More than 11,000 writers, publishers, students, teachers and dreamers thronged the Minneapolis convention center last week for the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. They were there to read, debate, promote and, most importantly, network at back-to-back parties. (Their booze-soaked reputations preceded them: neighborhood bars scrawled “Welcome, writers!” joyfully on their chalkboards.)
Since its first meeting in 1973 the conference has grown enormously. It’s become “like Comic-Con”, as veteran indie publisher Richard Nash put it at the opening night party.
Indeed the size and scope of “AWP” can be astonishing to outsiders; the lines of booths at the book fair stretch miles, and there are more than 500 panels and readings. But AWP’s sprawl simply reflects the proliferation of MFA writing programs, which are now ubiquitous in the American literary landscape. As MFAs multiply, so too do the arguments over whether the degree is of any use to aspiring writers. In fact, the New York Times weighed in just before the conference, with a piece entitled Why Writers Love to Hate the MFA. But in Minneapolis, there were many who spoke rather more enthusiastically of the degree.
The trick of marketing a creative writing program is to hint at future success while being careful to promise nothing in particular, since the link between training and great art is tenuous at best. “We are very practiced at the art of seduction,” said Lee Martin, a novelist and professor at the Ohio State University, introducing a panel on “What the MFA promises and what it delivers”.
“Come study with us and all this will be yours,” the advertisements promise. But all what, exactly, is “this”? A book? A job? A literary life? Even as an academic credential, its technical purpose, the MFA has started to look like a junk bond: in 2013 Poets & Writers magazine estimated that fewer than 1% of MFA graduates would go on to a tenure-track job.
Carter Sickels, an adjunct professor in two creative writing programs who published his first novel 14 years after earning his MFA, says he represents an increasingly common reality of post-MFA life. But he told the audience at the same panel that he wasn’t misled: “My teachers never said it would be easy, and it wasn’t.” For Sickels and thousands of other writers like him whose names may never be known outside their small communities, living an artistic life is still, for all its hardships, a dream.
Some MFA graduates who have gone on to teach see a larger social value in their work. Justin Tussing, the director of the low-residency Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine, said the MFA’s popularity is a valuable counterweight to a pragmatic culture that values technology over art. “Like we need another app,” he joked. Sonja Livingston, a nonfiction writer and professor in the MFA program at the University of Memphis, took this argument further, rejecting the cynical premise of the “proliferation” argument. “I love the idea that so many people want to make art,” she said. “I don’t worry about too many artists in the world.”
They have a point. For many people, the MFA is their first exposure to the idea that a “literary life” might be possible. Doug Van Gundy, a poet and professor at West Virginia Wesleyan University, grew up in rural West Virginia and says that his MFA was a revelation.
“For the first time in my life I was in a room full of people who didn’t think it was odd that I’d stayed up all night reading,” he said.
Natasha Oladokun, a student in the creative writing program at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, had never even heard of the MFA until her third year of undergraduate study. “At first I thought, it’s a secret. It’s a racket,” she said. Even when her professors made it clear to her that the degree “is not a stepping stone”, she wasn’t discouraged. Instead, she was drawn to the idea of spending two years working on her craft in a “rigorous and positive environment”, whatever the professional benefits of the experience might be.
The money, of course, is a problem. While Sonja Livingston paid out of pocket for her master’s program – “it never would have occurred to me that I wouldn’t have to pay for it” – she also concedes that “I’m not the poster child for smart financial choices.” However, Tussing, the Stonecoast MFA director, rejects the idea that these programs are simply cash cows for universities. “They tend to break even,” he said. “No one’s getting rich here.”
Ultimately, the cost of the program may be a poor measure of its value to a writer. Last year, Poets & Writers magazine stopped publishing its highly influential annual rankings of MFA programs “allowing prospective students to make what is ultimately a subjective decision, determining for themselves which program attributes are most important”.
And even those who have embarked on successful careers stress that the MFA is more valuable as an experience than a credential. Claire Vaye Watkins, the author of an award-winning short story collection, Battleborn, represents what she admits is a “mythic unicorn trajectory”. Speaking on the panel with Martin of Ohio State, Watkins explained after a funded MFA degree and a fellowship that allowed her to polish and sell her collection, she’s going to teach full time this fall at the University of Michigan’s MFA.
But no program can guarantee that trajectory, Watkins insisted, and alumni success alone should not be used as a measure of a program’s worth. “There is another model of value that we should pay attention to and protect,” she said – the opportunity to work intensively, obsessively on art with no particular regard for outcome.
Watkins quoted the writer George Saunders, who has said of MFA proliferation that “there is something gross about a culture telling people who are never going to be artists that they maybe are.” To that, she added: “It’s perhaps even more gross to tell people who might be artists that they won’t be.”
• This article was amended on 22 April 2013 to correct an attribution for an estimate that fewer than 1% of MFA graduates would go on to a tenure-track job. An earlier version also said that Poets & Writers magazine stopped publishing its annual rankings of MFA programs partly because they depended heavily on cost over other, less tangible benefits. That is not the case.
