What Good is an MFA After You Get Your Degree?
The Writer in the World meets MFA Lore!
A place for our thoughts on writing, and a place to find each other, and share opportunities and ideas —The Writer in the World
Hello Loreates!
A delightful opportunity fell into my stack this week. My former Goddard faculty colleague checked in with an offer I couldn’t refuse. She was looking for a way to preserve and perhaps revive The Writer in the World, the incredibly vibrant blog she started in 2012 as an online hub for our late, beloved Goddard MFA program. The site has been an archival time capsule since 2020, but it still contains a treasure trove of writing wisdom and inspiration from a spectacular community of faculty and alumni writers. Reiko has been personally paying to keep this content public, but it really needs a more permanent home.
So, I thought, why not make a new home for The Writer in the World as a section of MFA Lore? Reiko agreed to help me curate and transport the finest and most evergreen of the posts and podcasts from the archival site. And I’m hoping they’ll inspire and enliven our broader community of Loreates!
How will this work? Going forward, these WITW posts will not replace my regular MFA Lore weekend posts for paid subscribers, but they may replace some free mid-week shares. At least for awhile, instead of cross-posting from other literary Substacks each Wednesday, I’ll be building the new Writer in the World section with select stories and podcasts, like this one with herself, talking with fellow colleague about the intersection between her writing and her mixed-race Japanese-American heritage!
Initially, these posts will reflect the world that was at Goddard, but my hope is to open the Writer in the World to everyone who has or is working toward an MFA. I’d love to add contributors to this section and expand its reach going forward! If you’d like to share your thoughts about the MFA and postgraduate writing life, please drop me a comment.
I also hope you’ll let your friends know this is happening:
As a celebratory gift, I’m offering 3 months of full access to the whole MFA Lore site FREE, if you subscribe before April 30 with this special offer:
As it happens, I was already planning a story on post-MFA writing life with contributions from a bevy of Goddard alum, and this seemed like a wonderful way to announce the partnership between MFA Lore and Writer in the World. Of course, I now have so many reports on post-grad life that I need to publish them in installments, but that just goes to show what a terrific community of writers we are!
For today, I’m going to zero in on MFA grads (most but not all from Goddard!) who are here on Substack. Watch for additional post-grad stories in the next few weeks!
As always, Loreates,
Write on!
Aimee
From MFA to Substack and beyond!
The everlasting debate about the value of an MFA degree is probably more fraught today than at any time in recent history. Over the last 15 years, writing programs have been slashed and crushed under the pressure to raise enrollment and ROI for colleges. Many of these colleges themselves, like my own former employer Goddard College, have closed altogether. Tuition at the survivors, meanwhile has spiked, and now, due to Trump, student loan programs may be vanishing, too.
All this means that the prospects have dwindled for MFA students hoping to cadge a teaching gig after graduation. Meanwhile, the publishing world is imploding under the weight of vanity press books, which bypass virtually all the quality controls that traditionally filtered out less-than-quality writing. Who needs an MFA when anyone can become a “published author” whenever they feel like it? Who even notices finely-wrought prose anymore? Maybe editors at the Big 5 publishers do, but competing for their attention now feels like swimming into a fire hose.
The economic return on investment for MFA students seems to be shrinking by the day, and yet, I’ve rarely met an MFA alum who doesn’t firmly believe that getting that degree was one of the top 5 decisions of their life. I certainly do. But why? What are graduates actually doing with their degrees after they get out of school? And how does the MFA experience continue to impact their writing lives?
I put these questions to my own former students and other MFA graduates. This first group of responders are all on Substack, with stacks or coming stacks of their own. I hope you’ll enjoy this dazzling array of reflections on post-MFA life and consider subscribing to their publications!
will soon be writing at Lucas’s Substack:
Greetings from the backseat of a Mercedes Vito as we are pulling into the “Door of the Desert,” the small city of Ouarzazate, Morocco. I’m currently updating the 4th edition of my guidebook with Moon Travel Publications (Avalon / Hachette). This will be the 7th book to date I’ve written with Moon. At this point, I’ve developed a bit of a reputation for travel writing, for better or for worse, and find myself, like today, out exploring the world quite a bit. I do find myself dreaming about having the time to go back to novel writing or write longer form stories. But sometimes you have to take the writing that pays, you know what I mean?
writes The Armchair Journalist:
I received my MFA when I was 65 years old, from the Bennington Writing Seminars Program, a low-res MFA option. It was a life-changing experience because I was accepting myself and being accepted as a writer. I read and read and read. And learned. Since then I've been publishing, of course not as much as I'd like, and I've been working with a coach/editor who has been a major influence in really helping me find my voice. Thinking back, I don't think the MFA was so concerned with voice, but focused more on other aspects of the literary experience. Bennington "launched" me. The rest has been up to me.
writes at Victoria Veldhoen:
I completed my MFA while working simultaneously as a scientist. I found it incredibly gratifying to finally have a chance to work on my "art" and I quite honestly pursued it for the love of all things literary. My writing greatly improved through the feedback I received from my advisors and peers, and through critically studying creative nonfiction closely through my annotation work. Approximately three years after graduation, I chose to quit my scientist work and pursue ghostwriting full-time, in large part due to the confidence I had gained through the MFA.
Jaimie Li will soon be writing :
As a girl, I was a gallery-goer, and I spent many happy hours standing with my shins against the tripwire meant to prevent people from touching the paintings. Despite my fascination with this pastime, I didn't know anyone who worked in the arts much less worked as a writer. Conscious of the tripwire separating me from the artworks I loved, I always perceived an invisible line between the people who appreciated art and writing, like me, and the artists and writers themselves. It wasn't until I was 30, newly married, and enrolled at Goddard for a low-residency MFA in Creative Writing that I began to see how this wire was crossed. At Goddard, a bevy of teachers, visiting writers, and advisors plied me with a wealth of cultural and literary influences, all the while encouraging me to painstakingly develop my own point of view. Since then, I've taught writing workshops in various settings, most notably at Hugo House in Seattle. I've also interviewed other artists about their work (you can find them here: www.jaimiezongli.com).
Most importantly to me, two weeks after my Goddard graduation, I became a mother. I stayed in touch with the writing community at conferences and residencies such as Prospect Street Writers House and Foreword Retreats. I kept up correspondence with my writing group, who all work hard at their own serious projects. I grind away at my manuscripts. I parent my toddler. Currently, I am polishing up some personal essays to be posted on my Substack-in-progress
.Whereas I was once the girl stymied by the gallery-goer side of the wire, I now work hard to impress her. Everyone has a different pathway--and different goals--when it comes to their art. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, "Whenever you wake up, that is your morning. What matters is that you wake up.”
writes at A Little Elbow Room:
The first thing I did in my post-grad writing life was to continue running the weekly writing workshop that I had set up in an assisted living facility as my teaching practicum at Goddard. I found I delighted in teaching, and the writing workshop went on for years. I also began blogging. When I landed a literary agent at Grub Street’s Muse and the Marketplace for my gardening memoir I thought everything would come up roses. It did not. The pandemic hit and she was unable to get it published. I muse now about publishing it myself, perhaps I will. I’ve kept blogging. And in 2023 I became a monthly columnist with “The Nature of Things” in The Journal of the San Juan Islands, which I generally share on my blog, A Little Elbow Room.
’s stack is coming soon at Gregory’s Substack:
I graduated from the MFA Writing program at Goddard in 2003. I concentrated on playwriting but also studied poetry and novel writing. In 2004 there was a staged reading in NYC of my play Ultimate Aphrodisiac which saw a production in 2008 in Chicago (read a review here ).
I was also an actor for many years prior to earning an MFA. After graduating, I continued acting in several productions in Chicago including the play “Garden of the Three,” written by Palestinian American playwright Iymen Chehade about a Palestinian families struggle with the Israeli occupation.
I furthered my education by earning an MA in Applied Linguistics/TESOL at UIC graduating in 2011. From 2012 - 2016 I lived in Honduras volunteering as a Human Rights Accompanier. I primarily worked on the case of a peasant farmer involved in land struggles who was a political prisoner falsely accused of murder. After a long international campaign, he was successfully exonerated. I wrote news articles for online publications about his case as well as other social justice movement struggles against the corrupt Honduran narco government (read those here).
I began writing a novel based on my experiences in Honduras. It is still a work in progress. I continued writing poetry after my MFA experience most of it can be read on my Medium page: https://medium.com/@GregMcCain
In 2022, I began a podcast, Greg McCain’s Don’t Overthink It. There are episodes of me reading/performing some of my work from my Medium posts. Other episodes are works/monologues written specifically for the podcast. They can be found here.
I turned 62 this year and started receiving Social Security benefits. I’m working on the first drafts of a short piece for the podcast that could potentially be a staged play or short film.
There’s more to come!
If you have an MFA and would like to share your post-grad story for our next WITW “afterlife” post, please share it below!
Note: As a subscriber, you can control which sections of this publication you will receive. If you need help with that, read this from Substack Support.
Getting an MFA changed my life. I needed to make the commitment to myself that writing was what I wanted to do, and the low-residency model helped me build the habit of integrating my work life and my creative (also work, but different) life that's sustained me to this day (even during early parenthood). My graduate thesis became my first novel (Polska, 1994) and I quickly published a book on writing that I co-authored (Clear Out the Static in Your Attic). I've placed innumerable poems in the years since, and I am currently polishing my second novel now (working title: Naked Driving to the Witches' Graveyard) and still publishing book reviews when I can at islamcketta.com.
I'm someone quite far away from the MFA world. (Well, I was an English lit major as well as a psych major. But that's not the same.). So it was intriguing to read about MFA grads' journeys here. A friend was an MFA grad, and we discovered that we had such opposite impressions of writing norms, since they were trained in an MFA setting while I was trained in a genre fiction setting (mostly fantasy and romance). It's interesting to compare notes with folks coming from different backgrounds!