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C. Clayton Childress and Alison Gerber
The MFA in Creative Writing:
The Uses of a
“Useless” Credential
Abstract: Over half of today’s Masters of Fine Arts programs in creative writing in
the United States were founded after the year 2000. Has the MFA-CW become a
necessary credential for novelists? Relying on participant observation field re-
search in the American literary field and interviews with authors, publishers, MFA
graduates, and instructors, this work focuses on a paradox: Despite widespread
agreement that the credential doesn’t “teach” enrollees to be a good writers or
open up a pathway to a professional writing career, many involved in the literary
field hold an MFA-CW. In this paper, we look at the uses of the MFA-CW, finding
that although the degree serves little if any jurisdictional or closure-related func-
tions it is made useful in a variety of ways: for students as a symbolic resource for
artistic identity, for working writers as a source of income and community, and for
editors in publishing houses as a signal for possible marketing and publicity poten-
tial.
Keywords: Credentialism, Professions, Literature, Books, Publishing, MFA
The first Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFA-CW), the Iowa Writer’s
Workshop, was founded in 1936 by Wilbur Schramm. The “Iowa Model”, which
would diffuse across MFA-CW programs throughout the latter half of the 20th
Century and early 21st Century, centered on writing workshops in which students
take turns critiquing each other’s work. Although for brief time periods fiction
writers could find stable employment in the creative literary arts (i.e. the Federal
Writer’s Project from 1935-1939), the more recent rise of MFA-CW programs has
provided a historically unprecedented avenue of employment for creative writers,
as teaching in these programs is carried out by practicing novelists and poets (My-
ers, 2006).
Despite relying on a model created in the 1930s, this new avenue for employ-
ment first emerged in the 1960s, with 11 programs being founded between 1960
and 1969, and another 61 programs founded by the turn of the 21st Century. Since
2000, the number of offered programs has more than doubled, with over 150 MFA-
CW degree granting programs now in operation. Given this widespread and histor-
ically unprecedented proliferation of the MFA-CW, according to McGurl (2009, p.
ix), the rise of the degree is “the most important event in Post-War American liter-
ary history,” and has had the latent effect of institutionalizing the literary arts in the
United States (McGurl, 2009; Radavich, 1999).
To date, the vast majority of academic treatment on the proliferation of the
MFA-CW has been centered on two questions: 1) can creative writing be taught
(e.g. Harper, 2006; Lim, 2003; Neave, 2006), and 2) what effects, if any, has the
C. Clayton
Childress,
Department of
Sociology,
University of
Toronto
Alison Gerber,
Department of
Sociology,
Yale University
Contact:
C. Clayton
Childress,
Dept. of
Sociology
University of
Toronto
725 Spadina
Avenue
Toronto, Ontario,
Canada
Ccchildress
@gmail.com
ISSN: 1893-1049
Volume 5, No 2 (2015)
http://dx.doi.org/10.7577/pp.868
Received:
31 March 2014
Accepted:
2 Feb 2015
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widespread adoption of the MFA-CW had on the quality of American literature
(e.g. Aldridge, 1990; Gioia, 1992; Myers, 2006)? The former question, a pedagogi-
cal one, is of great importance to those tasked with teaching creative writing in
post-graduate degree programs. The latter question, nominally an empirical one,
takes up long-term trends of the “quality” of American letters. Yet both of these
questions share the core assumption that the quality of creative objects are fixed
and can be objectively defined (Gans, 2008; Becker, 1982; Bourdieu, 1984; Di-
Maggio, 1987; Frith, 1978). Instead, the appraisal of literary quality is dependent
on time (Barker-Nunn & Fine, 1998; Rosengren, 1985) and place (Griswold, 1987),
is subject to processes of interpersonal influence (Childress & Friedkin, 2012),
professional reputation management (Van Rees, 1987), the desires of literary elites
(Corse, 1995) and other extra-textual factors such as the gender (Corse & Wester-
velt, 2002, Tuchman & Fortin, 1984), race (Chong, 2011; Corse & Griffin, 1997),
activities (Janssen, 1998), networks (Anheier, Gerhards, & Romo, 1995), and repu-
tations (Dubois & François, 2013; Rusch, 1999; Verboord, 2003) of authors. The
subjective classification and reclassification of what constitutes “quality” creative
literature is, finally, subject to the organization of literary value and values within
evolving literary fields (Anand & Jones, 2008; Baumann, 2007; Bourdieu, 1993).
This article breaks from the two central frameworks through which MFA-CW
programs have been analyzed, while maintaining that the arts generally are a valu-
able case for researchers interested in the professions. The proliferation of the
MFA-CW has eluded sociological analysis, and in particular comprises a problem
for the study of the professions, in which creative work, despite recent profession-
alization and the embrace of professional status (Bain, 2005), remains only prob-
lematically professional. The vision of professionalism advocated for here, with an
emphasis on commitment and meaning, is much closer to Spillman’s definition
(2012) than to more traditional views of the boundaries of the professions with
their markers of professional status (Abbott, 1981, 1988).
The paper proceeds by considering the two major research streams in the pro-
fessions literature—human capital theory and occupational closure theory—that
might serve as the “usual suspects” in analyzing the adoption and diffusion of new
postgraduate degree programs. After showing that the MFA-CW presents interest-
ing divergences from the expected outcomes of these research streams, we argue
that to begin to theorize the rise of the MFA-CW we must first establish how the
degree is and is not used in the practice of the U.S. literary field. Findings point to
diverse uses of a “useless” credential with variation dependent on one’s role within
the field—this despite common agreement that the degree does not teach special-
ized knowledge or improve one’s position in the labor market for creative writers.
Three roles are considered in the paper that follows: aspirant authors, working au-
thors, and acquisition editors.
Occupational closure and human capital theories of
professional work
A long tradition of sociological research centers on processes of professionaliza-
tion in which occupational categories are defined through the institutionalization
and legalization of specialized forms of knowledge and professional association,
such as in the case of lawyers (Abel, 1989), doctors (Abbott, 1988; Freidson, 1970),
accountants (Hanlon, 1994), economists (Fourcade, 2006) and the like. Credential-
ism, involving the restriction of the labor pool in an occupational category to those
who have completed the relevant professional licensure or academic degree, is one
manner through which field configuring professional bodies and organizations
institutionalize control over the labor market (Abbott, 1988; Brown, 2001; Collins,
1979; Derber et al., 1990).
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Building off of Weber’s (1978) work on social closure, occupational closure
theory posits that along ascribed demographic demarcations—and increasingly
along achieved status demarcations such as education credentials or professional
licensure—professionalization projects work to limit entry to sectors of the labor
market by rendering pools of applicants as ineligible participants (Larson, 1979;
MacDonald, 1995; Weeden, 2002). As Parkin (1979) notes, limiting “resources and
opportunities to a…circle of eligibles” may be achieved through social, legalistic
or educational means (3), and may exist as a form of “opportunity hoarding” within
market niches (Tilly, 1999). Both through restriction and control of the labor sup-
ply, rewards for labor within the market niche can be made or kept artificially high,
even when claims to expertise or specialized knowledge are inaccurate or overstat-
ed (Luker, 1984). As such, one explanation for the widespread adoption of MFA-
CW programs could be that they are part of a professionalization project in the
creative literary arts.
We may however question these assumptions in the literary field, especially
since those with the most vested interests in using the MFA-CW as a tool for occu-
pational closure do not see the degree as useful in this regard, and instead question
whether and how the degree provides meaningful training for any occupational
category at all. As Michael Collier, Professor and Co-Director of the University of
Maryland’s MFA-CW program notes, “an MFA is not meant to professionalize
you as a writer. Rather, it is an opportunity to live as fully as possible in a commu-
nity of writers for two to three years” (Kealey, 2005, p. 201). In the Modern Lan-
guage Association’s journal Profession, David Radavich (1999) furthers this claim,
writing that “there is no profession for which an MFA or PhD in creative writing
provides direct training” (110). In fact, in its introductory “Q&A” section the lead-
ing guidebook for MFA-CW degree seekers leads with a question: “So, we need
degrees in order to be writers?” and responds: “of course not. If you want to be a
writer, write” (Kealey, 2005, p. 2). We do not see similar statements among the
leaders of our nation’s medical and law schools, or in other fields that have under-
gone occupational closure (nursing, accounting, librarianship). Given that the
MFA-CW neither blocks entrants nor is intended to block entrants from being
writers, it is unlikely that the rise of the MFA-CW can be best understood through
straightforward occupational closure and jurisdictional frameworks in the profes-
sions literature.
The accumulation of human capital is a second avenue through which we might
understand the proliferation of the MFA-CW. Building off the work of Adam
Smith (1863) and as elucidated by Lewis (1954) and particularly Becker (1964),
human capital theory posits that knowledge and competencies can be invested in
through formal education and exchanged for financial gain in the labor market. The
returns on human capital can be “specific” (Becker, 1964) to a particular industry,
such as is the case for a surgeon with a degree in medicine receiving financial re-
wards for her accumulated knowledge while employed in the field of medi-
cine, but not for employment in the field of architecture. Alternatively, as exempli-
fied by Spence (1973; 2002), human capital may serve as a “signal” of competency
in information asymmetrical exchange on the labor market.
Using the former approach, we would expect the acquisition of specialized
knowledge in MFA-CW program. The acquisition of specialized knowledge in the
MFA-CW is unlikely, however, as “for most of its history creative writing is a field
that has avoided scholarship” (Donnelly, 2011, p. 1), and even those tasked with
teaching in MFA-CW programs (i.e. those with the strongest incentive to advocate
for the usefulness of their labor) have significant doubts about whether the ability
to write creatively can be taught at all (Harper, 2006; Lim, 2003; Neave, 2006).
Using the latter perspective—the MFA-CW as a signaling mechanism—we would
expect MFA-CW graduates to improve their position in the labor market for crea-
tive writing, as their graduation from a degree granting program is a sign of their
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ability within the creative literary arts. However, as discussed below in the findings
section, acquisition editors—those tasked with selecting novels and novelists for
publishing contracts from pools of hopefuls—do not treat having graduated from
an MFA-CW as a signal of ability, and instead, regard the degree with suspicion
vis-a-vis the creative quality of the work. One might look to employment within
the professorate as the “real” outcome of the MFA-CW, but such employment re-
quires not the MFA-CW credential (indeed, many teachers do not hold it) but, ra-
ther, a well-regarded publication history; for this reason, we include acquisition
editors as well as aspirant authors and teachers in our discussion below.
Occupational closure theory and human capital theory, despite their uses in oth-
er fields, are unlikely explanations for the rise of the MFA-CW, at least through the
predicted channels. Instead, creative workers more broadly rarely achieve the clo-
sure considered by some necessary to the professional project or agree on organiza-
tional representatives (Berman, 2006, Menger, 2014). This may be due to the liter-
ary field—and the arts in general—envisioning multiple knowledges as valid
(Rueschemeyer, 1972), with “skill” and “expertise” largely functioning as network
artifacts rather than objective quality measures (Eyal, 2013). How, then, to under-
stand the rise and uses of the “useless” MFA-CW? In this work we contribute an
analysis of the professionalization of the arts through less frequently discussed
mechanisms: meaning-laden professional identity formation, the construction of
professional community, and the development of norms of professional practice.
To do this, we look to the uses of this useless degree in the literary field among
aspiring authors, teachers, and acquisitions editors.
Methods
Data were collected over 18 months between 2008 and 2010. The first author in-
terviewed over 120 authors, publishing professionals, reviewers, creative writing
teachers, bookstore owners, and bookstore employees and engaged in six months
of sustained participant observational research in a publishing house. This included
observing both for-pay and not-for-pay workshops and informal writing groups
with aspiring novelists. Observations were also conducted at a wide range of author
readings and signings in venues including major-chain and independent bookstores,
public libraries, and coffee shops, and regional and national industry-sponsored
events.
The topic of MFA-CWs first emerged inductively in interviews with authors
during early phases of field work, when asked to narrate their path into becoming
novelists, authors—particularly from younger age cohorts—brought up their time
in MFA-CWs. As the interviews were semi-structured, the first author began to ask
follow-up questions about why authors decided to apply to MFA-CW programs,
how they picked programs to apply to, what they learned during enrollment, and
what if any lasting effects they felt their attendance had on their writing and careers.
Eight authors interviewed (of 25) also currently work or have worked as professors
in creative writing programs, and they shared how they viewed their “jobs” as pro-
fessors in relation to their “work” as novelists. As the first author was concurrently
interviewing authors and engaging in fieldwork within a publishing firm, he began
to ask acquisition editors at the firm about how they viewed MFA-CW programs,
which was supplemented with interview data from literary agents (N=15) and ac-
quisition editors from other firms (N=42).
Due to the nature of data collection, this work only speaks to those working in
the teaching, creation, and production of literary fiction, and cannot speak to MFA-
CW graduates in poetry, or to those who have been either unsuccessful or uninter-
ested in securing a contract for publication or a job in another position (e.g. acqui-
sition editor, reviewer, literary agent) in the literary field. This paper aims instead
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to focus on investigating how MFC-CW programs are used within the creation and
production of literary fiction
Findings
Findings are broken out into three subsections: authors, teachers, and publishing
professionals. This is not meant to imply that teachers at MFA-CW programs are
not also working authors—in fact, they are—but only to provide analytic distinc-
tion between the roles and occupational rhetorics (see Fine, 1996) that teach-
er/authors use in relation to the MFA-CW.
Authors: time and symbolic resources for artistic identity
Respondents expressed a range of reasons why they decided to apply to MFA-CW
programs. In line with a 2010 survey of MFA-CW applicants in the Poets & Writ-
ers 2012 MFA Rankings (Abramson, 2011) in which the most frequently cited
reason for applying was to have “time to write” (55%), our respondents frequently
reported that “buying time” was a major factor for them. As Kelsey, who has gone
on to publish two novels, explained: “Well, when I was graduating [from college] I
knew that I wanted to go to an MFA program to keep writing and have more time
to [do so].” The MFA-CW provided “time” for Kelsey, who would otherwise have
felt compelled to find employment, most likely in a “day job” that would take time
from her writing. Like others below, Kelsey’s calculus made the decision to “buy
time” with potential tuition fees and lost wages a clear one.
While Kelsey saw herself as “buying time” to write, she could have, as recom-
mended in The Creative Writing MFA Handbook (2005), simply taken the time to
write without paying for a degree granting program. Instead, as it was for Michael,
an author living in the Northeast who worked in marketing out of college, the
MFA-CW served a symbolic purpose in making occupational aspiration of being a
writer seem more “real”:
I was working crazy hours and then going home and trying to work on a novel
and I had this realization that, that, I didn’t want to be one of those people who
is always working on a novel…It was a real gut check moment…Even applying
made my dreams feel more real. This is who I am and this is who I want to be.
Michael’s motivations were not atypical among respondents. While some, like
Kelsey, “always” knew they wanted to be novelists, others like Michael first tried
“a real job.” Yet despite this distinction, most respondents, in a variety of ways,
felt that their desires to become novelists were made more “real” somehow by at-
tending MFA-CW programs. Morgan, who also worked a “real job” after college,
explained:
It gave me something to say that I was doing…so my friends went from joking
“how’s the novel going?” because they knew that it wasn’t [when I was work-
ing at my day job] to asking “what’s it like there? What are the classes like?”
and I had progress to report and things to talk about again.
For students, enrollment in the MFA-CW was itself a form of professional identity
formation. While the “time to write” was sometimes real for entrants who were
trying to balance their writing with paid employment, for others, “time to write”
served a more symbolic function in that it was being enrolled in a program, rather
than simply writing, which made their time spent writing feel like a legitimate in-
vestment in a professional identity rather than a hobby.
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Once enrolled, respondents did not feel that MFA-CW coursework improved
their writing, but found that it served other purposes, including the time and identi-
ty resources discussed above. Kelsey said that her MFA-CW workshops allowed
her to “think about writing a different way and to have a vocabulary to talk about
writing which, for my own work, has not been too helpful. But when I write [free-
lance] reviews for magazines or websites, I know how to.” Colton, who has pub-
lished two novels, cited his MFA-CW workshops as making him more accepting of
negative reviews for his novels: “I just kinda take the good ones as encouragement
and then—I don’t know, once you’ve been to workshop so many times…you just
kind of lose the emotional aspect of it.”
For Kelsey the “sideline activity” (Janssen, 1998) of reviewing the work of oth-
er novelists is a skill she feels she honed and developed from having to critique
others’ work in her MFA-CW program, whereas on the other end of the writ-
er/reviewer exchange, Colton harnesses his experience of having his writing cri-
tiqued in MFA-CW workshops to manage his response to negative reviews of his
work. While neither Kelsey nor Colton spoke much about how “workshopping”
dramatically changed the quality of their writing (it provided “just things to think
about,” according to Colton), both ultimately found the experience useful for their
careers, particularly in learning the “softer” skills of the professional identity:
learning the language to talk about writing, how to deal with criticism of one’s
work, and how to critique the work of others. These less instrumental and more
implicit forms of skills acquisition also extended to informal education in the
machinations of the publishing industry.
This was the case for Maggie, who wrote what would become the “lead” fiction
title for a major publisher and be heavily promoted by them in her third year of an
MFA-CW program in the Midwest. She remembers her time in her MFA-CW as “a
vital turning point. So moving into that community after the theoretical discussion
of writing and the workshopping… that’s where I really sort of began to learn a lot
about the agenting process.” She felt that the two most important things she learned
in her MFA-CW program were that a manuscript “almost has to be ready to put on
the shelf [before submitting to an agent], and… that agents really function a lot like
editors now.” Maggie found that although most of her professors resisted discus-
sions of industry concerns—lest the MFA-CW be confused with a vocational or
professional program—older students were more apt to privately share information
about the publishing industry:
Here were people who were a couple years...ahead of us who had finished and
were now ready to market their books...[T]here was just the talk between stu-
dents, everybody wanted to sell their books so everyone was there for a pur-
pose…It wasn’t so much the education [in writing] I received, but being sur-
rounded by 12 other writers basically in every course, every day [was useful].
For Maggie, and many other respondents, this informal information swapping
within a like-minded network of aspirants was quite important.or other novelists,
like Colton, his time in an MFA-CW created social ties and a “collaborative circle”
(Farrell, 2003; see also Hargadon & Bechky, 2006) which he has relied on
throughout his career. Colton has three people that he met in his MFA-CW pro-
gram who continue to read and edit his work:
John [another student], I sort of consider him my line-editing specialist…Alison
[one of his professors], she’s always very good with parsing out the characters’
emotional journeys, saying this isn’t realistic or you need more of this
here...David [another fellow student] is more like just “let’s look at the events,
let’s look at what happens and see if that’s what should happen.” So they all
have their own concerns and it’s complimentary.
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Maggie and Colton both reference the networks that their MFA-CW programs
afforded them, though they talk of networks with different benefits. Maggie saw
herself most benefiting from the informal “rumor mill” or “grapevine system” of
industry news she acquired from other students, whereas Colton found a social
circle of likeminded authors who provide feedback on each other’s work. Barbara,
a successful novelist in her late mid-60s who did not attend an MFA-CW, provides
evidence of the negative case, lamenting that she doesn’t have the social resources
that MFA-CW graduates possess:
I’m happy [with my career], but I envy people who have a circle; I envy people
who were in MFA programs together where they bonded. I envy people who
were in MFA programs because they have mentors…I’m missing the context.
I’m not saying I feel uneducated… I mean I don’t have a certain sort of [social]
structure in place that some people do that are tremendous resources for writers.
Just as MFA-CW attendees do not feel that they learned how to write in MFA-CW
programs, Barbara does not feel that her lack of attendance has hampered her abil-
ity as a writer (i.e. “I’m not saying I feel uneducated”), but instead provides evi-
dence of the negative case that is positively asserted by those who did attend (i.e. “I
envy people who have a circle”). Overall, while MFA-CW graduates do not feel
that they learned how to “write” in their graduate degree programs, they describe
gaining other key skills and building networks through the MFA-CW that have
served them well in their chosen careers. MFA-CW programs gave them time to
write and a venue in which their aspirations to be novelists could be made to feel
more real both to them and to people around them. In turn, although their programs
were oriented toward ostensibly insulating them from the “business side” of writ-
ing, they learned about the practice of being a working novelist and engaging in
sideline activities, swapped information about the publishing industry with each
other, and established creative circles within the programs that they would go on to
rely on during their careers. Similarly, novelists who work as professors at MFA-
CW programs are uncertain about how their teaching relates to their work as writ-
ers, but find many uses for MFA-CW programs, including the same sorts of crea-
tive communities found by students, as well as the provision of a steady and livable
income that gives them time to write.
Teachers: a sense of community and teaching the unteachable for
wages
Teachers in MFA-CW programs express a range of feelings about their occupation.
Most think of their teaching as a “day job” which supports—intellectually, socially,
and most frequently, economically—their passion as novelists. Mallory, who has
written four books, has worked as a professor in an MFA-CW for over a decade.
Most important to Mallory is the sense of community she finds from her work,
which isn’t always available to her in her career as a novelist:
I used to say teaching just interferes with my writing because in terms of time it
does. But you can only write for so many hours a day. And it’s really lonely
just writing. You need to have community and the writers group is great but I
only see them like once a month usually…It can be good to write for a while in
the morning and then go to school and talk to young people…So it’s more about
community.
Many of the MFA-CW teachers reported that the sense of community they found in
their programs was important to their mental health, and broke up long stretches of
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writing alone. While most did not regularly lean on other faculty or students for
support in their writing, simply being around people who shared their passion made
their lives as writers more meaningful.
Despite this, many teachers felt reservations about being paid to teach a skill
that they feel is outside the bounds of formal education. Jasmine, an MFA-CW
professor in upstate New York expressed the common opinion that creative writing
cannot be taught: “I don’t know why we do it. I know why I do it, but we’re tasked
with teaching the unteachable.” Some, like Greg, justified this disconnect by simp-
ly stating “it’s a job, it’s a way to earn a living.” While this commonly professed
inability to teach what one is ostensibly being tasked with teaching—creative writ-
ing cannot be taught—could be dismissed as a core facet of the illusio (Bourdieu,
1996) of the literary field, rather than simply serving a power-laden rhetorical func-
tion it is deeply embedded in the very structure of MFA-CW teaching practice. In
MFA-CW programs the reliance on the workshop format, which decenters not only
the professor, but also formal instruction more generally and forbears the attain-
ment of pre-defined knowledge acquisition, ensures that even if creative writing
could be taught it will not be taught. As such a belief in the impracticality of even
trying to teach the ability to write creatively is reinscribed in pedagodical practice.
For some MFA-CW professors, such as Zach, creative writing, which cannot
be taught, is based on personal experience and personal discovery, for which work-
ing in MFA-CW programs limits engagement with life outside the academy:
Most writers now have to teach in universities because it's the way that we sup-
port ourselves, and it's a very odd thing to be going on to have all the people in
the country who are recording what life is like now, doing this really odd thing,
which is the academic world [and] is not the same as the rest of the world. It
would be nice if we could go back to living from writing.
While Zach references wanting to “go back” to a time when novelists could make
their living from writing novels, he does not specify the time period to which he
refers, and its historical existence in the U.S. is dubious. While the early and mid-
twentieth century have been reinterpreted as a “golden age” of literature in the
United States, the book market was comparatively quite small (Thompson, 2012),
and most writers could not expect to make an income from their books. Randall,
who served through much of the 1970s on the National Endowment for the Arts
Literature Panel thinks that this history has been lost, and replaced with an assump-
tion that novelists have always, and should be able to, live off their work as novel-
ists:
Certainly Hart Crane never thought society owed him a living. So there was that
radical shift…and now you have people who are so firmly entrenched in [the]
second generation and beyond, so firmly entrenched in the MFA program that
they have no other idea, they have no traditional grounding.
Many MFA-CW teachers describe having come to a difficult peace with the ten-
sion of ostensibly training a next generation of novelists who will not be able to
make livings as novelists, and doing so despite not actually believing that the skills
required to become a novelist can actually be taught. Yet overall, while teachers at
MFA-CW programs do occasionally feel that their work as teachers can be benefi-
cial to their students’ writing, more often, they find teaching to be beneficial to
their own writing. And most often, they use their employment in MFA-CW as a
productive social outlet to spend time around other writers. Most centrally, MFA-
CW programs provide a livable income to already-working writers who cannot
subsist solely off the advances for their book projects.
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Publishing professionals: networks and promotional resources
In May and June, literary agents begin to receive the bulk of their submissions
from that year’s MFA-CW graduates. Some of these will trickle into publishers’
inboxes quite early, but the deluge really comes during the fall or winter publishing
seasons. Literary agents and acquisition editors take a range of stances on submis-
sions from MFA-CW graduates, finding pragmatic reasons mostly related to the
industry knowledge respondents like Maggie discussed, and indirect and informal
promotional opportunities attendance might provide. Like MFA-CW students and
professors they are highly dubious of the claim that one learns how to write well in
MFA-CW programs and instead take a more negative position, complaining that
the quality of writing can even be adversely affected by MFA-CW attendance.
Some literary agents, such as Laurel, an agent in New York in her mid-40s,
appreciate the increase in submissions to her office around graduation season, as
she feels it makes one aspect of her job easier:
When I started as an assistant, I was out hunting for authors, reading all the lit-
erary journals for short stories and then following up to see if the writer might
have a book in them, going to amateur readings, always asking around if people
knew anyone, which, all of it is really a lot of work. We still do that but even if
we did not they, all of these people with novels, now know how to find us.
Laurel, who does not comment on the quality of submissions, believes that the
MFA-CW funnels would-be authors to her agency, and she believes that the most
important training young writers receive from an MFA-CW program is how to find
the appropriate literary agent, how to write a query letter, and other minutia of the
publishing industry which is informally traded between students and more fre-
quently avoided or expressly rejected by professors in formal MFA-CW classroom
spaces. Alex, an acquisition editor at a major New York imprint, echoes Laurel’s
impression, stating directly that “those programs cannot teach you how to write.”
Instead, making a distinction between writing and being an author, he feels that
MFA-CW programs should be more oriented toward teaching how the publishing
industry works, downplaying the possibility that the MFA-CW helps students learn
to write well:
The only value [MFA-CW] have is teaching students how to be authors, either
in the one course where they do that sort of thing, if that, or through osmosis
from their professors who talk about the industry and their experiences; how
things work.
While Laurel assumes that students are learning about the industry through profes-
sors and not through the informal “grapevine system” of information sharing be-
tween students, like MFA-CW students themselves she also makes reference to the
softer skills of professionalization—which may be an inadvertent outcome of at-
tendance in the program. She is distinguishing between being a “writer” (who may
or may not have the ability to write creatively) and an “author” (who may or may
not have the ability to write creatively, but has at least some understanding of the
publishing industry and how it works).
Randall, who works at an independent publishing house on the West Coast,
finds a “sameness” that bothers him when describing what he sees as a twice-
annual “dump” of submissions to his publisher:
The fact is that twice a year here we will get a huge flood of submissions be-
cause everyone is …told by their professors to submit their work… But the in-
terchangeability of, especially fiction in the MFA program, is readable and no-
ticeable… because there will be a couple of hot writers and the next year every-
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body in the MFA program will try to write like that guy. Sam Lipsyte is the cur-
rent hot guy, um, George Saunders is the current hot guy so next year I’ll get a
lot of short story and novel manuscripts that will be mimicking those two guys.
Just like Dave Eggers led to a whole blast of dysfunctional family memoirs.
Although this type of mimicry may be more valuable to editors of popular fiction
who are looking for hits that can be marketed and promoted in accordance with
trends, for acquisition editors who are seeking a “timeless” quality in works they
hope will contribute long-term (if slower) sales on publishers’ backlists, mimicry
of the “current hot guy” is a significant impediment to publication.
While Randall is quite critical of the trend-hopping and what he believes to be
the inferior creativity of creative writing produced in MFA-CW programs, he does
not feel that the MFA-CW is entirely without value. While claiming that he would
“hope not to notice” whether a submission came from an MFA-CW graduate or not,
he is somewhat disheartened when acknowledging a second logic of sales and
promotability for the submissions of some graduates:
If you’re going to go to Virginia, “did you study with XYZ and could we get a
blurb from them?” And you can see that infecting the whole blurb business. So
you can look at these people, realizing that’s how they got the blurb, they stud-
ied with them one place or another and managed to create some sort of tangen-
tial relationship with them that produced a blurb.
Blurbs, the short snippets of praise from well-known writers or reviewers that ap-
pear on book jackets, are thought of as one form of “advertising” for books. They
are often used in catalog copy to signal to bookstores that the author has famous
friends who may assist him/her, and to others in the industry that the author should
be treated well given that their famous friend may hold a grudge if they are not. It
is also believed that for general readers, positive appraisal from an author they like
or have read before may induce them to pick up the book while browsing. Just as
authors describe the accruement of social capital from their attendance in MFA-
CW programs, Randall describes another way in which this social capital is con-
verted in the “blurb business.”
Agents and publishers also see benefits—both in relation to networks and
sales—from representing or working with professors at MFA-CW programs, all
despite doubting that the ability to write well has actually been learned through
attendance. This was described by Sophia, a literary agent in New York:
I represent an author who is a professor at one of the top programs and that’s a
plus for me because I’m not just working with him. Because of his job, he can
send people to me. If he thinks one of his students is really talented he can say
“I want to introduce you to my agent,” which has happened a couple times.
He’s their teacher, so they want to please him and they’re really excited about
the opportunity and he can also explain what working with me is like and why
they should work with me [instead of another agent].
Whereas MFA-CW students may be able to get blurbs from their famous profes-
sors, their professors also serve as intermediaries to the literary field. For Sophia, it
is not merely the social connection, but also the social trust and influence engen-
dered through the professor/student relationship that makes representing a novelist
who works as a professor an added bonus. Some acquisition editors also feel that
working with MFA-CW professors provides an additional sales potential, as pro-
fessors are tied into an academic network of others who might buy their books, or
perhaps even assign them in classes. Nathan, an editor at an independent press who
is quite critical of the rise of the MFA-CW in the creation of new writers, optimis-
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tically hopes that MFA-CW graduates—the vast majority of whom he believes
have “no chance” of ever securing a publishing contract—may create a new gener-
ation of readers, when he tells us that creative writing programs make students
“better readers”, not better writers.
Overall, while publishing professionals are either indifferent to the quality of
writing coming out of MFA-CW programs or critical of it, they acknowledge that
the existence of the programs make their jobs easier in many inadvertent ways:
Despite purporting to train students how to write well, they train students in how
the industry works, and the social ties formed within programs can be of benefit to
publishers, both during the promotional practice of “blurbing” or in attracting new
authors. In turn, with regards to increased sales, authors who work as professors in
MFA-CW programs may be more attractive to publishers if they are tied into net-
works of other MFA-CW professors who may read and assign their books. And
finally, while MFA-CW programs might not train their students in how to “write
well,” they may train their students in how to “read well,” creating new markets for
modern literature that publishers depend upon.
We have seen how the MFA-CW is used in diverse and divergent ways by as-
pirant authors (who use the degree to “buy time” to work and symbolic resources
for the writer’s identity, and who gain professional practice knowledge), teachers
(who use the degree as an ideal “day job” and source of community), and acquisi-
tions editors (who use the degree to simplify their position and to market books).
Although not through the more widely recognized jurisdictional or closure-related
processes, this landscape of practice is crucial for the functioning of the U.S. liter-
ary field today, and the formation of professional identity through “soft” skills and
symbolic resources, which make the degree far from useless.
Discussion
Despite the relative incongruities between existing literatures on the professions
and the careers of novelists, to date, the proliferation of the MFA-CW has eluded
sociological analysis, and in particular serves as an important and neglected test
case for research on the professions. This article has aimed to take the first steps
down a path that takes creative writers as professionals seriously, and takes as its
starting point an investigation of the role and uses of the MFA-CW degree in the
literary field and the ways it is understood by field participants. In turn, it aims to
re-center discussion of the MFA-CW by starting from the initial building block of
how the “useless” credential is actually used by field participants.
With regards to the question of what an MFA-CW is “good for,” the answer this
article provides is a multivalent one: the degree serves different uses and different
purposes depending on one’s position in the field. This points to the variability of
value within fields, dependent on position in a more subtle and less mechanized
form than the competing “poles” of fields as discussed by Bourdieu (1993; on this
point see Childress, 2012; Moeran, 2014). Instead, even in “circuits of commerce”
(Zelizer, 2010) within fields––value may take on incongruent and position-
dependent forms within the same transaction: in the case of an accepted manuscript,
an MFA student’s “time to write” may be an acquisition editor’s access to blurbs, a
professor’s stable income, or an opportunity for an author and editor to reaffirm
their social tie and shared interpretation of “quality” literature.
For such a transaction to be successful, no party needs to believe that the MFA-
CW degree imparts specialized knowledge in the construction of creative works,
nor need they believe that the MFA-CW is a useful signal in marking “quality”
literature, or that the degree should or even could be used to limit the supply of
potential manuscripts available for contract. Although the initial catalyst for the
widespread adoption of the MFA-CW existed as a form of state-intervention to
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“hide” the funding of already-working novelists within institutions, in practice the
degree has been used as a means to a variety of ends. Although the MFA-CW may
not provide any form of specialized training in creative thinking or creativity it has
nonetheless proven to be of quite creative use.
This draws into question the degree to which these findings are mirrored across
creative degrees more broadly––Bachelors of Fine Arts (BFAs) in painting and
photography, Doctors of Fine Arts (DFAs) in social practice, and related forms of
creative training––as well as technical programs in arts related fields. Are creden-
tials as multivalent in painting as they are in creative writing? Does the DFA signal
professionalism in performance art to the same degree as it does for acquisitions
editors, or does it signify increased remove from the demands of the market in that
field? This possible remove from the market may be suggestive of a Bourdieusian
polarization in American artistic fields which, although present in France in the
middle of the 20th Century, looked quite different than it does in the American
context today.
Through the MFA-CW we have witnessed a wide-scale change in the coordina-
tion of the literary arts in the United States since the 1960s, based on a model
founded in Iowa in the mid-1930s. This change––the proliferation of advanced
degrees in creative writing, especially pronounced in the last decade––has been
credited with fundamentally reshaping American arts and letters (McGurl, 2009).
While the emergence and rise of a new post-graduate degree program more broadly
might be explained through research on occupational closure and human capital
theory, these theoretical trajectories seem less applicable to the case of the MFA-
CW. The existing literature from the study of the professions on occupational clo-
sure and human capital may simply be poor fits to explain the proliferation of the
MFA-CW, or they may be problematic more broadly for the arts and artistic ca-
reers in general. This, in turn, may signal a broader disconnect between contempo-
rary scientific research on occupations and professions and occupations and profes-
sions in the arts more broadly. One strategy for dealing with this disconnect may
involve a look to the “Production of Culture” approach as first elucidated in the
1970s (see Peterson & Anand, 2004 for review). In treating creative industries as a
special class for organizational analysis, one of the early goals of the approach was
to serve as an “accounting device,” engaging in similar exploratory analyses to see
if scholars could collaboratively build up to general rules and principles across
culture producing industries and fields. While this early project in the Production
of Culture approach remains somewhat incomplete, it can be reignited through an
analysis of the rise of degree specialization across occupations and practices in the
arts and arts related industries (e.g. see Porcello, 2004 for sound engineers, Rabkin,
2013 for artists, and more generally SNAAP at the Indiana University Center for
Postsecondary Research).
Both the study of the creative professions and research on professions and pro-
fessionalization more generally will benefit from increased attention to the integra-
tion of meanings and practices and, in particular, to an investigation of the uses of
meaningful objects. While the professions and professionalization literature has
mostly focused on jurisdiction, closure, and an objective expertise, the creative
professions highlight the extent to which less visibly instrumental but no less
meaningful mechanisms contribute to professional autonomy, market control, and
power.
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