Jennifer de Guzman » Academia

The Value of an English Degree

Jennifer de Guzman — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 23:29:53 +0000

Lately I have been thinking about what my English degrees have done for me, not so much in their specifics but in regards to the skills I acquired while studying literature. Then this morning I heard the story “Aspiring Writer Questions Value of English Degree” on the radio. The subject of the story, Heather Lefebvre, says that “her English studies have helped her to be analytical,” and that is exactly the skill I was focusing on. (Lefebvre also became an English major because her mother suggested being a writer as her “back-up plan” if being an actress didn’t work out. I admit that I snorted when I heard that.)

I think a lot of people think of English as a kind of touchy-feely area of study, for people who swoon on misty moors and recite poetry and the like. But the reality is that in order to be a successful English major you have to be able to both understand the emotional content of literature and wield logic with rapier-sharpness. You have to be keenly observant and care about how other people think and act. You must know your own mind well enough and have enough command of language to express your thoughts in an organized, clear, and eloquent manner. And you have to have a creative mind. These are the skills you need to recognize themes and strategies when you encounter them in literature, come up with compelling theses for essays, and to write those essays and take part in classroom discussions.

These aren’t skills that lead to accomplishments that are clear for a lot of people outside the English major community: you’re not building anything tangible or receiving an education that has a clear career path (unless you’re going into teaching, which everyone will assume anyway). However, they are skills that are immensely transferrable to a variety of careers. I regularly imagine how my English skills would help me if I had decided to become a lawyer or an advertising executive or even a police detective.

I didn’t decide to enter those careers, though. I chose to be a writer and an editor, so the benefit of my education has been pretty obvious, but I think what I learned as an English major would help me no matter where I ended up in life.

Writing, Post MFA

Jennifer de Guzman — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:21:34 +0000

December marked the second year since I finished my coursework for my Master of Fine Arts degree. Milestones, arbitrary as they might be, can be stressful, can make you ask yourself uncomfortable questions. How far have I come? Am I successful at what I set out to be successful at? I read stories about a writer who sells her novel seven months after graduating with her MFA, and I start to get that really annoying (to both oneself and others) self-doubt anxiety. Am I good enough? Am I trying hard enough? Is the future a bleak landscape of blasted ambition?

We all have our moments. This particular one is coming at 6:30 a.m., after I’ve been up for two hours after four hours sleep and I’m contemplating yet another narrative approach to the next novel I’m trying to write. (I’ve decided that first person wasn’t working.)

And the doubt I have is telling me that I’ve done too much of that — contemplating — instead of acting. A lot of my self-criticism is justified, I think. However, I think that people who have to regulate their own productivity — especially creative productivity — need to temper self-criticism with acknowledgment of what they have accomplished. Otherwise, you can paralyze yourself. Then you think about how you have accomplished those things and try to apply it to where you think you’re flagging. So:

Self Criticism: I have only finished one prose short story since graduating. (Albeit one I like and am trying to get published.)
Counter: I have also finished two complete revisions of my novel, which is in the hands of an editor at a good book publisher. And I wrote and had published 24 columns for Publishers Weekly, short comics for Newsarama and Comic Book Resources, and a short story in the anthology This Is A Souvenir: The Songs Of Spearmint & Shirley Lee.

So what’s going on here? The big difference is that writing short stories is something I have to do completely of my own motivation. There’s no one asking me to write them, no editor giving me notes on them, no guarantee of publication. It’s an expenditure of effort without guarantee of reward. But I used to write short stories regularly, and, no accident, get them published a lot more often, too. What happened?

For one, I shifted my focus. I used to write speculative fiction, which, I think, is easier to sell than straight literary fiction, since the submission and publication pools are smaller. Part of this change was due to ego — I wanted to be a literary writer, not a genre one — and part of it was just due to a change in interests. However, seeing as I still write stories with a tinge of the magical, it could be that I should return to doing what I was kind of successful at — writing and selling literary speculative fiction.

Another thing that happened is that I learned to be less active in promoting my work. I got writing gigs because editors asked me to write something for them. I won a contest because my friend Peter O’Sullivan submitted a story I wrote (he was acting as an agent of one of my professors). I got the opportunity to go to China because one of my professors nominated me. I won English department awards for papers that had been assigned to me. Alex de Campi did me an awesome turn and introduced me to agents and editors she’s worked with.

There was a lot of direction in my life, a lot of me being rewarded because I did what I was asked to do and did it well. But there was little of me making leaps into situations where I might fail. Facing the possibility of rejection is a lot less attractive than taking the acceptance that’s offered. But the thing is, if you stop throwing yourself in the path of potential rejection, the successes that put you out there for offered acceptance won’t happen, either. You’ll use up your stock without without replenishing it. You’ll stagnate and then dry up.

So that’s what is underlying the self-doubt — a failure to learn the right lessons from past success. I didn’t mean to make a New Year’s resolution, but it seems I have. I will risk failing more in 2010.

Questions I’m Tired of Answering

Jennifer de Guzman — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 14:01:03 +0000

I get a few people emailing me every year to ask me how to become a comics editor. They seem to think that it’s a line of work that is “fun” or “rewarding” or “cool,” and they want in on the glorious words-and-pictures life. They also seem to think that there’s some secret to getting a comics job that is different from getting any other kind of job. But there’s not. If you want to be a comics editor you:

Have skills that apply to that line of work, like experience reading comics, good instincts for storytelling, a good grasp on spelling and grammar, experience with graphics software, and the ability not to equate your self-worth with your salary.
Send your resume to comics publishers.

That’s it.

You definitely don’t write to comics editors and ask for advice, get some, and then never even bother to say “thank you.” Because that shit’s just rude. This also applies if you ask for advice about an MFA program.

For the record, here’s my advice for getting into an MFA program:

Write well. You get an MFA to write work on writing better.
Submit an application to an MFA program. Don’t tell the professors on the acceptance committee, “I’ve always wanted to be a writer and this will teach me how” in your statement of purpose. Show them what kind of writer you are and why you will be an asset to the program, not just how the program will help you.

That’s it. I have no further words of wisdom.

In-Class Thoughts

Jennifer de Guzman — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:38:56 +0000

I’ve been going through my grad school notes, deciding what to keep and what to dispose of. On many of my notes are little sketches of scenes in class that I would write when something struck me as interesting, absurd, or annoying. Here’s one I just found, written in November 2004 in my 18th-Century British Literature seminar:

So the man in my class, a middle-aged man with thinning hair who wears striped chambray shirts, jeans and brown shoes, says he is quitting the program because a company has made him an offer to take them public — an offer “too good to refuse,” he says, using those words. Others in the class are alarmed, trying to get him to consider continuing while he takes the company public, or putting off the IPO until the semester’s over.

“Obviously,” he says, the pomposity just before the surface, “none of you have taken a company public.” He goes on — it is a task that consumes one’s life, he says. “You eat, sleep, and shit it,” he says.

And, my god, I try to shift my mind around to try to fathom this. What would make me quit the program? What is that important to me? Money? Surely not.

That last line makes me laugh. If money is important to you, you really don’t have much business getting an MFA in creative writing! It’s not a degree that you earn back in money. It’s one that gives you returns in experience and community — and that is only going to be valuable to you if other things are not more valuable.

I wonder what happened to that man. I don’t remember him very much at all now.

Writing Shysters

Jennifer de Guzman — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:02:28 +0000

A comment showed up on my last post that I marked as spam: “It’s not so simple to do a good enough written essays, preferably if you are occupied. I consult you to define [essay mill] and to be spare from query that your work will be done by custom writing service”

All of that is [sic], of course. The writing really makes you think they’ll do good work for you, hunh? These kinds of pay-for-essay services, often called “essay mills,” are often outsourced to people in India or the Philippines who don’t realize they’re writing essays for cheating American students, and, as an AFP article — “In U.S., some students buy — not try — to excel in school” — recently pointed out, of horrific quality.

But that’s not really the point, is it? Even if the quality of writing and analysis were good, turning in an essay you did not write is cheating and violates the ethics standards any reputable university has. It could get you a failing grade or kicked out of school. Oh, and it makes you a marginal, reprehensible person who doesn’t belong in college in the first place.

The MFA Statement of Purpose

Jennifer de Guzman — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 05:42:30 +0000

While I was endeavoring to give good advice to someone applying to San Jose State University’s MFA program, I managed to find my own statement of purpose. I thought I’d post it with the thoughts about why I wrote it the way I did.

Statement of Purpose:
The Shoulders of Giants
by Jennifer de Guzman

She has pondered the words “Statement of Purpose” for so long that the words have ceased to have real meaning; it is written on the paper in front of her, traced over three times, curlicues framing it, a sketch of her hand beside it and, beside that, the words “all the works and days of hands.” Her pen has rolled from the drafting table, for a curious cat to bat away. She has three more just like it in her bag; she pulls one out.

She does not want to write anything so simultaneously earnest and precious as “I feel it is my purpose in life to write fiction.” She writes it anyway, then crosses it out with a series of uneven lines. What she wants to write will tell who ever reads it how the years that she has spent studying literature have exalted her, exhausted her, fortified her and frustrated her. It will tell them how she has learned that in the quiet, cold hours of the morning, when she has studied too long and too hard, Proserpina is just another girl longing for independence and fearing it at the same time; how she has seen how the love of beauty and pleasure can transform into decadence, and how a writer might translate thought and feeling and perception into words. She will tell them how she has witnessed death in Venice, life among the ruins and love in the time of cholera.

And then she will show how she was writing all the while, finding in Proserpina the inspiration for a new telling of her abduction, finding in the love of excess in Swinburne and Wilde the basis of a society in which death and art converge; and in Woolf’s modern fiction the courage to depict life as a luminous halo, to cast off the trappings of the materialist writer, even if only for 2000 words. “Writing fiction is no different from science in this regard:” she writes, “just like Newton, we have seen as far as we have because we have stood on the shoulders of giants.”

But, she thinks, I’ve only been riding piggy-back. She smiles, and the pen that she had taken from her bag rolls to the floor. All this time she has been peeking over the shoulders of giants, gaining what knowledge she could and writing stories that grew from that knowledge and her imagination. And she realizes her true purpose for striving for admission into the creative writing master’s program. So she retrieves one of her pens from the floor, resettles herself in her chair and writes:

I want to stand on the shoulders of giants.

So, yes, it is a bit overwrought, but it got me in. I worked in a lot of literary allusions because I wanted to give the committee an idea of my literary tastes, but also because there’s nothing like a shared feeling of “Yeah, we’re learned!” to endear yourself to academics. I had a 4.0 GPA as an undergrad and had been working professionally as an editor for three years when I wrote this, but what I wanted to impress on them was not “I want to be a writer” but “I am a writer.” It was about show — I am showing you what kind of student I will be, how passionate I am, not telling you.

I have no idea if this statement of purpose (along with my academic creds) would have gotten me in to Iowa or Columbia. It shows that my taste is fairly old-fashioned; most of the literature I allude to is Victorian and high modernist. But, having come from the SJSU English department, I knew that the department’s focus isn’t so much on contemporary literature and strong theory, but on the kind of works I reference. (Though later the head of the department would say to me, when I expressed an interest in Swinburne, “Isn’t he kind of awful?”)

There’s something kind of embarrassingly effusive about this short essay, but I remember writing it (I probably still have the notebooks with my scribbling and doodling in them — I wasn’t making that up for narrative effect) in a heady, late-night session and feeling every word of it. So it’s authentic, if nothing else.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Bulwer-Lytton…

Jennifer de Guzman — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:24:36 +0000

The results of the Bulwer-Lytton contest are in, and they’re pretty amusing.

The Bulwer-Lytton contest, for those that don’t know, is an award given for the worst opening sentence of an imaginary novel. It’s run by Dr. Scott Rice, who was chair of the San Jose State English department when I was an undergraduate. It’s named after the author of Paul Clifford (which opens “It was a dark and stormy night…”), now-obscure Victorian Novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Prof. Rice is responsible for me reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman in the first place, so I am forever indebted to him.

Fun fact: Andi Watson alludes to the Bulwer-Lytton Contest in Glister 1: Haunted Teapot, in which the eponymous teapot is haunted by a Bulwer-Lytton stand-in, who is incensed that his legacy is that of a contest that rewards purposely bad writing.

The MFA Workshop Experience, Part Two

Jennifer de Guzman — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:32:25 +0000

Giving Critiques

In an MFA workshop, you will give critiques — often for two or three pieces — every week. This consists not only in taking home a fellow student’s printed work and writing your critique down, but in a critique discussion with the rest of your class. I don’t know about anyone else, but I often worried more about giving critiques than receiving them. What makes a good writing critique? I wanted to be helpful, and didn’t want to misinterpret my fellow students’ work, be too hard or, because of worries about being to hard, be too easy on it. I worried about giving advice to people whose skills were more advanced than mine. I worried about telling people I liked that I didn’t like their stories so much. I realize now that those are the natural worries that can, if used properly, result in giving a helpful critique. These are the questions I kept in mind as I read for critique. It’s risky trying to guess at authorial intent, but the text can give you clues about what the author is trying to effect and can lead you a better reading of their piece.

Is it humorous or serious? A little of both? Once you answer this question, you can determine if something is working as humor, or if something is unintentionally funny in a serious piece, or if the author is achieving the kind of mordant humor s/he’s going for.

Who is the intended audience? It isn’t always you. This one requires a little imagination and empathy. You have to put aside your reading preferences and work on determining if teenage girls or older men, or who ever you think the audience is, might enjoy the piece. Acknowledge your limitations as a reader to the author, but don’t use it as an excuse not to try to give a helpful critique.

What kind of style does the author have? It’s probably not the same as yours. Don’t try to make their style into something it isn’t. Try to disregard your preference for well-polished gleaming Fitzgerald-esque prose to acknowledge that the author writes in a grittier style. How does that style work with the story’s or essay’s theme? (See next item.) Keep the style in mind when you suggest that a certain word choice might be infelicitous or if a sentence my be restructured.

If it’s a creative essay, is there a central idea you can describe after reading it? If it’s a short story, is there a theme? If you’re in graduate school, you should know all about theses and themes now — more often than not, in literature classes you are writing essays with a theses about other writers’ themes. The work you produce and that your fellow students produce should stand up to the same kind of critical scrutiny. Don’t write an academic essay about your fellow students’ work, but use the skills you have to work out the thesis or theme and determine if the story or essay is clear enough and supporting it. Or is the piece too on-the-nose, laying out and underlying its thesis or theme in a way that is unsubtle and repetitive? As you can see from the length of what I’ve written about this question, this is an element I think is very important and that was my favorite part of giving critiques. You have to ask the author, “What are you trying to say?” and help them make their statement more clearly or with more nuance.

When you write your critique and when you contribute to the critique discussion in class, be sure to include what your interpretation of tone, style, audience, and theme are. If you can’t answer these questions after reading a piece a couple of times, that’s probably a problem with the piece itself. Note to the author what gave you trouble in determining what kind of story or essay the piece is supposed to be.

For fiction and a lot of kinds of creative nonfiction, there are elements besides style and theme that make up a piece: plot, characters and dialogue, and setting.

Plot is my particular weakness, and supposedly one of MFA writers in general, who don’t tend to write outside-conflict kind of stories. Look for a central conflict in the same way you would look for a theme. Is it too subtle? Too obvious? Is it resolved too easily? Not well enough? Did you get a sense of tension and resolution as you read it? If so, there’s probably a plot. If not, there probably isn’t. How can the conflict be brought out?

Characters and dialogue are an area where writers can get a little self-indulgent. We talk about our characters like real people sometimes and can get pretty attached to them. This might make for a tendency to dwell too much on certain minutiae of their personalities or to have dialogue that was fun to write but does little to contribute to the story. Or sometimes a character is so clear to the author that s/he doesn’t make that character living enough to the reader. Characters and dialogue, like theme, can also be too on-the-nose. If a character’s emotional arc is too neat, and characters always say exactly what they are thinking, there will be no tension in the story. (I don’t need to really get into simple stuff like writing naturalistic dialogue and avoiding “As you know, Bob” exposition, right?)

Setting is not given as much importance as it used to in fiction, I think. You get the whole layouts of villages and particular farms in George Eliot or Thomas Hardy novels, but I think the contemporary tendency in non-genre fiction is for a certain generic quality to setting, like a really simple stage where the audience fills in the details or where the details of a room don’t matter so much. However, you should still get a sense that the characters in a story occupy a space that has boundaries and a few characteristics, and they should interact with that space.

The guidelines for giving critiques are pretty straightforward, and the first one shouldn’t even have to be articulated, but nevertheless:

Don’t be mean. Did you think the story was terrible? Like, really, really awful? Try to tell the author that it just wasn’t working for you and why. Just saying that it sucks or was bad or marking up the story with a whole lot of red ink is not helpful.

Don’t be a bore. This refers to the in-class critique session especially. If you’ve made your point, don’t keep repeating it. If someone disagrees with your interpretation or take on a story, you can reply to them, but don’t keep on going on with it after that. The critique session is about someone’s story, not about your prowess as a literary critic — put your ego aside for the sake of your classmate’s writing.

Don’t dominate. This is kind of the same as the last one. A critique session is for open, fluid discussion, not for you to pontificate about what you think. Give other people a chance to talk and be respectful while they give their opinions.

I often thought during grad school that giving critiques was as helpful, if not moreso, to my own writing than to the people whom I was critiquing, just as I feel studying literature makes me a better writer. When you seek out the problem spots in other people’s writing, unless you’re hopelessly arrogant, it makes you more attuned to the problems in your own writing. You can begin to apply your critiquing eye to your own work, and it will only benefit from that attention.

The MFA Writing Workshop Experience

Jennifer de Guzman — Wed, 27 May 2009 02:58:17 +0000

As I mentioned in my last post about getting my MFA in creative writing at San Jose State University, one of the draws for me was the literature units requirement. Of 48 units required for graduation, only 15 must be workshop units. The balance of workshop and literature classes varies from program to program (Iowa’s is about half and half and Columbia’s is 21 of 60 total units — these are probably regarded as the most prestigious programs), but even if they take up a smaller percentage of your units than other courses, the workshops are often the most important aspect of being an MFA grad student. They are where you most closely and personally interact with your fellow students and where you develop the most as a writer — not so much in your skill, though good critiques will help you a bit with that, but in your attitude. Both receiving and giving critiques teach you to keep your ego in check and understand your writing better.

So what is an MFA writing workshop like? I’ll give you my experiences, and I’ll bet they’re pretty similar to writing workshops around the country. I’ll concentrate on being on the receiving end of critiques first.

Receiving Critiques

Typically, in a workshop, two or three writers turn in a piece for critique at a time. When you’re up for critique, you might read a portion of your piece (or the whole thing), but after that, you are expected to be silent until everyone is done discussing your work, except if you are explicitly asked a question for clarification reasons. Desks or tables are arranged so that everyone faces each other.

Be Prepared for:

The phrase “I have a problem with…” This, for some reason, is the go-to euphemism for “I didn’t like…” of MFA students. I suppose because “like” is so subjective, but a problem, well, you don’t want anyone to have a problem with your work, right? Take it for what it is — something subjective that may or may not be backed up with good reasoning and taste.

Contradictory advice. The problems people have with your work may be directly at odds with each other. Some may like the first-person narrator; others may find the voice unnatural. They might argue with each other. Again, listen for your fellow students’ reasons for their opinions that help you decide which advice is best for your work.

People who absolutely don’t “get” what you write. They might not understand or agree with your aesthetic goals — which is a fancy way of saying that your writing just isn’t their kind of thing. This will always happen, but if you realize that there’s just a disconnect between your style and someone’s taste, not necessarily a matter of quality, then you can learn what’s useful and what you have to politely disregard. Don’t fall into the trap, however, of thinking that whenever someone doesn’t like something you wrote it’s because they don’t “get” your work.

People who want to rewrite your stories. Sometimes they will want you to change the plot. Sometimes they want your prose to be more like their prose. In one of my workshops, a very nice woman crossed out several sentences of my stories and rewrote them in a style completely at odds with the rest of the stories. Why? I don’t know. I considered whether my writing style wasn’t cutting it and needed to be changed up to achieve the effect I wanted, decided, No, it does not, and learned how to ignore stuff like this. It’s still kind of irritating when I think about it, but, really, it shouldn’t be.

Retaliation — or at least someone being irritated with you. This is related to interpersonal politics in workshops, and the best way to avoid it is to give honest, helpful and not-overly critical critiques. (I’ll cover that in my next post). Keeping your trap shut about critiques also helps. After my first critique session as an MFA student, I wrote in my blog that I was confused about the contradictory advice I had received and, in the end, had to decide to go with my best instincts and understanding of my writing and not try to please everyone. I remember being shocked at the barely-restrained hostility someone responded to my suggestions during a critique session and then in the line notes of the a critique I received from the same person after that, and it came to light in a note at the end: Someone told this student about this post in a way that cast me as an ungrateful “too good for you losers” light; this person had thought I was singling them out, which was not the case at all. I wrote an email, pointed the person to the post in question, and cleared it up. I still don’t know who was talking shit about me, but I don’t care at this point. What I learned from this is to never, ever, ever write or speak publicly about being frustrated with the workshop process while you’re still a student. I’m not a student anymore, though.

People you just don’t like. As I mentioned, you’re interacting closely with people in workshops, and personalities are inevitably going to clash. Don’t let the fact that you don’t like someone affect how you value their suggestions. They might have good writing insight that’s completely separate from their unattractive (to you) personality.

How does dealing with this help you understand your writing better? You have to learn to separate what constitutes personal preference on the part of your critiquers from quality issues in your writing. And, most importantly, you have to learn when and how to stick to your guns — and how to do it without being arrogant. When you have to articulate to yourself why you’ve made the choices you’ve made — why you structured a story a certain way, why you used this word instead of that one — then your writing improves, and facing suggestions for changes makes you consider if the changes would have merit (depending on your goals and style). Whether you choose to implement the suggestions or not, this process makes you critically consider your own writing, which makes you understand it better.

I find it helpful to remember that when it comes to my writing, I am in a position of power. It is my writing, and it will always be my choice about how to change it. It is arrogant to advertise this position of power by making it known how unhelpful critiques might have been — so undertake receiving and considering critiques and editing your work humbly and quietly.

I’ll write about giving critiques next time!

The MFA Experience

Jennifer de Guzman — Thu, 07 May 2009 06:59:27 +0000

I have a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from San Jose State University. It’s a relatively new program, as far as MFA programs go, and I debated with myself for a while before deciding on an MFA instead of an MA. A desire to focus on my own creative work was foremost in the decision, and that the degree is terminal, theoretically qualifying the holder to teach at the university level, also played a part. The latter part was rendered moot, though, because I didn’t do any graduate or teaching assistant work while I was getting my degree. Without any teaching experience, I’m unlikely to be considered for a teaching position, especially with English departments reducing their staffs. But that’s all right because at some point during the three-year program, I decided I don’t want to teach. I have a job in a creative field already, I reasoned, one that enables me to work on my writing while doing something related to my education, and, despite the recent setback of having my hours reduced, I still think it was sound reasoning.

But what about the MFA itself? Was it worth getting? Was the SJSU program a good one? Let’s talk about that.

The Program

SJSU’s creative writing MFA program is somewhat rare in that it requires students to complete workshops in both a primary and secondary genre (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or scriptwriting) and also to complete a good number of literature courses. It’s 48 units total, 9 in your primary genre (mine was fiction) and 6 in your secondary (mine was nonfiction), 6 units of professional development (a “Materials and Methods” class and an independent professional experience project). I often tell people I have an MFA in creative writing and literature because of this — the program requires more literary units than workshop ones. This, for me, was an attraction; I am devoted to literature and I wanted to study it at a graduate level.

My Experience in the Program

The Good

Literature Courses
Except for one notable exception, these were well-structured, challenging, and free from bullshit. The professors at SJSU tend to stay away from theory-heavy treatments of literature, with concentration more on formal, philosophical, and historical elements. The university’s Steinbeck Center proved very valuable as I labored on a paper on The Pastures of Heaven and Professor Krishnaswamy’s Globalization and Literature seminar offered an opportunity to study contemporary works of literature.

Nonfiction Workshop
I like writing assignments in workshops, and Professor Cathleen Miller gives good assignments that help you develop your craft. I had the most fun in her workshops, too, thanks in no small part to my friends Gary and Nigel.

Lurie Professors
An endowment to the university allows the English department to hire a well-known writer every Spring semester. The writer teaches an undergraduate course and a graduate workshop. I was lucky enough as an undergrad to take courses from former California Poet Laureate Al Young (he called me a “quintessential Californian”) and Simon Winchester, whose reporter’s sensibility helped me streamline not just my writing but my thinking as well. As a graduate, I took a fiction workshop from the late James D. Houston, whose wisdom and experience gave me an example to emulate. Other Lurie professors have included Ursula K. LeGuin and ZZ Packer.

Center for Literary Arts
The CLA has brought in some great writers for on campus literary events — most notably for me, Neil Gaiman and Salman Rushdie. It’s inspiring to hear writers speak about writing when you’re concentrating on the development of your own craft.

The Students
I met a lot of great people who are also wonderful writers while in the MFA program. It’s nice to be around people for whom writing is a given and who don’t struggle to come with writerly topics of conversation with you, awkwardly asking, “So… where do you get your ideas?”

The Not-So-Good

No Consistent Guidance for My Primary Genre
I must stress that this is something that is no longer the case in the program. Unfortunately, though, for those of us in the program at the time, the fiction professor left after my first semester, so I didn’t have a consistent guide in my primary genre. My other professors were not lacking, but I wanted something of a part-time mentor for my fiction, and I did not get one.

Politics
I wrote a little bit about this in my last post. University departments are full of personal politics, and I learned very quickly to shrug off stuff like reported conversations with the program director about me. (For example, I hadn’t taken any creative writing classes as an undergraduate at SJSU, and, as reported to me, the program director said this explained why “no one had ever heard of” me.)

That Myth and Symbolism Seminar
It seems a little harsh to single out one seminar as a bad point, I know, but I was so unhappy with this course. It had no defining structure, meandering discussions, and absolutely de-motivated me. It’s like it sucked all the academic ability I have in me right the hell out of my brain and body. I got my worst grade in any college course I’ve ever taken in this class, a B-, and it was totally my fault because I couldn’t be bothered to do the uninspiring weekly homework assignments. It was just dead awful.

That Ouroboros Feeling
In graduate school, specifically in a field like literature or creative writing, it seems that professors can often fall into the trap of thinking that their role is to create people who will eventually perform their role who will eventually teach their students to perform their role, and so on. Which is not really an outlandish attitude to have, but sometimes it can be a little inflexible, especially considering that an MFA degree is a professional degree, with the goal of producing people who are practicing artists or work professionally in a creative field. Which I totally do. But I was not allowed to use my job for my professional work units — I did a one-day comics writing workshop instead.

People Asking Me, “So What Are You Going to Do Now?”
This isn’t the fault of the MFA program; it’s just a common pitfall of getting a graduate degree, I suppose. My answer is usually “I’m already doing it.” Seriously, everyone. Stop asking me this.