online mfa creative writing

online mfa creative writing

Online MFA Creative Writing

1. Benefits of pursuing an online MFA in Creative Writing

By pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing from a top university, emerging writers can take advantage of faculty and curriculum that best prepare them to become published authors. For a program to be considered top-tier, it must have faculty who are established and successful authors and poets, and a curriculum that reflects this. The faculty and students in a top MFA program regularly publish books and chapbooks, and appear in Best American Poetry and other anthologies. The first step toward becoming a published writer is to find the right program, one that mentors and challenges the writer toward mastery of his/her craft and then guides him/her through the maze of publishing and applying for writer’s grants. In five of the past seven years, alumni and students in MFA programs have published over 100 books. This is often the best indicator of a program’s success. Ideally, published books and collections should be in the same genre as the degree. Poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction are the three most common focuses in an MFA program, though some do offer screenwriting and playwriting tracks. When researching an MFA program that is the best fit, it is imperative to examine the faculty and their books, and to learn what the alumni have gone on to publish.

2. Curriculum and courses offered in an online MFA program

The phase of Liberal Studies. The Master of Fine Arts is the terminal degree in the field of Creative Writing. Because the MFA degree is a professional degree, beyond the Bachelor of Arts, it is necessary to lay a solid foundation of theory and praxis, while familiarizing students with the values and benefits of further study should they wish to pursue a doctorate. These two ideas are concisely set out in the first two courses of the degree, the latter being an introduction to graduate study seminar. The concepts are revisited in the capstone course, known as “The Publishable Manuscript”. This is the philosophy underlying the MFA program at Full Sail University.

The complex and ever-evolving nature of the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree provides evidence that the study of creative writing is alive and well. As the initial creative environment has changed from single genre, single page to impressively interactive, web-based, we at Full Sail University have taken steps to improve our MFA program. Our belief is that knowledge of the past and current states of our art is a necessary prerequisite to successful writing and to lay a strong foundation for a profession in the literary arts. To this end, our revised curriculum is thoughtful and comprehensive, offering the student a liberal arts foundation, a solid base in literary tradition and theory, and an understanding of the complex, often contradictory ways in which the contemporary writer functions. Though it is web-based, the Full Sail MFA degree was designed to replicate the low-residency model, and revolves around the concepts of mentorship and community.

3. Faculty and mentorship opportunities in online MFA programs

With the proliferation of cheap, poorly taught online MFA programs, there is some truth in the idea that U.S. creative writing education has finally jumped the shark. Green – and older writers with secure day job careers – cannot afford to take off two years of paid work to do a course, either in terms of its effect on their material security or their progress as artists. They are more conscious that mid-career and established writers have no need for a degree MFA. They have no wish to be a teaching assistant, and so will not apply to a program with no internal funding available for MFA students. In response to these cultural shifts, a number of online – and increasingly, hybrid low-residency – MFA programs were created over the past 15 years that offer appealing, if not revelatory, teaching on the writing craft for lower cost and less time. While the focus remains on the production of innovative writing or literature, the development of such programs has given a greater number of poets and writers more career options, both within academia and without, and a more favorable developmental and financial landscape on which to progress an artistic practice over a lifetime. Unsurprisingly, this has been yet another nail in the coffin of the idea – long cherished in the USA even as it becomes harder to realize – that a writer must produce literature as a side job in addition to a ‘real career’ and that poetry must be a hobby for housewives and retired accounting execs. Today, poets and writers in their 20s and 30s still have much rap to take from society at large but it is becoming easier for them to reject a position of marginality within the broader culture and develop themselves and their art in ways that have broader impact. But not all online MFA programs are equal. In my opinion, the determining factor is the quality of faculty mentorship available. Duration and cost of the program will be the primary determining factor in whether to do a little MFA while working at the post-secondary level, continuing on a job track, or developing one’s art. Given similar cost, one would be best served by doing an online MFA that is affiliated with a strong writing program, either a full-blown accredited university English department with an undergraduate major or MA in creative writing or a reputable liberal arts college, and that has a strong proactive integration with traditional MFA or postgraduate student writers. This affords an online MFA student the greatest access to innovative literature writing culture and positive academic job prospects, providing that the faculty are supportive of the notion that creative writing is a professional discipline and that an academic career in writing – not merely in teaching literature to undergraduates – is the best way to give students the tools for the trade. This is particularly important for poets. Today, some of the best and most vocationally committed poets, from the USA and the English-speaking world at large, are earning PhDs in creative writing or literature for the principal purpose of training themselves to teach writing and creative writing at the college level, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to secure full-time academic employment without a terminal degree. At the very least, poet MFA students who later intend to do a PhD and seek teaching employment can maximize their loan debt by doing the MFA at a regionally accredited university where degree course credits can be used to secure future teaching jobs.

4. Networking and collaboration in the online MFA community

In anticipation of the specific vocationist and professional needs of students in the MFA program, the online program hosts two unique community spaces: The MFA Cafe and the Academic Workshop. The Cafe is a chat space open 24 hours with ‘live’ discussion and debate with students of varying genres and around the globe. The Academic Workshop is a forum where students, given a common assignment, such as ‘translate a dream into a scene’, ‘write a story entirely in imperatives’, ‘plot a story with a traditional Indian raga form’, swap writing and critiquing, learning by doing and by direct engagement with one another and their work. This workshop is necessarily focused – limited in length and student numbers to keep workloads within reasonable bounds – and is geared towards the production of experiments and drafts which will be of use for the assignments to follow. Regular workshop faculty will often drop by to give input and extra assignments with an eye towards the peculiar mixing of creativity and craft in specific genres. Most importantly, the defining pedagogical principle in all of these community spaces is that students will have differing relationships to them, and differing obligations to be present. While it is obvious that there will be students who need to hang out in the cafe and workshop all day and really get to know their colleagues, there may be others connecting from far off time zones with busy home lives who can only make transient appearances. All must be able to be full members of the community but it is essential that we avoid creating the typical online program situation in which those with less to do take more time to do it. This will often mean tailored variations of the assigned exercises and always means that there needs to be a clear structure of what has to be done and what is optional. And again, this is an experiment, subject to ongoing revision. We hope to learn a lot from it.

5. Career prospects and opportunities for online MFA graduates

The AWP reports that in 2009 there were 148 MFA creative writing programs. This number has only risen in the twenty-teens. Let’s suppose that in a given year there are twenty-five students per program (though the actual number is higher). That’s 3700 new graduates per year. Now let’s just say for argument’s sake that the market for writers continues to grow and the need for post-secondary teachers also continues to grow. This is not an accurate assumption but a generous one. Even assuming such growth, there are still only 770 new tenure-track teaching positions per year. This is not a job market. This is an episode of Survivor.

Perhaps one of the most uncomfortable issues facing creative writing students is whether or not an MFA is worth it. This question is so uncomfortable because it forces us to justify our art and to explain the ways in which we fit into or do not fit into the world at a time when the world seems to have little place for poets. The question is also uncomfortable because the answer may be a resounding no.