dyedviolet

Eyy congrats on getting into both!! I'm not super familiar with either of their creative nonfiction tracks, but all else being equal, I think you should take location into consideration. For some hard numbers, Missoula and Corvallis have similar populations (76k vs. 65k I think), but Corvallis puts Portland in daytrip range, while Missoula is the biggest town for four hours in any direction. One of those options will sound better to you, and that's for you to decide.

Same! A part of me is still clinging to hope since it's been a slow year everywhere, but just knowing the answer will be better than waiting.

I'm right there with you. I know there's weak points in my current project that I'm going to be blind to even if I suddenly gain the best editing skills ever seen on Earth.

The unrealistically optimistic route is to assume your writing just completely flipped this professor's views. Probably the best way to suss out the vibes is to email with them and ask some questions—hear it straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. More than likely, you've got time before you need to commit, and a decision that'll affect the next 2+ years of your life shouldn't be made when you have big doubts like that. Hopefully someone else can follow up with the insider scoop on faculty relationships.

Well, my apologies for not scouring your profile for every detail available. I do appreciate knowing that you read more broadly than I first assumed. I agree that recent American publishing has had a greater volume of formulaic fiction coming out (largely owing to the advertisement norms on BookTok), but I think beyond that point we will have to come to a civil disagreement.

You might be fine with dying at 60, but I have to insist on how wrong you are if for no other reason than my own interest in living past 35. At your age, you likely remember people talking about the hole in the ozone layer, or the impending extinction of the blue whale. I have to assume at least a passing familiarity with Captian Planet and its projections that the world would be over around the year...Oh, now! And yet here we are, with different topics being the hot-button ecological disasters. This is because people with higher levels of optimism than you in the benthic zone put in the work to reverse the damage. The hole in the ozone layer has shrunk since it was first discovered. The blue whale is still in our oceans. And if your conception of humanity-ending climate disaster is a singular event after passing a point of no return, then you lack entirely too much information to be making ten-year predictions. Climate change and environmental destruction are a myriad of intertwined systems, not a linear dial of "healthy" to "irreparably damaged." This is also not true. If you listen to anyone familiar with the inner workings of generative AI and/or LLMs, you'd know how utterly incapable they are of producing novel work. None of these models have cognition, none of them think, and none of them have anything resembling a capacity to understand something. They are not going to be able to look at the current state of science and propose a theory to further our knowledge of anything. When a machine makes a mistake, it makes it so fast that it can't be caught until it's too late; Fail Safe (1964) was fairly prescient on this front. We are in no way looking at a future where computers are autonomously synthesizing new medicines. AI as it is now has very limited use cases where it is genuinely beneficial, and all of those cases have it as a computational tool assisting a human's work. Furthermore, the AI economic bubble is predicted to burst as soon as this year, and with the ongoing shortage of computer parts, there will likely be a very steep decline in its use immediately following that burst. With the formalities out of the way, I can finally begin addressing something that is relevant to the main topic of this thread. I can respect your pragmatic approach to the potential benefits of acquiring a formal writing degree, but I have to point out how pretentious and rude you sound dismissing out of hand any potential value your future cohort may have for your writing. I hold a minor in creative writing (A minuscule achievement compared to your four degrees), so my understanding is that best practice for a workshop is to meet a piece where it's at, and to be very careful not to give prescriptive notes to the writer being critiqued. Are you so easily influenced that mere suggestion would drive you to a writing style you loathe? Do you turn your nose up at the idea of critiquing the writing of your strawmen, all while denying that you could potentially steer them towards something you find more palatable? Is it so hard to conceive of a world where your classmates' work and notes are... Gasp! Worth your time?! I have to hazard a guess that being so dismissive of the writing of people you haven't even met yet is not a quality that makes one a good writing professor. Moving past your misanthropic tendencies towards modern literary writers, let's examine the opinions you've shared on fiction itself. So, as you might expect from someone bemoaning the creatively bankrupt state of literary fiction, SocialKonstruct is a self-avowed fan and writer of... literary fiction? Surely you understand that with Amazon's mass-distribution and the decade-plus of ebooks being commonly favored, the writing coming from the United States and from Britain has been partially flattened into an anglophone literary style? If you wish to argue that they are different, I counter with the inevitable meshing of the two. The cross-pollination of British and American slang is already well underway, along with certain grammatical forms such as "I was sat there," in place of "I was sitting there." In a global world, there can only be so much difference in the literature of two countries that share a language. I suspect Australia will be joining this amalgamation in the near future. Of course, since your most recent data point on stylistic trajectories is from forty years ago, it's entirely possible that your conception of British literary fiction is simply outdated. Again, I have to respect a pursuit towards earlier styles of writing—I recently finished The Count of Monte Cristo and thoroughly enjoyed both the complexity of the narrative and the long-winded, flowery writing style of the 19th century. It simply seems disingenuous to me to so vehemently deride an entire swath of the literary landscape without being able to identify a work you dislike from the past 20 years, or without leaning heavily upon the work of a single critic. Similarly, while you state your willingness to argue for self-publishing's and Amazon's effects on literary writing, you fail to provide any claims for that statement beyond a link to McGurl's work. I understand you have used recent works as touchpoints to describe your personal worldview: —But a cursory glance through their author pages reveals that both Kim Stanley Robinson and Michel Houellebecq have books published from more than twenty years ago (predating 2005). Legacy careers such as theirs do not make much of an argument for any stance on what has or has not affected the recent history of fiction. It is not very easy to believe that you have personal experience with those shifts in publishing, and have not simply latched onto the opinions in McGurl's book. It is, however, the duty of the young to be on the pulse of the ever-changing present, and to share that knowledge with the... less young, so I will be happy to share a few recommendations that may help broaden your literary palate and break you out of your current mold. I will warn you that, unlike your strict adherence to literary fiction, I primarily read genre fiction, so there will likely be a mismatch of taste. The Blue Clerk, by Dionne Brand (2018): A prose poetry collection focused on interrogating the validity of Brand's own work, alternating through her own perspective and a fictionalized version of her thoughts framed as a dialogue between the characters of the poet and the titular clerk. House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski (2001): I bend my own rules regarding publishing date, but this book has had a resurgence of popularity because of the 2023 videogame myhouse.wad. House of Leaves is notorious for how it plays with structure; the abundant footnotes, the multiple appendices, and the disruptions of how the text is formatted on the page. The form is uniquely suited to a story about severe disruptions of physical space and multiple layers of doubt over what is or is not real; it is also why the book has been a mainstay in game design classes. Ranked Competitive Breast Growth/Estro Junkies (2025-): A collaborative project between online satirist Beth Leigh-Ann and transfeminist theorist Talia Bhatt, RCBG is a serialized webnovel that looks as the severe social dysfunctions that can arise within a community when necessary transitional care is only accessible through demanding, often contradictory performances. It's a very modern, somewhat commercial style of writing that unflinchingly tackles one of the most controversial, complex issues of today. Hatoful Boyfriend, by Hato Moa (2014): "This is a video game!" you may say. You would be correct; it is a game in the Visual Novel genre. "This is a game about dating PIGEONS!" You would be right again. It is also a speculative piece about a society post-mass-extinction event where a new intelligent species has largely replaced humans. It is a multi-layered tragedy where there is no narrative thread that allows every character to have a happy ending. It is a deeply interwoven melodrama, setting up the character arcs of eight different characters to all be resolved in one climax in a way a more traditional, linear narrative could not achieve. It is the most resounding proof I have found that the absurdity of a concept has no bearing on the quality of story that can be contained within; that, in fact, a more absurd set-up can allow one to suspend more disbelief and therefor become more deeply invested in the serious narrative to come. I cannot say I have much vitriol left after extolling the virtues of one of my favorite pieces of fiction. For now, I rest my case.