This Modern Writer: Closing Thoughts by Carmela Starace

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Although I have deeply enjoyed my time in an MFA program, as I prepare to leave it I have to wonder, what the hell was I doing in an MFA program in the first place?  Obviously, I like to write.  But my tastes are way too parochial for a graduate program in writing literary fiction.  In fact, just my use of the word parochial makes me think that the MFA program has actually ruined me.  Parochial?  Who do I think I’m kidding?  I’m the fifth child of first generation Italians and the only person in my family to go to college.  I don’t have a literary bone in my body.  Or if I do, it is a small unimportant bone – a single phalanx perhaps, as opposed to a femur or a fibula.

I’ve never been a member of the intelligentsia.  I’m from Long Island for God’s sake.  Not the fancy Fitzgerald East Egg Long Island either.  No way.  I was raised in a town filled with tract houses built in the seventies on top of what used to be potato farms.[1] When I was growing up, Western Long Island was like the Sodom and Gomorrah of the suburbs.  Amy Fisher, the seventeen-year-old Long Island Lolita, shot the wife of her forty-year-old lover.  She was a year behind me in school.  Hitler’s nephew (literally – his nephew) lived on the south shore and died the year I was in the eighth grade.  Also that year, high school junior Sean Pica murdered his girlfriend’s father.  Sean went to a rival school a few miles down the Long Island Expressway and my older brother used to play against him.  The actual Amityville Horror house, where Ron Defao shot and killed his parents and four siblings the year I was born, was on the bus route when I took the Number 9 to the Roosevelt Field Mall.  Remember that Sesame Street song from when you were a kid “Who are the people in your neighborhood?”  Well, these were the people in mine.

Meanwhile, I was reading every trashy piece of crap I could smuggle out of the library.  Even back then, the classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn could not begin to compete with incestuous gothic horror of V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic.  Pretty much anything trashy by V.C. Andrews or S.E. Hinton was in my hand from grades six through eight.  I still have the original copy of The Outsiders I got in the seventh grade.[2] “Stay gold” and “Do it for Johnny” are still part of my vernacular.

What I’m trying to say is that while I was never all that into school as a kid, I was raised on high drama.  I know characters.  I know plot.  I know dialect.  Shit happened on Long Island and I had a front row seat.  Perhaps this is why spent so many days in these past three years thinking please, spare me your quiet literary fiction, MFA instructors.  I haven’t got time for the pain.

**         **

In my lat twenties, just before I joined the MFA program, I had my feet deeply entrenched in the “genre” of chick lit.  From Bridget Jones to Girls’ Poker Night, my bookshelves were an embarrassment of riches.  I read for pleasure for long stretches on the weekends.  I read while I ate breakfast.  I read while waiting in line at the bank drive through and at red lights.  I read in the bathroom.  Those were good times.  The reading was easy.  I was transported.

Then I got into an MFA program.[3] And long story short, it ruined me.  I’ve outgrown all my guilty pleasures.  Now when I read the old books I used to love I think things like – what’s the temporal distance?  Why is this first person, present tense?  How can I know what Jenny is thinking when the story is from Jack’s third person limited point of view?

And then I look up and wonder – what the hell happened to me?  Where’s the girl who read mass-market fiction as if her life depended on it?  Where did she go?

Maybe it’s a fair trade.  These last three years, while it’s true I’ve lost my appetite for reading, I’ve become a fanatical writer.  I’ll leave UNM this semester with over a thousand pages of writing[4] that I’m not embarrassed by (and another two thousand pages that I will never show anyone).  That’s about one good page for everyday I was an MFA student.  I’m grateful for that.  I wouldn’t have written those pages otherwise.

What I won’t be leaving with, however, is an MFA degree.  That’s right.  After all that, I’m not even going to graduate.  And you know why?  Because I’m stubborn.  Because I can’t manage to take the three literature classes the curriculum requires.  I won’t take them on principle.  First, the program ruined my lifelong love of reading and then the program required me to take three literature classes?  That is some twisted shit.  And true to my Long Island upbringing, I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face and leaving without the degree.

I don’t mean to whine about or disparage my MFA program.  A lot of good things happened while I was an MFA student.  For one thing, I’m a better writer now then I was when I got there.  And probably just as important, I’ve found lifelong friends in my fellow grad students and professors.  During the last three years, I’ve had great experiences.  I had margaritas with Dorothy Allison one night in a cowboy bar in Taos.  I had dinner with Margaret Atwood twice.[5] Junot Diaz hit on me at a party.  Later that same summer, I went to Breadloaf and had the full Breadloaf experience.[6] The following year, I transferred to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop for a semester and then decided no school ranking was worth that kind of weather and promptly returned to UNM, where the classes were just as good and the grad students were a lot more fun.  The more I look back, the more I have to admit, I don’t begrudge a single day of the three years I spent not getting my MFA degree.  I’d even go so far as to say being in the program might have saved my life.

**         **

When I was about midway through my time in the MFA program, I was diagnosed with brain cancer.[7] I found out in April and spent the cruel month in bed with the sliding glass door open so I could smell the lilac bush that bloomed and died so quickly every Spring.  This was the beginning of a dark season of surgeries and treatments.  There was one particular week that I was so physically and mentally ill from the radiation to my frontal lobe that I started to believe it would be easier to be dead then to be alive.  But by some miracle, I managed to get out of bed one afternoon, stumble to campus and catch Louise Glick, who was reading a survey of poems from her long career.  She was so much smaller than I had expected, maybe ninety pounds soaking wet, yet her voice sounded like Maine in the winter – fierce, unconquerable, seductive.  She lulled me into a state of grace.  I think hearing her that day may have saved my life.  That may be my best MFA moment.

Now, a year and a half later and fully recovered, I’ve come to the end of my time in graduate school.  I didn’t make the finish line, but I have no regrets.  I’d go back and do it all again.  But sometimes, even when an experience is a good one, you just know when it is time to say good-bye.

And although I won’t leave with a piece of paper that will allow me to put the initials M.F.A. after my name, it’s okay.  A voice inside me has spoken up and said, “It’s time to move on.”  Even though nothing is wrong, even though I’ve enjoyed my time in grad school, even though I’ve got my health back and I know I’m probably not going to die from cancer, time is still passing.  Long ago, I thought I needed some kind of validation, something I could point to that would prove I was a writer.  I thought I couldn’t call myself a writer until I was published.  Then I was published and I decided I couldn’t call myself a writer until I had an MFA.  But in working towards that MFA what I’ve learned is the only thing I need to do to call myself a writer is write.  Maybe some day someone will buy one of my novels or screenplays.  It’s an exciting fantasy that I keep alive.  I’m not giving up.  I’m not quitting.  I’m just standing up and walking on to the next thing.  I’m just letting the seasons change.

[1] Maybe it was the leftover pesticides from those farms that drove people to do so many crazy things.  Like a cancer cell – only instead on Long Island it was an insanity cell.

[2] Later, when I was a junior high teacher, I read the entire book out loud to my Language Arts class.  I still get facebook postings from them ten years later every time Rob Lowe is on the cover of a magazine.

[3] Getting into an MFA program was an accident.  I just happened to be on campus at the University of New Mexico where I had gotten my law degree when I ran into the director of the MFA program.  I’d taken a writing class with him years before.  I told him I hated my job. You should apply to the MFA program, he said adding that that Friday was the deadline.  So I applied.  And then I was accepted.  And then it just seemed like bad manners to not go.  So I went.

[4] The thousand pages includes: the complete third draft of my first novel, the first 180 pages of my second novel, the first fifty pages of my third novel, three decent short stories, one dramatic screenplay, one horror screenplay and the first thirty pages of a romantic comedy screenplay.

[5] She’s a vegetarian.

[6] Not with Junot Diaz.

[7] If you have to get cancer, get it while you’re an MFA graduate student.  It gives you plenty to write about and all of your friends are usually free during the day.



Carmela Starace is a storyteller. You can find some of her writing online. She has a Twitter account but she has never tweeted. Follow her at carmelastarace.