Don’t Write Alone | Toolkit

So You Want to Apply for an MFA

For our Application Week series, MFA directors and professors discuss common misconceptions, how they support students, and answer that ubiquitous question: Is getting an MFA worth it?

If you plan on applying to an MFA in creative writing this year, it’s about time that you start thinking about your applications (if you haven’t already!). Most programs have deadlines in December or January, but the sooner you begin solidifying your writing sample, reaching out to folks for recommendation letters, and deciding in which programs you’re interested, the better shape you’ll be in.

If you’re still on the fence about whether or not you’d like to apply—or even attend—an MFA, we hope this resource will be useful for you. We reached out to three program directors and three MFA professors and asked them the same questions to get a sense of how administrators think about their programs, the application process, and the worthiness of an MFA itself.

In this roundtable, we hear from Lillian-Yvonne Bertram (former UMass professor and program director), Julie Buntin (professor at University of Michigan), Lan Samantha Chang (director at University of Iowa), Jonathan Dee (director at Syracuse University), Scott Korb (director at Pacific University), and Matthew Salesses (professor at Columbia University). Full bios for each respondent can be found at the end.

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As a director for an MFA program, what is the most important way you support the students in your program?

Lan Samantha Chang: We aim to create a diverse, inclusive, and equitable community in which everyone feels welcome and valued. As far as financial support is concerned, our students all receive the same stipend. We have a pilot program for funding where, for the first year of their two-year degree, students are given a choice of whether they are interested in a non-teaching fellowship, a research/editing RA, or a teaching fellowship where they participate in a special first-year teaching program with our permanent faculty. In the second year, students teach creative writing.

As director, I know I’m setting an example as teacher, a mentor, and a writer in the world. I want the students in our program to know that it is possible to have a job, a family, and a writing life.

Scott Korb: With students in our low-residency program spread far and wide across the country and, in some cases, around the world, I’ve found I’m most useful to them as a ready and available sounding board and resource, a conversation partner about the arts and publishing and teaching, and a guide through an academic career that, given the wide-ranging lives our students live, calls for flexibility, understanding, creativity, and compassion.

As a professor for an MFA program, what do you believe is the most important part of your job?

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram: Full disclosure: I left MFA teaching at the end of 2021, but I still teach creative writing at the graduate level and will likely soon return to MFA teaching. That said, I think one of the most important parts of my job might be helping students slow down and engage deeply not only with their writing but with the kind of writing life they want to have. For some, that might mean pursuing a PhD or changing fields altogether. The MFA can be a time to think about writing, but also how writing can be used and can be instrumental in a variety of other contexts and fields. An important part of my job is getting students through a program by helping them navigate academic and institutional systems that constantly intersect with and influence the kind of writers they want to be.

Julie Buntin: Before I started teaching at the MFA level, back when I still worked at Catapult, I remember talking to Yuka Igarashi, who was then the editor-in-chief of Soft Skull, about the nature of our work as editors/writers/teachers/literary people. She joked—Yuka, if you’re reading this, forgive me if I’m paraphrasing it badly—that sometimes it felt like our job was to carry a tiny flame a very long distance in terrible weather, doing whatever we could to protect it from the various forces that might stamp it out. I think about that all the time.

More directly, I guess I’ll say that I think the most important thing I can do is create a space—in the classroom, and the MFA community at large—where writers can dive into the big, messy, sometimes scary, sometimes euphoric work of figuring out what they are here to tell.

Matthew Salesses: The most important part of my job is helping writers reach their audience—through introducing new writing, exploring different traditions, clarifying the business side, etc.

What’s a common misconception about MFAs that you wish people understood?

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram: I am not sure misconceptions about MFA professors are that different from professors in other fields! This question also depends on from where the misconceptions are coming: students or the public?

Most of the students I’ve interacted with have a pretty clear and informed idea of what an MFA professor is like, what they do, what they can or cannot do. The general public, however, might think an MFA or creative writing professor just pontificates and doesn’t do any real “work” and everything is just inspiration and musings. This isn’t true. The current generation of professors has strong pedagogical training, engages in research, conferences, and contemporary debates. Being a professor is also heavily administrative. There is a great deal of “project management” professors do when they are not in the classroom. Like most things, misconceptions are often rooted in not knowing, which is why things like this roundtable are important, as is seeking out a professor and asking what the experience is actually like!

Lan Samantha Chang: We see ourselves as a diverse creative community in which people learn to make writing the center of their lives. We are about reading and writing. Because of our flourishing alumni, some outsiders see [the University of Iowa] as a career lab where people go to get published. This is a misconception.

Jonathan Dee: That it’s all self-perpetuating, a function of who you know, what college you went to, where you interned, etc. We’re not looking for applicants with golden resumes (though we don’t disqualify them either); we’re looking for great writers who aren’t already part of the literary ecosystem in that way, writers for whom an admission to Syracuse would constitute a life-changing break.

Scott Korb: As with some professionals I know in the publishing world—editors, agents, publishers—I sometimes worry that applicants believe that in submitting their materials to us, they’ve giving over to a faceless and feelingless MFA machine. In fact, we’re a small and caring assembly of artists and administrators who make calls for and read applications, field inquiries, and talk, really talk, about each application that arrives. We are thoughtful about the writer’s goals and their possible future in our community. We consider every writer’s capacity to transform us and our capacity to guide a transformation in them.

Matthew Salesses: ​​Admissions decisions aren’t always made as a group. Find your person.

What makes your MFA program unique? What makes you excited about working for this program?

Lan Samantha Chang: I love my students. Their brilliance inspires me every day. I love our community and I love Iowa City. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the first creative writing MFA program in the country. Almost ninety years after its founding, it remains a one-of-a-kind, diverse, deeply idealistic studio program focused on writing and writers. I feel very lucky to have such a meaningful job.

Jonathan Dee: We have some great attributes that aren’t necessarily unique (fully funded, strong commitment to diversity in admissions, etc.). The one thing I’d say that is unique to Syracuse, at least compared to other places I’ve taught, is the sense of continuity, of custodial memory. I mean, almost half our full-time MFA faculty (George Saunders, Brooks Haxton, Chris Kennedy, Chanelle Benz) went through the program as students.

Scott Korb: Our faculty is second to none, diverse in all ways, and the writers they attract to our program make us who we are at Pacific. What makes me most excited—day in, day out—is the work we do to welcome writers to the program who have historically been kept out of MFAs. Through active fundraising, we’ve sought and found incredible support for BIPOC scholarships and teaching assistantships; we have created master classes each semester, which are intentional spaces for writers of color interested in pursuing the degree; and we center mentorship as the key value and cornerstone of our students’ success.

As an MFA professor, in what ways do you teach your students (or describe to your students) the practical realities of being a writer?

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram: I talk to them about time—creating the time to be a writer, to do the writing. The only thing that “just happens” in writing is not writing. That’s the only consistent fact I have encountered in all my years.

The writing just doesn’t happen if you don’t do it! I explain how difficult it is to do my own writing—after all, I spend several more hours a week with their writing, on top of all the miscellany that comes with being a professor in an academic institution. If your job is not to be a full-time writer, then it’s something else and you’re always trying to fit the writing in around the edges. I don’t prioritize writing in my own life and I am honest about that, so I am always very open with students about learning to develop a writing practice and a writing life that can be sustained with the rest of one’s life. At the same time, I stress that it’s also okay to not be writing. Sometimes you just don’t want to—you want to spend a few months doing something else, maybe something else creative or just taking on a new project, and that’s fine!

Matthew Salesses: I’ve been leaving time at the end of classes for students to ask these kinds of questions. I also found it helpful to hear my professors talk about that side of their lives, so I try to do the same for my students.

When you Google “creative writing MFA,” one of the most popular questions that pops up is “Is it worth getting an MFA in creative writing?” As someone who works for an MFA program, how would you answer this question?

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram: I feel like this is a trick question and it’s always been a trick question you can ask about roughly any field. The dynamics of whether or not something is worth it are incredibly complex. You get out of it what you put in, and if you’re eager to develop certain kinds of professional connections, an MFA is helpful but not required. The degree doesn’t guarantee you an agent or a spot on the bestseller list, but I don’t think it gets in the way of that either.

I think it’s worth it to get a full time MFA degree if you want to be a full time student who, for a handful of years, is immersed in the study of literature and the studio life of a practicing writer and/or if you want pedagogy training and are keen on teaching. It’s worth it if you need the structure and immersion. It’s not worth it if you aren’t interested in being a serious student—and I think that goes for any degree. I’ve encountered students who have eked out as much as possible from every moment of their MFA and felt it was really worth it, and I’ve also encountered students who at the end of it were honest enough to admit they should have been more committed to it because they ran out of time to make use of what was offered. If you’re not going to really commit to it, it won’t be worth the money or—especially—the time.

Julie Buntin: Worth is such a tricky word. For any writer googling this, I’d first suggest you think about what worth means to you in this context. Is it financial? Professional? Something more amorphous and emotional? How might you quantify it?

Speaking not for my students, but for myself, I will share that I am certain I got my first literary job (as a bookstore events coordinator) because of my MFA. It’s also where I met my romantic partner, my best readers, first learned about teaching, and where I connected with the agent I still have today. The question of whether or not it helped my writing is more complicated. I think in some ways my first novel was written as a kind of return to the work I was doing before MFA workshops made me worried my subject matter (adolescent girls) wasn’t serious literature. It slowed me down, confidence-wise, but sped me up professionally and aspirationally, which left me with a confusing hangover for a couple of years after graduating. I think this happens to a lot of MFA students.

In addition to (hopefully!) thoughtful craft lessons, not to mention the emotional support of like-minded peers, almost every program nowadays connects writers with publishing professionals (agents, editors, etc.) and general info about the business of writing. That’s worth it for a lot of applicants. That said, and I passionately believe this, having spent years working for an organization that creates these kinds of opportunities for writers outside of the MFA ecosystem: You do not need to get an MFA to access all of those things. Even a fully funded program has costs—years out of the workforce if you’re leaving or pausing a career, upheaval to family and friends and routines, etc. I think every writer considering this path needs to balance these costs—financial, emotional, personal, etc.—against what they hope to get out of any given program, a delicate accounting to be sure because the gains from this kind of creative engagement can’t always be easily measured. An MFA degree doesn’t come with a book deal, or an agent, or even a finished manuscript (though ideally you’ll have a sense of how one achieves these things by the end of your program). It does represent years of dedicated thinking about writing, of growth and frustration and breakthroughs. Do I sound anti-MFA? I do not mean to—I think there’s complicated, glorious magic happening in our classrooms, but the question of worth is an immensely complicated and private one, different for each student.

Lan Samantha Chang: To be honest, I don’t think it’s worth getting an MFA if you are required to take out loans. There are plenty of ways to become a writer without enrolling in an MFA program.

Jonathan Dee: It’s worth having the degree for various professional purposes (it carries weight with agents and editors, it’s a help if not an outright requirement for some teaching jobs, etc.), but getting it is a hundred times more worthwhile than having it. The two- or three-year carve-out in which to devote yourself to answering the question, How good could I be, if I gave myself to it fully? is an opportunity that will likely never come your way outside of a graduate program, in the “real” world where you’re forced to fit writing itself around other, always more urgent, commitments. The one caveat here is that I would never casually counsel someone to go into debt, if that hole is going to be hard or impossible for them to climb out of.

Scott Korb: What I’ve witnessed among those who join and then proceed through the program, among those faculty who choose to teach here, and even among the writers who attend our writer’s conference, is that the artistic community and the time and space the program requires you to carve out of your otherwise busy days and weeks and months is hugely transformative. Ask anyone who’s been through the MFA. The one-on-one mentorship, the lasting alumni support and engagement, our deeply creative and humane teaching, the sometimes overwhelming quality of our residencies—there’s no other place to find this education in writing. We know our students have taken a serious step—in time, money, in the vulnerability it takes to make great art, to say “yes” to art—and we take our responsibility to them just as seriously.

Matthew Salesses: I think people need to answer this for themselves. What makes something worth it? What doesn’t? It’s about expectations, needs, and desires, but also the writer’s current circumstances. Can they take on debt? Do they want to be mentored? What stage of their career are they in? Do they want to teach? Is there a particular writer they want to work with? And so on.

For your program, how much do letters of recommendation factor into admissions decision-making? And how related must they be to creative writing?

Lan Samantha Chang: We don’t use letters of recommendation in admissions, but they are required for a few of our University-based fellowships.

Jonathan Dee: The first thing, and far and away the most important thing, is your writing sample. If the quality and originality of the writing aren’t enough to advance you to the next level of consideration, then letters of rec don’t enter into it, and neither does any other element of your application. Past that point: No, the letters don’t absolutely need to be writing-related, in part because some applicants don’t have access to the infrastructure of creative writing departments, internships, etc. that recs like that often require.

Scott Korb: Because many of our students have often been away from traditional academic settings for years, sometimes decades, we don’t turn to letters of recommendation to signal particularly schoolish qualities, or to highlight necessarily how well our applicants have achieved in creative writing classrooms. We look to their creative manuscripts to determine the quality and potential of their work, and to personal essays to understand why a writer has decided that now is the time for them to commit in a new way to their art. We look to letters of recommendation for insight into an applicant’s readiness to join a community of writers—including our faculty—who eschew ego and are ready to commit to themselves, their art, and the grand conversation that uplifts and transforms us all.

Any additional words of wisdom or suggestions you’d offer to those who are planning to apply to MFA programs this year?

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram: Do as much research as you can into the programs you are interested in. Make phone calls, talk to people. Know why you are applying and have at least a vague idea of what you hope to accomplish or what your goals are so that you can go in as clear-headed as possible. Make sure the numbers work: being a student is the opposite of lucrative. Be realistic about your chances of success—many people apply to programs two or three times before getting into the one they want, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t get in your first time around. If you’ve only recently started writing, it might not be the best use of resources (applications cost money!) to apply only to the most competitive programs. Prepare the best writing sample you can and, in your personal statement, lay out why an MFA—and the specific MFA program—is the right choice for you at this time in your writing life.

Julie Buntin: An MFA won’t make you a writer. Writing makes you a writer. There are ways to find community, develop and practice your craft, and build professional networks without ever stepping foot in an MFA classroom. An MFA can be transformative, a truly wonderful experience, but—have I said this already—it’s not a necessary step to publishing or having a meaningful creative life. If you apply widely, submitting work you’ve thought deeply about, shared with readers, revised, writing that demonstrates your vision and some committed thinking about craft, and are not accepted, rejection might have less to do with the quality of your work than a multitude of elements outside of your control. A “yes” means your work is great, but a “no” might very well also mean your work is great, it’s just that its first reader got a phone call from their mother at exactly the moment they hit the brilliant ending. (Most first readers—usually recent MFA grads—take this job very seriously, so this is truly not a dig! Just emphasizing that there’s a frustrating element of chance that has a bearing on the process.)

There’s not as much space between a “no” and a “yes” as you think. I’ve known of roundly rejected applicants who used the same sample the following year and were offered a place in their top-choice program. Every year, after we wrap up submissions, I find that a couple stories by writers who didn’t make it into the final round still haunt me. I am rooting for them always.

Scott Korb: I’ll be highly specific here. The critical analysis piece of our application raises the most questions and uncertainty among those inquiring about our program, and one word of wisdom I’d offer would be to treat this bit of writing as an extension of the personal essay. The personal essay asks applicants to consider their place in the world as a writer and to consider carefully and critically their own work and their preparation for graduate study. We welcome applicants to write in the same voice in their critical analysis, only turning their eye to the work of another writer, bringing the same style and technique and individuality that they used when writing about themselves to some other work that’s inspired them, disappointed them, confused them, awed them. What this will reveal to our admissions board is an applicant’s ability to apply their own care and intelligence to someone else’s writing. That’s the heart of workshop and a skill needed to enter into the mentorship at the center of our program.

Matthew Salesses: Try to get specific advice about your specific situation. Do you know someone you can ask? I also think the part of applying that people forget about sometimes is their cohort. Your peers are as important or even more important to your MFA experience as the faculty and program are. Try to find out more about who you’re entering with, who will be in workshop with you.

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Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of Travesty Generator (Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry that received the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Their other poetry books include How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), Personal Science (Tupelo Press), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). Their fifth book, Negative Money, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2023. They are an Associate Professor in the departments of English, Africana Studies, and Art & Design at Northeastern University. Former director of the UMass Boston MFA program, they also direct the Chautauqua Institution Writers’ Festival.

Julie Buntin grew up in northern Michigan. Her debut novel, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, translated into ten languages, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets, including the Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Vogue, the New York Times Book Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf and the MacDowell Colony, and is an editor-at-large at Catapult. Her novel-in-progress won the 2019 Ellen Levine Fund for Writers Award. She teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan.

Lan Samantha Chang’s new novel, The Family Chao, was published by W. W. Norton in February 2022. She is the author of two previous novels, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost and Inheritance, and a story collection, Hunger. Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin. Chang is the director of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives with her husband and daughter in Iowa City, Iowa.

Jonathan Dee is the author of eight novels, including Sugar Street and The Privileges, which won the St. Francis College Literary Prize and the Prix Fitzgerald and was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. A National Magazine Award-nominated critic for Harper’s and The New Yorker, a former contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, and a former senior editor of The Paris Review, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Dee is an associate professor and the director of creative writing at Syracuse University.

Scott Korb graduated from University of Wisconsin in 1997 and relocated to New York not long after. There he earned a degree in Theology from Union Seminary and another in Literature from Columbia University. His books include The Faith Between Us, a collection of personal essays presented as a conversation with Jewish writer Peter Bebergal; Life in Year One, a popular history of first-century Palestine; and Light Without Fire, an intimate portrait of the first year at America’s first Muslim liberal arts college. He is associate editor of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, which was awarded the American Historical Association’s 2009 J. Franklin Jameson Prize, and co-editor of Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy. He joined the Pacific University MFA faculty in the summer of 2013 and was named the director of that program in May 2020.

Matthew Salesses is the author of three novels, Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, The Hundred-Year Flood, and I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying, and a forthcoming essay collection. Matthew is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University and has taught at Coe College, the Ashland MFA program, the Tin House and Kundiman summer workshops, and writing centers like Grub Street and Inprint, among others. He has edited fiction for Gulf Coast, Redivider, and The Good Men Project and has written about craft and creative writing workshops for venues like NPR’s Code Switch, The Millions, Electric Literature, and Pleiades. He was adopted from Korea and currently lives in Iowa.