academia, learning, MFA Creative Writing, Teaching, writey stuff

MFA in Creative Writing, a Post-Degree Retrospective, Pros and Cons (part 1)

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Part 1: Background and Overview

Getting my MFA in creative writing was not in the plan when I went back to school in 2015 to complete my abandoned bachelor’s program as a non-traditional student. However, the more I sunk into student life, the more I realized that the advice I’d given my husband years ago could apply to myself. “If you enjoy school this much,” I advised my aspiring-professional-student husband, “you should really consider teaching.”

At least then you’d be paid to go to school, was my line of thinking.

So, hesitantly, I put an application in to one (yes, only one) Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program in the last year of my undergraduate work. My location ruled out a traditional MFA (the University of Minnesota, Mankato is the closest school which offers an MFA in creative writing, a two hour drive away), but I discovered a small low-residency program at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, an easy three-ish hour drive from where I live. Low-residency programs are mostly online, with (in Augsburg’s case, a yearly ten-day) “residency” where students attend an intensive in-person set of workshops and courses. Many MFA programs require two or three residencies per year, so Augsburg’s once-a-year summer residency worked better for my life and was much more affordable.

I applied to Augsburg late in 2016, and after a wait that was far more agonizing than I’d anticipated, I was accepted to the program’s creative non-fiction cohort in early March. Between March and May, I wavered. I wasn’t quite ready to take the financial gamble involved in continuing my education, but I didn’t really feel I was done with school just yet. I was increasingly drawn to the possibility of teaching on the college level.

However, when I walked for my graduation ceremony, I’d put aside the idea of getting an MFA. It was expensive, it was kind of scary, and I wasn’t sure I would be successful at teaching. Writing, however, I knew I could do. And that, I could do with an MFA or without. My plan at that point was to find a job that would pay the bills (i.e. student loans), build a (virtual) shed in the backyard and write in my off-hours.

Pro #1: Ability to Teach on the University Level

…In retrospect, the shed would’ve been cheaper, even if I had built the actual thing. But I couldn’t shake the desire to give my long-held dream of teaching a shot. About a week after graduation, I decided to take the leap. One of Augsburg MFA’s best features is that it’s one of the only low-residency programs to feature a teaching concentration. In traditional, fully-in-person MFA programs, students apply to be a graduate teaching assistant, funding all or part of their education by receiving on-the-job training in teaching basic undergraduate English writing courses. Low-residency programs, however, typically attract people with established careers, people who are looking for a way to polish their writing skills or publish their writing, not remain in the world of academia post-graduation. Augsburg’s program was exactly what I needed.

So, there was my justification. I could get my MFA, and have the possibility of teaching once I was done. Was it risky? Yes. Teaching jobs in academia —particularly teaching jobs in the humanities in the middle of an economic downturn and a pandemic— are extremely difficult to come by. Things may have looked slightly rosier a few years ago, but even then, I was never under the delusion that earning my MFA would guarantee my finding a teaching job. In retrospective, however, it was well worth it in my case. I wouldn’t have the job I have today (an adjunct instructor at my undergraduate university) without having earned my MFA.

An MFA in creative writing can be considered to be a terminal degree, which means that while it may not allow you to be addressed as “Dr. Lastname,” it does the job as far as opening the door to teaching on the university level. In my MFA program, the research component is an in-depth (in my case, twenty-four pages) “craft paper” on a topic pertaining to an issue in our genre. The main writing component is a creative thesis. In my case, this was a 180-page essay collection. Others in my program (in other genres) have written screenplays, poetry collections, novels, and plays.

Could I send my completed thesis/manuscript out to publishers? Perhaps, with a little reformatting and polishing. Many others have started their career as a published writer with their MFA thesis. However, other graduates and our mentors cautioned us that publishing one’s MFA thesis as-is, right out the gate is the exception and not the norm. Typically, an MFA creative thesis can be considered finished for academic purposes, but may still be a work in progress as to whether it’s publishable or not. Still, a few graduates of my MFA program already have books out currently or forthcoming. Some had published even before they began the program. Others have started literary magazines and small presses of their own.

Did I make the right choice, all things considered? Would I do it again? …Probably. Would I advise someone else to do it? That depends on a number of things. More pros and cons are forthcoming, point-by-point, in the following few posts to help you make the decision for yourself, if you’re considering an MFA in creative writing.

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Coronavirus Diaries, home happenings, learning, world happenings

Sunday Morning: Coronavirus Diaries, 3/22/20

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2020, so far, has not been kind to me. At the end of January, I fell down most of a flight of stairs on my way to my office where I teach, my journey ending in a mild concussion and a badly broken wrist. On the 31st, I had surgery to repair my wrist, and only now am I getting back to two-handed typing, handwriting, and –just in time to arm myself against anxiety caused by the recent global pandemic– knitting. And now, we’re stuck at home as I’m trying to write in the corner of my bedroom, wondering how Virginia Woolf would’ve fared under the circumstances, when the “room of my own” is routinely invaded by my kids wanting to flop on the bed and tell me they’re bored.

But today, I’m sitting at home on a Sunday morning, all of us together –my college daughter included. I’m writing while they make homemade donuts that we’ll enjoy while we’re watching the video of our church service. It could be worse. Much worse. Here we are, together, all of us relatively able to live together in fairly close quarters without becoming dangerous to each other. We have enough toilet paper, an online calculator tells me, for another eighteen days, and enough food in the pantry to feed us for over a week, if we’re a little creative once the cheese is gone. Because it’s always the cheese that goes first, of course, and cheese is literally and figuratively the stuff that holds together about 90% of our family’s favorite recipes. May God help us if any of us ever becomes lactose intolerant.

As educators, my husband and I are also blessed with jobs that translate fairly well to being done online, at home. Of course, he’s taught online for over ten years, so he’s the resident expert. I, in my first year of teaching, am still figuring everything out, and now that includes the intricacies of Canvas and Zoom and Microsoft Teams in addition to general pedagogy and how to keep a mid-day core level English Comp class engaged enough to not fall asleep during a fifteen minute lecture (still working on that one). Still, I figure, I’m only teaching one section this semester, and I have my two hour commute time back, so I have plenty of time to figure all this out. We’ll see how Tuesday goes. At any rate, we’re feeling pretty blessed in this little house this morning, especially since my son, who got the hazmat-lite treatment earlier this week at the clinic, tested positive for Influenza B and not Coronavirus. He’s mostly back to full functioning, just in time for his school to start e-learning next week. So, the count at our house is two teachers doing their teaching jobs online from home (one high school, one college), one temporarily online college student, one temporarily e-learning high school student, and one high schooler who normally does her schoolwork online. It’s going to be interesting around here next week.

So, a quiet Sunday, nowhere to go, a book or two to read, and my work is set out for me tomorrow. If it warms up, I might venture out for a walk, since they say that’s allowable, given sufficient distance from anyone I might run into outside with the same idea. For now, I think my coffee is done, so I’ll go pour myself a cup and enjoy one of my daughter’s homemade donuts while we figure out whether we can put a facebook livestream recording onto our TV. It can’t be any more difficult than setting up a Zoom meeting, can it?

 

*photo: view from our front yard, September 2016

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learning, observations, paying attention

The Week Between

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Somewhere in my travels through books and words I fell upon a two-word combination that’s stuck in my head ever since: liminal spaces. It’s a fancy way of saying the space (or time) between something. A quick glance at my dictionary tells me that it comes from the latin word for “threshold.”

As someone who’s lived through more transitions than I can count, whether that’s between addresses or between seasons or between phases of life, I guess it makes sense that those words would be a little sticky. So when I noticed several people around me mentioning the quality of these days between Christmas and New Years as a sort of liminal space, it made (and still makes) perfect sense to me. I feel it, too, this sort of letting out the breath held during Advent, just before the deep inbreath of New Years and setting back to work in a new year, perhaps with a new mindset and the cleansing feeling of having started anew. Yet, in these days between, there’s a heaviness of the year past, a time when things slow down and quiet and we’re given space to reflect –perhaps moreso, since this is not only the end of a year, but of a decade.

In a Midwestern winter, after a just-barely white Christmas and a few inches of fresh snow in this week between, the outside reflects the inside. Everything stills in the snow, and the bright frigid mornings seem to add to that clean, silent sense of space and openness. Here, there is space to let the weight of a year past settle into memory, and space to walk into the hope of a new year.

Some describe this week between as a letdown, a time when time slows, a time of fatigue and sleeping in and greyness –and I feel that, too. But I wonder whether that reaction is one of our culture, a culture which thrives on noise and busy-ness and fullness. Like nature abhors a vacuum, we resist these times of silent space. We don’t want to make room for silence, let alone have it handed to us in the form of a week with no agenda, with no parties to attend or tasks to accomplish.

But I really think this week-between is a gift. It’s a gift like the silence of snowfall: something that, as adults who see snow and think only of ice scrapers and shovels and snowblowers –who only see the work to be done to clear the way out– we forget. We forget the joy of playing in the snow, of lying on the ground in the middle of a fresh snow angel, listening. We forget when we focus on the past and the future and miss what’s going on in the moment.

Perhaps that’s the lesson of liminal spaces. Liminal spaces in nature are usually times of unusual beauty: sunrise, sunset, rainbows, the clouds building before a thunderstorm. They’re things we miss when we’re not paying attention. So, in this time-between, enjoy the silence. Pay attention, make room, and relearn the gift of the present.

Photo credit: “frosted sunrise” by c thomasson is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0  

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