So, I was thinking, this is a forum of informed, intelligent people. So, I’m curious: How many MFAs do we have in the house. I know that myself and Dean are denizens of that underworld, and I’m pretty sure I remember John Many Jars saying he graduated from poetry school (which is a fucking scarlet letter so far as I’m concerned).
My question is: how do we deal with that creative impulse once school is gone? Poetry consumes me right now, and I’m hoping for a few inspirational stories about being an artist and lifting kindergartners up to the basket for a slam dunk.
If not, I’ll take a story about a fellow going all Dylan Thomas and howling at the moon.
I’ve got lots of creative impulses but very little momentum. That’s about it. I don’t have an MFA, but I was this close to going back to school for one two years ago. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or not that I didn’t.
I worked on an MFA, completed everything including the thesis, and then discovered that not a single university I had applied to for doctoral programs in literature would even consider me. So I spent another year and switched to an MA in literature and theory, at which point pretty much the same universities loved me and wanted to pay my way.
Kinda lost my faith in humanity (or the humanities) at that point…
If you have something glued into your skull, something that will kill you if you don’t write it, an MFA is a good idea. It’s also a good idea if you want a job (it being a terminal degree and all). But, seriously, if you go back to school, they will grab your momentum and slap it back on your chest.
Wow, you wrote the thesis and then switched? I bow to you, sir. You are an ironman. I’m curious, did the urge to publish still rise? I say publish because the urge to write is pretty much tattooed on our forearms.
If Evan could cure me, I might start robbing banks for beer money (rather, whiskey money).
I think you get a job and work and write in your spare time. How many hours a day can you write poetry anyway? How many hours a week do you devote to actual writing right now? Elmore Leonard worked in advertising for years and got up early and wrote before work. Gene Wolf was the editor of some technical journal for many years while he wrote science fiction on the side. Glen Cook worked on an auto assembly line until he got retirement. These are people who all wanted to write so they worked it it around their day jobs.
Wallace Stevens…Ted Kooser…insurance execs. Stephen Dobyns, former newspaperman. Walt Whitman, Civil War nurse.
Sir, you wound us. Especially the placement of Whitman and Stevens in that list, because all poets are insecure, I think, and visualize themselves as… I mean William Carlos Williams wrote poetry while driving his car on his way to house calls. The way in which you wound us, or rather I, is the appeal to poets/writers doing something else. I mean… christ… Christian Wiman, I think it’s him, challenges the validity of the MFA for those very reasons. He says that the next Walt Whitman will not rise from an MFA program which to an aspiring poet is saying “you will not rise to the greatness that has already been.” I tend to follow the Delmore Schwartz model of poetry that you can see in his short stories. There’s always poetry to be written, so you spend the majority of your life staring at the place-mat while eating breakfast.
Ultimately though, I agree with you. A writer has to leave that ivory tower that is so, so comfortable. One of my best teachers put it this way: “If you want to be a writer, you need to go to a brothel or on safari.” The problem us MFA people face is that we are pretty much trained solely for academia.
I’m in the process of trying to get in to an MFA program somewhere. Sent out the last of my applications a couple weeks ago and now is time for the waiting. Hopefully by fall I’ll be starting my first graduate degree. That would be good cause my job search has gone exceedingly poorly since I graduated last May.
I had actually sent out a round of applications last year, but the situation was royally fucked by one of my writing professors who promised letters of recommendation and failed to deliver. That might have been fine had she not waited until literally days before the LAST school deadline to communicate this fact to me. So for some of the schools my application was simply incomplete, and for others I went from having a Pulitzer Prize winning author writing a letter on my behalf to a second philosophy professor. My application in general wasn’t as strong as it could have been anyway owing to the fact I was busy with my Senior year at the time it was being prepared. I’m a lot more confident in my chances this time around.
Yikes, that’s a messy situation to be in, but good luck to ya. Do you have a primary focus yet, genre-wise? Ackk, that’s a messy word “genre.” I’m asking if you’ve chosen a medium in which to express your thoughts. Like… poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction?
Seriously, though, it’s a tough road. The MFAs I know teach writing and such. One of them is basically a full blown member of the English dept. and is not forced to only teach comp classes. She teaches upper level courses as well. Another, sadly, didn’t get renewed this semester and is looking for work. But he was teaching classes as an adjunct until this semester. These are colleagues, which means they aren’t presented as statistical evidence in any way. I’m just noting that you can get some decent jobs out there that don’t involve just teaching freshman comp.
Unfortunately, higher education is being hit VERY hard by the economy. Recent data in the Chronicle suggests that some 50% of colleges and universities are freezing hiring right now. A much smaller percentage (but still much larger than is comfortable) are actually letting professors go, sometimes tenured and tenure-track professors! We had a recent faculty meeting about this, and we’re lucky insofar as we have dodged the worst of this so far (i.e. we’re still hiring and constructing and such). But it’s a really bad time to be looking for a job in academics, I’m sorry to say.
I’m of the social epistemic camp when it comes to grammar. As for my own writing, I just… commas confuse me; also I see now that appeal was the wrong word.
I agree about the current state of higher education. My school is being slammed right now (one of the reasons that I won’t be able to trek to AWP (sad smiley)). I wasn’t sure if English departments were being laid into so hard, because we managed to keep everyone, but I’m sorry to hear that they are. I suppose, though, Comp teachers are necessary to a university, so long as they work for slave wages and share a desk with four other people.
All this talk about higher ed has me dizzy. Screw it, I’ll work in the coal mines.
Very nice. The world needs more poets. I can imagine that the more competitive schools (Iowa, Virginia, et al) would try to focus you in one genre, and hopefully, you can find somewhere that lets you roam. But, good luck! I know these are the staring at the mailbox days, which is to say, these are the months in between application and acceptance. If you really want to be anal about it, I know Seth Abramson does a blog that lists the date that someone has received word from an MFA program. He lists pretty much every MFA in the country.
I suppose much depends on the kind of job you want. I think adjuncts will become more common and tenure-track positions will become less common, both over the next few years and in the long run. In fact, some are now arguing that tenure is an endangered species. Let’s hope I get tenure before that happens and can be grandfathered in!
But if you are willing to be an adjunct while teaching comp classes, that will still be an option. The pay is abysmal though. I mean it is truly, truly awful. I would not recommend being an adjunct as a legit career option for anyone. It’s the worst kind of slave labor, as you say. It’s also quite draining and many of the people who do it lack the energy to write creatively on top of it.
Me see. I figure I’ll just crawl into my favorite hidey-hole “poetic license,” though. I am, however, ashamed that seven years of English education have not paid off.
I’m still on the fence about appeal for stylistic reasons.
Why not get certified to teach and teach high school? That’s if you really want to teach, I mean. High school kids need good teachers and you get summers off to write. You get nice holiday breaks too. And the pay is better than the pay you get for being an adjunct.
Or figure out how to live as cheap as possible and work part-time somewhere to pay the bills and devote yourself to writing.
I applied to 10 schools this year for a Poetry MFA. I just sent out my last application Thursday, and am waiting with so much apprehension.
If I don’t get in (which is a big possibility), I have so many plans and will be happy. If I do get in, it will probably upset my life more than anything I’ve ever done, and yet I’m so excited!
My main thing is that I need all tuition waived and a decent stipend or else I won’t attend. I can’t leave a really good job AND take on a huge amount of debt. My partner will not have it.
What does an MFA at a university write about? Studying, over-worked as a TA, intra-departmental politics, fighting for grant money? They’re what you’d know about. Oh, wait, I know: You write with angst about the fact that you haven’t experienced anything real yet.
The best books I read about war were written by warriors. The life you live defines the words you write. So go live.
Just so you know, people live outside of universities BEFORE they attend. And believe me, craft is something that can and should be taught. It makes even the most mindless crap better and more interesting to read.
This is why I decided not to continue school after my bachelor’s in English. Of course, then I ended up working in television. I’m waiting for the day the well-spoken men in black suits with patches on the elbows come and take my English degree back.
Fixed. Not strictly true in all cases, but pretty close.
