Who needs an MFA anyway? Alan Ackmann confesses:
It was easy, for me at least, to lose perspective on the real world—the world of non-writers, with their various struggles, joys, and fears—and this distance made it difficult to write about that world. Part of it was the fact that I started my program when I was twenty-two. My real life experience was limited, and it wasn’t getting wider in graduate school, and for a time this made me both self-conscious and defensive. The best writers in my program, I felt, were the ones with ample real-life experience on which to draw, and their stories seemed rich in character and emotional depth, their styles matched perfectly with their subjects. The weaker writers, by contrast, hid behind surface level stereotypes and artistic hijinks, cloaking simple thoughts in pretty words. And as much as I tried to be in the former category, I’m afraid I spent (and, regrettably, still spend) too much of my time in the latter.
Universities cannot replace real life experience, never mind how much they’d like to.
An MFA might be a good idea, but only after you have the experience.
This is encouraging. I’ve thought I might like to go back to get an MFA at some point, but I’m glad I’ve had a couple years to pursue my writing and other goals outside of that environment. Hopefully it pays off.
If I do go back for my MFA, though, my first choice is hands down the Michener Center. I explain why here. I explain why here.
I’m a double MFA dropout, which I guess is something. It’s been a while since I seriously read any contemporary literary journals, but I used to work for one, and I remember how the contributors’ notes tended to read: MFA from Such-and-such U, teaches at X . . .
We lived in England for four years while my husband did his Ph.d (in theology, not creative writing!), and I published a good bit of poetry in journals over there during that time. I remember being delighted by the contributors’ notes in one magazine in particular: virtually nobody had any kind of “writing” degree, and one guy, whose poem I greatly admired, worked in an envelope factory.
To my mind the real value of a creative-writing program is that it buys you some time to do nothing but read and write. Beyond that . . . I dunno. Maybe it depends on where you are . . .