Mfa Quotes

Particularly with MFA students, who have so much invested - literally and figuratively - I feel like honest criticism is something they're owed. It's not going to be easier in the real world, surely. ~ Tod Goldberg

IN MY SO-CALLED CAREER, I'VE OFTEN WRITTEN THINGS THAT I VAINLY THOUGHT WERE INCREDIBLY GOOD AND THAT I ENJOYED READING SO MUCH I FIGURED EVERYBODY ELSE WOULD ENJOY THEM TOO, AND MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, I HAVE BEEN TOTALLY WRONG … I never stopped being surprised that so many critics were uninterested in them, or dismissive, or even hostile. often they tried to point out the allegorical failures of the pieces, even when they were clearly as non-allegorical as they could get. and more than a couple of times, I received emails from somebody asking me what happened, why didn't I write the stories I used to write, and why did I get into all this 'animal rights' nonsense? I guess they thought I was picketing outside university research facilities. I consider all my stories and novels to be animal stories … I never understood why people took MFA degrees, or creative writing courses, and I avoided taking them myself for many years … honestly, I can't imagine why anybody would want to go through the pain and agony of having his work critiqued in an open forum - I tell my creative writing students this all the time, they are all far braver than I am! ~ Scott Bradfield

He utilizes
form for a striking lecture;
young poets shiver

inexperience,
but thaw over their own work,
fertilize magic. ~ Kristen Henderson

I think in terms of educating a group of readers, MFA programs are very good. I just think the model of MFA programs in which a young poet goes through the program, publishes a series of books, gets teaching jobs, that's a bit at risk. ~ Edward Hirsch

I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It's all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer. ~ Chad Harbach

Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris in a table in the back, when I fell under the spell of Renée's bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star's Radio City. Renée was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song – the acoustic ballad Thirteen. She'd never heard their third album, Sister Lovers. So naturally, I told her the same thing I'd told every other woman I'd ever fallen for: "I'll make you a tape! ~ Rob Sheffield

MFA in a Box is designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor - but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor keeps it from being laugh-out-loud funny. ~ John Rember

The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table. ~ Edward Hirsch

I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice. ~ Kate Zambreno

Financial firms are sending their back-office jobs overseas. But what do fine artists do? They create something new, unexpected, and delightful that changes the world. MFA abilities are harder to outsource and more important in an abundant world. ~ Daniel H. Pink

During my MFA, I was lucky to be surrounded by a really supportive group of peers. And now I get feedback pretty exclusively from freaks only. ~ Alissa Nutting

You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel. ~ Stephen Graham Jones

The ghosts of Rilke and Wordsworth
along with the 300+ MFA programs, which now seem to employ all Living Poets
have misled the American public egregiously into thinking that poets are morally pure and/or useless. ~ Katy Lederer

PhD, MFA, self-taught - the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success. ~ Alexander Chee

I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Genre/forms are institutional questions mainly. Like matter to MFA programs in terms of which workshop you can teach. ~ Juliana Spahr

I have an MFA in writing. It is debatable if they are right for everyone, but I had a mentor who really changed my life, so it worked for me. ~ Rob Roberge

What an invaluable handbook! Lori A. May has done her research, knows her stuff, and, whats best, lets the programs speak for themselves through her extensive interviews. Theres a chorus of quotes from faculty, students, and graduates in The Low-Residency MFA Handbook. Anyone making the decision to apply for an MFA should consult this wise guide. Mays clarity and authority make it a gold standard. ~ Molly Peacock

My god, people are selling their work and people are reading it! The horror! That MFA programs have to advertise that they'll let you write YA or fantasy or what-have-you is just absurd, but we do, because the presumption is that they're closed to that sort of thing. You're offering an MFA in creative writing? Teach people how to write well, worry about that part, let the writers come up with the stories. ~ Tod Goldberg

I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs. ~ Jess Row

There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it's amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor. ~ Elizabeth McCracken

If you're part of any kind of writerly community, some of those people will have gone through MFA programs, and their thinking leaks into yours. So whatever changes MFAs have made to the culture, it's to the culture as a whole. It can't be pinned down to individual books in a way that some people would like to do. ~ Chad Harbach

I would be happier if people who went through MFA programs also were already, by then, deeply committed readers of poetry because we need readers of poetry as much as writers of poetry. ~ Edward Hirsch

I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it. ~ Edward Hirsch

I first became familiar with Dave Eggers's work when I was living in San Francisco and enrolled at USF's MFA Program. ~ James Bernard Frost

Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein "obsessing"? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and a year's worth of a PhD, Stein was an author I had to discover on my own. She wasn't on the syllabus anywhere in all that time. ~ Laura Mullen

When I say that I went to grad school in Iowa City, people often assume that I went to the famed writers' workshop MFA program at the University of Iowa. I didn't. I got a master's in journalism. ~ Chelsea Cain

Breezy journalistic sentences about wealthy white people unaware that other human beings are real became the rubber stamp product of the elite MFA programs. ~ Sarah Schulman

Does any (MFA) program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them? ~ Chang-rae Lee

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now. ~ Dinaw Mengestu

MFA program at the University of Michigan when we met. ~ Jennifer Coburn