Criticizing the MFA Writer

 When I started writing gain in prison, my friend Joel gave me advice to read. I was already inclined towards this idea. I drew up reading lists from what the prison library possessed and what I could obtain through the inter-library loan program. I still have books left to read thanks to Covid and there being only so many hours in the day. Somehow, somewhere along the line I formulated a genre for my own purposes - MFA novel. They seemed to share the qualities of writers writing about writers, Brooklyn and New York featured prominently and they were relatively well-mannered novels - neither Theodore Dreiser nor Ernest Hemingway nor Willa Cather need apply. All had MFA degrees.

Since my release, I have had conversations with my friend KH. He self-published a speculative fiction novel. He thinks MFA graduates have a stranglehold on the publishing business. I have not progressed far enough to have an opinion on that issue, but I incline to his opinion.

I write all this to explain why I read Beware the End of Art: The Millions Interviews Mark Slouka. I want any would-be writers not to do what I did and give up. Making up 40 years of possible work is an impossible task. Slouka is a writer who taught in Columbia's MFA program.

The Millions: So now that you’re retired from the MFA business and living in Prague, where is the good writing going to come from?

Mark Slouka: Thanks for that, but my guess is, pretty much where it’s always come from, which is to say, probably not an MFA program.  Honestly, the MFA industry in America is a wonder to me: The less people read, the more they seem to want to write, and a whole lot of them think that dropping the big bucks on an MFA is the only way to do it.  It can work for some.  For others not so much.

***

MS: Exactly.  If you want to write, make reading your MFA.  Find the writers who move you and try to figure out what they’re doing on the page.  If I’m honest, my teaching at Columbia, and later at the University of Chicago, really just came down to disarticulating the written page.

TM: Meaning . . .?

MS: Meaning teaching students how to read like writers, showing them what their options are in terms of voice, silence, time, dialogue, and so on.  How certain moves on the page—a period in the right place, to recall Isaak Babel—can break your heart.  If it was up to me, I’d teach nothing but example-based craft seminars, which go straight to the issues writers encounter, then cut people loose to do their own work. 

 For an argument that an MFA could be individually useful without being culturally significant, go here.

Read. Write. Read, some more. Read with an eye on an author turns the trick with their sentences, their paragraphs, their characters. Read everything you can and decide what is good writing. Read foreign writers and ask yourself if they are using techniques and ideas that you can use. Read Black and Hispanic and immigrant and female writers for the same reasons. Keep on writing.

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