I’m totally in awe of Stephen. An M.A., M.F.A and now pursuing a creative writing PhD! AND he’s a novelist with his debut novel, Bomb City coming out with Hub City Press later this year. With all of this going on, I’m super grateful he was able to answer, in abundant detail, all these juicy questions.

Shannan:

You have an MFA already from the University of Mississippi and now you’re doing a creative writing PhD at Florida State University. I’d like to first ask you about the MFA — Why did you choose your MFA program?

Stephen:

I was finishing an MA in English at Clemson when I was applying to programs, and I was working with two authors there, Nic Brown and Keith Lee Morris, who helped me prepare the stories for my applications. Both Nic and Keith had high opinions of the program at Mississippi and of Oxford—the college town, which has a reputation as a literary hotspot and attracts a regular stream of writers, artists, and agents. 

We thought Mississippi would be a good fit for my fiction because the stories I was writing then were modeled in the lineage of what you might call Southern or Appalachian literature, similar to Tom Franklin’s Poachers or Chris Offutt’s Country Dark—both are faculty at Mississippi. As it turned out, I don’t think either Tommy or Chris were on the reading committee that year, and so didn’t see my stories, but I was able to take workshops with them both and even have them on my thesis committee. 

As an applicant, I appreciated the way Mississippi operated. First, you send a statement of purpose and writing sample (no fees). If your application progresses to the second round, then you send in the transcripts and apply to the graduate school, basically all the hoopla. Compared to other programs I was applying to, who wanted all my paperwork upfront and fifty or a hundred bucks to read my application, Mississippi’s system seemed fair and writer-friendly. 

As for why I chose Mississippi after the dust settled: they were a three-year program, their funding package was on the high end of what I was being offered, I felt I had established foundations for relationships with faculty, their cohort size was very small—just four fiction writers, they were bringing in Garth Greenwell as visiting faculty, and the program director—Derrick Harriell at the time—made me feel welcome; he made me feel like there were people in Oxford who were excited about the things I was writing. As a young writer, this was really empowering and affirming.

Shannan:

When you were applying to MFAs, how many programs did you apply to and did you have any sort of an application strategy?

Stephen:

I applied to around twelve programs. It was an expensive, sweaty blur of paperwork. As for strategy, I tried to find programs with faculty I knew or who wrote in areas that were interesting to me, but the truth is that my knowledge of the field was limited. I had been writing on my own for years and not reading much contemporary fiction.

To find programs, I relied on my mentors—Nic and Keith—and my own research. So often, I would ask other writers if so-and-so program was “good” or not. Most writers replied that the only “bad” program was one you went into debt over. With few exceptions, I only applied to programs with the potential for full funding. I knew the odds were long, but I wanted to give myself as many chances as I could afford. 

I wonder what would happen to the small press and lit mag scene if there weren’t so many programs. Would they become more essential as community rally points? 

Shannan:

How did you choose your advisory/mentor? Did that choice change over time. If so, why?

Stephen:

I came to Mississippi with the idea that I wanted to work with Tom Franklin, and he turned out to be as talented, down-to-earth, and kind as everyone said. There were many writers I would have been happy to work with on faculty, and many I did work with outside of my thesis project, but Tommy’s approachability, the seriousness that he considered my work with, and my admiration for his literary citizenship set him apart. 

Shannan:

What was the highlight of the program? Something you remember the most, or that left the greatest impact on you. 

Stephen:

Mississippi has a reading series—Broken English—for their MFAs. If I remember correctly, first-year students read in the fall and third-year’s in the spring, with second-year’s hosting. This was one of the first times I had read my work (and you could tell because I read an entire short story, start to finish, with an embellished accent). 

Broken English brought everyone together. There was a ton of enthusiasm for the readings and support from the department and faculty in the way of attendance and promotional materials.

I’ve since found that taking part in readings and in-conversation events is a big part of being a writer and promoting your work. By making their reading series so central to the program—giving each cohort a role to play—Mississippi builds presentation skills and facilitates relationships between writers that might not be in workshop together. Outside of the writing you’ll do in a program, these relationships are one of the key takeaways, so opportunities to come together around fresh work—to meet fellow writers in a space of exhibition and vulnerability—are crucial. 

The highlights-of-the-highlights were the informal readings—salon style—at people’s homes or around fire pits. Those were formative times. It was common for folks to read a poem they admired (not their own work) and something new that they had written. Some writers had published books, others hadn’t published anything, but the feeling at those events—for me—was a team-feeling. Collective exuberance. Not competitive or comparative. Of course, I attended most of these during my first and second year, before the isolation of the 2020 lockdowns and my thesis project. I had big stars in my eyes. 

One more thing I should call attention to is UM’s relationship with The Longleaf Writers Conference in Seaside, Florida. The creative director is Matt Bondurant, who is also the current program director for Mississippi’s MFA. Once a year, there is a scholarship contest for the conference, exclusive to program writers. This gives you the opportunity to not only join a conference (a great experience) but join as a “scholar,” meaning your room and tuition is paid. In addition to participating in a workshop with a visiting author and attending readings and craft talks, you’ll give a reading of your own. This is a great way to participate in a conference for the first time, and Seaside—as you might guess—is a beautiful beach town. 

If your application is rejected (and mine was at many places), I think that can be a false-indicator of failure (guard your heart!),

Shannan:

Tell us about how you feel about the health of the MFA overall. Do you think it’s on its way out? Do you think it’s growing, gaining more popularity? Is it redundant? Is it indispensable? Why? Why not?

Stephen:

I hope it’s not on the way out. I don’t have access to any figures but, here in Tallahassee, things seem to be keeping on. For me, taking on an MFA felt like a risk, an adventure, a bet on myself. 

I think writers will continue to seek out the places where other writers are, where magazines are, where readings are, where there is creative license and fellowship. In our “program era,” finding those things at a university is competitive but possible. Expression is indispensable—and indomitable? It is certainly indispensable to give people the opportunity to focus on their work, and the MFA does that. Bless it. 

I also think of my writer friends who have chosen not to pursue MFAs. They find writing communities of their own. Break into one of those circles if you can, program writers! Those folks maybe don’t give a rip if MFAs live or die—they find their own niches. Writers gonna write. 

I wonder what would happen to the small press and lit mag scene if there weren’t so many programs. Would they become more essential as community rally points? 

Shannan:

How did you manage money during your MFA? What about immediately afterwards? Was there support?

Stephen:

Because I found a gem of an (ancient, cut-rate, Craigslist) apartment, because of the comparatively generous funding of the program, and because I had a nice summer job, I was able to avoid major money-stress during my time in Oxford. 

I was lucky to receive a fellowship as part of my acceptance package—Mississippi offers several. Mine wasn’t the top fellowship, which gave extra money and waived teaching duties, but it was very helpful. While it’s a lot of people’s dream to just write and not teach, I was glad for the experience and the investment in the campus. I’m not sure I would have been as successful without the structure and demands of teaching.

As a graduate student, things can feel a little mercenary. You’re there for your specific program. You might feel a little cloistered with your fellow specialists and separated from campus life—certainly more separated than the undergraduates.

Teaching kept me sharp, it required me to be more intentional about my writing time, and it invested me more in the campus—I had a reason to be there besides my own writing projects, which was helpful when those projects lagged or I felt isolated. Aside from those benefits, if you want to go into teaching at the university level, every course you teach is a valuable piece of experience. 

OK, back to managing money: I did what you might expect. I was frugal. I cooked a lot of my own meals. I worked a part time job in town for a while (Insomnia Cookies), though folks seemed to make much more in serving or bartending jobs. Others worked as ghost writers, technical writers, tutors, or other industry-adjacent jobs.

My ace-in-the-hole continues to be my summer job. I teach writing and kayaking at a sleep-away arts camp in New England—a job I’ve come back to since my MA at Clemson (this will be my seventh summer). This provides valuable supplemental income, lets me experiment in my teaching practice, and gives me an opportunity for travel. Camp work isn’t for everyone (I had taught primary and secondary school before becoming a graduate student), but it’s been a great gig for me. 

One thing I’ll say about Mississippi is that there were regular, well-advertised, and well-funded contests. Aside from the yearly department prize in fiction and poetry, which paid out around $500, there was a fantastic annual prize—then called “Elvis Meets Einstein”—that called for short, comedic poems. The winner read their poem on the local radio station and the prizes were substantial, sometimes as much as $3,000 for first place. That’s for one poem. 

The really wonderful thing about these sorts of department and program-exclusive prizes is that the competition is significantly reduced when compared to literary magazine and press prizes. While I was there, UM generally brought in four writers per genre, per year, so I was competing with a maximum of eleven other fiction writers for the department’s prose prize and around twenty-three writers (any MFA was eligible) for the radio prize. And that’s if everyone enters the context. Those are the best odds you’re likely to find. 

There were also paid opportunities to teach short workshops (often single-day seminars) in summer programs designed for young writers in the area. I applied to everything, every year I was eligible, and it helped.

Shannan:

Okay, serious question: how much writing did you actually get done during the program?

Stephen:

Another force that drove my writing was the magazine game. I was obsessed with submitting my work. That wasn’t the case for everyone in my program, and many people wrote a ton and didn’t submit, but I enjoyed the feeling of having work in the slush pile.

A good bit. I entered the program with a handful of stories and left with a short story collection, a novel manuscript, and the foundation for a book of poetry. 

My MFA years were a new high-point for my investment in the field. If your application is rejected (and mine was at many places), I think that can be a false-indicator of failure (guard your heart!), but on the flip-side I had been big-time affirmed by the selection process. I had definitively altered my life away from what I saw as more “conventional” tracks—I come from working class folks. No one in my family writes or studies art—and I was flat-out stoked to write poems and short stories. It felt like I had taken a fateful and exciting plunge. 

I wanted—still want—a teaching position, and I was convinced that having a book was essential to that goal. 

Another force that drove my writing was the magazine game. I was obsessed with submitting my work. That wasn’t the case for everyone in my program, and many people wrote a ton and didn’t submit, but I enjoyed the feeling of having work in the slush pile. When work was accepted, it provided a swell of validation, and when work was rejected, well, that’s just how it goes. 

Writing to submit led to reading more contemporary and more specialized writing. I began to construct my own idea of what the field was and who was in it. I felt like I was, in a small way, sometimes, contributing to a scene. That was exciting, and it drove me to write more. 

Shannan:

Design your ideal creative writing program. Imagine you have all the resources and support in the world. What will this look like?

Stephen:

That’s a fun one. Here’s my ideal: 

City or Town: A small town with fewer distractions worked for me, but it often requires access to transportation. In my ideal program, we’re in the sticks, but there are program owned vehicles that you can “check-out” or some such. Is that a thing anywhere?

Program duration: Three years. In theory, this gives you two full years to acclimate and write before you need to start planning your next move. It also allows enough time to accommodate lots of coursework and a year of dedicated thesis time. 

Curriculum:

20% historical works, whatever that means for your literary tradition of choice.

20% contemporary works, whether through working with the campus lit mag, coursework, or otherwise engaging with what’s being written now.

20% craft fundamentals, courses dedicated to things like scansion, grammar, and specialized industry forms, like book reviews and query letters.

20% community involvement or service, workshop services or readings set in community groups, schools, prisons, retirement communities, etc.

20% classic workshop.

Funding: Full funding with teaching responsibilities. Stipend is scaled to living expenses in the area and regularly adjusted for inflation. 

Teaching: Teach a little composition, sure, but let’s have the option to teach a course within our specialization in the second or third year. 

Cohort Size: Small. 4-5 writers per genre. This allows you to get to know everyone’s work. In my experience, a small group tends to communicate and collaborate more. Community events become more important, and if someone is missing, you feel it. 

Benefits: They exist. And not just access to the university clinic, but coverage for eyes and teeth, too. (As a grad student who needed a root canal last year, this is becoming a dreamy wish list.)

Visiting Writers and Professors: Yearly appointments, rotating between genres. This was so important to my experience at Mississippi. It energized the program to have a new writer come in. 

Reading Series: There should be a regular series dedicated to MFA writers cutting their teeth, and another for big wigs, authors touring books, and alum. The more these can be open to the local community, the better. (FSU combines these ideas into one series—The Jerome Stern Reading Series—and that’s also great. It’s a rush to share the stage with living legends. It also fast-tracks your on-site training as a reader.)

Genre Fluid Courses: Let the poets join the fiction workshops and so on. 

Find writers in contemporary lit mags that excite you and email them (or their editors) to voice your appreciation. This can be a great way to make contacts and friends in the writing world, which is famously small.

Shannan:

What made you want to do a PhD in Creative Writing? How does it differ from the MFA?

Stephen:

I felt like I needed the PhD to be competitive for a tenure track job teaching fiction or poetry. I also wanted to dedicate more time to writing without the pressures of a full-time job, so I tried for the PhD. 

How does it differ? The coursework is substantial, especially if you’re coming from a studio MFA without a heavy literature coursework component. I believe that most of the people in the PhD program at FSU have an MFA already. By that stage in my academic career, I had undergone a shift in my mentality and goals. 

Whereas I arrived at my MFA with not much written and spent most of my time working on short stories and poems, when I arrived in Tallahassee, I was editing a story collection and trying to sell (and also edit) a novel. The scale of my projects had shifted from short form to long form, and it was, certainly at first, hard to shift back into the flexible, spurious, experimental mode of thinking that short fiction and poetry workshops reward. I was used to being entrenched in my big projects. I was dreaming of more big projects. 

Frankly, after working on my thesis novel in general isolation during the lockdown in Mississippi, it was a big social adjustment. In my case, the PhD program is much, much larger than my MFA. The upshot is that there are lots of crazy-talented and driven people to meet, be inspired by, and learn from, but it can be a little overwhelming. 

One positive difference between the experiences is the priority you’re given in terms of teaching courses in the major—fiction and poetry technique, film, specific genres, and the like. This is great for PhDs, but if you’re considering an MFA at a school that also has a creative writing PhD, I would look into your ability to teach courses within your specialty. In FSU’s case, most of these courses go to the PhD students. 

Shannan:

Was the application process for the PhD different than for the MFA? What was involved? What made you pick the program?

Stephen:

Many of the application materials were the same, only they accounted for and explained how I had spent the MFA years. There was an emphasis on my teaching philosophy and future publishing and research goals that was absent from my MFA materials. 

I chose FSU because it was the best fit for my life. I’ve already spoken to the excellent teaching opportunities. Elsewise, the funding is relatively generous. The timeline is flexible—though some finish the degree as early as their fourth year, others stay for as long as six (though securing funding becomes competitive after four years).

The Southeast Review is here, and I love to work with magazines. Tallahassee is relatively close to my family in Georgia and the Carolinas. It is also close to Cumberland Island, a barrier island that is a focal point in my writing and research. 

And, of course, I chose FSU because they chose me. There are fewer PhD programs than MFAs. The competition is stiff. I applied to around six programs and was accepted at one. I’m grateful to be here, and that warms me to a place. 

Shannan:

Tell us about something exciting happening in your writing journey or career right now!

Stephen:

My first novel, Bomb Island (Hub City Press), is releasing on May 7th of this year, and I am over the moon. It’s a coming-of-age romance/thriller set on an island. It has a beautiful jungle cat on the cover, crawling over a field of perfect blueberry blue. It features a hand-drawn map (made by my partner), like it’s freaking Lord of the Rings or some such. Hub City is my dream press, and I am so excited to work with them.

Shannan:

Any advice for MFA and PhD hopefuls and/or recent grads?

Stephen:

Find writers in contemporary lit mags that excite you and email them (or their editors) to voice your appreciation. This can be a great way to make contacts and friends in the writing world, which is famously small.

Another spin on this is to learn how to write book reviews, then email your favorite presses and ask to review their new releases. This is a slick way to make friends, read the latest, land publications in tough magazines, and get free books.

Basically, get yourself out there—wherever the good stuff is. That’s where you’ll meet the people and pieces that will define the literary scene for you. 

Shannan:

You mentioned your PhD has way more people than the MFA. That's quite cool to hear. I know a lot of writers who don't even know there is a way to get a PhD in Creative Writing. I was one of those writers! Would you say a PhD post MFA is strictly best for those who want to definitively go down the path of research or teaching? Is research an element of a creative writing PhD as it would be for another one?

Stephen:

For writers who want to teach, I would recommend the PhD as it gives you more time to work on your teaching practice, develop a pedagogical philosophy, grow your CV, and make contacts. It’s the terminal degree on top of the terminal (MFA) degree. MFA holders do find teaching jobs without PhDs, especially if the applicant is comfortable taking non-tenure track jobs as an instructor, lecturer, or adjunct faculty. These are typically 9-month appointments with the possibility of renewal. 

For folks considering the PhD who don’t want to teach (or aren’t sure), there are still reasons to join a program. Most of these reasons are similar to why someone would pursue an MFA: access to faculty writers that you admire; getting paid a little to teach, take coursework, and write; time (more time than an MFA) and space to focus on your work. You will write a dissertation, so you’ll likely come out of a PhD program with a complete manuscript of some kind (pretty sweet). Maybe you just love taking coursework and being part of an academic community—I do!

As for research, creative writing PhDs are building towards a creative dissertation—in my case, this will likely be a novel. So for me that’s looked like visiting the place my book will be set (Cumberland Island), reading a lot of non-fiction about the history of the place and what lives there, and interviewing people.

Aside from this, my research entails reading contemporary fiction and poetry, creating a working knowledge of the field and trying to find my own niche within it.

I imagine the research of humanities PhDs working in other fields may be similar, though building towards a book-length study or collection of criticism or essays, and probably reading a lot of the same. Publication and presenting at academic conferences plays a role too—this is in-line with CV building for your sector of the field. 

Shannan:

I was also wondering about the FSU program in particular. Having been there now and taught there and met the students, what would you recommend to someone trying to get into that particular place? Is there any secret insight you could give that could perhaps heighten that application?

Stephen:

Nothing too secretive or surprising. Magazine publications help—a book is great, if you can swing it. Demonstrating positive literary citizenship—a record of service helps here; you might host readings or take part in some kind of community outreach. That said, there are MFAs here who published their first pieces (in great magazines) while in their PhD. Now, those people got their MFAs from high-profile programs—places like Iowa—so that probably helped with their admission, but still. I’d like to say that the most important factor is your writing sample.

When you play the application game, you’re hoping that someone on the selection committee champions your application. How and why that happens is mysterious, but hopefully it’s because that faculty member loves your writing and wants to work with you.