2022, the Poets & Writers database listed 261 MFA programs. These programs do not offer a credential>).
Yeah, I feel this poet very deeply. I got a "free ride" at an MFA program for three years, and though being among the writers and participating in workshops was enriching, not to mention the teaching duties, which I feel gave me the most insight of all, it took me a number of years to "recover" from my MFA. I survived the program because I refused to "become" the poet my professors were trying to mold me into, and instead continued to assert my own personality in my writing. I think the only way to effectively teach any art is to find out what the aesthetic and personality of the student is, and help them to become a more authentic purveyor of that set of unique attributes, not to have a "one-size-fits-all" attitude where you try to make all students the same artist based on your own set of aesthetics, etc. I think there are programs that do this, but again, you can't really "teach" anything, but you can model for the student the enthusiasm and introspection a life-long student and artist needs to shine in their own light, not to imitate a teacher's particular idea of success.
Thanks Lee. This has turned into a fine discussion. When I think of Pancake, as I mentioned in a post before, the name John Kennedy Toole comes also to my mind. The author of "A Confederacy of Dunces." Just like Pancake, Toole took his own life. I don't know the exact circumstances but I do know that Walker Percy is responsible for Toole's "discovery" and publication after his death at his own hand at age 32. In fact Toole's mom took the manuscript to Walker Percy who contributed the introduction as you will discover, if you happen on a copy of the book. Pulitzer Prize winner. Can you imagine? It makes me cringe to think of all of the writing that editors have rebuffed and snuffed over the years. Work we will never know. And it offers us a cautionary tale for editors and especially for writers who see their work tossed in the ash bin daily now because editors are overwhelmed or worse, because they have succumbed to the postmodern mob instead of championing a true writing meritocracy. Instead, we seem to have a social commentary bureau in charge of every publishing house. Thank goodness for the advocacy of McPherson and Percy. And by the way I think a lot of Walker Percy too. Particularly his late novel The Thanatos Syndrome. But...I am a sucker for Southern Writers and Louisiana. Percy was a UNC grad if my memory serves. Great writer.
Natalie this is a beautiful piece. I too look to the past for inspiration. More than once in his writing Wendell Berry laments the specialization that has come to dominate our world practically and intellectually. This holds true for the "craft" of writing as it has been packaged and commoditized as something to teach for a dime. There are four Irish Nobel laureates in literature. Having read Heaney, Beckett, and Yeats along the way I decided it was about time for me to get to know Bernard Shaw. Shaw was born a lower middle class boy in Dublin. He didn't attend Oxford or Cambridge or even Trinity College Dublin. He came up a harder way, like most of us. But he, as an autodidact, became the foremost playwright of his generation. And a respected music and literary critic. A novelist. And his plays earned him the Nobel in 1925. Reading his Wiki bio is well worth the time. I'm reading his play "Man and Superman" now and fully agree with him, that first, a writer has to have something to assert. That can't be taught by an MFA program can it? And Shaw said he would not pick up his pencil merely for the sake of art. Sometimes I wonder about people who apparently dedicate themselves to writing "creatively." According to Shaw that is a suspect endeavor. Maybe they should first set out to develop what it is they want to assert. That is what I also hear Mr. Whitman saying in your quote where he calls other poets detached. Whitman had something to assert. He knew it deep in his heart and intellect. And he brought the style to bear on it only afterward.
Read backward my dear people. That is where the truth lies. In old books, perhaps more than in new MFA Programs. And most of the treasure is off copyright, to boot.
Wow, I can't believe that someone who is obviously intelligent enough to become a physician did such little research before signing on to an expensive program when they were already six figures in debt. I have an MFA and the only way I would ever recommend one is if you are already wealthy enough to afford the program or if it's fully funded. I did the latter and had a great time even though unfortunately, half of it turned into remote learning as it was in the middle of COVID. An MFA isn't a prerequisite for a writing career, and I don't think anyone has ever claimed that. It is also not a good way to break into academia as creative writing jobs are given to those who are already publishing regularly, and other tenure track English positions like literature are usually set aside for those with a PhD in that particular subject. I'm sorry you didn't do your due diligence since the downsides of MFAs have been written about for at least the last decade if not longer. Good luck with your poetry, you're doing the right things now and not digging yourself into a deeper financial hole.
Natalie, you are creating your own MFA at your own pace and in sync with your tremendous responsibilities as a physician and parent. 👏👏The book “Portable MFA in Creative Writing” by the NY Writers Workshop helped me reach the same decision. Also, I paid off (finally) my graduate degree in my field and would never take on that student debt again. I’m certain with your current degrees and writing accomplishments, if you wanted to teach in the future, who knows, perhaps an instructor not requiring a MFA or developing your own workshop for creative professionals? I’d take that class! I did want to mention Iowa conducts summer workshops for graduate credit. I believe up to two classes before a student is required to apply to the program. A great experience and a short-term peek at the commitment required as a student. Thanks for sharing your story.
I’m with you on this. In addition I would also like to add that the overwhelming desire of many poets, veteran and amateur alike, to have their work published is, to me, more of an attempt to stroke one’s ego, to revert, in a sense, to the excited kindergartener’s cry of “Look at me!”
As a poet with middling interest in publishing my poetry (other than the wish to avert any sudden crash of my electronics, their current home) I’ve watched on the sidelines of many social media poetry groups as you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours cliques develop with the seeming obligatory kudos to each in order to receive the same from them.
I would rather write for my own personal gratification and thought development.
In my view a published book of one’s poetry should be a celebration of accomplishment in and of itself, public acclaim be damned.
A collection focusing on one subject, location, time, event or poetic form would be well worth reading.
It depends on why you write. If you enjoy writing, then writing is its own reward. If you write to connect with others, then you need an audience to connect with. A mutual admiration society like you describe may be what you need to sustain your writing and ego. If you need fame and fortune to sustain your writing, it’s almost hopeless, but that isn’t different for any other art form.
Thanks for writing about your experience, Natalie. I love learning how others navigate the question of to MFA or not to MFA. Over the past few years I've embarked on a DIY MFA of sorts, and it's been amazing. I've attended dozens of literary events and workshops, read hundreds of books, published dozens of pieces, and written thousands of pages, all without debt and mostly without leaving my home. Instead of being relegated to particular professors or peers, I take workshops with writers I admire and meet so many cool people along the way. I'm with you on the point about community involvement—those connections are wonderful, and while an MFA cohort can be hit or miss with them, there's a whole wide world of writers beyond those programs. If I were to find a magical unicorn of a program out there, sure, I'd consider pursuing an actual MFA, but plenty of writers have done just fine without (including everyone pre-1936).
That said, who gets published? Who wins contests? People with MFAs get awards and published in more "top tier" lit mags than those without. If your goal is to become a better poet, the University of DIY is fine, it has worked for me much along the lines Natalie lays out. If your goal is to teach, probably in an MFA program, you need an MFA and can live with the salary you're likely to earn. Community is not a tangible reward, but whichever route you take, it is the best reward.
That last sentence says it all. Community and joy in writing, however you find it.
Thank you, Natalie. I so love that line you quote from Whitman: “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” Right out of law school I was considering getting an MFA so I called James Alan McPherson the great short story writer and alumnus of my law school who was teaching at Iowa. I don't remember exactly what he said, but what I recall was that an MFA was valuable but he couldn't say it made a real difference in his craft. I think he said its great value was in the time to focus on the reading and writing. In the end, I decided against getting an MFA because I thought I could do that reading and writing on my own. It's much harder while holding down a job, but it's doable. If folks can afford an MFA or find a fully funded one, great; if they can't, you can do it the old fashioned way -- reading, reading, reading, and writing, writing, writing.
Stanley you had an enviable mentor. I remember reading McPherson's introduction to the "Stories of Breece D.J. Pancake." Pancake was one of his students at UVA. He
Committed suicide and the way that McPherson deals with it in writing has never left me. Thanks so much for sharing your memory of your conversation with McPherson.
Just jumping in to say that introduction by McPherson has been stuck in my head for decades. I only wish McPherson had written more in his later years. What he did put down in print was absolutely brilliant.
The part of McPherson's intro I still recalled was his first meeting with Pancake, who he heard out in the hall shouting "I'm Jimmy Carter and I'm running for President."
He actually published under the name Breece D'J Pancake, the weird middle initials due to a printer's error at The Atlantic with his first story, which he left that way.
ha! I love it!
I'm going to find that collection with the intro by McPherson. As I was just online looking for the book I found this essay. It's really interesting:
https://www.bookforum.com/print/2704/revisiting-the-short-promising-career-of-breece-d-j-pancake-24270
That's a solid retrospective.
I haven't thought of Pancake in years, but one of the stories Taylor doesn't think much of, "Time and Again," has stuck in my head, so there's that. Should a writer be good or memorable? I kind of like memorable.
I never really thought of him as a mentor but I guess in terms of the impact the call on me he was a mentor even if the mentorship only lasted the length of the call. I love his stories and your note makes me want to read that introduction to Pancake's collection. Thank you for mentioning it.
amen. Many aspiring poets even ones who have been through MFA programs do not read enough. More than that, many are unaware of the poetry recvolution ( and to a large extent the fiction revolution), led by African American and Asian Americans in ,respectively, the organizatons and spiritual/cultural/job/network opportunities of CaveCanem and Kundiman. Cave Canem was formed in 1996 by established black poets ToiDerricote and Cornelius Eady. In a decade and change it now has at least three thousandd members each with at least one book of poetry and around 5000 it.It inspired the creation of Kundiman for Asian American and Pacific Islanders. Cave Canem had veteran writers as mentors- Lucille Clifton,Michael Harper, Elizabeth Alexander, Rita Dove, Marilyn Nelson,Yusef Koumanyakka and others. Pulitzer Prize winners like Natasha Tretheway, Tyehimba Jess, Greg Pardlo and others flourished in this program (( Jess is currently the head coordinator). At the same time, I have had many friends in MFA programs who I asked how many "writers of color" have you read? The answer was "not many"; and as Tracy K. Smith wrote a few years ago about the socalled
sudden onset of political poetry and many MFA's disdiain for it
I am finding too many poets who have not read much African American literature, or for that matter, any of the astounding newish poets from Cave Canem or Kundiman which includes such absolutely stunning writers as Patricia Smith,Evie Shockley, Douglas Kearney, Terence Hayes, Roland Young, Major Jackson, Mai Der Vang, Sarah Gambito, Franny Choi,Cathy Hong, Barbara Reyes,Nick Carbo, Patrick Rozal and other amazing writers such as DaBniel Boruztsky, Vanessa Villareal, Eduardo Corrall, Noor Hind, Phillip Mestres, and, last but not least,two of the most astounding surrealists poets of the last fifty years or more- Hyesoon Kim of South Korea, and the Vietnamese-American human cyclone- Vi Khi Nao, especially (of her over ten books!- A Brief History of Torture, Fish Carcasses, and Oh, God, Your Babies Are So Delicious which is definitely in the running for BEST POETRY BOOK TITLE of the 20th century although I personally think that Morgan Parker's second book also excels: There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, as does Tiana Clark's I Can't See The Trees For The Blood, right up there with the last book by the legendary Mahmoud Darwish - I Don't Want This Poem to end (written on his deathbed), It's much easier in fictio where there would be a tie between the pioneering short story collection The Corpse Exhibition by Hassan Blasim and, still, Haruki Murakami's The Hard-Boiled Wonderland At The Edge ofThe World.
We've come a llong way from Farewell to Arms,Hemmingway's disguised biography of Venus De Milo that many did not understand was a cut above the rest, or Hudson's Green Mansions which has recently been re-examined and declared by the Delmonte Reading Group the first vegan novel in English literature. See if your media center has THAT one.
Note: Tomorrow, January 30, Benito Mussolini's barmitzvah date, Senators Ted Cruz and Marjoie Green wlll announce both their pending marriage and their coauthorsshp of the new Federal Law that will retire the word LIBRARY and replace it with : MEDIA CENTER. The removal of millions of books, magaznes, and all forms of printed matter will create"thousands of jobs" per Cruz and Green.. The books will be immediately pulped so that Texas wll have heat for the month of February, and, hopefully, March.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. There is one way that the MFA is helpful- in getting published in certain magazines. I Have 4 degrees myself- including Hebrew Literature MA, Ordination, JD and psychology- but I attended a few sessions and decided that I couldn't lay out more money for something I could do in some short workshops. Now I read voraciously and teach English where poetry is a big part of my curriculum. I don't publish that much because I am working on my memoir.
I entered the then-number 3 MFA program for two reasons: I wanted to keep studying literature because I hoped to teach, and I wanted the experience of graduate-level workshops that would keep me producing on deadline, something that helped when I became a newspaper reviewer some years later.
I found my 2.5 years immensely rewarding. I read books and poems I never would have encountered on my own, like the work of Hart Crane and a whole raft of contemporary British authors. All of that was inspiring. Likewise the enthusiasm of fellow students who made me feel I was in a giant writing group. And there were tons of readings I went to.
My lit professors were actually the most influential, especially a Wharton scholar, since 3 of my 27 books are related to Wharton: Edith Wharton's Prisoners of Shame (biography/litcrit), The Edith Wharton Murders (mystery), and Rosedale in Love (a rewriting of The House of Mirth). The mystery scored me my first review in the New York Times.
There are many ways to move forward as a writer, so anyone contemplating an MFA program needs to know what their goals are and do due diligence about the program, the faculty, student praise and complaints--and how much financial aid they offer. The info is not hard to access.
Mine helped me immensely despite a jerk professor in one workshop. I won a prize that launched my career.
Yes! Thank you for putting into words what I have been wrestling with for years.
Hello. Thank you for sharing. Can something be better than nothing? A year of MFA is a whole lot of academic credit compared to say one undergraduate course or what I used to do, a monthly community workshop. I’m a poet and physician, child psychiatry.
This is a great piece, Natalie!
Of course one can learn to write better through a variety of avenues, not only with the guidance of a graduate program. That said, I must note that the MFA degree, which is still considered a terminal degree and--generally speaking--required for university teaching, would be considered a "credential" (<in 2022, the Poets & Writers database listed 261 MFA programs. These programs do not offer a credential>).
Amen.
Yeah, I feel this poet very deeply. I got a "free ride" at an MFA program for three years, and though being among the writers and participating in workshops was enriching, not to mention the teaching duties, which I feel gave me the most insight of all, it took me a number of years to "recover" from my MFA. I survived the program because I refused to "become" the poet my professors were trying to mold me into, and instead continued to assert my own personality in my writing. I think the only way to effectively teach any art is to find out what the aesthetic and personality of the student is, and help them to become a more authentic purveyor of that set of unique attributes, not to have a "one-size-fits-all" attitude where you try to make all students the same artist based on your own set of aesthetics, etc. I think there are programs that do this, but again, you can't really "teach" anything, but you can model for the student the enthusiasm and introspection a life-long student and artist needs to shine in their own light, not to imitate a teacher's particular idea of success.
Thanks Lee. This has turned into a fine discussion. When I think of Pancake, as I mentioned in a post before, the name John Kennedy Toole comes also to my mind. The author of "A Confederacy of Dunces." Just like Pancake, Toole took his own life. I don't know the exact circumstances but I do know that Walker Percy is responsible for Toole's "discovery" and publication after his death at his own hand at age 32. In fact Toole's mom took the manuscript to Walker Percy who contributed the introduction as you will discover, if you happen on a copy of the book. Pulitzer Prize winner. Can you imagine? It makes me cringe to think of all of the writing that editors have rebuffed and snuffed over the years. Work we will never know. And it offers us a cautionary tale for editors and especially for writers who see their work tossed in the ash bin daily now because editors are overwhelmed or worse, because they have succumbed to the postmodern mob instead of championing a true writing meritocracy. Instead, we seem to have a social commentary bureau in charge of every publishing house. Thank goodness for the advocacy of McPherson and Percy. And by the way I think a lot of Walker Percy too. Particularly his late novel The Thanatos Syndrome. But...I am a sucker for Southern Writers and Louisiana. Percy was a UNC grad if my memory serves. Great writer.
Percy's The Moviegoer is particularly quotable.
"The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives..."
Natalie this is a beautiful piece. I too look to the past for inspiration. More than once in his writing Wendell Berry laments the specialization that has come to dominate our world practically and intellectually. This holds true for the "craft" of writing as it has been packaged and commoditized as something to teach for a dime. There are four Irish Nobel laureates in literature. Having read Heaney, Beckett, and Yeats along the way I decided it was about time for me to get to know Bernard Shaw. Shaw was born a lower middle class boy in Dublin. He didn't attend Oxford or Cambridge or even Trinity College Dublin. He came up a harder way, like most of us. But he, as an autodidact, became the foremost playwright of his generation. And a respected music and literary critic. A novelist. And his plays earned him the Nobel in 1925. Reading his Wiki bio is well worth the time. I'm reading his play "Man and Superman" now and fully agree with him, that first, a writer has to have something to assert. That can't be taught by an MFA program can it? And Shaw said he would not pick up his pencil merely for the sake of art. Sometimes I wonder about people who apparently dedicate themselves to writing "creatively." According to Shaw that is a suspect endeavor. Maybe they should first set out to develop what it is they want to assert. That is what I also hear Mr. Whitman saying in your quote where he calls other poets detached. Whitman had something to assert. He knew it deep in his heart and intellect. And he brought the style to bear on it only afterward.
Read backward my dear people. That is where the truth lies. In old books, perhaps more than in new MFA Programs. And most of the treasure is off copyright, to boot.
REM
Charleston, SC
Wow, I can't believe that someone who is obviously intelligent enough to become a physician did such little research before signing on to an expensive program when they were already six figures in debt. I have an MFA and the only way I would ever recommend one is if you are already wealthy enough to afford the program or if it's fully funded. I did the latter and had a great time even though unfortunately, half of it turned into remote learning as it was in the middle of COVID. An MFA isn't a prerequisite for a writing career, and I don't think anyone has ever claimed that. It is also not a good way to break into academia as creative writing jobs are given to those who are already publishing regularly, and other tenure track English positions like literature are usually set aside for those with a PhD in that particular subject. I'm sorry you didn't do your due diligence since the downsides of MFAs have been written about for at least the last decade if not longer. Good luck with your poetry, you're doing the right things now and not digging yourself into a deeper financial hole.
Natalie, you are creating your own MFA at your own pace and in sync with your tremendous responsibilities as a physician and parent. 👏👏The book “Portable MFA in Creative Writing” by the NY Writers Workshop helped me reach the same decision. Also, I paid off (finally) my graduate degree in my field and would never take on that student debt again. I’m certain with your current degrees and writing accomplishments, if you wanted to teach in the future, who knows, perhaps an instructor not requiring a MFA or developing your own workshop for creative professionals? I’d take that class! I did want to mention Iowa conducts summer workshops for graduate credit. I believe up to two classes before a student is required to apply to the program. A great experience and a short-term peek at the commitment required as a student. Thanks for sharing your story.
I’m with you on this. In addition I would also like to add that the overwhelming desire of many poets, veteran and amateur alike, to have their work published is, to me, more of an attempt to stroke one’s ego, to revert, in a sense, to the excited kindergartener’s cry of “Look at me!”
As a poet with middling interest in publishing my poetry (other than the wish to avert any sudden crash of my electronics, their current home) I’ve watched on the sidelines of many social media poetry groups as you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours cliques develop with the seeming obligatory kudos to each in order to receive the same from them.
I would rather write for my own personal gratification and thought development.
In my view a published book of one’s poetry should be a celebration of accomplishment in and of itself, public acclaim be damned.
A collection focusing on one subject, location, time, event or poetic form would be well worth reading.
It depends on why you write. If you enjoy writing, then writing is its own reward. If you write to connect with others, then you need an audience to connect with. A mutual admiration society like you describe may be what you need to sustain your writing and ego. If you need fame and fortune to sustain your writing, it’s almost hopeless, but that isn’t different for any other art form.