qwer2

Cameron Diaz has a line in some movie. She looks at her boobs and says they are soggier than they ever were. Then she says "the worst they ever were and the best they will ever be again." The theme is life only gets worse. I know a lot of non-tenure track writing faculty who say life is a lot harder after the mfa stage than before. First, a community becomes less firm. It becomes hard to find someone to comment on your writing. Second, the odds of getting published are worse than the odds of getting in to Iowa. The odds of getting a tenure track job is even worse than the odds of getting published. Non-tenure track university teachers make about $60K/year, and those jobs are hard to get to. You've chosen a rough life life. Artists don't live easy.

Here is a link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1460423647532209 But the moderator there has to approve you, and people have posted on this forum that she can take weeks. I am not a fan of the moderator. She just posted to market her personal "one on one" lessons on how to apply to MFA programs. The forum has a rule against advertising commercial services and fund me's.

Why are there two separate mfa forums? People like Mr Visser say they are checking 100 times a day, and that doubles their work. It can't be for anonymity. A bunch of people just outed their names on the other forum.

One person basically deciding who gets to attend, or actually ruling out 940 people, is actually pretty normal in modern society. If you look at other programs like an MBA, one person eliminates more than that many people. Almost no one wants to get an MFA. The same 1000 people apply to all the top programs. You cannot make money off of writing. All of these programs have like 4 fiction teachers and only one to four people deciding who gets in. Where you go for an MFA doesn’t matter at much as you perceive. It is just the next step before you, so it seems like this is all there is. After you get an MFA, you will discover that most graduates from Iowa MFA end up high school English teachers and are never published. If you don’t have an undergrad degree, most likely you won’t learn much at an MFA school. Shakespeare didn’t go to university, and maybe you don’t need to either, but most likely your best road is to go to an undergrad school before an MFA. I used to think it was degrading to go to community college when you’re old, but I now believe that the classes at community college aren’t all that different from the classes at schools hard to get into. They try to build the syllabus to cover a range of levels. They give you as much to read as you want.

Decisions will come when they come. Don’t be the poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.