I’ve been thinking about this post for a while now. I don’t know what it’s in response to exactly. Maybe it was Rick Moody’s article in the 2005 Atlantic Monthly Fiction Issue, lamenting the homogeneity of MFA programs, or movies like Wonder Boys and Storytelling, with their utterly dismal and, quite frankly, inaccurate portrayals of creative writing workshops. Maybe it’s stuff like this. It seems to be accepted wisdom that writing programs are soulless, stifling, tripe factories. And many of the people pushing this perception seem to be products and students of these very programs.

So why are so many people falling for the scam, and why do journals like ours publish so much writing by people with MFAs?

At first, it seems only logical. Art in the hands of the academy: what could be worse? Especially writing. Writing is so personal, so mystical. You certainly can’t teach it, not in the conventional sense. You shouldn’t even talk about it. You’ll talk it away. And where does inspiration come from? The muses? The voodoo subconscious? It’s like magic.

But it isn’t magic, it’s hard work, and the more you work, the harder it gets. This is not accepted wisdom, unless you’re talking to writers. None of the writers I know think that writing is magic. They don’t wait for inspiration (although it’s pretty welcome when it comes). They work.

Demystification is one of the most valuable experiences any young writer can have, and I had it in workshop. The value of revision is one of the hardest things to learn (you mean I have to write this again?), and I learned it in workshop. Physically present in a workshop, these things dawned on me, as the professor was saying them. It’s almost as if I “learned” them, but everybody knows you can’t learn how to write. It’s magic.

One criticism of writing programs and workshops is that they force young writers into molds, and that these writers then churn out “McStories” and “McPoems." From Stroboscope:

"MFA programs can churn out writers - cardboard cutout writers where they all have the same kind of writing style, the same sort of voice. After all, the students are listening to the same voices of authority, and reading the same sort of curriculum," said Gupta.

I’m not going to pretend like this McWriting (apologies to Donald Hall) doesn’t exist. I’ve read a lot of it. It’s part of the job. All I can say is that if a writer is capable of being stifled or turned to cardboard, they probably will be. There’s no helping that. Writing is hard, and hearing people criticizing your work for an hour at a time can be horrible. You either see the value of criticism or you don’t, and if you don’t, you’ll probably do whatever it takes to get the people in your workshop to stop. I’ll bet you a dollar that’s where most of this “workshop writing” comes from.

Does this mean that writing programs discourage originality? Originality is a word that people place a great deal of value on, especially when they are talking about writing. You usually hear it in conjunction with the word “voice,” which is another bit of siren-song balderdash.

I think that what writing programs try to do, what I feel my professors tried to do, was teach me the value of things like convention and technique, how to ascribe to these things while subverting them. You aren’t alone as a writer, you are part of a long tradition. Sometimes you follow that tradition, sometimes you veer away. It’s another tough thing to learn, but when it works, it makes for excellent reading. Original voices do not always make for good reading.

I would say that workshops try to discourage bad writing, but I know that sounds awful. It is possible, as with any large group of people who appear to be working towards a consensus (that isn't a workshop's job, but it happens), for individual or minority voices to be ignored or marginalized. A good workshop should try to prevent this as much as possible, but it’s probably inevitable that someone will feel left out or cajoled.

But here’s where I get mad. I’m too young to remember a time before the rise of the Creative Writing Program in American universities (the 1970's, according to Moody), but I’ve read the letters and biographies of writers who lived pre-CRW, and do you know what a lot of them wanted more than anything when they were trying to get their starts? A group of interested, professional fellow-writers to read their work and give them their honest opinions. It’s true, go look it up. My favorite writers wished for it, tried to cobble it together, had it for brief moments. What they were after was something like a workshop.

Do you have any idea what it meant to someone like Franz Kafka when he found someone intelligent who wanted to read his work? It meant he wasn’t alone. People like to think about Kafka as undiscovered and ignored in his own time. This is not entirely true. He was known to other writers, won some awards, had his stories published. There were people who took him seriously, and he cherished them. The problem for Kafka was that his father was not one of these people.

As isolating an experience as a workshop can be, it is nothing compared to not being taken seriously. And as harrowing as some days were, I never experienced anything like the workshop scenes in Wonderboys or Storytelling. I’ve taught a couple of workshops, and if a student said anything nearly as unwarranted as “What is it with you Catholics,” or simply "I hated it," they would either apologize or leave. I can’t think of a single professor I’ve had who would put up with that, let alone allow it to be the tenor of the class. I guess you could say that all these movies are doing is trying to evoke a certain kind of experience, but they seem to be indicative of an anti-intellectual notion about art that makes me feel sick.

Talking about art does not necessarily ruin it. Most young artists are dying to talk to somebody about art. I’m dying to talk about it.

And as for the "Jack Kerouac never got an MFA" argument: Jack Kerouac spent an awful lot of time finding other writers to talk to and to look at his work. Maybe that's better than a ready-made MFA workshop, but I think the principle is exactly the same.

Is it possible to become a writer and be published without going through an MFA or undergraduate creative writing program? Of course it is. But for a great many people, the attraction of a captive audience of peers and professionals can’t be ignored.

I can’t imagine what I would be without workshop. I would be a much poorer writer. Not all programs are as excellent as the ones I was lucky enough to be in, but if they were as bad as many people seem to be saying, I would have quit right away. As a writer, you must do what is best for your writing. You know where I learned that? Workshop.

There may be a second part to this post eventually. I have a lot of things to say about this subject (can you tell?), but what I want to leave you with is this: nobody tells us what to publish. The editors of Sycamore Review judge each piece of writing on its own merits, and if it passes through all the various tests and shenanigans, it goes in the issue, regardless of who wrote it or whether they went to school. If it seems like journals publish mostly “program” writers, it is because they are doing the majority of the writing, and the majority of the good writing.

Or at least the majority of the submitting. Part of being an artist is finding a way to reach an audience, both in the artistic sense and the practical sense. That’s what MFA programs teach. Work hard, get better, put it out there, make noise.

P.S. It is also quite possible that MFA programs inevitably teach competitive drinking. Watch this space for details.

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