Post MFA in Creative Writing Commencement Reflection
Must we be useful?
Or maybe, must we define “useful” through solely capitalist measures? That question is what drives me as I think about what others have said about the MFA world, poetry, and graduating with a creative writing degree. Kristi York writes in her blog post “The Long, Slow Death of My MFA” that getting an MFA does not economically add up to having one. “Son, be and do anything—just do not get an MFA,” she says. Yet, in a world where everything has a monetary price, what makes paying for learning to write different?
After graduating with an MFA, I’m glad I didn’t see her post before I began. So many voices already clamor to tell us what to do and who to be. So many never say why. (Dear man on the chicken-care message board who so emphatically demands people not brood chickens in the house: why must we not brood chickens in our houses? Why are you so adamant people not do this?) Or when they do, their reasons are grounded in capitalistic and competitive ends. And of the many things I learned while thinking, reading, and writing for my MFA, a marked one for me was that I believe capitalism breeds violence. Thus, any of the reasons given for not getting an MFA based on financial reasons fall on unconvinced ears (although I do not address the issue of MFAs being largely only accessible to middle- to upper-class people, which is, again, an issue I have with capitalism).
I went for a walk the other day with my writer friend who explained to me her current career situation and how she was raised to only pursue practical things. I learned the same. Our culture of dying liberal arts and increased tech schools attests to this. We met at paralegal school—indeed, how practical of both of us. In our mid-20’s then, we were late in finding that single career path and both landed at this college to do something other than brew coffee. When artistic-minded/neurodivergent people grow up believing we must be practical, we often fail to learn the skills that truly fulfill our desire, that make our hearts beat, that enrich us. We fail to learn how to listen to that desire. We are forced into what American culture perceives as something useful and don’t know how to change our circumstances. I’ve also never been driven by money or the need to be ahead of anyone else. I’ve never felt like I needed the nicest car (I would rather have a horse). Nor am I career motivated: getting the next position up does not appeal to me. Within American culture’s definition of career, I don’t have an appropriate answer about what to be when I grow up. I’m really quite happy if I could live sustainably by writing, growing vegetables, and caring for my animals. I don’t need to measure my worth by comparison or have a position higher or one that’s better than another.
I do agree with blogger Kristi York who says that many famous writers wrote without MFAs and continue to do so. Sappho did not need an MFA to be Sappho. J.K. Rowling studied French and classics. Two of thousands. Journalist Cecilia Capuzzi Simon in the New York Times asks whether “To M.F.A or not to M.F.A?” “One doesn’t need an M.F.A. to write,” she says. The first MFA was rewarded to three individuals in 1940 by Iowa University; the same school began its Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1936. The degree hasn’t even existed yet for one hundred years. It seems somewhat manufactured (aren’t all degrees?) to supply credentials for university teachers who then teach the same degree, or at least English. Why get one?
I recently met a young woman who had just published her first novel. She had a Master’s degree in English. Through this schooling, she learned how to write by discovering how other writers put their novels together. She learned the craft by reading, by knowing how to read. This is not beach reading, but reading for syntax and structure. How to read like a writer. This is something I needed taught how to do. I knew reading is part of writing (and is secretly why I want to write), but I didn’t understand how. I didn’t have an awareness of myself as a writer or the impact of syntax. I just threw sentences together and knew it worked relatively well, most of the time, somehow. I still remember the lesson one professor taught on the “being” verb: “Count how many times you have ‘are’ in that essay,” she said, “or ‘is,’ ‘were,’ and ‘was.’ They drain your writing of power. They have no movement, no muscle. They are empty words, like ‘’place’ and ‘there.’” I developed awareness of how a verb drives the sentence’s meaning, how some verbs can be visualized and experienced more than others. This transformed not only my writing, but also my reading.
I graduated from an MFA program called “Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative.” When a classmate and I were huddled together with our program director among the many counselor majors and business majors, all of us students dressed and waiting to graduate, the three of us decided our MFA needs to be called “Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative and Magic.” “Our school is Hogwarts, isn’t it?” my professor said. My classmate and I nodded agreement. We’d had similar conversations before. My professor taught me to find my own voice without changing mine into hers. She taught me through affirmation and silence. She taught me that learning to write does not have to be through criticism and abuse. We do not need our writing marked up with a red pen to discover how to find our voices. She taught me how the writing process is like the alchemical process of turning lead into gold. This is magic.
A week before my graduation, I picked up a book called Can Poetry Matter? by Dana Gioia, baffled that the question even needs asked. Published in 1992, his introduction states that American poetry belongs largely to its own subculture and will stagnate in its own isolation. Poetry, he says, has been academized into such a small, insular subculture that American culture at large fails to understand its relevance. Its value to daily life is lost in the weeds, forgotten. It has been tucked under the wing of the university where full-time creative writing teachers are obligated to publish. A lot. The amount of what is written is too much for the rest of the world to take in. There are daily more writers, but the amount of readers remains unchanged. Good writing is inundated by the sub par. I am apparently a product of this culture. I noted in pencil the date I read the introduction and wrote “Read one week before graduating with MFA.”
Gioia’s aim is, I think, a good one: to bring poetry’s relevance back to the larger culture, or even into the one of the arts. Get poets and artists to work together. Yet I remember a professor talking about how all the poets writing now is a sign that our culture needs to be healed, for poets are healers. Just as the earth heals her wounds and rages with fire and storms to renew balance, poets emerge to heal the wounds of society. Where is the balance for poetry in our culture? Does it need rescued from the clutches of the university? How can poetry step outside of the school’s restrictions and free itself from the clutches of structure? And is it the university or is it the publishing world saying what is worthy? Does the university say how poetry must be or is it publishers who say that? Or are they in silent cahoots? Can’t poetry be taught in a university and still be subversive?
Gioia also troubles me, however. He assumes it lost its relevance, as if poetry were a thing solely reliant upon the fickle whims of humans. I think poetry is beyond that. Poetry is more than what publishers deem worthy, more than what universities teach their students. Poetry persists.
Gioia says contemporary poetry still suffers the after-effects of the Romantics and their “emphasis on intensity,” yet he finds his answer to effective poetry in the 19th-20th centuries as poets were just exploring free verse and were perceived as counter-cultural. This contradicts his desire for poetry to be so accessible to the every-day reader. What about looking further back to a time when poetry guided culture? When it was found in the every-day? When skalds and scops were genealogists, kept the family history alive, kept the culture’s origin stories relevant? Poets were keepers of the records. Poets kept the balance.
Post graduation, and in the midst of writing this essay, I made a list of the things I learned from my three years of writing and reading for my MFA degree. This list contains both the practical and the spiritual. Writing, I discovered, is a sacred act. One question MFA programs and professors must address is whether they are teaching art or teaching a trade. After completing my undergraduate degree, I didn’t know what to do so I went back to school to receive paralegal training. The program was an Associate’s of Applied Science (AAS) in Paralegal Studies. This degree taught me far more hands-on knowledge applicable to a job than the bachelor’s I had received (although I will defend my literature and philosophy degree to the death for its liberal arts instruction). Not quite a tech school, it nevertheless taught an applied practice.
The MFA, I think, is a kind of mix between my bachelor’s in literature and my associates in paralegal studies. The MFA taught me craft. A practical endeavor. The MFA also taught me how to be a better human. Here we step into the sacred, into the mysterious unanswerableness of being. Poet Tracy K. Smith writes about Federico Garcia Lorca and what he called duende, a “keeper of the space” of mystery that resides beneath the ground like roots and above the ground like branches. Smith says, “we write poems in order to engage in the perilous yet necessary struggle to inhabit ourselves—our real selves, the ones we barely recognize—more completely.” Through my classes in the MFA, I learned how to attune to this tension between the mundane and the spiritual. My teachers in my MFA program watered my ground and taught me how to tend to the soil in which I grow. Whether that’s practical or magical (or practical magic?), I no longer need to make a distinction.
Authors Mark St. Pierre and Tilda Long Soldier write in Walking in the Sacred Manner about how the Lakota culture does not demarcate between sacred acts and everyday existence. They are intertwined, or perhaps not intertwined for this would suggest a duality. Instead, their every day is the sacred. This lack of distinction creates a culture that embraces mystery and respect for all beings, including plants and animals. It imbibes all action with spirit and purpose, with care and attention. This is writing to me and I needed a mentor to lead me to this discovery. So much of our culture demands independence and individuality, but I don’t think there is truth in all of it. We need guides of all kinds, humans, animals, and plants.
I gained community from my MFA, a sense of writing for myself first rather than publishers, and a habit of writing. I learned to have writing as vocation. I developed writing muscles, which is more than one kind of muscle (writing fiction feels so different than poetry). The community and practices I developed as a result of attending full-time are invaluable. Writing workshops, which do not have degree backing, can end up costing a similar amount and do not have the concentrated attention from teachers the way my MFA did. Here, I think, lies the true value in the MFA: concentrated mentorship.
Alastair McIntosh focuses on the role of mentorship in writing in his article “God, War, and the Faeries.” Mentors, he says, “lead out qualities of the soul” through one-on-one interaction, visions, and dreams. In the instance of writing my thesis, a book-length collection of poems, I needed not only my thesis supervisor’s guidance on craft, but also her encouragement to listen to my “qualities of the soul” that were whispering to me through the words that emerged in my early drafts. In McIntosh’s article, he stresses the importance of having a writer friend who guided him through several drafts of his book Poacher’s Pilgrimage to its completion. Without others, we cannot be wholly ourselves, we cannot be wholly human. I include plants and animals in this belief.
I discovered that I needed others to guide me because writing is more than just craft and not solely a solitary endeavor. Writing is expressing the self and what it means to be human in all our follies and beauty. I say, if a person can find a writing mentor in any way, whether it be through an MFA, workshops, or a friend, do it. Embrace it. Learn from them. I happened to find this in my MFA and I hope others find similar self-realization. I do not believe, however, that the value of writing mentors is wholly measurable in usefulness. Some things in life simply are not useful. But all things can be beautiful.
Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter?
McIntosh, Alastair. “God, War, and the Faeries: Mentoring and Carrying Stream in Writing Poacher’s Pilgrimage.” Christianity in Scottish Literature. Occassional Papers 25, 2023, pp. 269 – 294.
Simon, Cecilia Capuzzi. “Why Writers Love to Hate the M.F.A.” The New York Times. April 9, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/education/edlife/12edl-12mfa.html
Smith, Tracy K. “Survival in Two Worlds at Once: Federico Garcia Lorca and Duende.” Poets.org. https://poets.org/text/survival-two-worlds-once-federico-garcia-lorca-and-duende)
“University Archives: Resource Guide to University ‘Firsts.’” Iowa University Libraries. https://www.lib.uiowa.edu/sc/archives/faq/faqfirsts/
St. Pierre, Mark and Tilda Long Soldier. Walking in the Sacred Manner. Healers, Dreamers, and Pipe Carriers—Medicine Women of the Plains Indians. Touchstone, NY: 1995.
York, Kristi. “The Long, Slow Death of my MFA. Be a Writer (Just Do it Differently) — Notes to My Son.” Kristi Yorks Blog. https://medium.com/@kristiyorks/the-long-slow-death-of-my-mfa-4629bd4dac2