MFA Archive
MFA vs. Saint Germain des Près
Over the past five years, France has witnessed, bemused, the emergence of a very special breed of master's programs—in creative writing. Today, in a country that’s supposedly one of the cradles of Western literature (or so we French love to believe), there are, all in all, three such programs.
Why the MFA System Should Be Used to Subvert Cuts to the NEA
The scariest part of the proposed cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities is that people seem to have accepted them already.
On Scent and Time Travel
Somewhere in West Virginia sits a ghost town that once was a heap of millionaires. Thirteen unlucky mansions haunt Bramwell: the place where, about a century ago, the women bought boatloads of Chanel No. 5.
MFA vs. PhD
Last year, at 28, I attended my first writer’s conference in Virginia and a fiction workshop. I felt like a wallflower who’d only just realized all the other flowers had long ago left the wall in pursuit of something deemed extremely useful in the American literary community—the MFA.
“It all started when I began writing through masks”: An Interview with Tomás Q. Morín
Tomás Q. Morín’s first book of poems, A Larger Country, won the APR/Honickman Prize and was runner-up for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. It’s a collection that brings together a series of different times, places and characters (both historical and imagined) into a new world all its own, one that
“The poems toggle between wreckages”: An Interview with Kerrin McCadden
Kerrin McCadden’s poems illuminate life’s sharp-edged particulars, making the touchstones of this physical world resonate with the meditative music of our everyday existence. She’s the author of Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, winner of the 2015 Vermont Book Award and the 2013 New Issues Poetry Prize, as well as the
On and Of the Page: The Life–Art Collapse
A few years ago at a conference, I read a section from my long poem “Sublimation” in which the speaker describes a miscarriage that, in its vicious pain and effusions, wakes her up in the middle of the night. After the reading, as I was mingling my way toward
Out of the Blue and Onto the Page: How Translation Rekindled My Passion for Writing
When my mother, born in America to Israeli parents, first met my father in Tel Aviv, she said she knew he was right for her because he was an American living in Israel. As a young woman who grew up in transit—constantly being moved around between the two countries—she
Depressing Graphs for Writers
Remember this series of graphs from last month that depressed the hell out of everyone? The one that reminded us that no book from a woman’s point of view has won the Pulitzer in the last 16 years? We could cry about it, or we could look at some more
Why Bother with Craft?
“Craft” was a dirty word at art school, a subtle derogative. The college dropped “and Craft” from their name so recently that the signs on the highway still held those words. Once, in a class critique, a peer called a hand-painted map used to make a stop motion short
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