99 POETS & WRITERS^Other low-residency programs in the West
Antioch University in Los Angeles;
California Institute of Integral Studies in
San Francisco; Dominican University of
California in San Rafael; Goddard College
in Port Townsend, Washington; Institute
of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New
Mexico; Mount St. Mary’s University in Los
Angeles; Oregon State University Cascades
in Sisters; Pacific Lutheran University
(Ranier Writing Workshop) in Tacoma,
Washington; Pacific University in Seaside
and Forest Grove, Oregon; Seattle Pacific
University in Whidbey Island, Washington,
and Santa Fe, New Mexico; and University of
California in Riverside (Palm Desert MFA)
in Rancho Mirage.The core faculty of the full-residency
MFA program at Texas State University
in San Marcos includes Cyrus
Cassells, Roger Jones, Naomi Shihab
Nye, Cecily Parks, Kathleen Peirce,
and Steve Wilson in poetry and Doug
Dorst, Jennifer duBois, Tom Grimes,
Debra Monroe, and Tim O’Brien
in fiction.
special section MFA PROGRAMSthe program director, Brian Turner. The staff was diverse in terms of ethnicities,
sexual orientations, genders, and genres. It was fairly easy for a poet like me
to sit down with a fiction lecturer or YA lecturer and talk to them about ideas
I had for non-poetry work. What was the greatest benefit of attending your MFA
program? The reading lists and time with mentors. What was the most significant
shortcoming of your MFA program? Funding. SNC was the right program for me, but
I worried about my finances every semester. How did your MFA program prepare
you for post-graduate life? When I didn’t get a teaching or editorial job right away,
I thought I was failing my program and my mentors. I was depressed for a little
while because I was unsure of what the very next step would be without a job.
That lasted for a good six months. I finally got up and started trying some of the
other suggestions I had gotten from Suzanne Roberts, Lee Herrick, and Laura
Wetherington. I decided to send my poetry manuscript out and started pitching
my personal essays. Their feedback continued to guide me through the first few
crazy months of signing my first contract for my full-length collection, Hood-
Witch, getting my first official bylines in Slate, HuffPost, and the Texas Observer,
as well as helping me prepare my book proposal for the memoir I’m working on.
I don’t know if I could have done it without their guidance and encouragement.
If you had to do it all over again, would you do anything differently? No. I would still
go to Texas State’s MFA, if only for the experience. There are still a lot of literary
communities in which a queer person of color is not given the support and agency
t hey ne e d in t he ac ademic s e t t ing. I f I did have a chanc e t o do i t over again, I woul d
fight harder to get the support I and other students needed. I would fight harder for
the sort of education I felt I deserved. I would dedicate some of my time to working
with the staff to develop syllabi that better reflected the diversity of the global
literary community. Any advice for writers who are applying to MFA programs? In
no particular order: 1) Just do it. You are smart enough. Your voice has value. You
belong in that classroom. 2) Read. Read as if your life depends on it. Read your
genre. Read outside your genre. Read it all. Read the news. Read your childhood
favorites. Read the new releases. Read the coffee shop chapbooks. Read the self-
published novels. Read the best-sellers. Read the canon. Read outside the canon.
You can’t know where to go if you don’t know where we are and where we’ve
already been. 3) The workshop is hard but necessary. Don’t let it scare you. 4)
Be bold enough to ask for what you want from your program and humble enough
to know when it is appropriate to do so. I didn’t know it then, but most programs
have a procedure in place for important requests or complaints about the syllabi,
staff, or overall community. Don’t be afraid to be the change. 5) Research where
the working writers of your genre are teaching. If they’ve published in the last
three to five years, they are probably still obsessed with the process and willing
to talk about it with you. 6) Make sure the teaching staff is balanced in critical
theory and approach to content, as well as in representation. 7) Send your best
work. Edit. Let someone else read it. Edit again. Remember that your readers
are probably receiving hundreds of applications, and you have to do your best to
stand out in the best way in the shortest amount of time. Save the slow burn for
the workshop—after you’ve been accepted. 8) Follow the directions. Nothing will
get you denied quicker than going over the requested page total or neglecting to
include important info. 9) Contact other people currently in the program to see
what they think. A lot of people are more than willing to share their experiences.
10) Do your research. You can easily find out what students who were in the
program are now doing professionally. It will give you a good idea about what to
expect, network-wise. Have fun. Enjoy the gift of a higher education and a chance
to do something as amazing as creative writing.Brian Turner is the author of the
memoir My Life as a Foreign Country
and the poetry collections Phantom
Noise and Here, Bullet.