After the MFA: Fantasy, Reality, and Lessons Learned

Back in the spring of 2001, I enrolled in an MFA program in creative writing with a fiction specialization. For many reasons, including the fact that I’d already earned multiple graduate degrees and was employed at the time as a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard, I chose to pursue a low-residency creative-writing degree. I’d already earned a doctorate in history, I was already teaching, albeit in a term-limited position, and shortly before arriving on campus for my first MFA residency, I’d signed with a literary agent to represent my novel manuscript, “The Haguenauer Line.” I’d applied to MFA programs believing that the new degree would both help me become a published author and, combined with the teaching experience I’d already earned, would smooth the way to securing a tenure-track job teaching creative writing at a college or university.

In fact, if you had asked me back then how I dreamed I might be introduced a decade and a half later—maybe as a speaker at a big writers conference such as the one I attended recently in Boston—I might have come up with the following. Let’s call it my “aspirational” biography. Or, perhaps, a fantasy:

Erika Dreifus is the author of the novel The Haguenauer Line [published by Little Brown, Random House, or any other “big” publisher]. The same year The Haguenauer Line was published, Erika was honored as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” and one of the New Yorker’s “Best Young Novelists.” She is a tenured professor of creative writing in the Boston area [although New York or Washington would also be acceptable locations] who spends her summers alternating between residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies. She is currently completing revisions on her second novel, which will be released in the fall, and for which she will embark on a multi-city tour while she is on paid sabbatical.

Now the reality:

Erika Dreifus is the author of an unpublished novel manuscript, The Haguenauer Line, which, though agented, never sold. She is also the author of a short story collection, Quiet Americans, that she’d basically given up on ever seeing in print by the time an emerging micro-press contacted her. That collection was published in 2011, eight years after Erika’s MFA graduation and nearly two years after her fortieth birthday. Erika has not completed a new short story in nearly three years.

When her university teaching appointment ended in 2002, Erika continued to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while teaching writing in adjunct positions and freelancing for magazines. During this time, she began to apply for tenure-track writing jobs along the Boston-Washington corridor. She also applied for fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and others, but received nothing but form rejection letters in reply.

By the end of 2006, this lifestyle did not seem sustainable. So Erika applied for, was offered, and accepted a nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday, writing-intensive office job at the City University of New York, where she worked from February 2007 to July 2014. In August 2014, she became the media editor of Fig Tree Books, a press that specializes in fiction representing the American Jewish Experience.

In addition to the publication of her story collection, highlights of Erika’s writing life since her MFA graduation include 1) studying, writing, and publishing poetry—her poetry chapbook manuscript, “Double Chai,” was a contest quarterfinalist last year, and she continues to send it out; 2) writing and publishing personal essays and commentaries; and 3) reviewing books for many publications, including, recently, the Washington Post, the Missouri Review, and the Barnes & Noble Review. She is also an active online advocate for writers and for Jewish literature.

She has never won a residency to MacDowell or Yaddo.

There are several valuable lessons I’ve learned from my experience—none of which I understood before or even upon finishing my MFA—that I believe every writer considering a graduate degree in writing (or those who have recently received one) should know:
           
Your MFA thesis is not, in and of itself, a book. And even if some of it eventually shows up between book covers—three stories that I wrote for MFA workshops made their way, after further revision, into my collection—publication can take a long time. Again, nearly eight years elapsed between my MFA graduation and my book’s release.

It is very difficult to secure a tenure-track teaching job in creative writing. As the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) noted in its most recent “Annual Report on the Academic Job Market,” “roughly 4,000 graduates receive advanced degrees in creative writing each year; yet the AWP Job List reports that just over 100 tenure-track creative writing jobs were available in 2012-13.” You do the math.

It is also very difficult to support oneself solely as an adjunct instructor and/or freelance writer. To say that, a decade ago, I didn’t exactly dream of spending eight hours every weekday back in an office is an understatement; that environment, which I’d entered immediately after my college graduation, had pushed me straight to Graduate Program No. 1 in the first place. But that’s exactly where I found myself seven years ago. And, flexible scheduling, sabbaticals, and other perks aside, I’m not at all certain that I’d be much happier with a permanent (or at least, steady and secure) job teaching writing in a college or university. (But that, my friends, is a subject for another essay.)

As in the rest of life, things will happen in your writing life that you don’t expect and can’t predict. Notice how much more textured and developed my “real” biography is compared with the “aspirational” one. It’s entirely possible to become a different sort of writer than the sort you anticipated you would be, or thought you wanted to be, at the outset. Learning doesn’t end with the MFA program; your identity as a writer isn’t finished developing. At this point, as much as I love the idea of being a fiction writer, and as much as my degree and book publication proclaim me to be one, I don’t think of myself primarily as such.

Nor could I have have anticipated—not in 2001 when I began my MFA program and not in 2003 when I graduated—the growth of the Internet and technology. I could not have imagined then that my story collection would be published because I left a comment on a guest post on one of the many blogs I’d been routinely visiting—because the guest poster was establishing a publishing company that would rely on something called “print-on-demand” technology and was looking for work. I could not have anticipated that even if all the major pre-pub book-review publications—Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly—would ignore my book, I’d somehow manage to find readers (and reviewers) elsewhere, thanks in large part to bloggers, social media, and something called a “virtual book tour.”

The Internet has also connected me with other writers that I likely would not have otherwise met—many of whom I’ve become friends with in real life. And I’ve needed them, especially because, unlike many other people—maybe especially those who’ve attended low-residency graduate programs in creative writing—I didn’t leave my MFA program with a strong support system or extensive network.

Which leads to one final lesson: An MFA program is not necessarily destiny. To be sure, I don’t advise anyone to aim toward graduating from an MFA program utterly alienated from most of the program’s faculty and students (again, perhaps a story for another essay). But if that should happen, it won’t be the end of the world. Really and truly—for all of us—MFA graduation is just the beginning.

This essay was adapted from a presentation at GrubStreet’s 2014 The Muse and the Marketplace conference in Boston.

Erika Dreifus is the author of the story collection Quiet Americans (Last Light Studio), which was named an ALA/Sophie Brody Medal Honor Title for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature, as well as a Jewish Journal “notable book” and a Shelf Unbound “top small-press book.” She is the media editor of Fig Tree Books. Her writing and “Practicing Writer” newsletter can be found at www.erikadreifus.com.