What MFAs Are Good For

and what they're not good for

When I was in MFA school, there were several distinct discourse cycles about whether it was OK to do MFA school. Supposedly it made fiction conventional (a problem fiction never had before there were MFA programs), caused it to be too prettily written or not prettily written enough, or something else. Writers who earned a lot of money teaching at these programs — or writers who made money teaching workshops out of their living rooms, which workshops they insisted were rawer and realer than anything you’d get at these programs — went out of their way to write these absurdly overgeneralized takes, in which they’d insult thousands of students and teachers whose work, whether as writers or as educators, they demonstrably knew nothing about. Every time one of these pieces popped up, there would then immediately be twenty angry responses from MFA students making the equivalent of sub-minimum wage from their teaching stipends — we had nothing to lose and big chips on our shoulders, and were happy to defend our own honor in any publication, for peanuts. So the argument went on and on. At one point I had this running gag on Twitter where every time one of these pieces dropped, I would talk about the tiredness of contemporary anti-MFA discourse using only phrases cribbed from certain classics of the anti-MFA genre, like William Gass’s “A Failing Grade for the Present Tense.” That article was bullshit too, but at least he put some effort into it.

I don’t know whether it’s that my social world has changed, or if I’m really perceiving an actual shift in the culture. But it kind of seems to me like that argument has stopped happening, or that it doesn’t happen in the same way. People who don’t read much contemporary fiction will, if they dislike the one extremely hyped novel from any given year that they happen to pick up, sometimes blame “the MFA-ification” of fiction, but their heart isn’t really in it — this is just something educated people say to fill the time. It’s the literary equivalent of complaining about “partisanship” or “polarization,” a way to sound intelligent without really specifying what you mean. The big literary and literary-adjacent magazines have stopped running long attacks on these programs — the attacks are now just 2-3 lines in a review of a debut novel,