Thousands of aspiring novelists enroll in Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs across the United States each year, hoping to gain credentials that often influence who gets published. But does this institutionalization of creative writing breed elitist literature, or does it nurture talent? The debate intensifies as the gulf between literary and popular fiction widens.
The Rise of the MFA
The MFA format was pioneered by the Iowa Writers' Workshop, founded in 1936, which remains the first MFA in creative writing. Led for years by poet Paul Engle, it has produced literary giants such as Flannery O'Connor and Marilynne Robinson. Today, most celebrated authors are MFA graduates: Percival Everett from Brown, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from Johns Hopkins, and Jhumpa Lahiri from Boston. The lone wolf writer, like Thomas Pynchon, is more myth than reality.
Programs typically last two years and cost between $10,000 for low-residency options and upwards of $80,000 per year for full-time study. The non-profit group Poets & Writers lists more than 250 programs in the US, attracting thousands of students annually, most expecting to graduate with a complete manuscript.
The Workshop Experience
The Iowa style of teaching revolves around workshops where students critique each other's work under a professor's guidance. In theory, this pressure-cooker environment fosters analytical rigor. In reality, workshops can be brutal. Lena Dunham's Girls depicted the toxicity of such settings, where Hannah is torn to shreds for her story. Junot Díaz nearly dropped out of Cornell due to his cohort's dismissal of race as a social force. Mona Awad's novel Bunny takes the backstabbing to satanic extremes.
Madeleine Dunnigan, author of Jean, experienced similar dynamics during her MFA at NYU. She recalls a workshop where collective silence was an act of revenge against a student who hadn't written feedback letters. Despite such incidents, she acknowledges that workshops can be generative, forcing writers to confront their work through others' eyes.
Learning from Masters
NYU's MFA faculty reads like a dream literary dinner: Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Safran Foer, Katie Kitamura, Garth Greenwell, Brandon Taylor, Joyce Carol Oates, Ocean Vuong, Sharon Olds, Claudia Rankine, Valeria Luiselli, Hari Kunzru, and Parul Sehgal. Anelise Chen described Zadie Smith as "the most precise teacher I have ever had," line-editing each page on an overhead projector. Joyce Carol Oates is known for her strict style, once crossing out pages and asking, "What's the point?" One student welcomed it: "I want to be ripped to shreds."
Dunnigan credits her teachers for much of her novel. Brandon Taylor taught her the value of long scenes; Garth Greenwell helped her write sex; Jonathan Safran Foer made her consider meaning on a large scale; Katie Kitamura guided her through restraint; and Jeffrey Eugenides made her think about sentence construction. However, relying too much on a professor's opinion can be dangerous. Dunnigan admits to obsessively counting "good"s and crying after supervisions, exhausted by the care.
The Program Era and Its Critics
Mark McGurl's 2009 book The Program Era argues that mass higher education shapes postwar literature, offering a taxonomy of MFA fiction: "technomodernism," "high cultural pluralism," and "lower-middle-class modernism." Critics like J Robert Lennon dismiss program fiction as "mannered, conservative and obvious." Anelise Chen quips that readers would prefer "an amazing story dictated by an illiterate drunk" to a well-crafted but boring drama.
Robert Olen Butler, a Pulitzer winner, contends that creative-writing students "don't know the first thing about being an artist." Jo Ann Beard says she can spot an Iowa graduate by the honed, controlled writing. The consensus: MFA teaches style over soul, creating automatons who craft good phrases but lack essential substance.
The Impact on Literature
Do MFAs guard the ivory tower of literary fiction while "untrained" writers produce popular fiction? Or do they protect a dying art? Dunnigan notes that her classmates submitted widely, from magical realism to noir, suggesting diversity. Yet contemporary fiction often seems conformist, possibly due to narrow trends rather than MFA influence. "That many of the most popular authors today have MFAs, and that those novels might have a similar style, is a bit like saying fire engines cause fires," she argues.
NYU's MFA has produced notable writers like Raven Leilani, Maggie Millner, and Lillian Fishman. Dunnigan sold her book during the program, but only after four years and seven drafts. The advance wasn't life-changing. An MFA is a gateway, not a guarantee. Six months after graduating, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, forcing her to reflect on the program's true lessons.
Conclusion: A Tool, Not a Magic Pill
Ottessa Moshfegh's varied works—from the experimental McGlue to the maximalist My Year of Rest and Relaxation—defy easy categorization as program fiction. The MFA formalizes what was historically informal, similar to art students learning craft. The real issue is the commercialization of publishing. As Percival Everett said, "Brown allowed me to really just be who I am and just work." An MFA isn't a magic pill; it's a rigorous environment to learn how you write best.
