teaching poets

You can be too good a teacher-poet: One begins being thought of as a better teacher but a lesser poet.

playing long odds

He was prone to playing the long odds, so he quit his job, borrowed $50K and bet on getting an MFA in Creative Writing.

nature abhors a vacuum

Fortunately, the advent of the world wide web was able to absorb the increased output spurred by the creative writing MFA explosion.

sample audience

The workshop as focus group.

long road to the deep north

The best writing teachers don’t teach shortcuts.

low bar

The only writer I ever knew who actually washed out of his MFA.

fireworks

Perhaps the model of a good MFA program would be a kind of revolving hub, centered around a workshop set spinning with its aesthetic energy, generating critical friction, throwing off sparks—those MFA graduates who start their own creative fires across the cultural landscape.