MFA programs in creative writing spread like crab grass after the Second World War, each a poor hybrid of the first one grown by the University of Iowa. The original idea was to build a hothouse where literature bloomed as writers wrote and critiqued each other’s work. The problem, though, is that the hothouses now harvest a crop of weeds employable nowhere but in academia training other writers to train other writers to train other writers–if they get planted in one of the few real jobs in creative writing programs.

But enough with the bad horticulture metaphor.

What MFA applicants aren’t told is that unless they go on for a PhD and act like little scholars, most of them won’t be able to find work anywhere but in colleges or universities as comp dogs, as part-time writing instructors paid minimum wage or less with no health insurance while they grade reams of junk prose and hope to scribble (between semesters) the great American novel like Bernard (Bern) Malamud. Because the only route out of poverty into a tenured position without a PhD is to write the great American novel or short story collection or poetry collection and then teach in an MFA program fertilizing additional crops of cheap labor for English departments.

So all those ignorant, eager sribblers wanting to write their way into literary immortality and a middle-class job sign up for all those MFA programs in all those colleges and universities around the country. You can find them on discussion boards at zoetrope.com asking naive questions, such as: How many MFA programs should I apply to? What sort of portfolio should I submit? What besides an MFA is needed for literary genius?

The wiser or just wise ass writers on the site answer those foolish questions by pointing out the obvious: Writers and poets in the canon don’t have MFAs. Mencken never went to college, Wallace Stevens was an insurance lawyer, Faulkner dropped out of college, Saul Bellow fled from graduate school, Tony Morrison has no MFA, Vonnegut has no MFA, John McPhee has no MFA, Willa Cather had no MFA, Mark Twain had no MFA, nor did that guy (1564-1616) in England who wrote all those popular plays to make a buck. 

Well, the English profs will harrumph, the MFA didn’t exist when those writers learned their trade, and we don’t guarantee employment.

Exactly.

–the editors