A Kernel on an MFA

Part Two: Reflections on the first semester

Last August I took the plunge and entered a three-year MFA program in fiction, and last week I finished my coursework, turned in my final grades, and breathed a huge sigh of relief to have my first semester behind me. So how did it go? 

(This is Part Two in an on-going series about getting an MFA in creative writing. Read Part One here. If you have questions, drop them in the comments, and I’ll try to answer them here or in a future installment. I plan to post an update each term until I graduate in Spring 2026.)

Great Expectations

I’ll admit that I went into the semester with high expectations: I would write for two hours a day, make lots of new writer friends, dive into graduate-level coursework, and learn how to teach classes of undergrads. And I managed to do it all—except the two hours of writing a day.

I had very few “good” writing days this fall. Most of my time was eaten up by coursework, teaching, and a couple of family emergencies. About halfway through the semester, one of my kids needed emergency surgery, and so I missed a week of classes caring for him (thankfully, he’s fine). Then I fell even further behind because of an unexpected child care shortfall. Although I managed to meet all of my deadlines, I did so at the expense of my regular morning writing time. I haven’t even looked at my novel manuscript since mid-October.

Nonetheless, I managed to write one solid short story and one awesome short story, but I wrote both on deadline and the experience of writing them was unpleasant. I was writing under the gun to meet the deadline of my workshop, and I felt hyperconscious about what I was writing (was it good enough, was it phony, was it interesting, did I unwittingly reveal some terrible secret part of myself?). This is not the best recipe for creativity. Most of the time, my writing felt constipated, for lack of a better word. I rarely got into a state of flow, which is when my writing feels at its best, its most natural. 

A more senior student in my program told me she experienced something similar: for the first year of her MFA, writing “didn’t feel good anymore.” She attributed this to a “developmental leap.” You know, like the way a baby becomes fussy or regresses in their sleep just before they acquire a new ability, such as understanding cause-and-effect. She felt she was learning so much that her creative output hadn’t quite caught up to the advancements of her critical skill set. But then sometime during the summer before her second year, her writing suddenly started to “feel good again,” and her craft appeared to have improved by leaps and bounds. I am holding on to this promise—and I’m hoping I don’t have to wait another semester until I get there.

Welcome to the Monkey House

My favorite part of the program so far has been my fiction workshop and the relationships I’ve developed with other writers. This was a relief, as I was pretty intimidated heading into the semester. As I mentioned before, there are several writers in my program who have already published books. Good books. Multiple books. But I quickly made my peace with the fact that we are each on our own journey here, and the only path I need to worry about is my own. I may not be as close to the finish line as they are, but I’ll likely get there in the end, in my own time, if I just keep going. And in the meantime, what great company I get to keep!

On the whole, I found our workshop to be an incredibly supportive environment—and challenging, in the best possible way. (Unlike the deliciously cringe-y portrayal of an MFA program in those infamous episodes of the TV show Girls.) The craft standards were very high, but I never heard an unfair or unkind criticism. And about halfway through the semester it felt as if everyone was relaxed enough to start sharing morally and emotionally challenging material, an impression corroborated by my professor. This was just the license I needed to push the intensity of my own writing, and I felt I plumbed new emotional depths in both of the stories I wrote for workshop.

That said, one surprising stressor was the requirement that I read my fiction aloud at the program’s public reading series. Now, I do not generally stress about public speaking, but reading my fiction felt different. It felt way more vulnerable, and I didn’t have a sample that I felt lent itself to a reading: no crowd-pleaser, nothing fun or funny, or particularly lyrical or linguistically exciting. So I got fresh feedback on an old story from a new professor, who helped me shave off five pages (of a 25-page story), and my manuscript was all the better for it. I still didn’t enjoy the public reading, but it was good practice since this is something published writers do regularly. I also received positive feedback on my story, which was encouraging. I’m glad I don’t have to do it again until the end of my third year, when I hope I will have something I am eager to share.

A Sentimental Education

By far the most surprising experience of my first term was how much I enjoyed teaching. Being a teaching assistant is a requirement of my fully funded MFA, one that, I’m sorry to say, I gave absolutely zero thought to until the moment I received my course assignment last summer, when I realized I wasn’t going to just spend the next three years writing and thinking about literature—I was going to have to teach real, live college students. This term I was assigned a sophomore-level survey course on American literature from the Civil War to the present, and managing three classes of 18 undergrads every week required a steep learning curve. I basically had two days of “training” before I taught my first class and no instructions beyond “do whatever you want!” 

I spent a lot of time in the first half of the semester figuring out how to be a teacher. I sought advice from more experienced teaching assistants, I went to monthly workshops that my university provides on pedagogy, and I had my teaching evaluated by a couple of professors. All this effort paid off, and by the end of the semester I could walk into class with about an hour’s preparation. I actually enjoyed teaching (most days, when the students did the assigned reading), and I developed a good rapport with my students. When they walked out of class at the end of the final exam, I felt we had all come a long way together. I think they might even have learned something.

Unsurprisingly, I got as much out of the class as I put in. The course plugged some holes in my own education. I now feel grounded in Magic realism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Regionalism—all the -isms, basically. I got to re-read both Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, and Morrison’s Beloved, and these masterpieces taught me powerful lessons about the craft of storytelling. I also learned a lot about how to give a good lecture. The professor I TA’ed for is a gifted lecturer—possibly the best I have ever seen—and watching him for two hours each week was a masterclass in how to teach (one secret: repetition!). 

At his encouragement, I prepared and delivered my own 50-minute lecture on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” and first-wave feminism—a topic I previously knew nothing about—to more than 200 undergrads. This was a nerve-wracking experience, which required two weeks of preparation, but delivering a successful lecture to a packed auditorium is a high unlike any other, and I actually look forward to lecturing again someday—although maybe not as soon as next semester.

The Voyage Out

Looking ahead to the spring term, I am hoping to have two short stories in the bag and ready to workshop before classes even begin, so that I can front-load some of my deadlines, knowing that I will have two seminar papers and a ton of undergraduate student grading due at the end of the term. I’m also planning to spend winter break getting deep into the weeds of my novel again. I want to be already in the habit of spending the first two hours of my day on my novel before classes resume in mid-January, so that I can hopefully sustain my writing practice throughout the entire semester.

I am counting on the fact that I’ve learned enough about teaching that I won’t have to spend nearly as much time preparing for my classes or grading assignments as I did this past fall. I’ve also selected my own courses with feasibility in mind: although I’m taking two literature seminars (up one from last term), one of them promises to have a lighter reading load than the literature seminar I took this semester, and they both have “creative options” for the final paper, which will be much easier for me (and more fun) than having to write a traditional graduate-level research paper like the one I labored over this term. 

I went into the semester with a lot of excitement and a lot of anxiety, but my experiences so far have helped me kick my imposter syndrome to the curb. I may not have been the top writer in my workshop, but I wasn’t out of my league either. I felt like I actually belong here, and I am confident that this is what I want to be doing with these three years of my life. I’m really excited about next semester—but first I am ready for a good long break, for rest, for reading, and hopefully for lots and lots of writing.

Newsletter update: We will be taking a break for the next two weeks to enjoy the holidays with our families. We look forward to being back on Monday, January 8, with our thoughts on writing—and our writerly goals—for the new year.

Inspiration, Information, & Insight

• Reading was minimal for Natalia this week. Even her workout schedule suffered as her Garmin stopped telling her if she was “maintaining” or “detraining;” it was clear she had entered hibernation mode. She squeezed in a few political podcasts while on her 10 p.m. desperate attempt at movement on the treadmill and that was about it. She is breathing a sigh of relief as five of her MFA applications are in! While she immediately agonized over the use of “existence” and “existential" in the same sentence of her already-submitted personal statements (why 5,000 read-throughs weren’t enough to catch this, who knows?), she reminded herself that she had never prepared so much for her applications before and it felt good to work hard and to worry about a word choice on a statement instead of a major last-minute fiction sample overhaul (as in past years).

• Shelby read

  Lexi Merritt
  ’s essay on Trick Mirror and writing and is reflecting on her own writing process, wondering if it’s time she finally reads Tolentino’s essay collection. Otherwise, she has been slinging books at the bookstore during the holiday season, which is BUSY. She loves making recommendations to customers (if you want a book rec, feel free to drop a comment below!) but is ready for a break.

• Neidy is reading Brandon Taylor’s Filthy Animals and then plans to work through some of this list of books before the year ends. She has submitted all of her MFA applications and is now preparing for two programs she’s signed up for in the new year: an online workshop with Tin House and the Deep Dive Series from The Shit No One Tells You About Writing. 

• After an intense semester, Sarah is trying to get back into the headspace of drafting her historical novel by spending the first two hours of each day with her manuscript. She is also indulging in reading for pleasure after months of reading only for school. This week she finished Zadie Smith’s The Fraud and Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds—both works of historical fiction by master stylists, although the novels couldn’t be more different in style. Smith has recreated Dickensian England with her signature humor and “voicey-ness,” while Groff has written a bleak one-woman show about a Jamestown runaway. Interestingly, both deal heavily with colonialism. She thinks you should run out and buy them both.