I have no vested interest in the MFA degree’s legitimacy as seen through the eyes of proponents and opponents alike. I’m a 29-year-old man still looking to complete his Bachelor’s degree; fretting over the MFA is a little hasty. But I’m a potential customer, an outlier sifting through the information in the pursuit of an informed decision. Hence, my question: what do I want with—or need from—an MFA?

The current debate over the MFA intrigues me; the vitriol espoused by both sides makes for good link bait as I bounce from website to blog. Good questions are raised, silly conclusions are reached, and personal agendas, hiding behind opinions sizzling with esoteric quotes from textbooks no one reads, shine through: with so much point-counterpoint goodness, how can I not be curious?

Questions involving the MFA’s worth, for both writer and reader, appear daily in the form of seething articles and blogs bemoaning a decreased quality in modern literature. The correlation, on its surface, makes sense: more and more writers flock to MFA programs, and literature appears stuck in an imaginative malaise, so it must be the fault of “the program”. Exasperation is evident in the words of Alexander Chee, graduate of the University of Iowa’s vaunted MFA program & author of the novel, Edinburgh:

On breaks, I read essays by people still trying to discredit the MFA, responses to them, responses to the responses. I wouldn’t mind something written that was critical of the MFA in ways that were honest as to what is taught there, but this parade of paper tigers doesn’t resemble the world.

In the meantime, it’s a new business, created by the MFA: the industry of attacking the MFA.

That last sentence caught my attention, made me raise an eyebrow, singe the back of my throat as I gulped my (still) hot coffee. Since I read it, I’ve tried to parse out Chee’s meaning. “It’s a new business, created by the MFA: the industry of attacking the MFA.” I wanted to take it simply as a turn of phrase, but having read of most of Chee’s blog, I take him to be a deliberate writer. He means what he writes, even if a passage seems unclear at first. Chee went on to write:

I’m tired of these attempts at totalizing views on this topic, though, and tired of this argument, if that is what it is, which is not the same as being critical of the MFA and asking it to reform—it is about delegitimizing it.   This I think of as a mask—it only reproduces arguments elsewhere in the culture, arguments that are all really about money, and that are in themselves a mask for the same thing: access to a “safe place”, aesthetically and morally, that doesn’t exist. If anything is dangerous, it’s said totalizing view: the attempt to delegitimize the degree altogether, to portray the hard work of the people involved in an entirely negative light—and it is hard work. Worse, the anti-MFA crowd portrays itself as populist, when in fact the MFA is, despite portrayals to the opposite, a largely democratic force in American literature”¦

I agree with Chee in how MFA opponents present their arguments; a populist, seemingly all-inclusive message is the best defense—or offense—against a graduate degree designed to improve one’s creative writing. That is, if you agree with Elif Batuman’s assertion of “writing as self-indulgence.” The MFA is a walled garden, the opponents suggest, one that demands payment for admission by way of a religious devotion to craft.

For some populist perspective, here is a quote from Huffington Post blogger Anis Shivani:

The system is profoundly undemocratic when it comes to the quality of the product it engenders, and its relentless crushing of any incipient freelance competition. There is an undeclared boycott in place with the famous residencies, conferences, and awards, and non-guild members need not apply (unless they want to waste their fifty or hundred dollars in application fees). Yaddo, MacDowell, Bread Loaf, etc. among the residencies/conferences, and the well-known awards/fellowships/grants committees do not welcome outsiders. There is a de facto ban, though probably, with the minute number of writers outside the guild these days, it is something they have to worry about less and less. The same is true of the Stanford Stegner fellowship, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, which absolutely exclude those not already privileged enough to be members of the guild. You may pay a few thousand dollars to attend Bread Loaf as a “paying contributor” and soak in the mystery surrounding the aiber-masters, but you may never become a scholar/fellow/waiter unless you are a certified member of the guild.

Shivani considers the output of craft or, to use his words, “the MFA house style” as:

generally apolitical, domesticated narrative that remains willfully ignorant of modernism (the highbrow style doesn’t work with the guild’s self-presentation), leaning strongly toward the confessional, memoiristic, autobiographical, narcissistic, and plainly understood. The same qualities apply in poetry–the standard workshop poem is a narrative or associative slight effort, taking off from the quotidian, to rest in an uneasy or understated epiphany. There is also a language poetry subcomponent, but this has its own utterly predictable rules (the language poets think the lyric and narrative poets are closet fascists, yet they are blind to their own brand of conservatism).

To identify, with a shaky finger-point, the MFA as a catalyst for “apolitical, domesticated narrative” is a tried and tired response to the other side. The populist slant in such a position is rooted in the demystification of craft, to reduce it to its core components, to bring it down to the masses, to those who, the opponents believe, are excluded from the exalted ranks, kings and queens armed with craft as if its a pouch of magic powder thrown in the eyes of mere mortals, blinded by—or bedazzled with—lean, witty and empty prose.

By simplifying craft, which is posited as the cornerstone of the MFA, the opponents create in-roads to the walled garden, bringing the fight to the enemy, to shock and awe them with guffaws at their defaulted student loans, at their low adjunct pay, at their postmodern ho-hum of a novel, and unleash doubt from within, as if the destruction, rather than reformation, of the MFA will end the doldrums of modern literature. It’s not that Shivani and his ilk are wrong for questioning the MFA, but their arguments are in need of an upgrade. There is inherent value in the MFA—time and space to hone’s one skill, to begin or repair a project—and the opponents would do well to acknowledge, not ignore, this fact.

Both sides can at least agree that the MFA isn’t designed to address creativity—it appears the program provides the tools (craft) and leaves the writer to do what he wants with them. Opponents would argue that this is nothing more than plausible deniability for the other side—I didn’t tell him to write that shit, I only showed him how to revise!—but this is a legitimate issue worth exploration.

Arguments against the MFA sense this, although they typically give it surface attention by dragging creative nonfiction—personal essays, memoir, literary journalism—into the fight. They trumpet creative nonfiction’s current popularity, its domination over fiction and poetry in regards to cultural relevance, but they overlook the fact that creative nonfiction uses craft to develop provocative literary narratives and, move over, creative nonfiction writers gallop to MFA programs at the same pace as novelists, short story writers, playwrights, poets and screenwriters.

“Cultural relevance” is, of course, code for “real”. The supposition is that “real” is its own value; when compared with “fictitious” works, make-believe in the guise of moral and societal reflections, the “real” reigns supreme; it relates tales of real humans, of real political dramas and social conflicts. For the “real” writer, half of the work is done: characters named, plot developed, conflict identified. The “fictitious” writer, meanwhile, is left with his own brain stuffed with homicidal thoughts—murder those darlings—trying to make something out of nothing.

To my knowledge, there isn’t an MFA program tailored to address creativity. And why should it? Craft is quantifiable, almost mathematical in its study and application; “creativity” is ephemeral, intangible and, according to some people, unteachable. Besides, why apply—so goes the argument—if creativity, not craftsmanship, is your weakness? While her scathing article, “Get A Real Degree,” left MFA proponents smoldering throughout the Internet, Elif Batuman raised a valid point in her analysis of Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era :

McGurl persuasively suggests that [Flannery] O’Connor wrote “The Crop” as an “auto-exorcism” of her own inner amateur, who must occasionally have wondered what she was going to write about. The story had to be disguised as a satire about someone else, because no real writer would admit to such a shameful lack of “creativity”. But what is there to be ashamed of? Proust was surely speaking for many of his colleagues when he wrote that the desire to become a writer often comes long in advance of an “authentic” subject.

A million and one reasons for writers to apply to MFA programs, no doubt; this difficulty with creativity, with authenticity, is somewhere on that list. That craft does nothing to help with creativity—and it was never intended to do so—may explain some of the vitriol aimed at the MFA program. Some may feel duped, thinking they would exit the program as better creatives, as opposed to better writers & masters of The Elements of Style. To write—just write, baby!—and hope for craft to save the day, to salvage the draft, is sound advice for those who don’t suffer from creative malfunction.

And let’s keep it real. This very issue with creativity is the reason some fiction writers are now nonfiction writers (Batuman included); that a few of them are now opponents of the MFA, creative writing programs, or fiction in general is a bit telling (remember what I said about personal agendas?).

MFA proponents could call them quitters, hacks who chopped at “apolitical, domesticated narrative” for years before sprinting to the nearest academic degree (PhD in comparative literature for Batuman)—and I’m sure some of them do—but could this be what Chee meant when he said:

“It’s a new business, created by the MFA: the industry of attacking the MFA”?

I suppose it comes down to one’s definition of “writer”: as either master-crafter or one who can congeal the swirling dust and matter of personal interests, passions, and motivations, to slam the parts together, to create a universe out of nothingness. One is art, the other is the art’s scientific discipline; the problem is that the MFA addresses one and not the other; this, in my opinion, goes a long way to explain the paper tigers. And it may explain writers incessantly asking the question: economics aside, is the MFA for me? Luckily for me, I don’t have to answer; I still need my Bachelor’s degree.

@thomasdemary. @thomasdemary.com