MFA Program Quotes

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.

I was an English major in college. I was an obnoxious, tortured poet who wasn't very good. And after I graduated, I was a newspaper reporter in my hometown for three and a half years. And then I went and got my MFA at University of Alabama. And while I was at Alabama, that's when I began publishing, first literary magazines, and then at Harper's.

I got my Actors' Equity card officially by playing Nana the dog in 'Peter Pan' at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. That was the first show I did as a full-fledged, dues-paying member; I earned points in my MFA program, then went into the company after I graduated.

I first became familiar with Dave Eggers's work when I was living in San Francisco and enrolled at USF's MFA Program.

You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.

I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms.

I did go to an MFA program, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. For me, it worked perfectly. It was a small program. They only take five fiction writers a year, and they fund all of us - you don't go into debt to get an MFA. It's not like getting an MBA - you're not going to buy yourself out.

I got brilliant stories from people who'd never set foot in an MFA program and had published very little, and terrible stories from people who'd published a lot and had all the credentials. It was all over the map and that was part of the fun.

When I say that I went to grad school in Iowa City, people often assume that I went to the famed writers' workshop MFA program at the University of Iowa. I didn't. I got a master's in journalism.