Bulldoze the MFA programs before they demolish literature

A screed against the outdated cultural logic of the MFA program, 20th century minimalism, and "show don't tell"

“Today technique has taken over the whole of civilization… Death, procreation, birth, habitat—all must submit to technical efficiency and systematization, the end point of the industrial assembly line. What seems to be most personal in the life of man is now technicized. The manner in which he rests and relaxes becomes the object of techniques of relaxation.”

—Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

Years ago, prompted by a friend, I enrolled in the BA program in creative writing at Concordia University. What a waste of my fucking time.

The best thing I got out of it was a friendship with one of my instructors, the only one who didn’t seem to be largely interested in hurling out clichés and creating mini clones of herself, whose encouragement largely led me to just continue to “be me” in spite of the pressures of the environment around me—although the question arose as to whether I’d have even needed that inoculation had I not gone into the program in the first place. Over the course of the four workshops I took I largely got to sit around listening to enervating conversations between bobbleheads about the most picayune aspects of “craft.” I, meanwhile, became known for a typical one sentence critique: “this sucked.” I didn’t know what else to do. Outside this institution’s walls the relevance of literature was dying, and with it literacy, and rather than rise to the challenge with righteous aesthetic indignation to meet these existential crises of cultural meaning head-on, we were busy building bullshit networking clubs to enable mediocrity. What was the point of any of this? I ventured away from the program and dipped my toes in various other areas of study over the years I spent nursing a stimulant problem—linguistics, philosophy, religious studies—but eventually I just compiled my credits together and applied to finally graduate with a creative writing degree and move on with my life to law school.

To preempt the expected dismissal: this is not a case of sour grapes. My work was well-received. I had my stuff published in the program’s literary journal, I was invited to go to a writing retreat (I declined), and I was shortlisted out of three for the program’s creative writing award, the Irving Layton. If anything, I began to question what the program was moulding me into, what mechanism they had altered in my brain that allowed me to produce work that pleased their dull sensibilities.

As I progressed in the program I acted out further. Whatever my colleagues liked of mine in workshop, I would strive to do its opposite. I tried to deliberately flout every piece of hackneyed advice that was dispensed. I used excessive qualifiers. I wrote in the passive voice. I told and didn’t show. The very name of the place pulsated with the problem itself: “Concordia,” a paean to harmony and order—it revolted me. I found a few people with whom I saw eye-to-eye, and in time the first version of the Discordia collective took form. My first acolyte in this venture was my future writing partner, Adam, and together we reinforced one another’s egos by snickering at the institutional worms we so reviled. We agreed that the influence of MFA workshops¹ was killing literature and that the writing community vitally lacked convictions… and then he applied for the MFA. I joked about it, but felt betrayed, and eventually our friendship and partnership dissolved. Unfortunately, like many artists, he couldn’t deny the need for approval, the need for praise, the need for success and accolades, and so he submerged himself back into the treacherous waters of the workshop. It paid off in the end—the appropriate networking connections were formed, and his work, inoffensively pleasing as anyone could ask for, made its way to a decently-sized publisher. This only strengthened my resolve. I would choose a different path. I would go to war with the MFA.

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It takes a special kind of idiot to go to war with an abstraction, unless you have no intention of the war ever ending, like the “War on Terror.” But this form of idiocy is necessary to maintain one’s vitality. A person must have a cause, must have a crusade, must have an eternal and evolving private war or else they will simply wither and fade away. This became one of mine.

In 2019, I debuted Discordia’s collective id persona, The Poetry Heel, taking the stage at a reading in a luchador mask and unfurling behind me a cape printed with the words “ᴅᴇғᴜɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ᴍғᴀ” written on it in sharpie. The Heel, who would act with open hostility toward other writers, emerged as a response to the general banality that turning “writing literature” into a career with an associated degree requirement had created. As the Heel put it in-character: “The ‘professionalism’ of the writing career… has turned writer-to-writer relationships into professional contacts which require the sort of tenderness HR culture demands.” There are plenty of reasons for the present dispiriting state of literary output—growing publishing monopolies have led to safer and safer publishing decisions, which has brought with it the ascent of “upmarket” literary fiction; sanitizing sensitivity readers proliferating to make the products more “safe”; along with the encouragement of creatively-bankrupt, cheaply-executed late capitalist pastiche—but the MFA system ties into all of that, it is supportive of and supported by all the other deleterious elements, it is “of the same stuff.”

The Poetry Heel in performance at TraXide, Montreal, 2024

To continue from “Heel”:

When the MFA becomes an industrial focus-group craft-party networking-club, expanding entirely to pocket more grant money for the schools and make the appropriate social connections for mediocre writers whose admission is more about filling chairs that assessing prospective talent, what should be the mission of these kinds of programs in the first place gets lost.

The truth, of course, is that the MFA program could only ever have developed in this way.

I saw a post the other day that went like this:

I did an MFA at Columbia.

I didn’t get no style pushed on me.

In fact, I took a class on Faulkner & his global influence: a lineage completely antithetical to “program writing”.²

The final assignment for that class was to imitate someone's style.

I imitated baroque-ass Antonio Lobo Antunes and it broke open my own writing like nothing else ever did.

The reason that “program fiction” seems like a genre is because the nature of the MFA attracts students who love to get good grades.

There was so much when’s-the-test! energy; it was obnoxious.

And that leads to writing that sounds like it’s trying to get an A+.

The Sound and the Fury is not a book that would get an A+.

But if you really got it, you won’t be hampered by whatever your goofy workshop peers or teachers are barking at you.

Faulkner got published b/c he hounded Sherwood Anderson into passing his manuscript on; Anderson didn’t even read it!

The only place to hound a famous writer to help you get published is at an MFA program…

That’s the only reason to go.

The best way to learn how to write is to copy writing you love.

[credit:

HAROLD

]

Now, keep in mind, I never applied for the MFA, but my program’s MFA typically selected from those who did the BA, and so I got to watch the selection process work itself out. Of the students who applied, the ones who were admitted were largely ones whose writing through their BA was already gravitating toward “program style”—often the sort of apple-polishing keeners the poster here accurately describes—and the ones who weren’t accepted were mostly not (barring a few exceptions). There were some prejudices which played out not only in matters of style but in matters of identity—a trans guy I knew, a great talent who mostly produced maximalist unapologetic smut, once put what he thought about his rejection in pretty blunt terms: “I don’t write about my angst about wanting my tits cut off.”

OP can say that he didn’t have style pushed on him, but of course the style is mostly pushed invisibly. The focus group nature of the workshop provides social rewards for certain choices, deliberate or not, and even the most strong-willed writers will feel some of the influence of conditioning this entails when they’re doing this day-in day-out for a few years. When we then consider, as I observed, that MFA candidates tend toward writers who already have certain stylistic and personality features, this means that the general opinion of the focus group which forms is going to be skewed to the tastes and biases of these individuals, in both content and form, thereby making those few who weren’t already ready for the mould more pressured to conform to it. Whether OP was or was not influenced by the MFA dweebs (and can he really say for certain he wasn’t at all?), many doubtlessly unwittingly would be. This does not mean you have the Mark of Cain on you, but it does mean you need to take great pains to kill the MFA-holder in your head. Those of you with MFAs can be saved—a few of our hand-selected Fellow Travellers have MFAs—the MFA parasite which has burrowed in your brain can be purged, but it will only be through a process of cleansing fire.

Inherently, structurally, the system of creative writing education is corrupt. Its focus group form encourages writing which pleases the greatest number of people. Writing something which offends the sensibilities of your fellow students—whether aesthetically, politically, personally, whatever—is structurally discouraged. Work that could be “divisive” is suppressed by the environment’s encouragement of writers to please.

What pleases, meanwhile, is the wielding of subtlety, the mythical “showing” and not “telling.” But what does this principle actually mean? The vast majority of the greatest literature produced throughout history did far more “telling” than “showing.” Don Quixote, Les Miserables, Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, even a playwright like Shakespeare had his characters exposit on every little thing they’re doing—none of these works would have passed crit. The ideology of the university writing program, the underlying structure of “program style,” is biased in favour of a 20th century minimalist ethos of the Gordon Lish mode. I have written elsewhere about my distaste for reductive Weberian maxims, but while I would not call “protestantism” the locus of what has been called “protestant work ethic,” I do think that the nevertheless correctly-identified cultural attitudes of this same general historical social trend have contributed here to the development of literary culture.³ The same cultural logic which created the undergirding of capitalist political economy, whatever its locus, is the same which acted to create 20th century minimalism (and its poetic counterpart, the equally restrained post-Objectivist style) with its emphasis on the repression of raw emotion, manic zeal, and overabundance. This is to say that creative writing pedagogy works to help writers manufacture their own censorious artistic superego to throttle their artistic id. The aforementioned values give way for restraint and all those other qualities we are taught to value as sophisticated signs of intellectual life. You can actually see this very process play itself out by looking at the aforementioned Lish’s editing work, as highlighted by Stephen King in his piece on Raymond Carver’s unedited drafts:

The contrast between “The Bath” (Lish-edited) and “A Small, Good Thing” (Ray Carver unplugged) is even less palatable. On her son’s birthday, Scotty’s mother orders a birthday cake that will never be eaten. The boy is struck by a car on his way home from school and winds up in a coma. In both stories, the baker makes dunning calls to the mother and her husband while their son lies near death in the hospital. Lish’s baker is a sinister figure, symbolic of death’s inevitability. We last hear from him on the phone, still wanting to be paid. In Carver’s version, the couple — who are actually characters instead of shadows — go to see the baker, who apologizes for his unintended cruelty when he understands the situation. He gives the bereaved parents coffee and hot rolls. The three of them take this communion together and talk until morning. “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” the baker says. This version has a satisfying symmetry that the stripped-down Lish version lacks, but it has something more important: it has heart.

Sure, I like plenty of literary minimalist work fine, but its time has ultimately passed, and its tropes have become tired. But who can stand up to their purveyors? The MFA program takes on an unassailable symbolic power, consolidating elite status within the industry, to the point where the “author-function” is increasingly at risk of being almost entirely circumscribed by the academy, and the awards and grants go almost exclusively to those with degrees from them. Much of this is intentional, of course, as the writers workshops of the West largely began as the products of CIA culture war investments and MKUltra-adjacent reprogramming objectives,⁴ creating a cultural climate that is increasingly orderly, obedient, and institutionally maintained (similar to the development of the “schools of difference”—women’s studies, African-American studies, queer studies, etc.—which were able to co-opt unrestrained dissent and make it into a manageable subject contained in the classroom⁵). You may also see this in how bureaucracy has come to dominate literary life—bureaucratic skills such as grant-writing and networking take precedent and reward a writer far better than simply “being good at writing,” and are especially necessary under the pressure of publication metrics. This is all tied to that Satanic individual, “The Creative,” a sterilized professional class that functions as a sort of labour aristocracy of the art world. The growth of this system is appalling. In 2008 there were 156 MFA programs in creative writing. By 2016 that number had jumped to 244. But at least we can take some solace in this: that growth is likely unsustainable.

The position we are in is not unlike what occurred after the proliferation of the visual arts schools. The Royal Academy of Arts in England, the Académie des Beaux-Arts in France, all their analogues, and the academist styles they produced are generally seen as hallmarks of fluffy passéist nonsense. Artists across Europe rightfully rebelled against these institutions. From William Blake to Gustave Courbet to Claude Monet to Henri Matisse, many of the most visionary and exciting artists of this era were the ones who explicitly turned their backs on or outright attacked the academies (even some who participated in those academies for a spell, only to have the experience radicalize them against it in the first place).

Writers: do not let yourselves become obedient and pliable. If you can get a book out, fine, but do not compromise yourself in its pursuit, eschew “media training,” eschew “sensitivity readers” (my friends with books out via big publishers have had to endure both, and I think it was bad for their souls). Engage the Blake position. Fight the institutions, fight the academy, embrace DIY, get out while you still can. The MFA industrial complex is a soul-destroying trek through a professional degree toward a career in cocktail party pleasantries. No self-respecting artist should want that for a life.

CW program ideology is inherently technocratic. Technocrats brought us this world. Let us refuse to also have them describe it to us in letters. As the Poetry Heel noted in his Manifesto, this is writing towards death. Stop writing towards death. Start writing towards life. Go on the attack.

If any of our words resonated with you, please consider submitting your work to Discordia. We want your poems, your stories, and your polemical essays. Or come to our events in Montreal and other cities in that orbit.

There have been many pieces in the last few years coming to join the crusade against the MFA world, but I would particularly direct readers to

Micah Cash

’s recent (and heartbreaking) piece in

The Republic of Letters

, which I was especially moved by. As per usual I think the Neo-Decadents over at

Neo-Passéism

produce some of the finest critiques of the culture of letters that you can find on this platform, and their piece on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is no exception.

And if you liked all that, perhaps you will like this piece which uses Phillip Lopate to critique the insipid mental life of the people who teach creative writing:

1. Technically Concordia has an MA in creative writing, not an MFA, but I’m just going to be using “MFA” here as a catch-all.

2. I think its very much overstatement to say Faulkner’s work is so antithetical to “program style” but that’s another matter.

3. I’m aware that Weber sees “protestantism” as being in interplay with what we might effectively identify as the material conditions supporting it, and he is correct to say the two influence one another (a la Marx’s conception of superstructure and substructure), it’s just that he places too much emphasis on the cultural expression’s influence on the base when the truth is the opposite. But often those who refer to Weber even go so far as to cut all of this out of their assessment.

4. Just how this all occurred is a fascinating story for another time. Until then, Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire and Joel Whitney’s Finks are good resources on the subject. Discordia does however have a piece on William T. Vollmann, who, while not having an MFA himself to my knowledge, does probably have a substantial bodycount and connections to the CIA.

5. See: Roderick Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things.