My MFA Years
I throw shade on the worse behavior I witnessed
Thank you to all the new subscribers. I appreciate you spending time with me here. You’ll likely have already liked / restacked / shared / commented on the essay I published that I mention below. I was supposed to be taking a Substack hiatus this month, but that publication went live yesterday. I won’t likely send another update until after the first week of June, due to a deadline I have for something not related to Substack.
To those of you who don’t follow me and aren’t certain what I’m referring to above, please continue reading all the way to the end (or, if you don’t have time, please scroll to the end and click on the article). I’ve got a contest to win and I need your help. Thank you in advance for your support!
- Autumn
I didn’t plan to post until the end of this month, but I just had an essay of mine published yesterday in the excellent new hub for literary and cultural essays:
, which was recently founded by and .Last week I wrote about getting personal in our essays online, and whether this is something that is helpful or harmful to our writing careers (or personal brand, or whatever the industry calls it now). This was in anticipation of the personal narrative I had written. I knew it was going to go out to readers sometime soon. In the piece, I tackle a very emotionally charged time period that we all lived through that has lead to the polarization we’re now dealing with: 2015 - 2018. Yes, those years. The ones we likely try not to think about. I wanted to share what that era did to the atmosphere of the creative writing program I attended.
I have received some valuable comments, some from people who disagree with my piece. I have also received unhinged rants, which is to be expected anytime you post anything of value around cultural issues online.
I’d love it if you read this account of what I witnessed while I attended my MFA program. It is an indictment on the structural and cultural issues within academia. My intention was not to place blame on the creative writing professors, who were targeted during the years I attended. I also don’t hate my MFA program, despite what I witnessed there. I know there is a framework of pro vs. con, but I did learn and discover new work while at the program. I made some friends, some who are still writing and publishing. But I did want to focus on the darker side of what went down as well, because it did have a chilling effect on discourse.
I’m shamelessly asking you to read the essay below and after reading it, please comment, restack or like it (or all three) within the essay (not here). Although, feel free to also drop me a comment or DM me here too. I’d love to hear what you think, even if you don’t feel like you want to comment within the conversation on The Republic of Letters. There’s a contest mentioned at the top of the essay that I would like to win. I’m only about 10 likes shy of one of the metrics.
