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Interview with Steven Ford Brown by Louis E. Bourgeois

FOETRY.COM

And What Academia Doesn’t Want You to Know About

the Creative Writing Industry

Steven Ford Brown began his career as a rock music critic and journalist.  He then turned his hand to founding and editing several literary presses and magazines and then his own creative work.  His books include Heart’s Invention: On The Poetry of Vassar Miller, introduction by Larry McMurtry, (Ford-Brown & Co., 1988), Astonishing World: The Selected Poems of Angel Gonzalez, 1956-1986 (Milkweed Editions, 1993), Invited Guest:  An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry (with David Rigsbee, University of Virginia Press, 2001), Edible Amazonia:  Twenty-One Poems from God’s Amazonian Recipe Book, by Nicomedes Suarez-Arauz  (Bitter Oleander Press, 2002), Century of the Death of the Rose: Selected Poems of Jorge Carrera Andrade (NewSouth Books, 2002), One More River to Cross:  The Selected Poems of John Beecher, Introduction by Studs Terkel (NewSouth Books, 2003)  and Microgramas by Jorge Carrera Andrade (Pais Secreto:  Quito, Ecuador, 2005). He is also the editor of After Neruda, After Paz:  16 Latin American Poets (2001) and At a Crossroads:  18 Contemporary Poets from Spain (2003), two special issues of The Atlanta Review.  The American Association of University Presses and the University Press Books Committee chose Invited Guest as one of the “Best of the Best from the University Presses” in the United States for 2001 as part of a special program on C-SPAN Book TV. His website is www. stevenfordbrown.com.

Louis E. Bourgeois teaches literature and writing at Rust College.  He is co-founder and an editor of VOX, an experimental literary journal based in Oxford, Mississippi. His most recent collection of poems, OLGA, was released in September 2005 by WordTech Communications.  He lives on a farm in North Mississippi.

The following interview deals with the Foetry.com controversy as well as other issues revolving around the creative writing world in academia. The interview was conducted over a period of six weeks in 2005 via email.

To begin, many thanks for agreeing to answer a few questions for our readers. Alan Cordle politely turned down my request for an interview stating he was “interviewed out,” which is certainly understandable. In any case, he recommended you for the interview and I would like to start by asking, what is your role at Foetry.com?

Brown: I’m a friend and supporter of Alan Cordle, the founder of Foetry.com. I have spoken on the record in support of Foetry.com to the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Daily Iowan, Los Angeles Times and Moby Lives. My willingness to speak on the record to the media has been important as many university faculty members or writers in the MFA system who agree with Foetry.com’s mission will not allow themselves to be quoted for fear of retaliation. I’ve also written letters to various university presidents, university presses, newspapers, AWP and the Association of American University Presses.

For most of the past decade, I have worked for a private investment firm in Boston. I’m not employed in academia. If I speak out, there’s no one in academia to blacklist me.  The only thing anyone can do is not give me a grant if they sit on a panel at the NEA, not review one of my books or say bad things about me. There have been personal attacks against Alan, threats of lawsuits and attempts to question his ethics. Comments have been made about his wife. Although Alan has a steely resolve about this issue, I would think personal attacks are something you don’t get used to.

The problem with MFA programs is writers employed in that system are afraid to speak out for fear of offending writers in more powerful positions who can affect their careers. The inability to have freedom of speech on these issues is—to me—a more frightening issue than cheating in the literary world. Writers were blacklisted in the 1950s for speaking out. Have we come no further since then so that writers are afraid of being punished for speaking out about things that are obviously wrong with the system? A panel on Foetry.com was proposed at a recent AWP conference and rejected. AWP itself has in fact been silent on this very issue.  What is a Writing Program if it doesn’t promote freedom of speech?  Isn’t there a contradiction there?

Could you explain what the current mission is at Foetry.com?

Brown:  Alan can say this better as he is the founder of Foetry.com. I see it as a movement of writers attempting to change the framework they’ve been given by the Corporation (AWP and the MFA program/publishing system). What Alan envisions is simple:  If there must be a contest system for publishing new writers, make it transparent, accountable and make it fair. Tell us who the judges are in advance and do not allow entries to that contest from former students or friends of the director or judge. If you enter a contest at Burger King or Pepsi or 7-11, there will be a disclaimer on the back of the entry form that friends and relatives or employees of the contest sponsor and/or judges can’t enter. Even Seventeen magazine has similar contest guidelines for its literary contest. Burger King, Pepsi, 7-11 and Seventeen magazine have more stringent contest rules than the University of Georgia Press or University of Iowa Press!

Alan is simply taking the same principals that apply in real life and applying them to the literary world of contests. His wife is a poet and he was angered at seeing her spend large sums of money to enter contest in which there was obvious cheating by judges who selected former students or friends. In the world of private finance where I am employed, you cannot trade favors with brokers on Wall Street to gain an advantage in trading stocks. Every quarter I have to declare under penalty of perjury to my employer personal stock purchases and sign a document that says my record is clean (i.e., I am not being investigated by the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission]). Ethical concerns are a primary issue in all facets of American life. The American public demands fairness in business, consumer issues, finance, sports, etc. You learn the rules of fair play as a child in grammar school when you play basketball, football, little league, and soccer. You expected fairness when you voted in your homeroom for class president. Many of the literary contests we have discussed seem specifically designed to not have ethical guidelines that prevent the director and/or judges from benefiting a small specific group (former students and individuals the director or judges have had a relationship with).

What I have always understood is that academic cheating is forbidden at American colleges and universities.  It’s a core value in academic institutions. When I spoke to Alex Tizon at The Los  Angeles Times (Tizon is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist) he explained that one of the judges under fire had sent him an outline explaining their justification for selecting six former students or friends in literary contests. This writer had judged six national contests and had never selected anyone outside her circle.  Writers involved in literary cheating as judges have actually tried to convince the media that what they are doing is justified. They argue the literary world is a small one. They argue the manuscript by their former student or boyfriend/girlfriend or colleague really was the best one and deserved to win. What I have said in response to these claims to the media is that the literary world is a small one if you never step outside the circle of your friends. I argue there is no way to know if your student/friend’s manuscript was the best if you didn’t read the rest of the contest entries!

I first got involved with the University of Georgia and the University of Iowa competitions. It was at Iowa that the attorney in the university Office of Legal Council in response to my questions confirmed to me by telephone and email that the Iowa Poetry and Fiction Prize competitions had manuscript screeners who were graduate students in the Writing Program, the poetry judge for the past five years was a graduate of and had been a long-time professor in the Writing Program and the different judges of the fiction contests for the past five years had all been instructors and/or graduates of the Writing Program. The 2004/2005 winners in fiction and poetry at the University of Iowa’s literary competitions were all graduates of and/or former teachers in the Writing Program or employed by the University of Iowa. From a national competition that took in between 1,500 and 2,000 manuscripts from all over the United States four out of four possible winners in fiction and poetry were graduates, former teachers or current employees of the Writers Workshop or University of Iowa. Four out of four winners of a contest sponsored by the University of Iowa had intimate connections to the university.  There is no rule at the University of Iowa Press that an employee or former student of the university cannot enter the contests.  This takes place at a university with one of the most prestigious writing programs in the country! It frankly seemed to me that the situation was specifically tailored to benefit Iowa Writing Workshop grads, that it was an affirmative action program for Iowa Writing Program graduates subsidized by the contest entry fees of unsuspecting writers and taxpayer dollars (the fiction competition is underwritten by an NEA grant and the University of Iowa receives federal and state tax dollars).

The problem with the Iowa guidelines is that a student, upon graduation from the Writing Program, can walk down the street from the English Department to the University of Iowa Press and submit a manuscript to the literary contest judged by a writer they just spent two years working with on that manuscript. The screeners might recognize the manuscript of a fellow student they just spent two years with in workshop. A teacher who taught in the program can leave and then turn around and submit a manuscript to the judge they just worked with as a colleague. There are no prohibitions against this in the rules. The problem that we all have with this is that in the past (pre-Foetry.com) writers who submitted manuscripts with submission fees never thought that cheating could (or would) actually take place. This contest system at Iowa is clearly not fair no matter how you try to spin it.

The story at Georgia became more noteworthy because Jorie Graham (Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard University professor) was involved. As the media began to pick up this story, the defenders of the University of Georgia—or, the university contest system in general—began to call those who raised their voices in protest of the manipulation of the system embittered losers, etc. Let me state here, I haven’t entered any literary contests. Alan is not a writer. There was also this continuing argument that Alan’s thesis was wrong, nothing had been proven and we simply did not understand the good deeds being performed at Georgia and Iowa by the judges on behalf of American poetry.

What fractured the entire argument against Foetry.com—and legitimized the charges by Foetry.com—was that Ed Dupree, a writer in Cambridge who was working with Alan, filed an Open Records request with the University of Georgia. Alan also consulted with the Georgia Attorney General’s Office. The University of Georgia Press was forced to release their internal records and correspondence related to a specific contest in a specific year. Now, please remember that for the entire twenty-year history of the Georgia Contemporary Poetry series the judges were all secret. Alan had made several requests to Georgia to release the list of judges and the Press refused.  The forced release of the records confirmed what Alan had been saying:  the contest at Georgia featured multiple judges secretly selecting friends and former students as winners in the literary competition. This is all documented at Foetry.com.  In many of those years, open literary submissions to the contest had no chance of winning. The only important aspect of the open submissions process was the fact that it generated $15,000 to $25,000 annually for the University of Georgia Press. It’s estimated that Georgia took in between $150,000 to $250,000 from unsuspecting writers during the lifespan of the Georgia Poetry series competition.

Correspondence from the director of the poetry series to the editor of the University of Georgia Press released through the Open Records request indicated that he selected a winner of the competition for that year before he had read all the submitted manuscripts.  The eventual winner (who never entered the contest but was solicited outside of the contest) was connected to the judge for that year.  In fact, the winner was the husband of the judge. This kind of activity at Georgia was secret for twenty years until Foetry.com obtained the records. That means that for twenty years unsuspecting writers annually sent in fees to subsidize this activity.

The Open Records request has now been used elsewhere and documentation has been completed at other contests. Another resignation of a director of a literary contest has been forced because of pending release of materials related to ties between the director, judges and winners. What we continue to see throughout the contest system is systematic cheating as judges select friends or former students. It is impossible for anyone to state that what Alan is saying at Foetry.com is not true when the internal records of a university press related to the contest in question have been released so the writing community can see what has taken place. You have to wonder why anyone would solicit money from writers for a public contest and then insist that all records of their activities in relation to the contest be kept secret.

I find myself in agreement with the Foetry.com movement, if I may call it such, in that I agree that the poetry contest world borders on the scandalous. However, for me, exposing the creative writing contest industry is just the beginning of the expose:  some of us believe that the whole MFA creative writing complex needs a shakedown. Has Foetry.com considered expanding its “investigation” beyond poetry contests?

Brown:  Louis, you are right. It is not just the contest system. It is also about what I refer as the commerce of literature, what happens after the poem, short story or novel is written and then marketed (sent out for publication). Foetry (the term is one coined by Alan:  fraud+poetry) .com has begun to infect everything in the literary world, from reviewing grants to readings to inclusions in anthologies and even literary history. As a result of Alan’s work at Foetry.com, it is possible to see the systematic way certain individuals have been going about trying to redraw the poetic map of America to benefit themselves, their friends and former students.  By secretly selecting certain people to judge contests who in turn select friends or students, it’s a way to empire build, to extend literary influence. Part of the key to this is to keep your circle small and privileged and the internal exchange of favors secret. It has gotten to the point where we can’t trust the reviews, the awards, the grants and anthologies. In recent years, we’ve had no less than seven or eight poetry anthologies touted as America’s “best younger poets.” The poets included in those anthologies appear to be more the product of personal or political affiliation (a group of writers centered on a particular writing program or connected to a particular writer) than a literary aesthetic.

As a writing community we are shooting ourselves in the foot. The media gets it. For a long time the media has been skeptical about the mass numbers of writers tumbling out of MFA programs, the books with breathless blurbs on the back announcing this writer as the best ever (the blurb is usually by their teacher). With the extraordinary numbers of MFA graduates now, it’s like Hollywood everywhere in which every other waiter or barista at Starbucks is an out of work (or unpublished) MFAer.

Let me add this last thought about the fallout of the MFA program expansion and the numbers of MFA writers we have today.  From 1900 into the 1940s poets like Sterling Brown, Louise Bogan, e.e. cummings, H.D., Eliot, Frost, Langston Hughes, Jeffers, Millay, Marianne Moore, Pound, Sandburg, Stevens and William Carlos Williams existed as individual knots of poetic force or energy. But there was a great deal of distance between the knot of poetic energy of Pound in Italy and Eliot in England and Jeffers in California and Moore in New York City and Sandburg in Chicago and Stevens in Hartford. There was no formal creative writing system.  The Iowa Writing Program was created in the 1930s and thus began a formal system for producing poets.  From the 1930s on, different parts of the country were producing poets under the tutelage of Mark Van Doren, Robert Lowell, John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren and Yvor Winters. There was still distance between Baton Rouge, Iowa City, Kenyon College, Seattle, Stanford and New York City.  With the expansion of the MFA programs in the 1960s, the numbers of poets in America truly began to expand. The great distances between poets closed down and the eventual result is that every English Department now has a few poets. Many writing programs have a half dozen poets and fiction writers. Poets are stacked on top of poets.  In addition the programs have as many as twenty to one hundred aspiring fiction and poetry students. What has developed from that closeness is a culture of ingratiation and accommodation.  You do for me and I’ll do for you.  This has made it harder for a culture of honest literary criticism to exist, the kind of criticism produced by Bly, Dickey, Jarrell and M.L. Rosenthal in the 1950s and 60s.  That means that virtually every poetry review you see today is laudatory.  Poets at twenty-five are being called the next great thing, literary geniuses.  Book review editors at major newspapers and the media see this and are of course skeptical.  However, I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention a group of writers who today are doing the hard work of writing serious “literary criticism”:  Garrick Davis, Dana Gioia, Joan Houlihan, Adam Kirsch, William Logan, and David Owen are a few worth mentioning.

So there’s hope, but everyone has pretty much conceded there is no broad audience for American poetry. The kind of poetry being written and published in this country today is generally only read by other poets. American poetry exists in what I have referred to as a false economy supported by the NEA and MFA programs. If you apply economic principals to the literary publishing business then three quarters of the publishing houses and literary magazines would no longer exist. We are producing a product that not very many people desire to read. Unread manuscripts and books are stacking up like fallow wheat in the fields of Iowa!

The result of the MFA Program system is that some 50,000 to 75,000 MFA graduates have been produced in the last three decades.*  The great majority of those graduates now own a degree they will never use. With colleges and universities increasingly depending on non-tenure track and part-time faculty to cut costs, the pressure to publish a book to obtain a job has increased dramatically. Now anyone can say the world can’t be worse off for publishing so much poetry and fiction, but if the world of literature suddenly resembles the ugly competitiveness and cheating of the business world then how much more enlightened are we as writers for having all those books and literary magazines? Is the literary world supposed to be like The Apprentice, Fear Factor or Survivor? Is that the direction we really want for the teaching and publishing system in our American universities? Do we really want a system in which writers are afraid to speak out for fear of losing their jobs? Do we want a system in which writers desperately spend $4,000 or $5,000 dollars in the contest system attempting to get a book published so they can be eligible in the job market only to be cheated by a corrupt judge?  Do we want a system in which ethics in the university are compromised? Doesn’t this whole activity, this cheating undermine the very idea of the core value of academic integrity? And what do you do with a writer teaching in the MFA system who has three books published as the end product of cheating in literary contests? It’s very troubling and it will not change until writers themselves demand change.

What precisely is the retaliation that MFA faculty and the like fear from speaking out on the side of Alan and Foetry.com?

Brown:  MFA programs generally consist of six or seven faculty (the larger programs have more faculty) with twenty students. The two years spent in writing classes with these teachers is an intimate experience. The degree program in writing lends itself to a close bonding experience (more so than the bonding in an MBA or graduate law program). And human nature says when you bond with people you naturally want to help them.

The 300+ writing programs in this country are very competitive in seeking the best applicants. The way MFA programs are judged is on the success of their students. All the websites and publicity literature for the programs announce the many awards and books and grants and fellowships their students have received. Writers are also more impatient today. In the past, after you received your MFA it was not unusual to work on a book of short stories or poetry manuscript for another ten years before publishing. I went through the Al Poulin anthology of American poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 1975) and made a list of the poets (mostly the poets of the Generation of the 1920s) and when they first published first books:  Robert Bly and James Dickey were 39 before they published first books; Elizabeth Bishop was 35; Hugo was 38; Donald Justice was 35; Gerald Stern was 46; Lucille Clifton, Roethke and Snodgrass were 33 years old.  Today writers want to publish a book while they are still in the program. The good and bad thing about America is everything here is defined by success (or lack of it). With reality TV, the giddy heights of the stock market and the star culture in general everyone feels more pressure to be successful.

Having said the above, I will tell you I have seen specific scenarios in which writers have been driven out of programs for speaking up. I know a younger writer at an east coast university who was driven out because of a sexual harassment allegation by a student against a prominent writer teacher. The younger writer went to the administration in defense of the student and her right to bring charges. The younger writer eventually had to leave and find a job at another university. The Writing Department as a whole turned on the younger writer in defense of the older writer despite the fact that the allegations were true and there were many witnesses to the incident.  A story was done on this incident at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Even today there are plenty of stories in The Chronicle about what happens when you stand up and raise your voice in an academic setting. It’s no different if in the same closed environment you question the judging of a literary contest by a colleague. If you’re a new junior professor and working on the five year clock and not sure if they will retain you at the end of the five years and you have a mortgage and family to support, it isn’t wise to get involved in a fight over someone else’s ethics. This battle with the university presses is about the ethics of their contest system.  Beginning writers are impatient and they want success now rather than tomorrow. Teachers want to be able to portray themselves as successful teachers by having their students publish books. That is how everything stacks up in that system.

Your point about the MFA industry resembling the business world of competition and profits is a good one.  This poses the question, when did all of this happen? At least some of us became creative writers out of defiance of the corporate attitude. I have always been under the assumption that creative writing is a pure act of rebellion, yet my own experiences in the MFA world has shown me that most of my contemporaries who sat with me at the workshop table were the first to conform to the whims of the workshop group and the biases of the workshop professor, an attitude I find appalling. Where did the great non-conformists go?  Where are our Thoreaus, Pounds, Becketts, Plaths, Faulkners, Ishmael Reeds, etc?

Brown:  I always go back and think of the artists and poets and musicians of the Generation of the 1920s (born in the 1920s) as the group that really put their stamp on American culture. Many of the men served in World War II and came back and went to college on the GI bill.  Women were still not fully integrated into American life. There was great economic development in the 1950s as American business began to develop and expand, particularly in international markets as the Marshall Plan helped rebuild Europe and we also rebuilt Japan. In this country, uniform blocks of neighborhoods were built to accommodate the push for more privately owned housing for American families. There was uniformity to the corporate workplace and stereotypical expectations of American men and women. Everyone in America had a role to play that was defined by gender, race, orientation and class. Finally, resistance began to build to the idea of these limited definitions of what different kinds of Americans could and should be in their lives.

The Generation of the 1920s is the generation of artists who rebelled against metered poetry, who engaged in action painting and pop art, who channeled acting to make it more direct and engaging, who broke the barriers of jazz and folk music, who helped redefine the American aesthetic and set the groundwork for future movements in civil rights, feminism, gay rights and multiculturalism. Those were the rebels:  Dave Brubeck, Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’ Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, W.D. Snodgrass, Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Diane Arbus, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, John Cassavetes and so many others.

This was an era of the maturing of American art—and redefining of American culture itself—as artists sought to break convention and explore boundaries. Collectively, American poets broke away from metered verse just as jazz artists moved towards a freer form of musical expression and Dylan went electric and Pollock set up his canvas and threw paint at it. Black Mountain set up shop in North Carolina so artists could tinker and experiment with concepts of the modern art genres. Frank O’ Hara ran around Manhattan and worked at the Museum of Modern Art and was the life of every party.  Robert Bly sat out there on his Minnesota farm with pals William Duffy and James Wright and translated Swedish poetry and Pablo Neruda and Antonio Machado and attacked the academic poets. Allen Ginsberg took off his clothes in a San Francisco art gallery, declared himself a homosexual and read Howl for the first time. Betty Freidan wrote and published The Feminine Mystique and opened a door into the private lives of women. Kinsey did his famous study of the sex lives of Americans at Indiana University and we learned for the first time (in a public forum) that the missionary position was not the only sexual position Americans engaged in and we were much more complicated as sexual beings than we ever thought. African-American writers were publishing influential books and becoming increasingly outspoken and politicized.

In the 1960s the NEA began to pump money into the literary world and eventually the MFA system. As the MFA system expanded more money followed NEA money and the numbers of grants and fellowships increased. Suddenly, if you were a poet or fiction writer you could do very well with a university job in a writing program, an NEA, a Guggenheim and whatever else was out there. At some point in the early 1980s poetry became glamorous.  I remember the multi-page spread that Life magazine did of American poets. The poets were given full-page glamour shots (Philip Levine was photographed lifting weights!). As the MFA programs grew, they became an integral part of the university corporation.  And just like any corporation there isn’t a lot of room for dissent. If you are sitting in an MFA program working on a degree you’re not a rebel. You have the legacy of literary rebels in the back of your head when you enter the writing program, but if you’re a rebel writer you would attack the corporate system that has evolved into the cheating scandal at the university presses.  At the same time the writing programs provide a place for writers to be and a source of income so it’s much harder to be a rebel when there are financial opportunities dangled in front of you. It’s much easier to be a rebel when you have nothing.  Since many of the cultural, ethnic and social barriers of the 1960s have fallen (but not all) there are fewer barriers to break down now. We should today be more concerned about the environment in countries across the globe, in equity for countries that historically have been economic basket cases and the gross inequity that still exists today between rich and poor across the globe.  Unfortunately, these are not very sexy causes.

75,000 MFAs! What happens to them after graduation? How many go on to publish legitimate books?  For that matter, how many find full-time teaching positions?

Brown:  After two years of participating in a writing program and intense work on a manuscript, the idea that you can’t get a book published is a very difficult thing for any writer to face. But the fact is that with 75,000 graduates there simply is no place to put them all, there are not enough publishers and subsidies to take care of all of them. My theory is that the literary contest system has helped to quiet the rumblings. I do believe university presses like and have come to depend on the revenue generated by the contests. For them it’s free money. But if there were no contests at all and no hope of getting published and no chance of getting a job in your field, I do believe there would be more activism at AWP, there would be more writers taking a public stance on this issue and speaking out.  At least with a contest system you can graduate with an MFA and spend a good ten years submitting to the AWP, American Poetry Review, Iowa, Walt Whitman and Yale contests with the hope that you’ll win. After ten years you might give up but for those ten years you have plenty of contests to submit to (and to spend your money on). I’ve noticed in perusing contests that the market is so bad now that even the Yale Poetry Prize winners have submitted to nondescript book contests and come in second or third. Until Alan created Foetry.com, writers were blindly sending in their $25 to literary contests.  If they had their suspicions about a contest, they had no way to confirm them.  Today, literary reputations are made only among ourselves because we have not developed an audience for poetry because of what we write.  This is not an era of Frost and Sandburg when poetry was widely read and appreciated.

Many writers eventually leave the system and do something else in life. I live in Boston and so you see MFA grads teaching elementary school, working as baristas at Starbucks, becoming political activists and working for John Kerry or John McCain, writing for The Boston Globe, getting MBA degrees, becoming scientists, farming or working for private investment firms! I would say that many of them never publish a book with a reputable press. This year another 3,500 or more writers will graduate from the MFA system. Where will the great majority of them go? What percentage of them will ever publish a book? AWP recently did a study on hiring of MFAs in their field in the university system. It’s worth a read.

Has anything good come out of the MFA Writing Program system?

Brown:  It’s interesting that we’re having this conversation because we are doing it in a post-Foetry world. There was a time before Foetry.com when no one really knew for sure—they might suspect cheating in contests, that certain writers advantaged others-but they didn’t know for sure, couldn’t prove this was, in fact, going on. That said, it’s clear that the Writing Program at Iowa has turned out some of the best writers of the last fifty years. The list of Iowa Writing Program graduates is certainly a distinguished one.

I briefly attended a writing program and after a year I went and did something else. I didn’t fit it and it didn’t fit me. I do think the opportunity for anyone to study something they love with a master teacher is certainly a wonderful thing.  It doesn’t matter if you love economics and study with John Kenneth Galbraith or film direction with Scorsese or creative writing with Donald Barthelme. But despite our convictions about our talent not all of us are great writers or actors or dancers. Not every dancer in ballet can do a masterful entrechat or pas de bourrée. That’s just a fact of life. Not all MFA writing grads will write books that should be published.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with the MFA program concept. The direct result of what you have now—the competitiveness, the cheating—is related to the fact that there are too many writing programs, too many MFA graduates and a lack of demand for the end product. The creation of new and more MFA programs is a make-work solution to this problem of too many graduates.  An MFA writer convinces a college or university to create an MFA program, hires some like-minded people (or friends) and suddenly you have a program with twenty MFA students. The college likes it because it’s a way to get cheap labor to teach English composition instead of paying a full-time professor with health insurance and benefits. The MFA program teachers like it because they can teach poetry and fiction instead of English composition. It also gives the MFA teachers a captive audience year after year for their own books and work.

I’m concluding this interview on Monday and on Tuesday somewhere in America someone with an MFA degree without a permanent teaching job will get up and decide that another MFA program needs to be created and it needs to be in Greenland! Another new program, more jobs, more students! The franchising of the MFA programs—like literary versions of Starbucks—is the worst thing to ever happen to American poetry.

*AWP would theoretically be the best source for accurate numbers of MFA graduates over the past four decades.

VOX