This article on “America’s two distinct literary cultures” (via University Diaries) touched me because I almost went down the Master of Fine Arts in writing road myself—and of course I taught alongside people who had done so.

After graduating from Reed College with what amounted to a BFA, I was accepted into the MFA program at the U. of Montana, which I was drawn to because Richard Hugo was there, and I really admired him. (Still do.)

All the paperwork was done; I had only to take the Graduate Record Exam. The day came, I woke up, and I did not go to the testing. Instead I went to work in an advertising agency (the English major’s equivalent of being drafted, I used to joke).

Then came years working in magazine publishing, then daily newspapers (definitely not the normal career path for journalism), a little while in book publishing, and finally p.r. for higher education—until one night “some god or daemon” kicked me in the head and said “Graduate School. Religious Studies.”

Which led, ironically enough, back to the English Department. A job’s a job.  And I was on the fringe of this scene:

Thus the fiction writer’s MFA increasingly resembles the poet’s old Ph.D.; not in the rigors of the degree itself—getting an MFA is so easy—but in the way it immerses the writer in a professional academic network. She lives in a college town, and when she turns her gaze forward and outward, toward the future and the literary world at large, she sees not, primarily, the New York cluster of editors and agents and publishers but, rather, a matrix of hundreds of colleges with MFA programs, potential employers all, linked together by Poets & Writers, AWP, and summertime workshops at picturesque make-out camps like Sewanee and Bread Loaf. More links, more connections, are provided by the attractive, unread, university-funded literary quarterlies that are swapped between these places and by the endowments and discretionary funds that deliver an established writer-teacher from her home program to a different one, for a well-paid night or week, with everybody’s drinks expensed: This system of circulating patronage may have some pedagogical value but exists chiefly to supplement the income of the writer-teacher and, perhaps more important, to impress on the students the more glamorous side of becoming—of aspiring to become—a writer-teacher.

It’s a provocative if wandering essay, full of little knife thrusts like ” the continued hunger of undergraduates for undemanding classes.”

I never taught fiction or poetry, but I did teach some creative-nonfiction classes, and I will never know if I was really any good at it or not, because I was one of those “writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any.”