Antonia Angress
Founded in 1997, the three-year program at the University of Minnesota offers degrees in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. It offers full funding in the form of either a fellowship or teaching assistantship, which includes a tuition waiver, health insurance, and a stipend. Incoming class size: Up to 12. Application deadline: December 1, 2021. Application fee: $75. Core faculty includes poets Peter Campion, Ray Gonzalez, and Douglas Kearney, fiction writers V. V. Ganeshananthan and Julie Schumacher, and nonfiction writers Kathryn Nuernberger and Kim Todd. cla.umn.edu/creative-writing
About twenty-five, which in retrospect was kind of ridiculous! I was very unhappy at my job and had been thinking about applying for years. When I finally decided to go for it, I didn’t want to have to reapply, so I figured, given the sobering odds of admission, that my best bet was to cast a wide net. For Funding was number one. I wanted time to finish the novel I was working on, and it didn’t make sense to go into debt for that, so I only applied to fully funded programs. Geography was important too. I applied to programs all over the country, but only in places my partner and I could see ourselves living for at least two years. We wanted to be in a city or a sizable town, so I didn’t, for example, apply to programs in rural areas. I was accepted to seven and wait-listed at seven. About $1,500. When I applied, I’d been out of college and working full-time for five years, so I’d built up some savings. I also have a supportive partner with a good-paying job; otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to afford all those application fees. Luckily, I’d already taken the GRE a few years earlier. I chose the University of Minnesota because they offered me a two-year fellowship, which meant I wouldn’t have teaching responsibilities for two-thirds of the program. I was working as an elementary school Spanish teacher at the time, struggling to write a novel on the weekends, so the idea of getting a break from teaching was appealing. I also liked that it’s a three-year program. I’m a fairly slow writer, so I knew I’d need all the funded time I could get. And I loved the work of the fiction faculty: Julie Schumacher, V. V. Ganeshananthan, and Charles Baxter, who has since retired. Yes, I was fully funded for all three years, though I had a part-time tutoring job in the summer to supplement my stipend. It completely changed my life. It gave me the time and the creative and financial support I needed to finish and polish a novel, which I sold in my last semester of the program. I do think, though, that some small part of me hoped it would be like , with doting professors holding my hand and giving me constant pep talks, which obviously it wasn’t. This isn’t to say that the faculty at Minnesota aren’t supportive or that they don’t care—they are, and they do—but they’re adults with their own lives, as are grad students. I’ve learned that there’s no writing mentor or MFA program that will make you write your book. You are the only person who can make you write your book. It’s a small program, so it’s pretty tight-knit. Some people live together, and several have ended up getting married. One of the greatest gifts my program gave me was my friendships with other writers. Now that we’ve graduated we’re all scattered, but I can still count on them to read my work and to offer solace and advice. I think—I hope—that we’ll always be in one another’s lives. The lack of structure. I was on campus a few hours a week or, during COVID, on Zoom, but otherwise my time was my own. It’s not like college, and it’s not like preprofessional grad programs where you have tons of face time with your professors and your classmates. It can be wonderful but also paralyzing. I had to be very self-motivated to make it work. The sense of community. Before my MFA, I’d never really been part of a creative community. I don’t think I truly thrived as a writer until I was surrounded by other people’s talent and ideas. Its whiteness. Historically the program has been disproportionately white, though that’s started to change in recent years. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, grad students successfully got the administration to agree to switch from a ranked waiting list to an unranked one to ensure more diverse cohorts. I learned different things from different people. My professors taught me to be a sharper and more analytical reader, and they helped me navigate the publishing industry. My peers cheered me on, held me accountable, and told me candidly when I was deluding myself. The program taught me to read like a writer, to take a book apart and figure out how it’s put together. It trained me to move through drafts more quickly and to be less precious about my work. I write nearly every day now, which wasn’t always the case. And I write faster than I used to, though still at a snail’s pace compared with other writers. My program has a Brown Bag lunch series for which they bring in editors, agents, and people in writing-related fields to talk about the publishing industry and career options for writers. Publishing was never really a topic of conversation in workshop, though. Cast a wide net if you can afford to. Don’t be shy about applying for fee waivers if you qualify for them. Interfolio is your friend. Know that taste is subjective and that where you do or don’t get in can feel like a crapshoot, because it probably is. If you’ve just graduated from college, consider waiting a few years. Being out in the real world and having a job, even one you dislike, will give you plenty to write about, and it’s wild how much your work can change and improve in just a couple of years. Personally I think it’s helpful to go into a program with an idea of a project you want to work on, or with a chunk of it already written. On a related note I’ve often heard the advice not to apply with a novel excerpt. I’ve never sat on an admissions committee, but my view is, if you’re a novelist and you’re working on something you’re excited about, apply with the strongest chapters, ideally ones that don’t require a lot of context. Don’t force yourself to produce a short story just because you’ve heard you should.
