Donna Trussell

Are Master of Fine Arts programs pyramids that enrich a few at the top and embitter those at the bottom?

Are they Ponzi schemes that ultimately collapse on themselves?

Or are they heavens on earth for those who practice the secular religion of writing?

This debate has been raging for decades.

Years ago I read an article — I believe it was in Poets & Writers. [Ed. note: I think it's this article, Why Is American Fiction in Its Current Dismal State by Anis Shivani. Thank you conepuppet.]

Open up any current leading journal, and the typical story starts off with these phrasal bits: “My mother…my father…I was in the sixth grade…my friend Ellie…in the backseat of my parents’ car…”

The author’s point is that MFA programs churn out middle-class writers who could write about nothing but their childhoods because that was the last time life was unstructured enough to surprise them.

Another quote from Shivani’s essay:

The conventions of literary fiction are that the bourgeois hero (more likely the heroine) be vulnerable, prone to shame and guilt, unable to fit the pieces of the larger puzzle together, and on the same banal moral plane as the “average reader”: sympathetic, in other words, someone we can “identify” with, who reflects our own incomprehension of the world, our helplessness and inability to effect change.

Then there must be full accounting of motives and intentions, causes and effects, actions and consequences, in a step-by-step, gradually unfolding manner, all in the aim of achieving psychological credibility-as if humans were predictable voting machines, as if all that happens lies within the boundaries of explicability; and the result is not explanation, but unintended mystification, not psychological profundity but sheer tiresome exposure, unwanted nakedness.

I’m not as educated or well-read as Mr. Shivani, but even in my limited experience in fiction writing classes, I noticed a predictability to the stories.

I felt like a social worker taking over for someone who was retiring: Here are the case files. I could almost hear the thudding of each file on my desk as new characters were introduced and established.

In the stories there would be some kind of frustration, followed by a searing experience, and then a moment of understanding, connectedness or forgiveness. The main character emerges a bit battered, but more enlightened, noble or kind.

Social critic Eric Hoffer, best known for his book of social commentary The True Believer, wrote in The Passionate State of Mind that people will “try to assert and prove themselves by whatever means and under every sort of condition.” He continues:

It is permissible to wonder what other means for the demonstration of individual worth are likely to develop in a nonacquisitive society. Vying in creativity is not a likely substitute for vying in acquisition — not only because creativity is accessible only to the few, but because creative work is without automatic recognition.

The nonacquisitive society is likely to develop into a combination of army and school. People will prove themselves by winning citations, degrees, medals and rank. Whatever else we cure by eliminating greed, we do not cure life of its triviality.

Hoffer’s description could have been lifted from an unofficial guide to academia, particularly English departments.

Writer/professor David Gessner addressed the ivory-tower effect on creativity in Those Who Write, Teach in The New York Times.

Energy is finite while college students seemingly are not, and after teaching for a while you begin to feel as if you are in a Star Trek episode, lost on a strange planet made up of a thousand pods of need, all of them beaming out at you, sucking your energy, and all of them, invariably, asking you to read something. Since the reading life feeds the writing life, since we are what we eat, this can wear you down, to say the least.

The novelist Mike Magnuson puts this sentiment more bluntly: ‘What teaching has done for me is make me not want to read anything, written by anybody, for the rest of my life.’

Here’s singer/songwriter David Olney’s advice to young songwriters: Pay attention in shop class. Olney had to bus tables for a while, and he believes there is no quicker path to depression than cleaning up other people’s garbage. Learn a trade, he says.

So what exactly are the MFA pros and cons?

In the pro-MFA corner, we have:

T. Coraghessan Boyle interviewed by Liam Callanan on awpwriter.org:

The old guard, the generation before mine, felt that novelists must live in the world: they should work in the slaughterhouse and the coal mines, write a great proletarian novel, and become self-educated. And of course that may have been the case to a degree, but they also had great editors like Maxwell Perkins to bail them out.

I think that now we don’t have great editors. We have editors who are basically trying to hold on to their jobs and who publish good books once in a while. They’re basically cheerleaders for the books. They’re not editors, really. They’re incapable of being editors; they don’t need to be. Because editing is done — self-editing is done — through the apprenticeship in the writing programs.

Nearly everyone from my generation on to your generation and beyond will have been through an MFA program. It’s just the way it is now. It’s a different world. It’s essential.

Poet Eric McHenry wrote an “anti anti-MFA” manifesto that appeared in Poets & Writers in 2003. I haven’t read the article, but it was explained to me as a rebuttal of the notion that poetry could ever be a popular medium again. However, the explosion of MFA programs in the last 15 years has enlarged the poetry audience by creating a subculture devoted to literature.

I wish McHenry’s essay was online so I could provide a link. I did find an anti — to the third power — response to McHenry’s essay. The comment was titled poets and writers and mr mchenry and it ended with:

poets and writers is a trade rag. the articles in poets and writers are concerned with publication and reviews and prizes. they are not concerned with communication. they are not concerned with language. they are not concerned with poetical forms. they write about how to address bad reviews. they do not mention bad poetry. why is that?

In the anti-MFA corner, we have:

Writer Nick Mamatas interviewed by Robert Ryan Mullen:

I think the MFA system is the largest Ponzi scheme in academia today. It’s the hardly published teaching the possibly unpublishable how to teach the courses that they’re taking for the next generation of suckers.

Of course, the best MFA programs from rich schools pay off for their graduates, but everything is always easier for the petit-bourgeoisie in the first place.

As for the other 85 or so graduate programs in creative writing that have erupted like a skin rash over the past few decades, they are essentially valueless for the students, though of course they are important for the university system.

Most of the comments on Cinderella Schools for Writers by Gregory Cowles on papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com are decidedly anti-MFA.

One commenter agreed that getting a mentor is crucial. Finding that mentor is the problem. True mentoring is spontaneous and unenforceable. Just because a student paid tuition does not mean anyone on the faculty will do more than the bare minimum for that student.

Another comment suggested that among themselves creative-writing teachers talk about students the way hookers discuss their johns. [Ed note: One could argue that workshops are built on the dominatrix model: You pay to get abused.]

In The MFA Education Scam blogger King Wenclas makes some good points about the burgeoning wealth of universities, about monopolies, about the construction of gates, the hiring gatekeepers and then the raking in of profits.

The second and final comment on the blog by an anonymous artist (curiously, the comment was published some two years after the original post) makes this observation:

There are thousands of BFA and MFA painters being pumped out of universities across the country every year. Few people can make a living on paintings. Tremendous supply, miniscule demand even with illustration. The best paying job they’re going to get in their field? Teaching a new crop at the same universities…

Maybe painting is not meant to be an occupation. I can accept that. My concern is with the false hopes Art School feeds incoming students. “All of our instructors are working artists” they say. Sure they are. They’re working as teachers. By junior year most students catch on and just stick around for their degree.

Garrison Keillor advised one aspiring writer to skip the MFA.

It’s a scam run by English departments to fatten their coffers and doesn’t do you much good except as a social club (you can find better ones elsewhere). You’re apt to find star faculty who never teach and a whole lot of semi-published writers doing the teaching and the prevailing culture is one of mutual flattery. You waste two years hearing people tell you how wonderful you are and then you graduate and find out that nobody wants to read your stuff.

[Ed. note: I've never been much of a Keillor fan, but I found myself warming up to him after reading his Roar of Hollow Patriotism column.]

The writers conference from which I just returned could be viewed as a microcosm of the academic writing world. Some students left the conference ecstatic. Others felt had. One student observed that for the first week everyone is on their best behavior, but by week two, the facades begin to fray.

Me? After staring down ovarian cancer, there’s not much that scares me. However, I reluctantly admit I was brought to tears by my private faculty critique. That has never happened before.

One student said if this was the first time in 25 years I’ve been devastated by a teacher, I’ve been lucky. Another student winked at me and said, “Want me to hurt him?”

I was brought to a different sort of tears by Tim O’Brien’s reading in which a dead sister speaks to him in dreams.

A writer said to me, “Tim O’Brien — well, he’s one of a kind. Even his craft lecture made people cry.”

I suppose those are the moments that keep writers coming back. And keep them looking the other way when Toto tugs at the Wizard’s curtain.

[Ed. note: My continuation of this rant was published on Politics Daily on October 24, 2009. Ripping Off Writers Since 1852: The Literary Industrial Complex.]