On Beginnings, Belonging, and Abandoning MFA Culture

Dispatches from Craft Year

There is almost nothing I miss about academia, but the one thing I do miss is teaching. I told this to my Craft Year cohort at our first meeting on Sunday. Seeing their faces and names, all together for the very first time, filled me with so much joy, and with the same sense of obligation that always comes to me when I enter a classroom.

It was no small decision to teach a free, year-long intensive writing course. Any commitment to teach is a big decision, no matter the circumstances. But this course holds a particular heft and importance for me because there are so many writers out there like these writers who deserve a space that is safe and welcoming and that builds creative community mindfully, and there are so many ways in which MFA programs have historically gotten that wrong. The existing critical conversation about this is expansive (some of which I link to below); I’m not attempting to supplant it, simply add some of my own perspective and continue the discussion, because we cannot talk responsibly about the craft of writing if we do not first address the environments in which many writers are asked to learn and to create their work.

When I started as a fiction student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the late 1990s, I was 21 years old, and I was filled with a naive anticipation. Everyone at my college had told me that I was blessed to get into Iowa and that I couldn’t possibly go anywhere else, and I believed them, because like most people, I knew little at the time about the history of its inception. In my first days in the program, I was smart enough to recognize that I was much younger and far less experienced than a lot of my peers, many of whom were doctors or lawyers or engineers or who were coming to Iowa from careers in publishing.

Then, two weeks into the program, the director at the time called me into his office. He was the kind of man who called John Updike “Johnny,” and he intimated me from afar; up close, he was stern and slightly terrifying. I sat down in front of his desk. He waved a hand around the room.

“Take a look around you,” he said. “These are all books written by writers who attended this program. You don’t really belong here.”

I was floored.

“What do you mean?” I said. “You chose my manuscript just like everyone else’s.”

I was a very young woman, he said. I didn’t have enough life experience. My writing was strange. I knew my style did not align with the plain style, Ernest Hemingway-esque writing that was popular in the program at the time.

The message I got in that moment was that I had to prove myself every day to be there. The words that he said to me then, and later in workshop with him, which I wrote about in an essay a few years ago, have stayed with me, a scar that I cannot quite get rid of.

Time has softened the edges of that experience for me, given me the ability to see the nuance of the thing, to muster some compassion for the director. I don’t think the director was malicious; I will not name him in this piece because he is long dead, because the people who were there with me know who he was, and because a person’s legacy is often complicated and I am not the final arbiter of anyone’s. Others who are far more famous than me have written laudatory essays about how he influenced their writing; I believe these things can all simultaneously be true. I think this director was battling his own biases, and I think he was steeped in the workshop’s longstanding culture of machismo and sexism. I think he also believed he was doing me a favor: I think he was trying to toughen me up, to help me see that I needed to build a hard shell in order to survive.

I shared this story with the Craft Year cohort on Sunday because I wanted them to know I did not need that, and neither do they. Neither did the other writers in my program, particularly the marginalized writers, many of whom likely experienced the same thing I did or far worse. What I needed was kindness, and guidance, and someone to see my vision. What I needed was rigorous critique of my work that didn’t tear me down in the process and helped me stand strong in my work, no matter what other people had to say about it.

I needed a sense of belonging.

I was lucky to find a handful of professors at Iowa who gave me this kind of support (thank you, Elizabeth McCracken. Thank you, Josephine Haxton, aka Ellen Douglas. Wow, do I wish you were still here). But they did not, could not repair all the damage or remove the sense that I did not belong there, that I was intruding in a space where I was not talented enough or old enough or male enough to be welcomed.

Iowa might have been the template, but it was not the exception. Many MFA programs have a legacy of encouraging aesthetic and stylistic conformity to the detriment of their marginalized students. From what I hear, Iowa is also becoming a different, more diverse, more welcoming place, thanks in great part to the work of director Lan Samantha Chang. Many other MFA programs are following suit and are also slowly changing, primarily because the whiteness and wealth and cisness and heteronormativity of these programs is finally beginning to balance out with infusions of faculty and students with a wider variety of histories, experiences, and perspectives.

But as with the rest of our mess of a society, there is still such a long way to go. Ask Gazzmine Wilkins. Ask Leanne Ogasawara. Ask Namarata Poddar. Ask Matthew Salesses. In fact, ask anyone who isn’t white about the nature of their MFA experience, about whether their cohort saw their vision or worked to change it, about whether they felt welcomed and heard or whether they were reminded in small ways and in large about how they didn’t fit the mold.

The effects of my own MFA experience have been profound and lasting. I did not write at all for five years after I completed my degree. By the time I graduated, I felt I had lost what little voice I had started the program with, and it took me years and years to get it back. That was not all Iowa’s fault; I was young and vulnerable and very impressionable, and I had a great deal of work to do on my self-esteem. But I was also lucky to have the glimmers of support, the professors and friends, who kept me afloat there, who helped me not give up on myself so that I could, in time, do the internal work necessary to become a writer who knows and believes in her own voice.

I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to get here—so many from my MFA cohort have dazzling writing careers and published heaps of books in the time it has taken me to get to this point—but I have made my peace with being a late bloomer. I am, in this moment, simply glad I know myself as a writer, that I finally arrived.

I am also lucky now to have different mentors, mentors like Frank X Walker and Roxane Gay who do a tremendous amount of work both publicly and behind the scenes to create the kind of environments and opportunities that help young writers flourish. And because they have given me so much, because I would not be the writer I am becoming without them, I want to share that support and community with other writers, especially those who cannot, for whatever reason, enroll in an MFA program.

This work is one way in which I honor the mentors who lifted me up, who made me.

Sunday was just the beginning for our group, but I hope it did its work to establish the atmosphere of our community. I hope it let these tremendous writers know that they belong, and that the group is theirs as much as it is mine, and that we are actively abandoning MFA culture for something we will build together, one class at a time.

I hope you’ll also read up again on these writers before my next dispatch. Note their faces, their names. They are so damn talented, and there is so much ahead of them. This is just the beginning for them too.

You also might check out our playlist. I’ve added a few more songs that I hope will keep you writing.

Until next time.