Barbaric AWP!

I'm a little delinquent in posting this week because I've just come back from a weekend conference of writers, writing teachers, and writing students in Atlanta. The conference, run by AWP (Associated Writing Programs), meets once a year, and features panels, a book fair, and much schmoozing.

When I was a writing student, it never would have occurred to me to go to a conference like this one, but among the roughly 5000 attendees of this conference (which is probably also the number of people who regularly buy and read literary fiction in America these days) there were throngs of not only MFA grad students who aspired to be writers, but also laypeople who aspired to become MFA grad students.

Indeed, as the number of MFA programs seems to increase every year while the number of books sold decreases every year, you have to wonder, what are all these programs for? Even if every graduate of an MFA program were guaranteed a publishing contract, there simply aren't enough readers out there to buy all these books. And since the only direct career path that an MFA degree might be useful for is a job teaching creative writing to other creative writing aspirants, the question emerges (as it did many times this weekend), do all these programs exist merely to breed more teachers to work in more programs that breed more teachers to work in more programs and so on?

At a couple of programs I went to, I sensed a real sense of resentment and anger on the part of MFA students who kept asking questions along the lines of, "What am I supposed to do with this expensive, useless degree?" One answer is quite simple: write. You get an MFA degree because you want to be a writer, a career with few guarantees of anything. But the real question these students were probably asking was, "Why did your program agree to admit me and take my tuition dollars knowing that even when I got out, the chances of my succeeding at this were pretty small?" My answer is Caveat Emptor, let the buyer beware. If you decide to get an MFA to become a writer (and there are still many other ways of becoming one), you ought to do your homework in advance about what kind of programs you're applying to and if they might suit your needs. An MFA is no guarantee of publishing anything, so I wouldn't go by how many published writers a given program has churned out, but rather whether its faculty and courses seem to be the kind of thing that might help you grow as a writer and reader.

Related and not related to these matters, the theme I heard repeated most often over the weekend was: "Embrace Failure!" One panelist told an anecdote about how the company 3M requires its scientists to spend ten percent of their time on experiments that they think probably won't work. That's how the post-it note was developed (an invention I couldn't live without). The larger message of all this is that the surest way to fail at something is to do all that you can to avoid failing at it. "A bad draft is better than a good idea," another panelist said.

Here's another way of looking at failure. Compared to Shakespeare or Tolstoy, we're all failures. We can only hope to, as Beckett said, "fail better." The question isn't should I get an MFA or what should I do with it if I get a degree and not a publishing contract, but rather how can I pursue my dream as boldly as possible?