2024 Creative Writing MFA Applicants Forum

[Hjanep]

50 minutes ago, pananoprodigy said:

I'm now at the point where I actively dislike weekends because I feel like there's less chance of getting admissions news. 🙃

Same but also it looks like some programs still make calls over the weekends based on last year’s draft. It just feels so eerily quiet probably because AWP but come on results

[TPike]

This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill. I’ve finally been accepted to draft 😭

[Chex]

3 hours ago, pananoprodigy said:

I'm now at the point where I actively dislike weekends because I feel like there's less chance of getting admissions news. 🙃

Same! It just feels like pointless time because I scroll and scroll and know there's almost certainly no news coming (although last year someone reported getting a call from Cornell on a Saturday). I'm just glad this weekend is halfway gone; soon it'll be Monday and I'll be back to my shenanigans, though AWP is sure to put a damper on that. I'm trying to school myself to wait through next week into the one after it.

2 hours ago, TPike said:

This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill. I’ve finally been accepted to draft 😭

Hahaha! I'm happy for you! I hope you're finding your way around the troves of posts.

[Scribe]

3 hours ago, TPike said:

This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill. I’ve finally been accepted to draft 😭

Makes one of us. You’d think once they got going there’d be a mass approval. 

[TPike]

33 minutes ago, Scribe said:

Makes one of us. You’d think once they got going there’d be a mass approval. 

I almost didn't make it in. @bluespruce told me about these questions I had to answer, but I swear they weren't there before

[Scribe]

13 minutes ago, TPike said:

I almost didn't make it in. @bluespruce told me about these questions I had to answer, but I swear they weren't there before

Questions like what?

what’s your name, favorite color, and the flight velocity of a sparrow?

also, do they let you know one way or the other?

[TPike]

56 minutes ago, Scribe said:

Questions like what?

what’s your name, favorite color, and the flight velocity of a sparrow?

also, do they let you know one way or the other?

Lollll. They ask three questions. One was for sure about if you’re a teacher or something. Another was about the type of writing you do. And I don’t remember the other. But unrequest and then request again

[prufrock_]

18 hours ago, triciadawn said:

Def feeling post-deadline regret now.

I am too in a lot of ways, especially regarding my SOP and one of my story choices (I submitted the same two 10 page shorts to every program).

This is my first time applying, so it's definitely a learning experience. if I only get rejections this round, the silver lining is I'm making a list of a lot of great schools I didn't know about/apply to that I will next time.

[triciadawn]

3 hours ago, prufrock_ said:

I am too in a lot of ways, especially regarding my SOP and one of my story choices (I submitted the same two 10 page shorts to every program).

This is my first time applying, so it's definitely a learning experience. if I only get rejections this round, the silver lining is I'm making a list of a lot of great schools I didn't know about/apply to that I will next time.

I’m really worried about my SOP, especially after learning about the “kisses of death” to an application from r/gradadmissions on Reddit. Re: mentioning mental illness. I didn’t mention mental health explicitly in my sop, but I did say something like I bounced around around a lot due to hurricanes and I Iived in a psych ward and a shelter after I got out of a bad relationship. Now I’m worried I sound so emotionally unstable. 🤦🏾‍♀️ I wrote that an MFA will give me the stability I need to really immerse myself in writing. I’m afraid it just makes me sound so weak, like I won’t be ale to write no matter the a circumstances. However, I tried tying my experiences with displacement into how I write about themes of displacement and loss. 

My sample is a very short excerpt of chapter one of a novel that doesn’t stand on its own as a short story, and my short story is a 17-page surrealist story with heavy SA themes that I never workshopped. 🫠🫠🫠

I think my work is “strong” or I wouldn’t be applying, but I just think adcoms won’t “get it.” I’m not sure how well I pull off experimental stuff, but I want to show some range alongside my realist novel. 

I’m also curating my list for next cycle. It’s really helping me pass the time. Kicking myself I didn’t apply to Michener! Now I’m wondering “what if” that was the school that would get my weird stuff. 

Edited February 4 by triciadawn

[ajcam]

For all Michener hopefuls. You probably already know this, but I just saw something interesting on their website:  Rejections won't be emailed to us. Nor will "updates to our application" emails be sent if we are being rejected. Rejections are only posted on the "My Status Application Portal," which we have to check ourselves. Not sure if this is correct--it's just the way I interpreted their website. Can anyone shed any light on this?

[TPike]

17 minutes ago, ajcam said:

For all Michener hopefuls. You probably already know this, but I just saw something interesting on their website:  Rejections won't be emailed to us. Nor will "updates to our application" emails be sent if we are being rejected. Rejections are only posted on the "My Status Application Portal," which we have to check ourselves. Not sure if this is correct--it's just the way I interpreted their website. Can anyone shed any light on this?

Just went on the admission portal and it says, "As soon as a decision is made on your application, it will be posted on this page, and you will be notified by email." Idk, their portal is confusing enough. 

 

 

[Scribe]

11 minutes ago, ajcam said:

For all Michener hopefuls. You probably already know this, but I just saw something interesting on their website:  Rejections won't be emailed to us. Nor will "updates to our application" emails be sent if we are being rejected. Rejections are only posted on the "My Status Application Portal," which we have to check ourselves. Not sure if this is correct--it's just the way I interpreted their website. Can anyone shed any light on this?

i did NOT know this! or maybe i did but forgot in the ebb and flow of the whole process. In any event, i just checked and there's no info there yet.  If someone hears, let us all know. 

1 hour ago, triciadawn said:

I’m really worried about my SOP, especially after learning about the “kisses of death” to an application from r/gradadmissions on Reddit. Re: mentioning mental illness. I didn’t mention mental health explicitly in my sop, but I did say something like I bounced around around a lot due to hurricanes and I Iived in a psych ward and a shelter after I got out of a bad relationship. Now I’m worried I sound so emotionally unstable. 🤦🏾‍♀️ I wrote that an MFA will give me the stability I need to really immerse myself in writing. I’m afraid it just makes me sound so weak, like I won’t be ale to write no matter the a circumstances. However, I tried tying my experiences with displacement into how I write about themes of displacement and loss. 

My sample is a very short excerpt of chapter one of a novel that doesn’t stand on its own as a short story, and my short story is a 17-page surrealist story with heavy SA themes that I never workshopped. 🫠🫠🫠

I think my work is “strong” or I wouldn’t be applying, but I just think adcoms won’t “get it.” I’m not sure how well I pull off experimental stuff, but I want to show some range alongside my realist novel. 

I’m also curating my list for next cycle. It’s really helping me pass the time. Kicking myself I didn’t apply to Michener! Now I’m wondering “what if” that was the school that would get my weird stuff. 

wait, that's the kiss of death??? I'm f-ed. In some SOP's I actually went into family history. 

and I'm all about the what if's too. but from what I've heard, including from one MFA professor, the SOP is the least important component. 

4 hours ago, prufrock_ said:

I am too in a lot of ways, especially regarding my SOP and one of my story choices (I submitted the same two 10 page shorts to every program).

This is my first time applying, so it's definitely a learning experience. if I only get rejections this round, the silver lining is I'm making a list of a lot of great schools I didn't know about/apply to that I will next time.

You're a better human than i. if i don't get in anywhere, i'm giving up. 

10 hours ago, TPike said:

Lollll. They ask three questions. One was for sure about if you’re a teacher or something. Another was about the type of writing you do. And I don’t remember the other. But unrequest and then request again

Gatekeeping muthafuckers 

[prufrock_]

2 hours ago, triciadawn said:

I’m really worried about my SOP, especially after learning about the “kisses of death” to an application from r/gradadmissions on Reddit. Re: mentioning mental illness. I didn’t mention mental health explicitly in my sop, but I did say something like I bounced around around a lot due to hurricanes and I Iived in a psych ward and a shelter after I got out of a bad relationship. Now I’m worried I sound so emotionally unstable. 🤦🏾‍♀️ I wrote that an MFA will give me the stability I need to really immerse myself in writing. I’m afraid it just makes me sound so weak, like I won’t be ale to write no matter the a circumstances. However, I tried tying my experiences with displacement into how I write about themes of displacement and loss. 

I did something similar in my SOP's. If it ties into your writing and makes your voice unique, then I don't think it's a 'kiss of death'. That subreddit skews VERY heavily to STEM. I imagine writing 'i have (unmedicated) adhd' in a STEM application is indeed the kiss of death. And, too, writing something like 'i'm bipolar and stay unmedicated since I only write during manic phases' would be an instant disqualification for us. But using your unique history in the SOP is what it's all about. I wouldn't worry about it (but i'm also just some random person, maybe we should both be worrying about it!).

[itsbeensnowing]

2 hours ago, triciadawn said:

I’m really worried about my SOP, especially after learning about the “kisses of death” to an application from r/gradadmissions on Reddit. Re: mentioning mental illness. I didn’t mention mental health explicitly in my sop, but I did say something like I bounced around around a lot due to hurricanes and I Iived in a psych ward and a shelter after I got out of a bad relationship. Now I’m worried I sound so emotionally unstable. 🤦🏾‍♀️ I wrote that an MFA will give me the stability I need to really immerse myself in writing. I’m afraid it just makes me sound so weak, like I won’t be ale to write no matter the a circumstances. However, I tried tying my experiences with displacement into how I write about themes of displacement and loss. 

I would not worry too much about this. There is no true "kiss of death," especially for creative writing MFAs, where the SOP plays a very minor role compared to the writing sample. There's probably some committee member out there who would be put off by mental illness mentions, but the reality is that for every piece of advice regarding SOPs you find, there will be another piece of advice out there that directly contradicts it. This is of course true when you have online anons trying to reverse engineer someone's success or failure and attribute the results to particular elements of the SOP, but it's even true when you're hearing it straight from the horse's mouth. Different people/programs want different things, and not all of those preferences are going to be made clear.

I remember coming across two SOP guides by two committee members from two different programs (one was Dave Madden, the director of the University of San Francisco's MFA, the other I believe was Stephen Graham Jones but I can no longer find his post) in which one said you should avoid mentioning any faculty by name (because the person reading the application might not be someone you mentioned, which is a "bummer") and the other said you should absolutely mention faculty (because if you show respect for their work, they're more likely to return the favor). And you'll find other advice elsewhere that doesn't quite line up with either of those. So I've learned to take any sort of advice with a grain of salt. (There's nothing wrong with Dave Madden's post -- he says himself at the end that he's never denied an applicant because of something they wrote in their SOP, and he's never been the only person reading an application, so his opinion isn't the be-all end-all -- but a good chunk of his advice could be contradicted by someone else's advice online.) The best you can do is follow the prompts each program provides (e.g. some do ask for a focus on personal autobiography, some are more interested in literary influences and academic history), everything else is pretty much unknowable besides the blindingly obvious "don't seem like a horrible person" stuff.

I also think a lot of advice about excluding mental health talk from SOPs is more relevant to non-creative grad programs than to MFAs. Mental illness is not a great reason to go into a chem PhD or something, but it could very well be an important component to one's writing process and journey. I could see a committee member taking "an MFA will give me the stability I need" the wrong way, but you also have no way of knowing how they will interpret anything.

[Scribe]

7 minutes ago, prufrock_ said:

I did something similar in my SOP's. If it ties into your writing and makes your voice unique, then I don't think it's a 'kiss of death'. That subreddit skews VERY heavily to STEM. I imagine writing 'i have (unmedicated) adhd' in a STEM application is indeed the kiss of death. And, too, writing something like 'i'm bipolar and stay unmedicated since I only write during manic phases' would be an instant disqualification for us. But using your unique history in the SOP is what it's all about. I wouldn't worry about it (but i'm also just some random person, maybe we should both be worrying about it!).

I wonder if we'd be saying the same thin about ASD or even depression? it's funny how universities can openly discriminate here. although your referenced to unmedicated or untreated conditions would be understandable.  

I've read a sample SOP from someone who suffered a form of colorblindness i think. they totally made it work for them.

i do think there's a danger in using your SOP to explain or even contextualize your writing. 

[triciadawn]

59 minutes ago, Scribe said:

i do think there's a danger in using your SOP to explain or even contextualize your writing. 

I let my work speak for itself for the most part. But curious why you think this. The sample SOPs I’ve seen discuss influences and the experiences that shaped the work. I do agree any context should be kept brief, and that space can  be used better to show why you’re a good candidate. 

 

1 hour ago, prufrock_ said:

That subreddit skews VERY heavily to STEM.

So true! Guess I have to wait until March to see if it made any difference. My thought was if they loved my writing enough to read my SOP, there wouldn’t be much I could say to change their minds. 

Edited February 4 by triciadawn

[Scribe]

22 minutes ago, triciadawn said:

I let my work speak for itself for the most part. But curious why you think this. The sample SOPs I’ve seen discuss influences and the experiences that shaped the work. I do agree any context should be kept brief, and that space can  be used better to show why you’re a good candidate. 

 

So true! Guess I have to wait until March to see if it made any difference. My thought was if they loved my writing enough to read my SOP, there wouldn’t be much I could say to change their minds. 

I only believe it’s true with regard to your writing sample. It absolutely SHOULD contextualize the whole of your work - your purpose. 
I hate that too but it makes sense. It lets the committee know why writing is important to you in particular. 

[sunnysequoia]

Any Swifties in here? 😆 Taylor Swift just announced a brand-new album called The Tortured Poets Department and the aesthetic literally screams English and MFA to me LOL. Like the album cover looks like it could be the cover of a poetry chapbook and this makes me very happy hahaha.

[goldentulip]

13 hours ago, sunnysequoia said:

Any Swifties in here? 😆 Taylor Swift just announced a brand-new album called The Tortured Poets Department and the aesthetic literally screams English and MFA to me LOL. Like the album cover looks like it could be the cover of a poetry chapbook and this makes me very happy hahaha.

yes! there was actually a post a few weeks ago circulating that was a photo of her, aaron dessner, and jack antonoff during a recording session and the caption was “in another life they would head the english department somewhere” and it made me laugh. and when the announcement came out i felt like the leo dicaprio meme like “hey! did they see this!?” 

[sunnysequoia]

7 minutes ago, goldentulip said:

yes! there was actually a post a few weeks ago circulating that was a photo of her, aaron dessner, and jack antonoff during a recording session and the caption was “in another life they would head the english department somewhere” and it made me laugh. and when the announcement came out i felt like the leo dicaprio meme like “hey! did they see this!?” 

Omg that's freaking hilarious 😂 Do you have the link to that photo? I'd love to see it myself hahaha

[Chex]

I know it's only Monday but this week already feels so silent. It's going to be torture getting through it to next week when the AWP buzz will have died down. By the way, congratulations to those attending AWP. I hope you have a good time there and meet lots of interesting people.

*Frantically searching for something to occupy mind* 

[prufrock_]

I looked at last years draft notifications and noticed there was quite a bit of activity during AWP.

I'm hopeful we'll hear back from Washington University in St. Louis this week, based on last years timeline.

[Chex]

1 minute ago, prufrock_ said:

I looked at last years draft notifications and noticed there was quite a bit of activity during AWP.

I'm hopeful we'll hear back from Washington University in St. Louis this week, based on last years timeline.

Well I certainly hope so. The only difference was that last year's AWP happened in March - over a month later than this year's - so the notification season was already well under way. AWP came very early this year. Programs that notify early in February could have their schedule somehow impacted.

[TPike]

21 minutes ago, Chex said:

I know it's only Monday but this week already feels so silent. It's going to be torture getting through it to next week when the AWP buzz will have died down. By the way, congratulations to those attending AWP. I hope you have a good time there and meet lots of interesting people.

*Frantically searching for something to occupy mind* 

I also feel like it's been crazy quiet. Kinda nerve-wracking 

[Chex]

Wow wow. People are reporting poetry acceptances from Johns Hopkins and University of South Florida on Draft.