Dear writer,
The best source of advice on the writing life is so often other writers. But if you’re at the start of your literary career, with questions about how best to develop your art—and where, and with whom—you may not have found your community and your sounding board for these queries yet. So we asked six writers we admire to step in as mentors and answer a question on many emerging writers’ minds: Should I get an MFA? In the following letters they share their advice to you on finding a path that will nurture your talent and help you flourish, as a writer, as a person—and maybe, just maybe, as a graduate student.
Sincerely,
The editors
Dear writer,
There is such a wide range of things “MFA program” can mean—an annual class of a hundred or of six; a program you pay for or a program that pays you; a program that provides a full campus experience but that requires, for better or worse, uprooting your life, or online mentoring and short residencies; a full schedule of workshops plus language, craft, and literature courses or just workshops and thesis hours—that the question, in the abstract, of whether to attend one feels impossible. There are some main benefits an MFA program might provide: time, direction, community, professional networking, teaching experience, and a credential. Aside from the teaching credential, none of these are exclusive to or inevitable in MFA programs, but it’s nice not to have to assemble, piece by piece, the things that support your work. My advice is to consider your priorities and narrow the question from whether an MFA program is appealing to whether a specific set of programs is appealing. Some programs provide none of those helpful things, and very few provide all of them, but many do at least three out of five quite well.
What a program does well is often personal. An unfunded program will provide time to prioritize writing if money is no object, but if it requires debt, organizing your postgraduation life around repaying loans will steal some of that writing time back. Some people thrive in small cohorts, which provide significant individual attention and make it easier to workshop a single project with the same readers, while others prefer the energy of a larger class with more opportunities for new perspectives. If none of the published work of a program’s faculty or recent alumni excites you, it may
