How did a semi anti-establishment, rule-thwarting, convention-trashing writer such as myself end up with an M.F.A. degree after six semesters in graduate school? It’s a puzzle, sometimes even to myself. I never believed whole-heartedly in the graduate of fine arts degree. In fact, there was a time when I actively rejected its validity.
William Faulkner didn’t finish high school, I told myself. Then he somehow attended college and didn’t finish that either. He read everything and copied down what he liked. Sometimes, he copied whole books just to feel the power of its particular arrangement of words — to learn how to make the same patterns and rhythms with language. And, he studied people. He watched them closely. He loved them enough to reproduce them in words.
Toni Morrison (another favorite) didn’t get an M.F.A. degree. She read Faulkner and Woolf a lot, combined that with tons more reading, then sat down to write. So when I considered whether to apply to graduate programs, I asked myself things like: What good is an M.F.A. degree but to shove rules up my nose? What are rules, anyway? Where did they come from? They came from people who did something unprecedented and well received. The goal shouldn’t be to follow the rules and please the masses, but to forge them and masses shmasses.
Yet, forging and taking (at least measured) risks as a writer that contribute to the advancement of literary fiction is something I’m absolutely committed to, M.F.A. or no. And, the fact is that there are benefits to higher education in the arts. There are valid reasons to attend the post-baccalaureate halls of academia and they apply to even the staunchest anti-intellectualist artists.
Valid reason number one: Community. It’s true that you can set up your own writing, reading, or art making group and attain this phenomenon. But. The sad truth is that nobody is likely to concentrate that much on your work unless they’re being paid. And if they do, it’s even less likely that they will be qualified to help you in a way that will ultimately benefit your work. With the M.F.A. program, you can interact directly with an artist you admire and be accountable to that person in a real way to produce better art.
Valid reason number two: Accountability. You’re not only accountable to a qualified mentor, but to a group of peers. And, most importantly, to yourself. You have to show up for your art every day. You are forced to do your art whether you feel like it or not. Further, you’re forced to share it with people, whether you want to or not. Doing these things on a consistent basis for a long time will, inevitably and in spite of yourself, make you a better artist. Maybe you have supernatural self discipline and can do this anyway. I certainly don’t.
Valid reason number three: Connections. People with your personal dream career will come and speak to you. Often, they will even see your work. Regardless of what anyone says, what I have found to be true is this: Talent is ten cents per dozen. Connections are almost always the reason a particular piece of work gets widely circulated or well sold.
Probably there are other valid reasons but those are the ones that caused me to attend graduate school in pursuit of an M.F.A. in fiction writing. Well, that’s not quite true. There was one more important reason and it was this: I needed to show myself and the world what was most essential to me. I needed to demonstrate it. I needed an action I could take that would send an important message. To the universe. Or the stars. At least, to me. It was my shout from the rooftop that I am a writer, that I have stuff to say, and that the world will hear it.
Fundamentally, I know that to be true with or without graduate school. And yet, I need to do an action that strongly backs up that knowing if I want to avoid perpetual existential crisis.
How often do you question the meaning of your own existence? Most writers and artists I know do this often. It’s when a vague empty feeling attends every mundane activity. The laundry basket weighs a thousand pounds and takes immense effort to empty. Grocery store aisles feel like wade pools of hot tar. We become dispirited and disjointed, lacking any connection to the vital source of our life-energies. The antidote is to do — really, really — what we’re most passionate about.
More though, we aren’t safe by simply signing up for the M.F.A. program. The doing has to continue with soldier-like determination even then. There is one path for us to follow and it’s our own. The M.F.A. program is to keep us following it, not to become it. Beware the phenomenon I call over-education. Over-educated writers spend too much time stuffing their minds with intellectual knowledge about writing, the various conventions of and around writing, the business of writing, etc. They read or are otherwise exposed to great writers and lose confidence, turn shy, insecure. They lose the conductive capacity needed to inject power into the work. Or, rather, to let that power flow into it, unobstructed.
Writers and artists, at their best, are simply conduits for the creative process. Something big wants to come into the world through us. Something inarticulable. Something misunderstood. Something that can, at best, be referred to by a work of art that becomes, if even for a moment (in von Durckheim’s words) transparent to the transcendent. How do we create something transparent to the transcendent? If this is the goal of M.F.A. programs — to reverse engineer the process of how these things get created — then its falling short might result from the misuse of these structures. After all, the classics and the great works of art that line the halls of the Louvre weren’t people’s thesis projects. So how did they materialize?
By being shouted from the proverbial rooftop. That’s how.
They materialized from an artist engaged in the act of living deliberately in service to her art.
(A longer, edited version of this article will appear in the September inaugural issue of Gnome Magazine, as will an edited version of the piece below entitled 150 Grams.)
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