Just got back from a trip to the local grocery store. The checker who rang me up is in the undergrad creative writing program at SFSU (the local college--same program I got my BA from about five years ago). We had the following conversation:
Me: How's the writing going?
Checker: Well, I've been pretty busy with school stuff, trying to finish up my bachelor's this semester, so I haven't had much time to write.
Me: This is your last semester, huh? Congratulations.
Checker: Well, my last semester as an undergrad. I'm going on to graduate school.
Me: Gonna get an MFA?
Checker: Yeah.
Me: Where you gonna go?
Checker: I'm gonna apply to USF and Mills [both private schools], but I wanna get in to the program at [SF] State, 'cause it's cheaper.
Me: What do you write? Poetry?
Checker: Nah. Fiction... about being Mexican. It's pretty boring, but nobody else is doing it.
Me: Oh. Well, good luck.
I walked out of there shaking my head, and holding my tongue.
The checker is a nice guy, and I wish him nothing but the best. Because of that, and because I've got pretty strong opinions about MFA programs, I had a powerful urge to NOT hold my tongue. But I reasoned that he sounded pretty sure of his decision, and I reasoned that he didn't want a relative stranger pissing on his parade. I mean, I hardly know the guy. If I was a close friend of his, if I knew him outside of our superficial checker-customer relationship, maybe I'd feel more of a right to tell him what I really think.
And what I think, to put it plainly, is that he's thinking like an idiot.
Let's pass over his completely clueless statement that there aren't any people writing about being Mexican (I mean come on! It's such a ridiculous idea that I don't even know how he could come up with it. Do a Google search for 'Mexican American authors' and you get 8,950,000 results in .18 seconds. The top hit is for a Wikipedia page titled 'List of Mexican American writers,' which lists more than 140 names, many of which are the names of bestselling authors. No one writing about being Mexican American? Come on!). Let's just pass over that statement completely, and focus instead on why he's thinking like an idiot for considering an MFA.
Well, shit. Getting into the MFA topic is opening up a pretty big can of worms, too, and plenty of people have already been there and done that. So let me try to boil my thoughts down to a few brief points:
1. MFA Programs are fucking expensive. (My checker friend was considering both USF [estimated cost: $50,000+] and Mills [probably even more expensive than USF], but hoping to get into SFSU [estimated cost: $22,626, and with the way the CSU system is raising tuition costs to offset reduced state support, it'll probably be a lot more than that].)
2. MFA Programs will not give you a degree that helps you earn any kind of money. (The money consideration is important mainly because of the cost of the degree itself--you're going to build up a significant debt in the pursuit of that degree. But the principle job an MFA makes you suitable for, as far as I can see, is teaching MFA courses, which doesn't earn any money for any significant number of people. On a side note, this little catch-22 actually leads us toward another idea I have: that the writing school industry is inherently cannibalistic. You want to make a career out of your writing degree, but your writing degree doesn't qualify you for any career other than teaching writing, and so you need to find students who want to take writing classes, and then those students will need to find more students to teach, so they can charge them money, so they can use that money to pay off the debt they incurred while obtaining their degree. It goes on an on, a snake eating it's tail.)
3. MFA Programs don't necessarily help you write, and likely will make it harder. (My checker friend admitted that he's been 'busy with school stuff' recently, so he 'hasn't had much time to write. I had the same experience when I was at school, and the writing I did find time for was rarely the type of writing I wanted to do--I was so busy with class exercises and projects that I hardly ever had time to work on even short projects of my own, let alone longer works. Maybe that changes once you get into the MFA program, but I doubt it.)
4. MFA Programs will stifle your creativity. (My theory about school is this: it depends upon the idea that you don't know what you're doing, that you can't figure it out on your own, and that consequently you need someone to teach you. I mean, if you can figure it out on your own, what do you need school for? And so built into the system, as a self-preserving device, is the prerogative to find fault in your efforts, in order to offer you guidance. This effect is especially sinister when it comes to writing, which is already a quixotic quest.)
I could go on, and probably will in a later blog post, but I'm going to end this one here.
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