People will say that MFAs are bullshit. You don’t become a good writer by going straight from college to graduate school, by sitting around tables and talking about books. People say that MFAs teach us the “correct” way to write: how words are supposed to sound, what details we’re supposed to use, the proper shape of a plot, the way an ending’s supposed to feel. People say that MFAs produce writers who produce the same old boring story.
I remember reading some article, shortly before I began my MFA program—I think it was in Poets & Writers—which talked about how writers have this reputation of being crazy and drunk. The author of the article was saying her grad program was the opposite—that they all stayed in during the weekends and wore braces at the keyboard to prevent carpal tunnel.






