Get your own MFA!: What I learned in grad school

Hey! Good to see you all in your seats again after the last two weeks off. It was a true gift to take so much time away from even looking at the closed body of my laptop, just one corner shining out beneath a pile of hiking clothes, nary a whimper as it shut itself down from neglect.

The dogs and I took a long, beautiful journey from northern New Mexico through southern Colorado, Utah, and Idaho, to swim in the town where a river runs through—Missoula, Montana! The occasion of my good friend’s wedding was the perfect opportunity to visit this place where I went to grad school, and to think about what I learned when I lived there, and what of that place lives in me still.

I often get asked about my MFA, whether it was “worth it” and what it was like. Some of these askers are seriously considering pursuing a degree, but I think most people who ask about it just want to know—am I missing out? For a lot of people, the MFA is a fantasy—time to write!—and they’re curious about my experience, and maybe whether a graduate education in writing is ‘worth it.’ There are three crucial things that did indeed make the MFA ‘worth it,’ and you don’t need an MFA program to get any of them.

This post isn’t covering all the questions you should ask yourself if you’re really thinking about applying to an MFA—if any of you want me to write that post, happy to do it! And I won’t rehash all the “MFA vs. NYC” discourse here, or the MFA-CIA history, or other controversies, though worthy and relevant topics! These are the things I learned that made my program valuable to me, that might be valuable to you in the immediate present. So lemme do some reflecting.

I met my now-married friend Stefan a decade ago in the then-great Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Montana in Missoula, founded by the poet, essayist, and large nice man Richard Hugo in 1964. Stefan is now an English teacher at a Montana high school; he’s best remembered in our program for always wearing a suit when he taught his undergraduate courses, to show his students that the space of learning was sacred and he took their time seriously; he wrote non-fiction essays about the cultural significance of shelter belts in North Dakota, and doled out great advice in his Northerner accent like, “When you feel bad, get dressed.”

Stefan was one of the constants in my two years in Montana, an incredibly supportive, deeply kind and stable man who often provided necessary correctives against the rock-n-roll choices of the rest of our cohort. Among the rockers and radicals, stooping a bit closer to my immediate self, was Charlie. A whispy Oklahoman raised in a conservative family, Charlie wrote visceral poems that read like mazes through the synapses of dream. When asked in a workshop what his piece up for discussion was about, Charlie snorted (maybe the only real snort-of-dismissal I’ve heard in my life) and said, “It isn’t about.” Charlie lived in a ramshackle house on the northern edge of town with his beautiful wife Maria and two German Shorthaired Pointers. His second book is soon to be published through a prestigious literary press, and we’re still friends.

My other close friend was Eve, also a poet and one whose work everyone loved, which centered on the body and queerness, and was full of pop-culture references, insider feminist jokes, and small, shocking uses of breaks and white space that made the language of her poems seem to eat itself. Eve had long hair and an old cat and knew all the lyrics to my favorite grunge records. “I am / doll eyes / doll mouth / doll legs” we would scream out of my car on our way to some department event, arriving late and laughing.

Me, Charlie, and Eve were a group, we were poets, or “did poems” as I would have said, and we loved to talk about poetry, and novels, and writing. (Our program was not a studio program, which meant we could all take courses in any writing genre; my thesis was in poetry but I also took classes in fiction and nonfiction, as well as pedagogy and literacy, and all the events and parties were mixed.) I remember late nights of after-parties when Charlie would read aloud in his living room from Charles Olson or Franz Wright, tears in his eyes, all of us in awe of what language could do, very young and very in love, meaning it.

Me and my friends doing Montana things.

Books, books, books. The house was full of books. My apartment was full of books. The town was full of books. Everywhere! I remember all of the books, I will never remember all of the books. In addition to teaching composition and rhetoric and an undergraduate poetry workshop during my program, I got a coveted job at Shakespeare & Co., a long-standing Missoula bookstore with high tin ceilings and giant windows overlooking the magnificent Clark Fork River with its rapids that have their own names, where I learned so much from the eccentric owner Garth and found myself, with no shock at all, to be a natural book pusher. I loved it, I loved selling books. I worked at the Book Festival, I introduced authors at our readings, holding their books in front of me, waving them at the crowd. I bought books and lugged books, sold books and abused books—underlining hard enough to rip through three pages, breaking spines like fireworks. I’m running through these memories now. James Welch’s Winter in the Blood, reading all the way through in my hunting-cabin chair and looking up as the sun rose. Searching for the mythical copy of one of our professor’s novels, a copy he’d razored edits into, removing words and paragraphs from the best-seller that had been published two decades before. Selling my favorites by Edward Abbey and Joy Williams to a now-disgraced rock star who came into the shop after I’d closed and begged me to protect him against ‘dying of boredom.’

There were books, but even more than the books were the printed pages. We printed our own stories, essays, and poems for workshops, packets of ten people’s work each week, we got photocopies of chapters and essays from our professors that I still have, pages of curricula summaries I don’t want to lose. There were draft pages all over the floors of my friend’s rooms waiting to be organized into samples and thesis manuscripts, not to mention the hundreds of pages of essays and poems from my students I carted home to fill with notes—when it came to feedback we did everything by hand.

We did other things by hand. A concentration of creative energy stored inside us was whetted by the allowances of the program and bloomed out beyond the writing into other areas, into music. We played a lot of music, a bunch of us in a band together, then a few configurations, running the open mic at the local dive, playing intermissions at readings, jamming with a couple of the male professors, the ones who also liked to drink with us, which I’m not saying wasn’t problematic, but we loved the camaraderie and specialness of it, moving from the bright day of the classroom to the dusk of the closest pool hall, still talking about some essay structure, joking about the trivial brilliance in some backstory. These evenings didn’t always end well, but they did end, and I miss having that kind of access sometimes still.

I also did a lot by feet. Walking off the late night before, the path along the river leading into the woods, hunting the landscape for new images, night walks through sleepy neighborhoods to see through the windows of the sleepy neighbors, pacing my second-floor apartment by the river, shaking more photocopied pages as I memorized the entirety of “Prufrock” for an in-class recitation (I nailed it). A friend house-sat for a professor and saw that he had paced a rut circling his own backyard—an eccentric writer, pacing. People hiked, stood in the river to fish, floated the river and walked back to their cars.

These are the things I remember. I remember the books, the pages, the people, the walking, the drinking, and the music.

In many ways, I am describing being young. A lot of us said, “After two years, I finally figured out what I want to write,” or “finally found my voice” or simply “I finally got ready to do it.” A lot of us wished we could start again when we were through. Which is to say, the MFA gave us time to fuck around and find out, in a good way. This ending felt like a success. What was left at the end was the beginning of something else, something we would have to carry through on our own. We didn’t necessarily learn what to do, but we did leave equipped to figure it out. Charlie, Kelly, Renée, Caylin, Emma, Alicia, and others from my cohort have published books of poetry, novels, non-fiction. Some went on to PhDs. I learned I loved working with writers and students more than anything, and made a path for myself. No matter how old we were when we started, time passed and we grew up.

Did the MFA make these successes possible? Yes. Would they have been impossible otherwise? No. The MFA is an institution, and art and passion don’t require institutional approval to exist, be loved, or have a purpose. There are three elements that made my MFA a good and worthwhile experience, but you don’t have to drop everything and go do a program to incorporate these elements into your life—just have fun Making Fun Art.

Time

It’s true, the best thing about the MFA for your writing is that someone has given you an assignment and expects you to turn it back in—your writing time is the priority. This is your job, to write, for this amount of time, and that may be all you get. But why wait to be told to prioritize the time? You might not be able to turn writing into your main job, but think about why you don’t prioritize your writing now—do you feel guilty? Would it be a relief to have someone with authority tell you to use your time writing? You will probably never, ever get that. These institutional hang-ups are old-fashioned and based on nothing. Be your own authority; no permission needs to be given, you are already free.

Maybe you opt for a semester-length time commitment, and say, “For the next four months I’m going to prioritize writing. Here’s what that means.” It doesn’t have to be the number one priority, you probably can’t do that. But maybe it can edge up to number three on your list from something you’ve never prioritized at all, and maybe you can create a schedule for yourself you really stick to, easier because you’ve committed to only four months, you have a limit. You probably won’t be able to fit in the same writing schedule you could if you were just in school for it, and that’s ok, this is your MFA. Consider it a “low-res” program, which are part-time programs designed for working people.

Also, everyone in my MFA program had jobs, I should say; some like me were lucky enough to have teaching jobs and receive tuition coverage and a living stipend, though I still worked at the bookstore on top of that; Billy was a bartender and ran the lit mag; one woman kept her therapy practice open; Eve worked at the Smokejumper’s station. I just want to emphasize that everyone was working hard! I don’t know where we found the time do so much fucking up now that I think about it. The point is, I guess, we all prioritized the same thing, and time was made.

I cover a lot in this newsletter and will cover more on how to make time, ritualize your practice, create a generative schedule, and containers for different projects and periods of writing—so this is a lot of what we’re talking about here. If you want to produce a lot of work, the time the MFA gives you and its demands allow for that, and you too can consider a semester-length, or a season to really prioritize. Set expectations for yourself, make your own demands of you. If you can do that and create an accountability system that works, great. You’re doing a third of the work of an MFA.

People

Get friends who are smart and talk to them about stuff you’re reading and read things together and talk about it, share your writing and read and listen to theirs—get together and read your stuff out loud. It doesn’t matter if someone’s a poet and you’re writing memoir, it’s all art and made up of the same stuff. Writers hear all the time that writing is solitary, hard, terrible, and lonely—no one will ever understand! Well, actually, a lot of people understand—they’re called other writers. If you can get a group of friends together to talk about ideas, stuff you’ve read, to read out loud to each other, to read excerpts of your own in-progress work without judgement, to share and listen, to ask questions, to learn to listen and ask questions, to be stoked on this insanely fun thing together that gives you so much agony, this is what it’s all about. It’s what it’s all about. Being self-conscious is so boring and unhelpful to your life and work.

At Montana, there were always opportunities to hear and support people’s work, facilitated through the program and organized by the students. We had a formal reading series where every student reader got an introduction written by another student, we had of course the thesis readings; we also had those after-class non-inclusive drinks with the professors (problematic, I get it!), and opt-in summer reading series over pancake breakfasts in people’s living rooms. All of these made up the experience of being there—sharing, listening, discussing, and speaking with so much loud passion and excitement about enjambment or overlapping timelines, you wouldn’t believe.

If you can get even two friends, like my Eve and Charlie, you don’t need to go back to school. One partner-in-creativity can change everything for you. If finding like-minded people is really difficult / not your life (maybe you’re a closeted writer, maybe you’re isolated physically on the oil rigs in Alaska), that would be a good reason to look into an MFA, sure, but not that’s not only place to look—writing groups online, local meet-ups of writers, look these things up, and then just put yourself out there. You are not alone. People everywhere, right next door, are in the creative closet. The more open you are about your work and dreams / what you want to do, the more light you send under their closet door, the more you help to wedge it open. Go to open mics, go to local readings in your community, go to lectures, find people who are also making time to appreciate and be around art—those are your people.

(I also have a post in the pipeline about how to set up a good writing group with other writers! Stay tuned.)

Reading

As much as the feedback from professors in these programs matters (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t), it’s their reading lists that are the real gold in my opinion. Understand that the curricula they make for you is essentially just stuff they really like. No writer who’s become a professor cares more about teaching than writing. So they’re sharing the writing that they love with you—that is how they teach. (Some of them are also amazing teachers, I’m being general but anyone reading this who has done time in an MFA is nodding.) I deeply value the reading I did at the behest of my professors, much of which I never would have encountered without their guidance, much of which has formed and informed my life.

But, they’re not holding any secret knowledge of ‘what you need to read in order to be a real writer.’ It’s stuff that makes them want to write. You can find your own. You want to read stuff that makes you want to write, and that helps you understand the potential of writing, what writing can be and do. You can create this curriculum yourself.

Start with an author you love, and see if you can find some books or writing or authors they love. Have they mentioned anything in an interview? Do they reference another writer’s work? This is the same category of stuff I got from my professors, and you can find it out there. Also, look up lists of books, essays, etc online if you’re trying to get deep into a certain genre or style.

Go to a local bookstore. I cannot over-hype this advice enough. Ask the clerk questions. 100% of people who work in bookstores love books. They want to answer your questions, guide you, share their knowledge. Help bookstore clerks fulfill their purpose! “What are you really liking right now?” “I like this author, and I want to try something new, who should I read next?” “I’m trying to learn about narrative nonfiction, what titles would you recommend?” “I don’t know a lot about the essay form, is there an anthology you’d suggest to start?” Ask them what their bookstore is really good at, too—a lot of places have niches for you to explore that aren’t advertised unless you ask. Bookstores are like a living curriculum for you to walk through.

Now, go get a copy of The Sentence by Louise Erdrich, read that, and then read the reading list in the back of that book, and read as many of those books as you can.

As far as ‘craft books’ or books on writing go, there are plenty, some of them are really popular, almost all of them have some really helpful things to say and some other things that won’t help you. Is it “worth it” to read some of these books? Yeah, of course, definitely. Does that mean you’ll learn all the secrets of writing from someone else’s book about writing? Nope, you’ll get the secrets of writing from your own book, of course, the one you write! But many of these books—personal journeys of writing like Steven King’s On Writing, handbooks of technique like Storycraft, guided practice like The Artist’s Way—have something to offer, and reading some of these can help you discover how writing works, what skills you want to develop, and what seems like it’s just someone else’s story. I didn’t read any of them / wasn’t assigned any in my MFA, outside of prosody guides and Richard Hugo’s Triggering Town, but I’ve read many since and I do think a reading list of these books can be helpful outside of a program, especially because they allow you to see in to other writers’ processes.

(In the pipeline is a post listing out some of these books and providing info / my take on each! You’ll also be reading more from me about reading for writing, how to read as a writer, and the identity of the reader!)

So that’s it—time, people, reading.

Ultimately, what do you think you’d get out of an MFA? More than anything, I wanted to teach and escape New York and publishing. That’s exactly what I did. My teaching experience at Montana and my time in the process of so many other writers enabled me in important ways to develop the work of my life, this work I do with writers like you now. And as far as escaping New York is concerned, I fell madly in love with the West and it’s where I live today, I never returned to the city. I draw as much creative inspiration from these landscapes as I do from books.

To be given permission and even instruction to be writing and reading is enormous, and it is enormous to be read—but you don’t need an institution to do these things for you. You can give these things to yourself, you can gather with others and do it for each other. The MFA is helpful because these allowances are made for you by ‘authorities,’ the permission, the request. But this isn’t necessary; the belief that you ‘need’ anything other than the things above to be a writer is wrong. When it comes to writing (or your life!), don’t wait for anyone to tell you or ask you. You just need time, friendship, and other people’s words. Chart your own course Making Fun Art, you might get a lot more than a degree.

Hope you enjoyed these reflections! If you have any questions about my experience, the MFA generally, or anything else, leave a comment or send me an email. I’d also love to hear your questions about reading, making reading lists, finding things to read, reading anxiety, etc.!

Back Friday with your next creative writing prompt.