Culture Shock: Reassessing the Workshop
1.
I had been living in Japan for 20 years when I moved back home to the United States in 2011. Upon my return, I decided that I would finally focus my energies on creative writing. But where to begin? The more I consulted friends and colleagues, the more I heard the same thing, over and over
“Whatever you do, don’t get an MFA.”
I received this advice from published authors and, even more frequently, from MFA-holders themselves. My understanding of MFA programs was limited—I’d heard of the prestigious “Iowa Workshop” but was otherwise completely unaware that MFA programs in the U.S. had exploded in popularity over the past two decades.
In Japan, there is no such thing as an MFA. People who want to be writers study things like literature and journalism. My own undergraduate background was in philosophy from Berkeley, and I later got an MA in Japanese literature and linguistics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In grad school, we read voluminously, wrote translations, and did literary analysis. After graduating, I worked as a translator in the fields of business, government, and academia. It was around this time that I had what was probably the best creative-writing “craft” experience of my life: I was hired to translate a novel from Japanese to English.
More than once I’ve been told by successful writers that if I wanted to become a writer, I should copy out by hand my favorite novel. “You have to
