The Crown Heights apartment of Tony Tulathimutte, whose second novel, Rejection, was published last month, recently underwent a transformation. “I bought a table,” he tells me.
His 2016 debut novel, Private Citizens, earned him a Whiting Award, a blurb from Jonathan Franzen, and a claim to “the first great millennial novel.” But this succès d’estime did not bring a stable income. Tired of ad hoc teaching jobs, in 2017 Tulathimutte founded Crit, a writing workshop hosted in his living room.
Alongside copies of his own debut, the bookshelf behind him features buzzy debuts by former students Julius Taranto and Rax King. “Realizing literally all that is needed to teach these classes is enough space for about nine people to sit,” Tulathimutte says, “it becomes more and more obscene thinking about having to pay any substantial amount of money for this.”
Before starting Crit, he taught for Sackett Street Writers, an independent workshop that started in 2002 as an ad on Craigslist. The organization, which Poets & Writers magazine has called the “top alternative to M.F.A. programs,” now runs nearly a dozen workshops online and in New York City bookstores, studios, and living rooms.
The past few decades have seen a proliferation of graduate writing programs—and a growing chorus of M.F.A. critics. The workshop model has been accused of racism, sexism, and entrenching hierarchical pedagogy; of turning literature into ivory-tower esoterica; of being apolitical; of being too political; of exploiting adjuncts and saddling students with excessive debt.
But Tulathimutte isn’t interested in reform. In a recent essay for Triangle House Review, he argued that the creative-writing M.F.A.’s “value as a credential has suffered hyperinflation, even at prestigious places,” and made the case for D.I.Y. writing programs. In other words, what if we kept the workshop but ditched the university?
Across the country, a number of writers have started workshops that market themselves through word of mouth and social media as M.F.A. alternatives. For the students, the workshops are cheaper and more flexible than traditional graduate school. For the teachers, many of them educated at the top M.F.A. programs in the country, running their own class provides much-needed income, community, and the freedom to speak candidly about the fragile state of their profession. As for the future of fiction, only time will tell.
An Idea Whose Time Had Come
It wasn’t so long ago that American writers had “a remarkable degree of contempt” for the academy, says Mark McGurl, a professor of literature at Stanford University and the author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. “The last thing you wanted to do was be associated with the university.”
Then, in 1936, Wilbur Schramm founded the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “It seemed like an idea whose time had come,” he said modestly. But in the land of the Protestant ethic, Schramm had to justify the seriousness of poets and novelists debating the finer points of narrative. The term “workshop” made writing appear “industrious and productive,” according to Ted Thompson, the founder of the online workshop Longhand. “It’s a brilliant piece of marketing.”
The workshop is said to have professionalized creative writing. First, gain entrance into a prestigious graduate program; next, leverage the credential and connections from the program to publish a book; then, parlay that publication into a teaching position at a prestigious graduate program; and finally, earn tenure for time and money to write more books.
Nice work, if you can get it. But while the number of M.F.A. programs has exploded (64 in 1994, more than 250 today), and prestigious programs receive thousands of applications per year for a dozen or so spots, the degree has been diluted by the sheer quantity of graduates. Entry-level teaching positions are essentially gig work, and tenured professors rarely leave. Tulathimutte compares faculty positions to “Supreme Court vacancies.”
“Realizing literally all that is needed to teach these classes is enough space for about nine people to sit,” Tulathimutte says, “it becomes more and more obscene thinking about having to pay any substantial amount of money for this.”
“Is it the equivalent of a law degree? Clearly not,” McGurl says. “There are the M.F.A. grads who make a living from their writing—a tiny group. A larger group qualify as teachers and then make their living as creative-writing teachers. And then there’s yet another group who go on and do something completely different.” Thompson notes, “It teaches you how to embody this role and create these habits of art, but then you have to figure out how to buy yourself time to do it. And I don’t know that anyone in the academic world really has any way of helping you with that.”
Crit charges $850 for 12 sessions, similar to Sackett Street Writers (some going for $700 for eight weeks) and Longhand ($325 per month, varying lengths). Each offers sliding scales of financial aid. It’s a lot less than Columbia University and N.Y.U., whose current tuition and fees exceed $70,000, if also a lot more than the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which is free for those such as Tulathimutte who are fortunate enough to be accepted.
The founders of these upstart programs are fiercely critical when it comes to the cost of an institutional M.F.A. What surprised me was that they had so few qualms about the workshop model itself, particularly the idea that other aspiring writers are the best sounding board for your work in progress. Sophie Kemp, a writer whose first novel is being published next year, compared the peer feedback she received in her Columbia M.F.A. program to the Goodreads comment section. “You have to listen to people say the most inane and useless stuff about your work,” she says.
Whatever its flaws, “the basic form of a group getting together and somebody reading their stuff and others critiquing one by one has proved very, very durable,” says McGurl. “For all of the possible limitations of that model, I guess you have to sort of give it credit.” This might explain why, though independent workshops may market themselves as alternatives, they closely resemble the programs from which their founders graduated. The D.I.Y. M.F.A is not a threat to the old guard but a vindication of it.
Micah Cash is a high-school teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His writing has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, The Village Voice, and Forever Magazine
