SOME THOUGHTS ON THE MFA

I'm recycling a series of essays on pobiz (the poetry business) I published some years back in my column Under the Slush Pile in Mad Hatters Review edited by the late Carol Novak.  Enjoy.

From Under the Slush Pile by Helen Ruggieri   THE MFA – SHOULD I OR NOT Every time you open a magazine these days it’s full of places you’ve never heard of gearing up for a new low residency writing program. There’s the tennis people and the skiing people in Vermont and the Stephen Foster bunch on the Sewanee. For ten to fifteen thousand or so a semester you can buy yourself a degree in poetry writing or fiction writing without (almost) leaving the comfort of your own computer. There must be money in it and there must be thousands of interested students or the colleges wouldn’t be adding this program to their catalogs. Now the question is this – should you enroll in a program or not. What exactly is an MFA and does it have a social purpose? Don’t expect any helpful advice on that question. We can only list the results of a survey we conducted (our painstaking research a result of our MFA training) to determine the best and the worst aspects of getting a Master of Fine Arts degree. TEN BEST THINGS 1. If the book doesn’t work out, you are prepared for a career in juggling. 2. Your family begins to think you might have talent. 3. You get fountain pens for gifts. 4. You can describe that odor better than anyone else in the room. 5. No one expects you to know who got voted off “Survivor.” 6. You get to sleep with visiting poets. 7. You have someone to ask for a reference. 8. The student loan folks know you by your first name. 9. You meet people who know who the Wrights are (not Orville and Wilbur) 10. Inevitably, someone starts a magazine and asks you for work. TEN WORST THINGS   1. You have to explain (over and over) what exactly an MFA is. 2. You have to be civil to PhDs 3. Everyone expects you to win at Scrabble. 4. People are afraid to write you because you’ll correct their grammar, etc. 5. The student loan folks know you by your first name. 6. You can’t make payments working as an adjunct instructor. 7. A blank sheet of paper is your only friend. 8. Inevitably, one of your classmates publishes a book. 9. Inevitably, it gets good review. 10. Inevitably, you get rejected again.