Mfa Quotes & Sayings

When I say that I went to grad school in Iowa City, people often assume that I went to the famed writers' workshop MFA program at the University of Iowa. I didn't. I got a master's in journalism. — Chelsea Cain

If you don't believe in yourself, and you don't have the fortitude to make that dream happen, why should the hotshots in the publishing world take a chance on you? I don't believe that you need an MFA to be a writer, but I do think you need to take some good workshops. — Jodi Picoult

Another quite useful and healthy outlet for anger is writing. Even if you "can't write." Because actually, if you can speak, you can write. It's just a period of adjustment using your fingers instead of your mouth. But if you write - or type - exactly what you're thinking, without even a single change, when you read it, whatever you wrote will sound like you, talking. That's writing. No MFA required. Especially if what you're going to write is a letter. — Augusten Burroughs

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now. — Dinaw Mengestu

There is a necessary gestation period during which a writer should protect his work, because the minute he sends it out, or joins a writing group, or enrolls in an MFA program, he engages the part of himself that is focused on the result more than the work. For — Betsy Lerner

I got brilliant stories from people who'd never set foot in an MFA program and had published very little, and terrible stories from people who'd published a lot and had all the credentials. It was all over the map and that was part of the fun. — Ben Fountain

The ghosts of Rilke and Wordsworth
along with the 300+ MFA programs, which now seem to employ all Living Poets
have misled the American public egregiously into thinking that poets are morally pure and/or useless. — Katy Lederer

Does any (MFA) program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them? — Chang-rae Lee

The Longstockings are eight children's and young adult writers. We all came out of the New School MFA program, and we meet regularly to critique each other's work. — Lisa Graff

I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs. — Jess Row

I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice. — Kate Zambreno

I would be happier if people who went through MFA programs also were already, by then, deeply committed readers of poetry because we need readers of poetry as much as writers of poetry. — Edward Hirsch

If you're part of any kind of writerly community, some of those people will have gone through MFA programs, and their thinking leaks into yours. So whatever changes MFAs have made to the culture, it's to the culture as a whole. It can't be pinned down to individual books in a way that some people would like to do. — Chad Harbach

What an invaluable handbook! Lori A. May has done her research, knows her stuff, and, whats best, lets the programs speak for themselves through her extensive interviews. Theres a chorus of quotes from faculty, students, and graduates in The Low-Residency MFA Handbook. Anyone making the decision to apply for an MFA should consult this wise guide. Mays clarity and authority make it a gold standard. — Molly Peacock

I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms. — Hanya Yanagihara

Genre/forms are institutional questions mainly. Like matter to MFA programs in terms of which workshop you can teach. — Juliana Spahr

I went straight from the Marine Corps to the MFA. The way that you would express things among Marines is somewhat different than the way you're supposed to express things in a creative-writing workshop. — Phil Klay

Breezy journalistic sentences about wealthy white people unaware that other human beings are real became the rubber stamp product of the elite MFA programs. — Sarah Schulman

I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career. — Garth Greenwell

There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it's amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor. — Elizabeth McCracken

I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me. — Elliott Colla

There's nothing about me on the jacket because I have no credentials. I majored in English at school, but I only took one creative writing class. I think I got a B. And I never really thought about getting an MFA. I'm too spiteful to take criticism constructively and I'm only comfortable being honest about people behind their backs, so workshops or group critiques were never what I was looking for. For years I just wrote in journals and didn't really worry about turning any of it into stories or stuff for other people to read, so I guess I developed my writing style by talking to myself, like some homeless people do. Only I used a pen and paper instead of just freaking out on the street. If they switched to a different medium they might be better off. It would probably help if they had someplace to live too. — Paul Neilan

Financial firms are sending their back-office jobs overseas. But what do fine artists do? They create something new, unexpected, and delightful that changes the world. MFA abilities are harder to outsource and more important in an abundant world. — Daniel H. Pink

The effects of MFA programs, and the rise of creative writing instruction more generally, are far more diffuse than people think. Even if you're a writer who has avoided institutions your whole life, you're still going to be reading a lot of writers who have MFAs, and are affiliated with universities. — Chad Harbach

MFA in a Box is designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor - but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor keeps it from being laugh-out-loud funny. — John Rember

MFA programs are to the world of art what gentrification is to your neighborhood. — Sarah Schulman

The idea that you live your life in phases - I've never bought that. I feel like I'm the same person who sat in at the draft board in 1965, I'm the same person who joined a fraternity, I'm the same person who got an MFA at Bennington, and I'm the same person who founded Weather Underground. My values are still intact. — Bill Ayers

Once the travel guide came out and won an award, once I got an MFA in creative writing, once I sold my next novel, I finally started telling people that I was a writer. I remember how special that year felt. — James Bernard Frost

I first became familiar with Dave Eggers's work when I was living in San Francisco and enrolled at USF's MFA Program. — James Bernard Frost

My first MFA was in poetry, and it was very much part of a professional trajectory leading to life as a professor. But in my second and third years at Harvard, I realized I didn't want an academic life. — Garth Greenwell

MFA program at the University of Michigan when we met. — Jennifer Coburn

I think the MFA programs have had a real effect on the state of American fiction, but I don't think it's a question of "this is written by someone with an MFA, and this isn't." I challenge anyone to identify a book in that way. It's totally impossible. — Chad Harbach

I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories. — Jennifer McMahon

I think in terms of educating a group of readers, MFA programs are very good. I just think the model of MFA programs in which a young poet goes through the program, publishes a series of books, gets teaching jobs, that's a bit at risk. — Edward Hirsch

Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein "obsessing"? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and a year's worth of a PhD, Stein was an author I had to discover on my own. She wasn't on the syllabus anywhere in all that time. — Laura Mullen

I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it. — Edward Hirsch

I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program. — Billy Collins

My god, people are selling their work and people are reading it! The horror! That MFA programs have to advertise that they'll let you write YA or fantasy or what-have-you is just absurd, but we do, because the presumption is that they're closed to that sort of thing. You're offering an MFA in creative writing? Teach people how to write well, worry about that part, let the writers come up with the stories. — Tod Goldberg

I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It's all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer. — Chad Harbach

PhD, MFA, self-taught - the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success. — Alexander Chee

The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table. — Edward Hirsch

I have an MFA in writing. It is debatable if they are right for everyone, but I had a mentor who really changed my life, so it worked for me. — Rob Roberge

During my MFA, I was lucky to be surrounded by a really supportive group of peers. And now I get feedback pretty exclusively from freaks only. — Alissa Nutting

You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel. — Stephen Graham Jones

The walls of her stall were covered with graffiti. If it had been funny ("Pull here for MFA Degree" right below the toilet paper dispenser) she would've stayed longer, but it was mostly weird random names and dates. — Grady Hendrix

He utilizes
form for a striking lecture;
young poets shiver

inexperience,
but thaw over their own work,
fertilize magic. — Kristen Henderson

Particularly with MFA students, who have so much invested - literally and figuratively - I feel like honest criticism is something they're owed. It's not going to be easier in the real world, surely. — Tod Goldberg

Don't be pretentious is my first advice to young writers. This is the big problem - just because you're getting an MFA doesn't mean you have to write for the Academy. Be true to your personality. Don't temper your personality down with words. Don't build defensive fortresses around yourself with words - words are your friends. — Gary Shteyngart