Cara was publishing short stories during all of this, and by the time she joined The Southern Review, agents were knocking at her inbox. But she managed the unthinkable: she didn’t sign with an agent right away.
For starters, Cara didn’t have a complete manuscript yet, but she also felt nourished by her job at the magazine. “One thing an editorial position afforded me was the luxury to not have a hard deadline and to be able to write the book that I wanted to write,” she says.
In short, an MFA—even at the most prestigious program—is a privilege you must rise to meet. It isn’t going to do the work for you, it isn’t going to write the book for you, it isn’t even going to make the contacts you’ll need professionally unless you organize yourself into becoming the empathetic, curious, and supportive literary citizen that people want to see succeed.
If you feel confident enough in your savings (or someone else’s savings) to see yourself through the limited job market that greets most MFA graduates, you’re a lucky person. Take that acceptance letter, and go. But if you can’t afford a life off salary while you’re in grad school, if you would need a loan to attend, and/or you’re not in a position to be accepted to a fully funded program, it’s not super wise to pursue an MFA. Or at least, not a traditional one. Or at least, not right now.
It’s worth noting here that teaching experience is crucial to your success on the academic market, so if you do apply to MFA programs, consider those that give equal teaching experience to their students. First-year candidates in such programs will generally find themselves at the head of a freshman composition or creative writing class, while second- and third-year students can tackle subjects further afield such as literary journalism, travel writing, or experimental nonfiction. Some programs will even give their first-year grad students a crash course in assignment and syllabus creation to ready them for the challenges of teaching and time management. Regardless of the size of the class you’re leading—or the topic—these early teaching gigs are worth their time and effort. With each semester, you’ll be acquiring the confidence you need to craft syllabi and lectures when the stakes are higher (i.e., when you’re doing a demo class in front of an academic selection committee during a campus visit). After all, you want to know you can bike before the training wheels come off!
Is there a world in which I can teach without an MFA?
You can debate the pros and cons of MFA programs until the cows come home, but unless you’re exceptional enough to prove the exception, you’re going to need one if you want an academic teaching job. The good news is that for most creative-writing positions, you can stop at the MFA. “Most programs won’t require that you have a PhD in order to get a tenure-track creative writing job,” says this book’s editor, Julie Buntin, who has been through the academic-market maze herself. “But some that are housed in English departments or that have a theory or comp component to the teaching load might. Pay close attention to the job listing!”
The list of writers who have managed to get teaching jobs without an MFA degree is short on names, but they all have sterling CVs. The aforementioned author Saïd Sayrafiezadeh—who teaches at Hunter College, Columbia University, and NYU—doesn’t have an MFA (or a BA for that matter), but he was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, publishes on the regular in The New Yorker, has received a Whiting Award as well as a fiction fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and is on the board of directors for the New York Foundation for the Arts. Author Kathleen Alcott—who has taught at Bennington College, the Center for Fiction, and Columbia University—didn’t attend an MFA program either, but she has three acclaimed books (one of which was a Kirkus Prize nominee), a short story that made the short list for the prestigious Sunday Times Short Story Award, and bylines in household-name outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian.
On the other side of the exceptional, Cara Blue Adams—another writer we just met—has an MFA and a tenure-track teaching job, but she doesn’t have a book. What she does have, however, is a deeply thoughtful background in both publishing and editing, with awards and fellowships to boot. “People tell me they loved my first book,” says Cara, who has published, among other places, in the Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, and The Sun. “They also say they had a great time at my wedding, although neither of these events have happened yet.”
In summation, you can get a teaching position without an MFA degree behind you, and you can move up the tenure track without a published book, but you can’t do any of these things if you’re not busting your butt to create great work on the side. This is easier said than done, of course, and you can’t just “decide” to be extraordinary, but what you can do—if you want to circumvent the traditional path to professordom—is acknowledge that you are going to have to work incredibly hard to do so. And then do it: work harder than hard.
Creating (and maintaining) a literary community without an MFA
There are a lot of reasons writers don’t attend an MFA program: they’re categorically opposed to them; they can’t afford them (financially and/or emotionally); they don’t know that they exist.
I was in this latter case. I lived in France for most of my twenties, and by the time I moved back to America and woke up to the fact that most authors had MFA programs in their bios, I felt too old, too married, and too financially unstable to pursue an MFA.
I was, however, longing for a literary community, and it wasn’t initially clear how I could find one outside of an MFA program. I was living in a really rural part of Massachusetts with very few people—much less writing people—around. A serendipitous part-time job offer in New York City gave me the chance to try to find my kinfolk. In order to get as much out of my time in a metropolis as possible, I decided to attend a reading series for each of the four nights that I would be in New York, and to introduce myself—in person—to one stranger at each reading. I did this for four months straight, and although the positive outcomes I experienced were aided by my extraversion, I’m nevertheless convinced that there are solid, actionable, and affordable things you can do to build a literary community without an MFA. Some of these suggestions are free, others require an investment. For the paid options (attending summer conferences or an online writing class), remember to save receipts for tax time so you can deduct these costs as a business expense.
Attend too many reading series
You know the musical expression “playing by ear”? At reading series, you can train your ear to help your writing. Take it from someone who survived a writer’s twenty-two-minute “autofiction” revelation about a particular type of oral servicing he once received on a couch: once you hear someone bomb in front of a microphone, you will do anything—everything—to avoid terrible writing. In-jokes, tangents, potentially offensive content, narrative indulgences—attend a lot of reading series and you will be only too happy to remove these malignancies from your work.
Volunteer as a reader for a literary magazine
Being a reader for literary magazines allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of what people are writing—and not writing—about, and it can be very useful for your creative writing process to be a gatekeeper for a while. Understanding what makes you want to accept or reject a story will inevitably inform the choices you’re making in your own work. Are you trying too hard to be funny? Do you go on tangents? Do your characters do nothing but stare out the window drinking tea? There is just as much to be learned from reading flawed writing as there is from reading polished work, plus you’ll come away with a new respect for the form rejection letter after you’ve been exposed to a bog of misspelled, uniquely formatted submissions from misanthropes and misogynists who are only too proud to tell you that they couldn’t be bothered with your submission guidelines because this attached thirty-five-thousand-word novella about a man without a girlfriend absolutely needs to be in your poetry journal. NOW.
Attend a summer writing program
The cons