icarusancalion

I'm debating applying to an MFA program. Or MFA programs, rather.

The goal would be to teach at the junior college level.

The trouble is, I don't have a lot of confidence in college creative writing programs for me as a writer. I wonder if they implicitly teach a kind of literary snobbery.

Does the workshop process, where you throw your stories in the ring to a bunch of people who have little interest and no investment in them, really benefit the writer? Do stories "get better"? Do writers "get better"?

Or do they turn a kind of MFA product, stamped with the seal of approval that "this is now literature"?

What are the pedagogies behind different MFA programs? I keep running into people who tell me X writer who runs this or that program is truly great. Yet they can't tell me how they benefited. Instead they tell me, "Oh, yeah, he was really hard on me" with a kind pride that they could "take it." I'm unclear what the improvement was. Except for developing a thick skin.

I can tell you how I benefited as a writer from fandom. I can enumerate the beta readers, relationships, resources for research, and unflagging enthusiasm for stories. The challenges, the massive stories in short periods of time, the engine to finish that novel that comes from having an audience waiting for the next part, the sparking of creativity. There's a freewheeling joy in fandom that I'm not sure exists in MFA programs.

I wonder if it isn't more beneficial to just read. Just experience life. Turn off the writers the lens, the way a photographer needs to learn to get out from behind the camera.

Of course, I learned that particular approach from a professor who did an MFA.