The MFA Rejection Quarter-Life Crisis
by Hannah Goss
The MFA once seemed like a secret society existing only for the surest, truest, most brilliant writers, and more importantly, a slingshot to success. I wondered if the MFA was a kind of pseudo-nepo-baby? Would Harper Collins or Penguin Random House see the degree and take my manuscript, no questions asked?
I was a junior at Duquesne University when I first heard of an MFA program in creative writing from my fiction professor. The two faculty members in my small program who had MFAs held an informational meeting for all of us who hoped to break into this secret society. Only three of us attended the meeting, eager to know: Was this our ticket to becoming a writer, truly and honestly? Was this the way to see our name in print, making a career out of the scribbling we did in the solitude of our rooms?
Instead, we learned it was, at best, a boutique degree. At least, that’s what they said. I still don’t know what that means except that I figure it’s what a boutique is: unique, specialized, and overpriced. These were not meant to be words of discouragement from our faculty but rather words of caution. Don’t overemphasize its significance. Don’t go into debt. My all-knowing twenty-one-year-old self took it with a grain of salt. I needed that piece of paper.
I spent my senior year of college compiling a spreadsheet of top-rated MFA programs, evaluating their location (East Coast, New England preferred), their stipend (one has to eat), teaching requirements, and professional opportunities (literary magazines, publishing, and editing skills). I was methodical and determined. I prepared my portfolio with the gracious help of my fiction professor with line-by-line editing and revised personal statement after personal statement. I was doing everything by the book, but the thing I wanted so badly, to write, was exactly what I’d stopped doing in the process. By March, I’d been waitlisted by one program and rejected from the rest. The rejections shook me. I saw graduate school as my inevitable future. How could I be done with my academic career? I needed the MFA to waive in front of all my doubters so that I could say, “Look here! I’m worth something.” Instead, I scrambled for the backup plan I hadn’t made as I walked across the stage to collect my diploma.
After the rejections, I retreated to my parents’ house in rural Lancaster County–the prodigal daughter’s return. I went back to my summer job as a prep cook and caterer in my small town at a cafe known for being an overpriced tourist stop, passing off Costco ingredients as locally sourced. I sliced deli meat and mopped floors and wondered if this is what it was all for after years of filled journals, carefully annotated short story anthologies, and Barnes & Noble gift cards. I felt myself to be a failure, the starving artist doomed to a food-service job, resentful of her unrealized potential. Still, I was determined to apply again; I needed to prove something. I spent the days after work, still smelling of grease and potatoes, shoveling spoonfuls of short stories down and carving out the pieces I wanted to steal like a butcher. I collaged my rejection letters together using some Modge-Podge to paste in a poster frame – my grand motivator. I got a story published, and some of my coworkers at the cafe read it. I came in one morning to the baker telling me she’d cried; it had stirred something in her, made her feel seen. I realized I was a writer to her.
It was the fall of 2023, a few months after my rejection. I stared at my poster frame collage, and I took it down. Until that point, I had been waiting for someone to permit me to write. I had been waiting for a graduate degree. I realized that having an MFA wasn’t going to make me a writer. It wasn’t a knighthood I needed to be inducted into. There was no monarch of writing and literature, no degree, that could grant me the title.
A year prior, when I was finishing my undergraduate program and our university’s last literary magazine was released, the other senior creative writers and I gathered for our pizza party in College Hall, a windowless classroom on the English department’s floor, and we signed each other’s poems and stories with bright-eyed optimism that our names would be widely in print someday. We treated the inside covers like yearbooks, and inside mine I have six notes that all say, don’t stop writing.
If there’s one thing I learned from my two rounds of applying to MFAs, it’s that intent matters. I reapplied, but this time I wasn’t chasing a degree, a title of prestige, or a sense of validation. The biggest part of creative writing that I missed was being around other writers, and that was my new intent. To learn from others, to be inspired, to sit at a roundtable workshop and voice ideas about how to make a piece work better and in turn, learn how to make my work better.
Now I’m here, at Bowling Green’s MFA program as a fiction writer. The first few weeks that feeling returned–the dreaded imposter syndrome. However, our first Q&A session for our Prout Reading series took place just last week with an alum, Jacqueline Vogtman. We all wanted to know, how do you make it happen after? When you’ve finished the degree and have dedicated two years of your life to writing, how do you return to the real world? We talked about writing habits, about making time for writing in the early hours of the morning, and about doing it every day. But we also talked about the connections formed in an MFA. Their cohort still talks and reads each other’s work. They’ve invited her to read her new book at the schools they teach at. So, the MFA is more than a degree; it’s an investment in a supportive community that knows what it’s like to sit behind the closed door and stare at the blank page. A community that knows what it’s like to Modge-Podge rejection letters onto a poster board.
Sitting in workshops in East Hall 406 with our printed copies of each other’s stories and our marginal notes, each of us tossing out what-ifs and questions, I feel like I am doing a lot more than earning a degree to frame on my wall. So, do you need the MFA? While I don’t think it will get you a published manuscript by default or get your relatives off your back about your employment status, I think it’s worth a lot more than that.
