December 13, 2023
I Have an M.A already. Here’s why I’m still doing an M.F.A.
by Karan Kapoor
A breakdown of why the MFA was a good choice for me despite graduating from a top Masters program
First off, welcome to the ONLY POEMS Substack. We’re super glad you’re here and we can’t wait to bring you some amazing stuff over the next few weeks and beyond. It’s going to be a poetic 2024, dear OP community! Usually you’ll be hearing from Shannan and Justine, as well as other cool guests we invite to write and engage with here, but today I thought I’d open up this platform with some personal sharing. As Ana, my daughter, is learning these days, “sharing is caring.”
Maybe you’re thinking about getting an MFA and are wondering if it’s at all worth the hype. And wait, is there actually hype? Or you already have a graduate degree like me and might feel there is no point to the MFA even if some programs catch your attention. Or perhaps you’re done and dusted with the MFA experience and are now embarking on the journey of making it as a real poet in the world (hint: you already are a real poet in the world!). In any case, I’ll share here about my personal choice to do an MFA despite having an MA in Literary Art Creative Writing.
I don’t much like the term “career poet”. Perhaps I’m money-shy or something. I grew up in a house where we weren’t supposed to openly discuss how much anyone makes or even plans to make. But we were all supposed to have huge ambitions, of course. I was supposed to be a doctor or an engineer (this is the mantra of most Indian parents). And what am I now? A POET. Ugh! I’ll tell you a secret:
at 18, I cleared one of the main exams that are required to get into the prestigious IIT program in Delhi. To my eagerly awaiting family, I took home a sullen face and revealed that I failed. Why? Because I knew I could never actually study technology in any way, shape or form. I was meant to study writing. I was meant to read literature. And yes, I felt I’d be able to make enough money by doing so. At least to live a comfortable, middle class life. I was happy with my mid-level poetic ambitions.
I was mainly reading poetry books from the British Council Library at the time. I’d scan page after page of books I loved, photocopy my favorite poems and mark them up. The one thing I kept noticing was that a lot of those poets had something called an MFA from big name universities and colleges. So it began to seem like that was the way to actually, you know, be a real poet. Well, I googled MFAs in India and came up with a beautiful nothing. Yeah. Not one Master of Fine Arts program in all of India, full of all kinds of artists bustling and struggling and aching and breaking. But there was a similar program. Just one. The Master of Arts in Literary Art Creative Writing at Ambedkar University in New Delhi where I lived! Perfect, I thought. The deadline was in a week. NOT perfect.
I scrambled to get together my application materials and submitted everything with literally hours to spare. When I found out about my acceptance, I had also just learned of my grandmother’s death. It was a deeply difficult time, but as I navigated the grief of losing her, some of my best work was generated. It was during this time that I wrote “Dida,” a poetry collection centered around my grandmother. Funny how death can inspire you to live.
The program itself was wonderful, for the most part (it was during the pandemic). I had some great professors and I do think that this is one of the biggest reasons any program succeeds. People learn from people and we naturally like to be taught within a community. Those two years were marked with a lot of personal growth as well as a whole shit ton of personal problems because of home life.
Perhaps the most often quoted Virginia Woolf line ever is: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.” This became overwhelmingly obvious to me. If I wanted to be a “real poet in the world”, I had to actually get out and live in the world. Unfortunately, this is just not the norm in India for most young people living in joint families. Let alone joint families with complex intergenerational trauma.
So, I planned an escape. After my graduation, I’d apply to a fully funded MFA program in the United States and fly away to study poetry for free! Foolproof stuff, really.
In a few days, Shannan will be publishing a piece with Sub Club where she delves a little deeper into my MFA application journey (of which she was a huge part). For here though, I want to break down the reasons why I chose the MFA despite having an MA. After the initial alarming need to get out of my home, many more solid reasons have emerged. And now, having just finished my first semester at Virginia Tech’s awesome MFA program, I can actually elaborate on those reasons further.
1. PLACE
An MFA program is usually well thought out in terms of place (both location wise and the immediate space where it takes place). Because MFA programs are essentially niche pockets of super engaged writers and teachers, there is usually more attention to detail when it comes to figuring out how and where classes are set up, what amenities the small student group will have easy access to. As a bonus, a lot of the faculty and senior students engage with the community around the university or college and beyond to create more exciting platforms and avenues for sharing work.
2. MONEY
Okay, perhaps this is a double-edged sword. Some MFA programs give a usually-fair stipend (which generally goes along with teaching positions), while others can cost a lot. I think which one you choose to go to depends on many factors, and just this point alone doesn’t make any specific program better or worse. For me, though, the stipend was a huge plus. My MA had no such stipend, nor the responsibility of teaching. With the MFA package, I was able to get an almost-livable wage for three years alongside learning to teach students.
3. PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
The teaching experience you get while doing an MFA is truly invaluable. Sure, maybe not everyone wants to follow the old-school style of having a professor day-job and then writing on the side. But this teaching experience isn’t just beneficial for landing real life teaching jobs (though this is certainly true). I firmly believe that teaching others is one of the best ways to learn. Plus, this is a good way to stay engaged with that “real life” thing I was mentioning. As poets, we can have a tendency to do a lot of navel-gazing, spiraling into our own created worlds. Being among young and excited people who feel you can teach them something can help us come back down to earth.
4. COMMUNITY
I will never use nor endorse the term “networking” because it fucking sucks and takes the humanity out of connection. Community, however, is invaluable. This is what we’re all looking for. You know that famous saying “blood runs thicker than water”? Yeah, it’s a mis-quote. The full quote reads: the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb, and it means that the families and communities we choose to create in our lives are deeper and more powerful than the ones we are born into. Everyone says college is a time to make the friends of your life. Now, I’m an ultra introvert and this isn’t really the case for me. But community, I think, is different than just drinking friends and card games (though no shade on those either). Community is about having other crazy people like you around who can just sit for hours and read poems together. At least it is for me.
5. CAREER
Yes, yes, not a career poet but come on, we all need to eat and live, right? The most technically important distinction between an MA and an MFA is that the latter is a terminal degree. This means that most places that want to hire you as a professor will look for either a PhD or an MFA (if you’re in the creative field). An MA alone will generally not land you a “real life professorial job.”
Now, none of this is the gospel set in stone, and it is true without a doubt that one does not need an MFA to be a writer. It is also true that the MFA landscape is rapidly changing. There are people who believe the MFA is on its way out, while others feel that things will continue to evolve and grow in MFA programs around the world to meet the changing needs and demands of the literary world. Take for example the MFA at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington where Justine is a candidate — seeing the need for students to develop skills in the publishing world, they now offer a simultaneous post baccalaureate certificate in publishing. We’ll be exploring all these outlooks and more in this substack – stay tuned!
Also, be sure to check out Shannan’s Lit Mag News article today on why ONLY POEMS isn’t a nonprofit and no longer intends to be one.
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