It's MFA application season

Application season for would-be MFA students lines up roughly with that of American collegiate football:

The anticipation, the planning and preparation, starts right around Labor Day weekend -- often a little before. The actual games/activity begin in September and stretches though most of the fall months, culminating in the final sendings-off of applications in the end of December and first part of January. Then there are bowl games and, for collegiate football, things are done. We wait a few weeks and then everyone goes to a Superbowl party even if they're not big on pro football because, hey, it's the only football there is for a long time, and everyone's making a big hype over it so why not?

Once the Superbowl is over, however, MFA applicants are still waiting, waiting, growing more nervous and neurotic by the day. They spend their time on the MFAblog or the Poets & Writers forums checking to see if anyone is reporting a rejection or acceptance to the schools they applied to. It is a dark few months.

Then, late-February through mid-April, the response letters and emails slowly trickle in. Rejection. Acceptance. Rejection. Rejection. Acceptance without funding. Rejection. Waitlist. Acceptance.

You jump for joy. You pout. You call your mother, wife, girlfriend, college roommate. You make plans. You worry your lip. You talk to other people. You worry some more. You get frustrated. Your buddy buys you a celebratory beer. You develop a sore from worrying your lip so damn much every day. Then you get to take a deep breath and watch the Stanley Cup finals because this application season has extended beyond the confines of a single sports season (or a single metaphor), but at least it's over ... unless you're reapplying.

In which case, you plan all summer for the start of next season.

Thankfully, for most people, this cycle does not happen more than once or twice in their life.

This week on Speak Coffee to Me, we'll get back into the MFA talk and particularly the application talk because it's that time of year and hey, I really have nothing to say about football that you can't hear on Sports Center.

Googling the Statement of Purpose

I have recently been informed by a fellow MFA candidate that when you google "statement of purpose, mfa" or "sample statement of purpose, creative writing" you get ME.

I was shocked.

This might mean that the traffic to my Statement of Purpose posts is higher or that they've been linked back a lot. Or, in all likelihood, it means that there are very few samples of statement of purpose on the web for creative writing programs. Not sure why that is. A year after I applied and was admitted I posted my sample online. It's still up there if you want to see it. It's so personal that I doubt anyone would want to steal it outright and the pattern/tips I followed are still available online courtesy of Vince Gotera.

I'll leave it to Vince to get into the particulars, no need to repeat them here, but essentially a statement of purpose in creative writing is formatted like an essay (not a letter) and it states why you want to intensively study writing. And if you know what specifically you hope to do during your tenure as a student -- more often this applies to students who are seeking Ph.D.s in writing or who are returning to grad school after a long time in the work force -- you'll want to state your specific goals you hope to achieve as a student. I cannot repeat enough how unimportant your SoP is compared to your writing sample. Worry about your writing sample first, your SoP second.

My colleague and classmate who told me that my blog appeared at the top of the search engine list is gunning for a spot in a Ph.D. program -- which I'm sure she'll get. I doubt she found my example as helpful as someone who is applying to a masters program would but I wish her well on her SoP writing. And I direct all Ph.D. applicants to take a look at M. Ramirez Talusan's posted statement of purpose which is much more academic than mine.

Why do so few people post their statements of purpose? I have no idea. It's not like it is a text that you will ever use again. No one publishes their SoP for money or fame. If you're afraid that someone will rip off your SoP then clearly it's not personalized enough to your circumstances and interests; nor is is firmly rooted in your writing style. One can't "buy" or "rip off" another's SoP. Consider this: you are putting a SoP in front of career professors; they know when a student's writing style or ability suddenly shifts. And students with red flags don't get admitted. So post your damn SoP and help some clueless but diligent people out.

MFA Statement of Purpose

I have never seen as much freaking out on MFA discussion boards (or on the MFAblog) prior to the first round of acceptance letters being sent out as I see about the Personal Statement or Statement of Purpose (SoP).

It is not the most important piece of the application -- that would be the writing sample -- but it has to be the most stressful for applicants. My theory is that it's difficult because it's too open ended. We know what to do for the writing sample: we write our own way. We know what to do for recommendation letters: we get someone to recommend. But the SoP needs to be about the applicant, and the university, as well as about the program and why s/he is better than all the rest. It needs to boast and suck up without either boasting or sucking up. And moreover, it needs to be short.

Do I have a magic formual? Nope. No one does. Probably because it's not as important as your writing sample.

The MFAblog's best advice is

a statement of purpose is not a resume in narrative form; it is a plan that outlines the relationship between the candidate's past, present, and future.

(read full article here)

Some things to consider about this SoP: I had recently quit law school and wanted to address that fact. Namely I wanted to say that I wasn't going to be a grad school hopper or a flake, and that I had truely learned my lesson, so I used my SoP to handle that. Some applicants use their SoP to address their research interests or what form or vein they would like to work in. My interests could be summed up simply as "writing contemporary fiction" and being "well read" in as many time periods and literary styles as possible so I didn't go into depth on that.

The first story I ever wrote was “Alfred the Alligator with Stripes.” I was seven. “Alfred” had hand drawn illustrations and an illustrious print run of one. My mother was terribly proud of me. She bound the book in a scrap of green and white wallpaper to make it a “real” paperback and showed it off to everyone. I couldn’t understand why she was so excited. It was just a story; I was making them up all the time. The real challenge was sitting still long enough to write them. By the time my attention span caught up to my creativity I had another monster to battle: my own practicality.

When I went in to meet with my Intro to Creative Writing professor for the first time as a college sophomore she asked me what I was planning to major in. Computer science, I told her. She was disappointed I was not going to major in writing and told me that I should consider it given my current work. I told her it did not seem like a practical major. She laughed and asked me what major from a liberal arts school was practical. I was back a week later with the paperwork for her to sign to become my advisor for my chosen major of English writing.

When senior year rolled around, students from my seminar asked me what I was going to do when I graduated. I told them law school. Really? They all asked. You don’t want to be a writer? I told them glibly that I also wanted to eat. To be honest, it was not a desire to avoid being a starving artist as much as it was the thought that becoming a lawyer would make others take me, my work, and my opinions seriously. However, the more I discovered about lawyers the less I could not envision myself being one. I could not see myself solving the mundane problems of the everyday attorney by wading through stacks of old case opinions written in archaic language. Archaic not because they were ancient, but because judges can be as stuffy and long winded as they like. No one is there to push judges to write something that a reader could relate to or, perhaps, enjoy.

I began talking to a friend who was then working on her senior project in fiction. I began to reminisce about how much fun that semester had been for me and how much time I had spent on my project, a novella. None of the writing I had completed for my seminar project had felt like work. Neither had the readings, rewrites or critiques of classmates’ projects. They were what I got to do in stolen moments, things that I chose to do to push off “homework” until later. I smiled at the memory. I was about to tell her to enjoy every moment of the process, particularly workshop, when she cut through my reverie to state that it was the hardest thing she had ever worked on and could barely make herself write each week. I tried to rationalize the discrepancy in our experiences. Maybe I had just been lucky to have a great professor or an intriguing group of students. They had respected my work and given my suggestions weight. Perhaps they had caused me to disproportionately enjoy the process. But the more I considered it, the more I realized my senior workshop was not an anomaly. Time and again, with different instructors and different groups of students, I had thrived in the workshop environment. I had been taken seriously, both for my own writing and for the feedback I had given others. I realized that the respect I had been hoping to find by becoming an attorney was what I had left behind in my creative endeavors. I realized that I wanted to work with words for the rest of my life. I wanted to teach about words, write about words, read, edit, and write about them again. There is a Confucius saying: choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. In order to lay the foundation for such a life I have decided to pursue graduate education in creative writing.

I understand that I first need to develop my craft. It is part of the problem I ran into when I was seven. I had great stories floating around in my head but not yet the tools to put them down on paper with art or grace. I have come a long way since seven. In addition to my ever expanding attention span, I have earned a B.A. in English writing from DePauw University, completed a novella, won an honorable mention in a local poetry competition and engaged in writing workshops outside of my degree program. One of the most valuable experiences I have had in the past year was attending the Kenyon Review writer’s workshop. At Kenyon I met a group of adults from all walks of life who took writing seriously, and took me seriously for doing what I did. To them writing was not playing or dabbling, it was weighty work. It was the first time I had met such a group of people outside of the writing faculty at my university. By the time I gave my reading to the assembled group, a hundred people with literary backgrounds, I was so enthused that I could not have been prouder or happier, not even if my mother had bound the story up in a scrap of wallpaper.

This essay (or some form of it: shortened, more specific, or split up depending on specific school requirments) was submitted with six applications -- a range of schools. Please note that if you don't apply to a range of schools you had better apply to a great many schools. I was accepted at three out of the six. Five were MFA programs and the sixth was a MA to PhD in creative writing program. Three fully funded and accepted less than 6% of their applicants the year I applied, Wisconsin-Madison, Michigan, Notre Dame. I was in the other 94%.

Ideally, what any applicant reading this will take away is to stop worrying about his or her SoP and spend that energy on his or her writing sample. However, I know that probably won't happen.

2010 Update: I'm now in the final year of my MFA program and because someone asked me for an MFA Progress Update I started writing a series of posts about it including my thoughts from Year Zero of the process (decision and application), Year One (arrival), Year Two (doldrums), Year Two-point-five (figuring out who you are as a writer) and Year Three (or at least the beginning of year three). If you're on this page with my MFA SoP sample, then these posts will probably be of interest to you as well.


2011 Update: I have completed my MFA! I'm also running a series of posts this fall on MFA application season, Reasons to get an MFA, Low-residency MFA programs, How to find an MFA program, and Why you should pay no attention to MFA rankings. To see all at once, follow the tag MFA or MFA application.

The Great MFA Debate

It's been raging for years. Maybe raging is too strong a word. More like people have been muttering and sputtering about it for years. One camp pushing for the academic legitimacy of a writing degree and another camp tossing around phrases like might as well spend two years and sixty thousand dollars on a cabin in the woods if you want to write.

Poets&Writers Magazine runs their Nov./Dec. with this headline every year. They print pretty much the same thing every year but lord only knows how many copies they sell to basically say do it if you want to teach. And then some midpoint people who say do it if you can do it without going into debt. And then they print one grumpy guy defending his grumpiness as a state of mind not affected by all students to strive for personal strength instead of group acceptance.

Whatever.

What I find more ludicrous (yes there is something even more pointless when discussion MFA programs) are the attempts at ranking schools. Since there are no numbers to crunch here the best any one can do is peer evaluation. So this list from USBC is of how good people think programs are. They are subjectively ranking programs they haven't attended or worked at and programs they might not know anyone at. Yes, they might have attended one program and teach at one other but the rest of the programs they're ranking...?

Then there was this interesting blog entry from Paper Cuts on the NYTimes site, stating that he was looking for "Cinderella Schools," writers out of one program making more money and fame than Iowa graduates. And, in the end, he couldn't get enough data to figure out anything.

Interesting experiment though. I always assumed that MFA graduates never really achieved any sort of monetary success. They taught. They published small. But unless they became the next Ron Carlson, usually the types of writing that MFA programs champion isn't popular fiction (read: limited, if any, commercial value.)

Despite this, there's all sorts of pressure, desperation and struggling, along with sleepless questing through internet forums to get whatever information possible to make a better application to MFA programs. To which end I'll publish my Statement of Purpose here in the next couple days.

I know why I wanted to get an MFA (I want to teach) but the writing world seems to just keep tearing at the subject of whether MFAs are good for writing. I've known people to say they promote sameness. That they focus on short stories and no one wants short stories. Then the next person says that MFAs are the last defense of the short story (this is the same person that claims big publishers are trying to eradicate the short story form from the literary landscape). Then there are published writers lamenting the fact that they'll have to get an MFA if they want to go any further (she told me she needs "the connections that come with an MFA"). Commercial writers are often vehemently opposed to the thought of more schooling. Probably because academic programs try to beat the genre writing out of a person if they find it lurking there. Then again have you noticed how many commercial writers used to be lawyers? That alone tells you two things: 1) education itself isn't a bad thing and 2) most people are inherently unhappy being lawyers.

MFA Statement of Purpose

I've been taking swings at my statement of purpose for a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing for a few weeks now. Finally, in the last week of November, I'm getting serious about it. Why now? Because I promised myself I'd have all these technical pieces finished by Dec. 1 (one month before my earliest deadline). So it's crunch time.

Helpful resources I've found in my search:

"How to Write a Great Statement of Purpose," Vince Gotera
Practical how-to advice for a MFA statement of purpose:
http://www.uni.edu/~gotera/gradapp/stmtpurpose.htm

"A Purposeless Statement?" Peter Derby
A little more theoretical advice, but necessary to make you step back and realize there is no magic words that can unlock your MFA:
http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2006/12/2006121301c/careers.html

As always the MFA Blog has some good tips:
http://creative-writing-mfa-handbook.blogspot.com/2007/08/tips-on-statement-of-purpose.html

And if you're interested, M. Ramirez Talusan from the MFA Blog, has posted her old statement of purpose online:
http://mramireztalusan.blogspot.com/2007/11/mfa-statement-of-purpose.html

Their advice in summary? Don't bad mouth people, write like a professional not an artist for the essay, tell a captivating story or tell about your writing interest if it is more captivating than you are. Oh and say specifically why the hell you're crazy enough to go to get an art degree in writing.