“So how’s the MFA?” I get this question several times a week these days, because about a month ago, I embarked on a life-long dream: I started a graduate program in Fiction. Since this newsletter is geared to the early-career writer—one who may be considering applying to an MFA program this fall (as a couple of my fellow Kernelists are)—I thought I’d share my experiences so far. If you find this interesting, let me know what’s useful in the comments below, and I’ll try to provide periodic updates as I go through my three-year program.
So what’s it like?
First off, it is more intense than I had imagined. I feel as if I need about 24 more hours to the day, every day. My situation is a little unusual. I have four children, the youngest of whom is four, and although I am not the oldest person in my program, I am the only mother (that I’m aware of).
On the one hand, this is a challenge because it means that outside the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. my time is not my own but belongs to my family. On the other hand, you can get a lot done in those seven hours, if you are very focused. So I make sure to be at my desk every day right after daycare drop-off, and I power through until my alarm rings that it’s time for me to pick him up. I am exhausted, and I am stressed out, but I’m also exhilarated.
My Week at a Glance
Monday
8:00–3:00 Read for classes, write fiction
3:00–5:30 Seminar: Introduction to Graduate Studies (ENG 600)
Tuesday
8:00–12:00 Read for classes, write fiction
12:00–1:00 Lunch with my husband
1:00–2:00 Attend the undergraduate lecture (ENG 224) for which I TA
2:00-3:00 Teaching prep
3:00-5:00 Afterschool activities with my children
5:30-6:30 Author readings (almost weekly)
7:30-8:30 My own fiction workshop with my Kernelist buddies
Wednesday
8:00–10:00 More teaching prep
10:00–11:00 Teach Section #1
12:00–1:00 Lunch with my husband
1:00–6:00 Write fiction, critique stories for Workshop
6:00–8:30 Fiction Workshop (ENG 680)
Thursday
8:00–9:00 Prepare for teaching (respond to student emails)
9:00-10:00 Teach Section #2
10:00–11:00 My office hours (meet with students, paperwork)
11:00–12:00 Teach Section #3
12:00–1:00 Lunch with my husband
1:00–2:00 Attend undergraduate lecture (ENG 224)
2:00–3:00 Office hours (attendance, paperwork)
3:00–5:30 Graduate Literature Seminar on Eudora Welty and Photography (ENG 776)
Friday
8:00–3:00 Read for class, write fiction
This schedule doesn’t leave me much time for writing, much less for the assigned reading. Last week alone I had over 1,000 pages to read, between the stories in my fiction workshop, the texts in my literature seminar, and the 400-page novel I was teaching to my undergraduate students. This week I have slightly less assigned reading, but I also have about 120 pages of student writing to grade.
This is a huge concern for me, because while I consider myself a great reader, I am not a particularly fast reader. Last week I budgeted 21 hours for “reading and writing,” but the reading claimed 20 of those hours. This bodes ill for my creative output. I am quickly learning that—for the first time in my life—I simply cannot do all of the assigned reading. It is hard for me because I have always been a very type-A student and I am genuinely interested in what I’m studying this term. My plan going forward is that once a week, I will list and rank my assignments, and I will try not to deviate from the ranking. Whatever I can read in the allotted time, I will, but I won’t prioritize assignments over my own creative work.
Priorities, priorities
Just before I started my MFA, I spoke to one of my new professors with whom I’ve developed a good rapport, and I asked him point-blank what he thought an MFA student’s priorities should be. He didn’t miss a beat but counted off on his fingers, saying: “1) Your own writing. 2) the students and professor you TA for, to whom you owe a duty. 3) Your literature seminar. You’re not here to be a good student, you’re here to become a writer.”
“Also,” he said, “and this is perhaps the most important thing: write two hours every day. Two hours. Every. Day.” This was what I had intimated for myself, but in practice it has been very difficult to execute.
For the past month, my priority has mostly been my students. Perhaps this was necessary in the beginning, especially for a novice teacher like me. There are 60 of them, so I get a lot of emails, and already one student has come to my office hours in tears. I hate showing up unprepared for class as a student, but as a teacher I find it unimaginable, so I spend about five hours a week on my teaching duties (prep, responding to emails, reading for class) in addition to the five hours a week I spend with my students in class.
Yet, many of the more advanced students in my program insist I would be wise to spend as little time and mental energy on my TA responsibilities as possible. I had budgeted five minutes to read each of the 60 papers I have to grade this week, but another TA warned me, “No way, one minute. You only have time for one minute per paper.”
While I understand this argument, I think my priorities might be slightly different. For one thing, having homeschooled my own children for eight years, I actually care about teaching, and I like to think I’m pretty good at it. I also hope to get steady work as an adjunct after I graduate—at the very institution where I am currently a student—so my performance as a teacher assistant here matters to me. To this end, I’ve even taken on a bit of extra work at my professor’s suggestion, volunteering to deliver a 50-minute lecture later in September on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” to a class of 200 undergrads. Was this stupid? Probably. I’ll let you know how it goes.
But as you can see from my schedule, the hours I’ve apportioned to reading, writing, and teaching simply don’t add up, and I need to quickly rejigger my time to devote more hours to writing and creative work. This may be the single most important decision I make over the course of my three years here.
Surprise, surprise
One month into my program, and I can already see the ways my own writing has both benefited and suffered.
It has benefited by being in conversation with the work of my fellow students, the works I’ve been assigned to read, and the perspectives of my professors. I am already over the moon about the feedback I am getting from the professor who is leading my workshop this term. It is so rare for a beginning writer to get that kind of close, line-level attention from a seasoned professional, and I am thrilled that in my three years here, I will be able to work with six different mentors. Every day I am discovering new ways to deepen my stories and polish my prose.
But I actually have less time for writing than I previously did. Last year I regularly squeezed in a few hours of writing each morning before my children woke up and my day got under way. Since starting school I have written in fits and bursts, some days writing for hours at a time, but most of the time frantically jotting down ideas and snatches of prose before the words escape me. I try to devote Monday and Friday as my writing days, but so far other responsibilities (teaching, reading, family) have crept in, and the word counts are not piling up as they did before. I will figure this out. I will have to.
How much of this struggle is unique to me and my unusual home environment? Probably a lot. Outside of regular business hours, I need to spend time with my family, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. When I was younger, I used to be able to put in a second shift after my children went to bed, but nowadays, all I’m good for after 9:00 p.m. is an hour of reading for my classes. But I don’t think time management is a struggle unique to me; the other students in my program—whatever their ages—all have competing commitments.
Just don’t tell yourself you want to get an MFA so that you will have more time to write. My experience has been that you will have less time but more desire—and many more writing deadlines. This can be galvanizing or it can be paralyzing. I’m putting all of my chips on the “galvanizing” side of the table. Still, if you want “time to write,” I’d recommend getting a day job that pays the bills and from which you can mentally walk away at 5:00 p.m. and devote your non-work hours to writing.
So why am I in an MFA program?
For me, starting this program was the impetus I needed to make a radical shift in my life and finally commit to a career as a fiction writer. (I had previously worked as a non-fiction writer, full-time and then part-time after the birth of my third child.) The demands of my program have necessitated that I put my children in public school and daycare and devote my days to my own work. For the first time in 10 years I have a steady income, a normal work schedule, uninterrupted hours to my day, and a room of my own. (Pro tip: Get a library carrel! I spend hours a day in my little cell, happily working away in silence without so much as a window to distract me. Another pro tip: Find a treadmill desk! I spend an hour or two each day working at one in my university’s library, and it has been the best thing for my well-being, in addition to my productivity.) As my literary hero Virginia Woolf explained, a writer’s main requirements are: “a room of one’s own” and the freedom to make use of it, and my MFA program has provided me with both.
This is also the most significant thing I have ever done toward realizing my writing dreams. It has been a public declaration of my long-held, secret desire. And as a terrible procrastinator, I am counting on the very structure of the program to hold me accountable to my goals with its deadlines. At the end of these three years, I will have at least one finished manuscript, possibly two: the collected short stories from my fiction workshops, and the novel I am working on concurrently with my fellow Kernelists through our novel incubator group.
Most of all it is thrilling for me to be surrounded by other writers who are as excited about craft and storytelling as I am. We not only work closely together in Workshop but in equally important ways through the casual conversations in our shared workspaces, in literature classes, at public readings, and social get-togethers. The social aspect of an MFA is what you make of it. For instance, the weekend before classes started, I organized a field trip for my fellow students to travel to the Mississippi Book Festival for the day, and we spent 14 hours together attending panel discussions, meeting some of our literary heroes, and talking non-stop about the books we love to read and aspire to write. I feel experiences like this have the potential to be one of the biggest assets of my three-year program, and so I am working hard to make my MFA culture as supportive and productive as it can be, and so far, I’ve found my efforts well-rewarded.
Is it necessary?
For me personally, attending an MFA program feels like the necessary step to achieving my goal of becoming a published fiction writer. In a way, I had been systematically closing other doors of opportunity for years so that only this door remained, and I must open it.
However in no way do I think an MFA is necessary for any writer to become published. Half of the fiction students in my year were already published writers before they entered the program. Half! And several of the more advanced students have published novels and story and poetry collections while still students in the program. (Talk about intimidating, am I right?)
I can easily imagine an alternative path for myself, and maybe the one that makes most sense for you, a path where I continue writing privately for two hours every day. Where I make the most of my incredibly supportive workshop (shout out to my fellow Kernelists!). Where I eventually win a spot at a coveted summer workshop. Where I publish my first story in a well-regarded lit mag. Where I attend national writers conferences, and find an agent, and inch my way into the writing world. This path seems equally plausible and equally fulfilling.
But the secret to both the MFA and the non-MFA route is that brilliant and supportive workshop group. They are so rare! But they’re out there. I found mine by answering an open call on social media of all places, and it has been the single most important thing in transforming me from an aspiring writer into a serious one.
My kernel of advice: consider the daily realities, along with your dreams, when deciding to pursue an MFA in writing.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Shelby keeps bringing home books from work at an alarming rate and hopes to finish the half-read books she’s started so that she can make her way through some of the new ones. She is also beginning to prepare applications for Tin House’s Winter Workshop, in both novel writing and short story writing, and Kenyon Review’s Developmental Editing Fellowship for Emerging Writers.
Recently Sarah’s reading has centered on the writer Ha Jin, who was a special guest at her MFA program last week. She read several essays from The Writer as Migrant, short stories from The Bridegroom, and started his novel Waiting, which won the National Book Award. He read aloud a provocative scene from his soon-to-be released novel The Woman Back from Moscow and spoke about his upbringing during China’s Cultural Revolution and his unexpected path to writing poetry and fiction in English. Sarah’s favorite craft advice was his insistence on heightening the drama of almost any prose scene and his recommendation to always read a work of “classic literature” that is in conversation with the novel you hope to write.
We all have a stack of books we buy and mean to read and then don’t. Natalia has started making her way through this stack, although it hasn’t stopped her from also borrowing way too many books from the library. She’s starting with A Little Life. Already she’s noticed how some rules are meant to be broken as the writer stays close with the main characters through everything, showing moments from chopping up vegetables to riding the subway. All the in between is there and a lot of the story is pushed through by the interiority.
Neidy’s flash fiction, “Wish Eater,” was published in Trampset this week. She also started reading Lillian Li’s Number One Chinese Restaurant. She loves Li’s complex characters and attention to detail.
One of the bizarre realities of graduate programs is that no one fully understands how and why they work—not the students enrolled, and certainly not the people teaching in or running the programs. There is a strange magic by which students enter half-formed and emerge confident and skilled and entirely remade. As far as anyone can tell, the learning takes place by osmosis. I think it’s mostly just a process of stewing in your talented peer group and taking inspiration from their motivation and focus and creativity. It’s hard to replicate that experience in your own regular life.