IF YOU’VE been rejected from an MFA program, the experience may have left you stumped about how to move forward as a writer—or, worse, questioning your abilities. You wouldn’t be the first writer to feel this way. A rejection from an MFA program comes with a particular sting and creates a particular dilemma: Should you brush yourself off and try again, or are these rejections a meaningful judgment of your talents as an artist? The answer is almost certainly the first: If the MFA still calls to you, reapply. Admissions committees change, your work evolves, and no one cloistered group of academics gets to decide if your work matters. It does. But it’s also worth remembering that there is more than one way to learn to be a writer. “The main thing is to just keep writing,” says Sakinah Hofler, a fiction writer, poet, and playwright in New Jersey who has been where you are now. Other writers agree. Some of their stories of persistence follow—may they remind you that your rejections are not a judgment of your worth or worthiness and that there are many ways to pursue your work.
