Below the grand opera of its politics, below the bombast, dysfunction, and partisan rage, a new generation of authors is writing America, and thousands of them are choosing to do it from within the US college network, as students and teachers of MFA programs - the ‘largest system of literary patronage for living writers the world has ever seen’.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop was founded in 1936. In 1975 there were fifteen American colleges offering creative writing MFAs; in 2008 there were 156. In 2016 – the most recent year of data – there were 244, not to mention the ever-expanding constellation of other degree-conferring creative writing programs, from BAs to PhDs, almost two thousand in total. Every year, US colleges process more than 20,000 MFA applications, and send between 3,000 and 4,000 graduates out to shape the future of American letters – as writers, publishers, teachers, and readers. The rise of the creative writing program, argues Stanford Professor Mark McGurl, ‘stands as the most important event in post-war American literary history’.

Elif Batuman (photo by Beowulf Sheehan)There is something extraordinary about it, an ever-growing chorus of young voices using the social legitimacy of a degree to carve out the space and time to be artists, but American literary history has been pointedly quiet about the MFA. As the novelist (and vocal MFA critic) Elif Batuman writes, ‘literary historians don’t write about creative writing, and creative writers don’t write literary histories’. Both disciplines (and they do see themselves as separate disciplines – the former looking backwards the latter ever forwards) seem embarrassed about the merging of art and institution, a discomfort that manifests in widespread pop-cultural derision of the MFA.

The MFA is the degree writers love to hate. As the writer Lincoln Michael sardonically writes: ‘Every now and then, the literary world likes to take a break from debating whether ebooks are taking over or whether the novel is dead to discuss an even more pressing matter: are MFA programs bad?’ It’s a blunt, subjective, and singularly unhelpful question, premised on the assumption that program fiction is a monolithic beast, distinct somehow – not only stylistically, but morally – from ‘real’ literature. ‘MFA fiction’ has become a lazy cultural shorthand for crappy fiction: generic, derivative, and dangerously toothless pap; an institutional boa constrictor slowly squeezing the life out of American letters.

In the months before I moved to Virginia, a collection of essays was published that weaponised that question, combatively titled MFA vs NYC: The two cultures of American fiction (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014). The book was a nuanced and pragmatic account of America’s vaguely bifurcated culture of literary funding (universities and New York publishing), but its boxing-ring title demanded that teams be taken: team life experience (NYC) versus team ivory tower (MFA); garret versus classroom; caution-to-the-wind versus caution; original talent versus cookie-cutter clone. It wasn’t hard to work out which team you were meant to be on. I heard you could buy ‘Fuck Your MFA’ tote bags in some of the scrappier New York City bookshops.

The MFA has questions to answer: the conscionability of miring students in college debt for a degree with woeful employment prospects (less than 1.5 per cent of the US workforce is employed in the arts); and the degree’s inclusion (both in enrolment and pedagogy) of minority and under-represented literary voices. The late D.G. Myers famously described the program as an ‘elephant machine’ – a machine for making other machines: ‘The academically certified creative writer goes out to teach creative writing, and produces other creative writers who are not writers, but who produce still other creative writers who are not writers.’ A pedagogical Ponzi scheme.

But the ‘good or bad’ debate is tedious, bordering on the farcical. In 2016 The Atlantic deployed a team of computational researchers to try and pin down the differences between MFA and non-MFA authors with an arsenal of linguistic algorithms. They compared published works that had been reviewed by the New York Times, and – shockingly – found no differences. It seems that market pressures and gatekeepers might matter more than the insidious brainwashing of a few university writing classes. ‘What’s interesting about the MFA debate,’ Michael explains, ‘[is that] it tends to completely ignore the groups that actually determine what gets published in favor of an MFA-centric theory of the literary universe where all other players orbit around the MFA, propelled by its workshopped gravity.’

In a 2011 interview with Salon, the current director of the Iowa program, Lan Samantha Chang, noted: ‘It’s so fascinating to me that smart people waste, or spend, an enormous amount of effort criticizing people who love to read and write. You know?’ I do know. When I mentioned to a friend this week that I was writing a piece about the MFA, and wanted to say something new, he instantly replied: ‘Maybe you can’t. Maybe the MFA extracted any remaining thought and creativity you had, and there’s your topic.’ That’s what you earn when you earn an MFA.

I’m tired of justifying my decision to go. There are so few good choices available for people who want to make things, and a qualification matters when opportunities are scarce and established career paths are crumbling (when I first considered a mid-career change to writing, a number of Australian publishing industry professionals encouraged me to get an MFA: ‘it’s a solid way to show you’re serious’). I left a career and stretched a marriage and a mortgage across an ocean to complete my MFA, and I knew I was damn lucky to even have the option. It sure felt like the ‘real world’ to me.

More importantly, the debate is a furphy. MFA fiction didn’t infect American fiction, American fiction invented the MFA – the degree has been taught (and taken) by many of its most influential voices, from Flannery O’Connor (Iowa grad, 1947) to George Saunders (current MFA faculty, Syracuse). ‘It’s virtually impossible,’ as the novelist (and MFA graduate) Chad Harbach writes, ‘to read a particular book and deduce whether the writer attended a program. For one thing, she almost certainly did ... And even if the writer has somehow never heard of an MFA program or set foot on a college campus, it doesn’t matter, because if she’s read any American fiction of the past sixty years, or met someone who did, she’s imbibed the general idea and aesthetic. We are all MFAs now.’

We are all MFAs now? Having spent three years inside an MFA, I’ve been trying to make sense of what that means. The model – with its antique pedagogy – is not only a potent American invention, but a potent American export. You can get an MFA in Canada and the UK; across Europe; in Israel, Mexico, South Korea, and the Philippines. In New Zealand. In Australia.

It’s hard to see the shape of a system from inside it; harder still when that system is wilfully blind. It wasn’t until my final year, when I was preparing to teach an undergraduate creative writing course, that I was encouraged – albeit limply – to consider creative writing as a discipline. It wasn’t as if some grand secret were being conspiratorially withheld; such concerns were simply irrelevant – distractions. We didn’t talk about politics or ethics, literary history or critical theory. We barely talked about how to turn our inchoate hopes into sustaining, realistic careers, in teaching or otherwise (although teaching was how we grudgingly earned our space in the department, we were cheap teachers and cheap to teach).

What we did was what MFA students have been doing since the very first days, out in the corn flats of Iowa: we sat around a table with copies of a classmate’s story in front of us and ‘workshopped’ it. We talked about how it worked and didn’t work, as if the author of that story were not awkwardly sitting among us, condemned to silence. On our best days, our conversations were vibrant and warm-hearted. On our worst, they were conduits for personal animus. Mostly, they were a form of pedagogically sanctioned vivisection – taking a work that was barely alive and slicing it up. Taking ideas that were ungainly and edged and rounding them off, making them smoother, safer to handle.

The unspoken goal was to ‘win’ workshop, but there were only two ways you could win: writing the best stuff or caring the least about whether or not you did. It was a cultivated apathy, deceptively competitive, and not, I later discovered, restricted to my program. ‘What I felt very strongly,’ an Iowa grad told me, describing his experience more than a decade ago, ‘was not indignation so much as sadness and bewilderment at a fundamental lack of curiosity or bibliophilic hunger.’

Yet we had all worked so fiercely to get into the program. The acceptance rate for Harvard Law School hovers around fifteen per cent. The acceptance rate for a fully funded MFA is routinely less than five. To select its fiction class of twenty-five, Iowa sifts through more than one thousand applicants. My class of eight women (four fiction, four poetry) was drawn from hundreds. But enthusiasm was gauche, writing a chore.

The same stories were submitted class after class, semester after semester. Hardly anyone read the books, and there were hardly any books to read – nothing penned outside of North America, or much before Raymond Carver. When I asked why we didn’t read beyond the continental border, a professor joked: ‘Well, this is America.’

I was never allowed to forget it. I was the only international student in my cohort. My visa papers were stamped ‘Non-Resident Alien’ and that’s exactly how I felt – a zoo kangaroo, an ungainly antipodean novelty. My corner of America seemed tripwired with unspoken rules and hierarchies, and I kept snagging myself by asking about them. A fortnight into my degree, one of my teachers suggested I should do myself a favour and head back home; I didn’t belong. A semester in, I wondered if she was right.

The bullying was high-school baroque. ‘If they’d treated me like they’ve treated you,’ another professor told me, when I returned for my second year, ‘I wouldn’t have bothered.’ I’m glad I did. I taught myself to write in those breathlessly, brutally lonely years. I found astute readers. I met some of my literary heroes and made new ones. I read and talked and made things – just not in the way I had hoped.

‘The problems in society are announced early in MFA programs,’ argues the writer Sabina Murray; ‘the arguments that we have around the areas of language and art serve to reflect greater arguments and upheavals’. I moved to Virginia in August 2014, eighteen months into Barack Obama’s lame-duck second term, and I left my Blacksburg apartment, with its family of wall-nesting squirrels, in May 2017, four months into Trump’s monstrously inevitable presidency. I had a ringside seat to a country turning in on itself. America was gearing up for the next election and – as with MFA versus NYC – cultural teams were being chosen; not between the left and the right, those teams were long set, but deep within them.

In workshops, the conversations we tried to have about authorial permission – who has the right to write – were heated, messy, and important. For better and worse, these are some of the conversations that will come to define my generation of art makers; a generation for whom art is difficult – some would argue impossible, others necessary – to sever from its maker. Do authors have a right or a responsibility to tell stories that are not their own? How linked is that right/responsibility to an author’s social and cultural power? What do we lose when those with power step in to speak for those without? Where is the line between ally and appropriator, between highlighting and hijacking?

But we didn’t trust one another; rather we instinctively reduced one another to what we knew, which wasn’t much, or what we expected, which was even less. In the lead-up to the election, America did the same thing.

When a discussion becomes a terrain, territory matters – territory is power. You patrol your borders, demarcate them. You build walls and fire from the ramparts, and before long you have bricked yourself in. The self becomes a cage. Empathy becomes impossible. In art, fiction inches ever closer to memoir. In politics, thinking becomes feeling. Feelings become fact.

‘Our understanding of what it takes to be an artist is geared to an era’s myths,’ explains Jean McGarry, director of the Hopkins University MFA program – just down the road from my school. What the rise of the MFA suggests is that the myths of this era seem to be meritocratic and professionalised, ‘the arts are more inculcated than they were before. It’s no longer the genius coming out of the ground fully fledged.’ But the hypermasculine musk of the self-destructive American writer–genius is hard to wipe off – a ‘wine-chugging Hemingway firing a homemade rifle at a rabid shark from the back of a speeding ambulance’, as Harbach delightfully summarises. It was certainly alive and well in my program. I scooped whisky vomit from the throats of paralytic classmates who had stopped breathing; overheard others snorting crushed Percocet to get through the teaching day. When a Muslim student was admitted to the program, people wondered what she could possibly have to write about because she didn’t drink. There were rumours of cheap heroin from West Virginia. It was obliteration as performance, as homework. If you didn’t participate you were suspect, excluded. Paired with the apathy, it created a toxic malaise that obscured an immovable truth. The students who wrote, were the students who wrote.

And here is the grand tension of the MFA, its peculiarly American irony: the structure that makes it possible is the very structure that makes it suspect. ‘The program writer, even if he’s been both student and professor,’ writes Harbach, ‘always wants to assume, and is to some extent granted, outsider status by the University; is always lobbing his flaming bags of prose over the ivied gate late at night. Then in the morning he puts on a tie and walks through the gate and goes to his office.’ Or as McGurl more sedately writes in the MFA’s most comprehensive history, The Program Years: Postwar fiction and the rise of creative writing, ‘a discipline concocted as a progressive antidote to conformism [has been] charged with being an agent of that conformism’. The MFA is a system established on the hatred of systems and anchored in a recriminatory dialectic of shame.

In the land of the ‘Great American Novel’, the writer–genius myth speaks to something fundamental about how America sees itself – rugged, untethered. And it is hard not to see that myth’s contemporary tenaciousness as the reflection of a post-Reagan, neo liberal
unwillingness to recognise the role institutions have played in American prosperity; a mindset in which the simple story of the self-made man – the puller of bootstraps, the callus-handed tamer of The West, the John Wayne cowboy – is plastered over a more complex institutional reality. McGurl writes, ‘the creative writing program produces programmatically ... a literature aptly suited to a programmatic society’. The pop-cultural contempt for the MFA masks itself as discomfort with the first part of that sentence, but we have long since accepted the fundamental role of instruction, guidance, and practice in the role of other artforms. It is the last part that humiliates, that terrifies – the acknowledgment that American individualism is institutional.

Dr Eric Bennett, Associate Professor at Providence College‘It would be a great loss to our literary history if our disrespect for institutional relations as somehow embarrassing ... made us less than vigilant in remembering and understanding them,’ warns McGurl. Yet that is exactly what is happening. In a staticky call between my apartment in Cairo and his office at Providence College in Rhode Island, Dr Eric Bennett and I discuss Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle and American creative writing during the Cold War (2015), his vital account of the ‘apocalyptic fears and redemptive hopes’ that – along with the GI Bill and the progressive education movement – galvanised the postwar expansion of MFA programs in the 1940s and 1950s. ‘When I was publishing Workshops of Empire, I was hopeful that at least some of the MFA programs would pick it up and find it interesting,’ he tells me, ‘but I didn’t hear from any of them. The only people who picked it up – and I don’t know why I was surprised by this – are people who have an international perspective.’

Bennett’s book traces how creative writing programs became conduits for the soft diplomatic struggle against the Soviet Union, helmed by literary cold warriors and bankrolled by the philanthropic behemoths of corporate America (most notably, the Rockefeller Foundation), and at least once by the CIA.

If the right writers were afforded the institutional legitimacy of the university – tamed and tidied for the American consumer – it was believed that they could craft a literature of individual freedom to counter the collectivist utopias heralded on the other side of the Iron Curtain. A literature that, as Bennett writes, would ‘inoculate citizenry against fearsome ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of catastrophic global warfare, and forestall or prevent a Third World War’. These were not to be didactic, idea-driven tales, no – simply free people living free lives. The grand ideology would be disguised by its politically apolitical absence; using the self to speak for the many. Audiences at home and abroad (and the international writers imported into the MFA) would see the obvious virtue of American freedom.

Eight decades later, the centrality of the self has become an unquestioned, near-invisible reality. As McGurl shows, the aesthetic triptych of American letters is anchored in the self: show don’t tell; find your voice; write what you know. These modern ‘rules’ of writing – portrayed as craft rather than politics – generate fiction that strives for timelessness by untethering itself from history. Fiction that strives for connection by anchoring itself in the tactile and sensual. As Bennett explains through the Skype hiss: ‘individualism is simply antithetical to a book about ideas’.

The fiction we were encouraged to write in my MFA program was not stylistically similar: there were avant-garde surrealists and hyper-realists and meta-fictional narrative knotters. It was as individual as we were, but also as individualist – what McGurl calls, ‘the many different forms of American sameness’. We didn’t just write what we knew, we wrote who we were. It was not millennial narcissism, but an eight-decade legacy of narrowing the aperture in the quest to speak universally by speaking only for one. A legacy too, of bespoke consumerism, of being conditioned to mistake a form of culturally-sanctioned individuality ‘as the occasion for individualism of the wilder kind’. We are all MFAs now.

‘The weapon that was initially directed against totalitarian ideologies – the praiseworthy weapon of the small voice – has become directed at the United States itself,’ Bennett tells me. The freedoms of American literature have become a straitjacket. ‘For decades, American writers have had so little explanation of themselves as American because of the stigma attached to American imperialism. I think a lot of them regard themselves as nationless, which might be the only thing worse than regarding themselves as American. American writers would benefit from having a fuller sense of themselves as Americans – instead of amplifying their Americanness, actually interrogate it, diminish it. It would be conducive to smarter writing.’

To become denationalised is to see your culture as the default – edgeless, normal, eternal. A denationalised writer cannot hold her country to account because she cannot see it, only herself inside of it. A denationalised voter is the same. And what of a denationalised leader, a denationalised nation? The dynamics I saw at play around the workshop table reflect the tensions and contradictions of the country that invented it. A nation that woke the day after the 2016 election and did not recognise itself, because it had been trained not to look. The MFA is a mirror of its nation. As Batuman scathingly writes: ‘The MFA stands for everything that’s wonderful about America: the belief that every individual life can be independent from historical givens, that all the forms and conditions can be reinvented from scratch.’ It feels important to recognise this at a time when America feels like a question, when it feels necessary and urgent to understand the country that made Donald Trump possible, its dark grievances and lurking furies.

I’m reminded of my last weeks in the MFA, when I cajoled a professor into assigning an Australian novel: Cloudstreet. Over the fortnight we read it, my classmates bailed me up to complain about the Australian slang, the Australian history, the Australian secrets beating in the book’s Australian heart. They talked about the novel as if reading it had been a favour to me, as if I had been indulged.

Our final discussion – the final hour of my degree – was intelligent and lively. There was cheap wine and a tray of supermarket barbecue chicken, and the camaraderie that comes from a pending dissolution. And – for the first time – they asked me questions about my country. Not about the spiders or the sharks, but about its national myths and Indigenous history. They asked me how it felt to be Australian, what it meant to think like one. I had tried to tell them many times before, but Cloudstreet helped them hear me. That’s what fiction can do; why it matters. In the three years I had sat beside them, the people around me had never considered that my experience of ‘their’ books might be as disorienting as entering Tim Winton’s Western Australia; they had never considered that I had spent three years mired in unfamiliar vernacular and unshared histories. For them, literature meant American literature, anything else needed to have its geography or its politics pinned to the front. Their stories were assumed to be my stories because their stories were universal. Purpose built. In being so different, Cloudstreet helped them see themselves more clearly. At least I hope it did. That’s how I’d like to remember my last workshop day.

I’ve lived a nomadic life: thirty homes, three continents and counting. I’m writing this essay from yet another new desk, overlooking the Nile. Living out of a suitcase creates a profound sense of placelessness. I used to respond to this expatriate distance by being dismissive of Australia and its literature – its tedious insistence of interrogating and reinterrogating its identity. I am ashamed to have been so ashamed. In my MFA, I saw – I was forced to see – how profoundly I am Australian. My professor was right, I did not belong in my MFA. That was its value to me.

Batuman asks, ‘Why can’t the programme be better than it is? Why can’t it teach writers about history and the world, not just about adverbs and themselves? Why can’t it at least try?’ With its unstoppable momentum and astonishing potential – an international chorus of young literary voices – these are the questions the MFA needs most to answer. They are my questions for the country that built it, too.