2022 Creative Writing MFA Applicants Forum

[MDP]

Also, just wanted to say I'm grateful for all the people and info in this forum. Y'all rock. I was in Draft on FB my first application cycle and vowed never to enter it again, haha. I know some people find it helpful but it felt too much like a pissing contest to me. Much prefer GradCafe...feels old-school somehow  

[Nightwitch]

30 minutes ago, MDP said:

That's great! Nice going  It definitely felt better to get things done in advance. Sure helped to be out of undergrad. First time I applied felt hellish start to finish, in large part because of all the senior year theses and coursework. Working full time isn't always a blast, but it was so much easier to get apps done than when I was still in college!

Oof I get it. Somehow, I feel a lot more motivated to apply after going to work, cause now I know how precious writing time is, especially with a freelance job with no fixed hours. It takes up most of my day to earn a decent sum. I know I could probably take time off to write, but there's always that nagging fear of what if? since it's not a stable, constant thing I can depend on. I certainly would like the stability of a program, especially if it comes with funding in the form of a scholarship or TA ship. I love my job xD but I love writing more. 

I'm sorry if it's a jumble of incoherent, run-on sentences

[MDP]

2 minutes ago, Nightwitch said:

I know I could probably take time off to write, but there's always that nagging fear of what if? since it's not a stable, constant thing I can depend on.

I SO admire you for doing freelance as your main gig! Seriously, that takes discipline that I have always lacked. Last year I really had to come to terms with the fact that I'm not cut out to be a freelancer. 40 hr/wk in-person job is pretty much essential for me or I make no money and lose my mind, lol. I always have a couple freelance projects on the side, though -- write blogs, design some logos, edit people's fiction. But man, was it hard to try and manage it full time!

[Nightwitch]

7 minutes ago, MDP said:

I SO admire you for doing freelance as your main gig! Seriously, that takes discipline that I have always lacked. Last year I really had to come to terms with the fact that I'm not cut out to be a freelancer. 40 hr/wk in-person job is pretty much essential for me or I make no money and lose my mind, lol. I always have a couple freelance projects on the side, though -- write blogs, design some logos, edit people's fiction. But man, was it hard to try and manage it full time!

Eyy thank you! Somehow, freelancing did turn out to be a 40hr/week thing, sometimes more  sometimes less. I mostly do teaching, so it depends on how many students I have. It's hard, that's true, especially with juggling their schedules, but totally worth it when they realize how much they've learned and improved  

[hot_toddy]

Anyone heard back from Ole Miss? 

[nosferatatouille]

lol I was just about to hit submit on my final application, but turns out the application fee is a whopping $100. Guess I'm waiting until payday for this one!

[MDP]

Applied to Hollins on a whim yesterday...anyone else applying there for fiction? I liked the feel of their website/location/funding options.

Edit: I'm bored at work, post some links to your publications if you've got em. 

Edited January 5, 2022 by MDP

[koechophe]

6 hours ago, MDP said:

Edit: I'm bored at work, post some links to your publications if you've got em. 

https://halfwaydownthestairs.net/2020/09/01/latency-by-ben-watson/

https://www.whlreview.com/no-15.3/fiction/BenWatson.pdf

Not the pieces I'm the most proud of, since I haven't been trying to get published lately (and by that I mean, since early 2019) but I guess someone liked them lol. 

[MDP]

8 minutes ago, koechophe said:

https://halfwaydownthestairs.net/2020/09/01/latency-by-ben-watson/

https://www.whlreview.com/no-15.3/fiction/BenWatson.pdf

Not the pieces I'm the most proud of, since I haven't been trying to get published lately (and by that I mean, since early 2019) but I guess someone liked them lol. 

These are awesome, thanks for sharing (and making my work day that much better! ) First one gives me some Ready Player One vibes, second one some Eternal Sunshine vibes. I love the speculative fiction feel with each.

Funny that the second one includes haircutting -- this story of mine has a (brief) hair cut image at the end, haha. It's a speculative piece from about 2018-2019 (I also haven't been submitting almost anything since early 2020, so I feel you). I still like this story pretty well, though of course it's old now so there are a bunch of things I would change. Nature of the (editing) beast. 

http://thecoachellareview.com/archive/fiction/resting-state/

[koechophe]

Thanks for sharing! I got some McCarthy / Obrien vibes from it, the more objective POV with minimalist punctuation. I can also see a lot of poetic influence in the writing too, which I think is interesting (in a good way!)

As much as it pains me to admit, my haircut story is the most successful thing I've ever written, even though it's not my favorite. It's been published in multiple places, one of which I sent in like 4 pieces and they picked it, as well as giving it 1st place in some contest I didn't know was even a thing. Just generally has had better reception than any other single piece of writing I've sent off for publication (though I have a lot of newer ones I've never even tried with).

I did learn a lot from it though. I wrote that piece before my college education, and during undergrad, it kept being more successful than a lot of the pieces I was writing at the time, which irked me. And then at some point, I realized that all my studying into literary fiction and all the "rules" about what makes things literary was stinting my writing. So I started blending genre into my writing, and it went a lot better after that. I guess I write a lot better when I'm not trying to follow rules ?

 

[MDP]

2 minutes ago, koechophe said:

I realized that all my studying into literary fiction and all the "rules" about what makes things literary was stinting my writing. So I started blending genre into my writing, and it went a lot better after that. I guess I write a lot better when I'm not trying to follow rules ?

Yesss totally agree. Genre blending is the best! I know some programs put a lot of emphasis on cross-genre work these days -- VCU and Hollins seem to value it.

[MDP]

8 minutes ago, koechophe said:

As much as it pains me to admit, my haircut story is the most successful thing I've ever written, even though it's not my favorite. It's been published in multiple places, one of which I sent in like 4 pieces and they picked it, as well as giving it 1st place in some contest I didn't know was even a thing. Just generally has had better reception than any other single piece of writing I've sent off for publication (though I have a lot of newer ones I've never even tried with).

And no need to feel pained, I think it's awesome that it's done so well. You should definitely send off some more of your newer stuff! I'm trying to muster the willpower to submit to some publications this spring, but part of me just wants to take a break from writing until rejects/accepts come in. I can't focus on much lately, least of all writing...

[oubukibun]

Thanks for the kick in the ass, the kind soul who asked about FAFSA.  It had somehow escaped my mind but managed to get it sent in earlier this week.  Still enough time that I'm not kicking myself too much about forgetting.

As a part-time interventionist, I'm so exhausted by the end of the day (mentally, physically), but I have carved out an hour/an hour and a half at the very end of the day when I'm sleepiest to write or work on what I currently have laid out on the slab.

I applied to eight schools (all over the place too) but if none of them take me at my word, then I'm just gonna have to bypass the master's altogether.  I can't keep cycling every year hoping for someone to choo-choo-choose me.  I need to live my life, too.  Otherwise my writing will really stagnate.

I'm going in for poetry, and right now (I'm a little upset this is not part of my portfolio, haha) I'm working on my most experimental piece yet: a poem that tries to recreate a state of mind or emotion or even a physical body through the syntax, grammatical structure, the words themselves.  Quite frankly, I don't even think genre-blending is the next frontier, but rather, taking writing itself and projecting it onto other canvases, actually blending not just genres but forms of creation altogether in a way that isn't seen as an 'experiment' but as a new standard.

I'd love to be able to live in a world where empty warehouses and halls are filled with living, breathing poems and short stories that we can touch, smell, even taste...  And then wiped clean.  So all we have is the page and the words.  And we realize how much more transformative it is to breathe life into the writing out there in the world instead of continuing to compress and distill it into the 'perfect' sentence on a tiny, rectangular white space.

We'll see.  My Statement of Purpose got some editing; I fine-tuned it some.  But there's only so much I can tweak before I start parsing invisible detritus, haha.  And ain't nobody got time for that.

I wish you all a great journey, even if it isn't the one you intended to take or receive.  I wish the same for myself, because it is the only thing I know I'm guaranteed.

 

Cheers!  I'm excited to hear and read when schools start to inform people of their decisions!  I'll be sure to let this forum know in case we share schools (Hollins, for one).

 

Toodles,

Manny

Edited January 5, 2022 by oubukibun

[Meso]

@koechophe, try as an experiment rewriting the haircut story with no inner thought. Instead of "I felt lousy," confine yourself for this exercise to expressing that through things like "Our car was 40 years old, and its dust made me cough." In other words, convey the lousiness through things like noticing lousy things and speaking about them in a lousy way. 

[koechophe]

28 minutes ago, Meso said:

try as an experiment rewriting the haircut story with no inner thought. Instead of "I felt lousy," confine yourself for this exercise to expressing that through things like "Our car was 40 years old, and its dust made me cough."

I appreciate the exercise, and have done similar things in writing classes since, but there's no way on earth I'm touching that story again. I wrote the first draft of it back when I was in high school (about 10 years ago) and I am so sick of it that it's just going to sit on its laurels of being the first thing I ever published.

Also not sure that story would ever work as a minimalist expression piece, tbh. The story is definitely too verbose and prescriptive as it stands now, but straight-up objective narration would fail here, imho. 

[Meso]

@koechophe, 1. What is a prescriptive story? 

2. Then do the exercise with another story. I'm trying to help your writing. The haircut story can't make it into a fully funded mfa because literary fiction presumes you should avoid things like "I felt lousy," in favor of things like "Our car was 40 years old, and its dust made me cough." Maybe you write differently today. 

[koechophe]

2 hours ago, Meso said:

The haircut story can't make it into a fully funded mfa because literary fiction presumes you should avoid things like "I felt lousy," in favor of things like "Our car was 40 years old, and its dust made me cough." Maybe you write differently today. 

That's a gross oversimplifcation. 

Different styles of literary fiction demand different things. More minimalistic or objective narrations would ask for what you're talking about. More stream-of-consciousness or post-modern approaches, especially ones which value poetic prose, would not. I can point out more than a dozen examples that are even more filled with statements of direct feeling than my own piece, but it works, because they're going for a specific effect. Unreliable narration with statements of direct feeling is frequently used in good literary fiction. 

To homogenize all of literary fiction under the umbrella that it prefers objective narration rather than colored, opinionated narration is frankly damaging to people who don't follow that specific narrative structure.

I'm not saying this to defend the haircut piece, I've already said numerous times it's not my favorite, I wrote most of the text 10 years ago, and it somewhat baffles me that it's had so much success. 

2 hours ago, Meso said:

What is a prescriptive story? 

Stories that are overly prescriptive are stories that tell readers how they should feel. Essentially, stories that are too direct with the meaning of the story. It's a term I picked up from a writing craft book a while back that stuck.

 

 

Edited January 6, 2022 by koechophe

[oubukibun]

Huh.  Strange.

Alaska (Fairbanks) emailed with me telling me how much money they'd be giving me through FAFSA but I haven't even been accepted into the program.  Haha, talk about jumping the gun, I guess.

I didn't know this was something that happened.

Odd.

[MDP]

Found this post from @dogearedin last year's forum (...I have a lot of spare time at my job) and thought it had a lot of great info so thought I would repost here!

 

______________

 

Posted March 16, 2021

Hi friends! LONG POST INCOMING. I hope it is helpful.

Some weeks back I mentioned that my institution has one final-year student in each genre join the admissions committee and review incoming apps. I got to review incoming fiction applications. I'm very grateful for the behind-the-scenes view I got of the admissions process. This week we finally had our meeting to finalize our list of offers (it was a 3-hour meeting). I wanted to offer some advice and share some observations for anyone applying again next cycle. 

As a note, of course no advice will be universal. Every department and every writer is different. There is no surefire way to guarantee admission to a program. These are just things I've realized as an MFA student/adcom member and wished I knew before applying. 

• Your writing sample is the most important thing. I think people have been told this already, but I want to emphasis this point. Your CV is not as important. Of course, it might not hurt to have a flourishing CV, but having more publications and experience in literature/writing won't mean much if your writing sample doesn't stand out from the bunch. The CV was the last thing we looked at in applications.
• Perfect and polished work isn't always the best. It sounds a bit weird -- I know. Of course, you should send what you are confident in. But ultimately, you are meant to grow stronger as a writer in an MFA program. If your writing sample doesn't show that you would benefit from graduate school, then some profs in admissions question what they would even be able to teach you. Think about whether you would benefit from workshop and formal education. The most excited manuscripts to read (which we all agreed on unanimously) were the ones that did something interesting and were kind of rough around the edges. This might not be the case for institutions that value something different than ours, but it is important to us that writers can really grow and get something out of our program. We weren't as excited about people who sent by-the-books "perfect" stories. The writing was great, but it was hard to picture these applicants in a workshop. This is difficult because we always want to submit the best work possible to programs. But to the admissions committees, this sample is all they can use to determine if you would benefit from graduate school. This is something I didn't think about until I was behind the scenes. I noticed myself much less interested in pieces that were perfect. Everyone on the committee was excited about the possibilities for growth they saw in a manuscript and for the successful risk takers that tried something interesting that surprised them. (Again, though, every program and committee will be different)
• The mindset behind reviewing MFA apps is very different from the mindset behind reviewing litmag submissions. Luckily, I have years of experience reading for litmags. In that scenario, you want to find the polished, well-written, balanced stories that don't need as much work. The ones that are ready for publication. The mindset is different when reviewing writing samples for MFA apps. We generally were interested in innovative forms/perspectives/styles that would greatly benefit from years of workshop and formal education. 
• You do not need an MFA from a highly-ranked program. You do not need the shortest program possible. Look at funding and program fit before anything else!  Really think about why you want an MFA. Hopefully you want it because you want to become a stronger writer and work with a community of other writers. Maybe there is a faculty member at the institution you're applying to that you really admire and want to work with. Maybe you want it to pursue a teaching career in creative writing. These are all great reasons to me. But if you just want the MFA to have the MFA, chances are you will make the wrong choices when it comes to which programs to apply to. You might get accepted to these places and not feel fulfilled. When I was first applying to MFAs in 2017, I was really interested in the big-name schools that would make me feel accomplished and important on paper. And I was really interested in the shortest programs possible. I think big-name schools are still worth applying to, of course, if you genuinely believe you could thrive and grow in that school's environment then I definitely think you should apply. And I always encourage "aiming high" because why not? But make sure the faculty and culture of that place fit with your goals. And I genuinely can say that most people I know who have MFAs agree on longer, fully-funded programs being the better choice over 1-year ones. After all, you are there to learn and work on a manuscript. If you can get paid for years to really dig into your work, I would take that. 1-year programs might be stressful and overbearing, and you might finish feeling like you were able to grow or absorb any actual information. Having the time and space to experiment and question everything is really valuable. But everyone is different! Maybe you thrive under pressure or you have other commitments and life situations that make shorter programs more ideal. That totally makes sense. No matter what though, please please please look for FUNDING. If you only aim for the most popular programs, your chances for funding are lower. There is a larger applicant pool. That is a fact. Try adding some lesser-known schools with great faculties. They often have a bunch of funding for you and a smaller applicant pool. After all, if your reasoning for getting an MFA is to learn and grow as a writer, then the name of the school shouldn't be what is most important to you. I stand by this fully. And again, I still think its great to try for more famous programs...don't say no for them.

AGAIN: This advice may vary by writer, by program, by admissions committee. Nothing is black-and-white. I just found these things to be really important to consider. 

This is a lot of writing lol. I'm sorry for the wall of text. I'm happy to DM anyone who wants to talk more. I am graduating with my MFA (fiction) in May, and I've been accepted into a PhD program for English Lit and Creative Writing for the Fall. I am happy to answer any questions! Good luck!

________________

(Again here at the bottom so no one will think I know what I'm talking about... this is @dogeared's post not mine lol. Just reposting)

[koechophe]

14 hours ago, oubukibun said:

Alaska (Fairbanks) emailed with me telling me how much money they'd be giving me through FAFSA but I haven't even been accepted into the program.  Haha, talk about jumping the gun, I guess.

I had this happen last year with WSU, but they also denied my application, so... yeah. It generally doesn't mean much if you get funding info for FAFSA

[koechophe]

I've said my piece, and I'll leave it at that. More important than anything else in writing good fiction (literary or otherwise) is authentically capturing a character's voice, and that often requires breaking rules of concision and concretion. 

I'm not going to waste my time arguing writing theory with someone as obviously ill-intentioned as you. 

 

 

[nosferatatouille]

Damn imagine just how boring the literary world would be if everyone understood their high school English teacher's SAT prep lessons as the objective and absolute rules for writing anything

[MDP]

Another post from @dogearedwhere they elaborated a bit more... I just found it interesting, hadn't heard this perspective before!

 

_________

 

Posted March 16, 2021

 

lilacbread

 

This is really insightful, thank you! I'm definitely curious about "perfect" or by-the-book stories looked like. Did they follow traditional themes, turns, styles, plot devices, etc.?

dogeared

Hi! Yes, great question I can definitely elaborate on. Definitely followed traditional themes, styles, and plot devices. Sometimes we could predict what was going to happen or what choice the author was going to make. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it wasn't exciting? I had trouble picturing these people in workshop. Or sometimes the plot/concept was interesting, but it was executed in ways that weren't testing the writer's limits?? If that makes sense. It seemed like these writers had already found and polished a style and tone that wouldn't really benefit from going to graduate school -- they could definitely start their writing career successfully while grad school would be life-changing for other applicants. 

This also reflects the personal taste of the committee, which differs everywhere! These were just my specific observations in my institution. Different programs work better for specific styles and aesthetics, which is definitely something that everyone can benefit from considering when creating their list.

 

_________ 

[eternalwhitenights]

Hi everyone! I applied for the first time last year, didn't get in to the one program I applied for (Notre Dame) (thank God--I definitely wasn't ready ?), and I just hit "submit" earlier today on my application to Notre Dame again, round 2 (still the only one I'm applying to)! I feel a lot better about my application this time around, and I just feel much more grounded personally going into this application round than I did last year. Excited to see what's around the riverbend for me (and y'all!).

Just wanted to wish everyone luck, you all will be in my prayers, and great to see familiar faces around again! (@panglosian @mrvisser @Ydrl off the top of my head!)  Hope everyone's doing well/staying mentally sane, and good luck!

[koechophe]

@eternalwhitenightsHey, welcome back! Good to see you! Hope that the app goes well