Personal Essay

Written by M. Altstaetter

The big issue with wanting to be a writer is that you have to be good at writing. You might cry, “Hey moron, what about [ENTER TERRIBLE BOOK THAT MADE A BILLION DOLLARS SOMEHOW AND HAS 5 STARS ON GOODREADS]”.  

Excellent point. There are many terrible books and stories and poems out there. To be real, I have no rebuttal. I suppose you must either be really bad (think movies you love to hate so much they become genuinely good, a la The Room or any X-Men movie [I say fondly]) or really good. You don’t hear much chit-chat about books that are just okay, and I imagine for most of us, just okay is not what we’re reaching for. Even the most beatnik wannabe hipsters among us can probably admit, deep down, that 99% of writers want to be Famous and Known.  

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’d be the first to admit I also want to be Famous and Known for my writing. I would say the majority of people, even outside of the field of writing, who say that they don’t in some way, shape, or form, dream about some kind of notoriety are probably lying. Something, something, technology, something, something, kids these days, but I would even argue this is true for most of human history. I would be willing to hedge a bet if you gave a hermit crab full consciousness, it would also dream of becoming rich and famous. That, or Go Mad From The Revelation and kill itself. Either/or.  

In the 16 (!!!) years I have considered myself a writer, I have struggled greatly with the idea that if my work is not quality enough to be Famous and Known, then it’s not good enough to complete. As a child, I assumed I would be the youngest author ever (Imagine my rage when I found out the youngest author in the world was already younger than me – it was a fearsome thing). This upset me enough that I stopped writing for several months, until I picked it back up in middle school. Surprise, surprise, as I eventually realized how difficult it is to get published, get famous, and get money from the whole endeavor, I gave up again for almost a year. In high school, I regrouped, and managed to be consistent, writing my crappy novels that were more or less ideas cribbed from comic books, for all four years.  

I attended THE Ohio State…branch college in Lima…majoring in English with a minor in Creative Writing. Well, they gutted the Creative Writing program there that same year, because God forbid the poors have any fun. The dream withered quick without it, as I realized what many people coming from villages of 1000 people who think they are good at something must realize when they go to an actual city – aw, I’m not actually that good at this, I was good at this there. And since I wasn’t good at it, clearly I wasn’t going to get what I wanted out of it, and so, again, I stopped writing.  

I wrote here and there in the latter years of college, but never anything serious. I would get halfway through a story or poem and think, no one is ever going to read this but me and maybe one of my weird friends, and give up. What was the point?  

When I applied to the MA (yes, I am not an MFA, if it wasn’t obvious by all these run-on sentences and my beloved parentheses and hyphens), I did consider, briefly, applying for the MFA instead. I had enough (unedited and old as fuck) poetry or fiction to do the application for either. But I enjoy the work of literature, and I’m alright at it, and, as I had realized over the years, I was never going to stand out among other writers. So, the MA. Which, for the record, I love and feel very comfortable in.  

Was I wrong for wanting acknowledgement for my work and letting the lack of it derail me? I’m biased, because I’m me and I love being right, but I’d say no. We live in a world where a writer can’t live on whatever cash they get from writing. Most writers work multiple jobs. Even if a writer manages to survive off their books or stories, they get derided constantly by the notion that “anybody can write a book” (technically true – see above; “there are many terrible books”). You can put all your blood, sweat, tears, and money into something, and just get a few 3 star reviews and your relatives mockery for it. Can someone be blamed for getting discouraged?  

I don’t write much, still. I am somewhat busy, true, but I harbor the same fear and jealousy about writing, which is what really stops me. Yesterday I was reading Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, and instead of enjoying its genius, it started pissing me off – why can’t I do that? I couldn’t even appreciate it. I read a great poem, and it ruins my day instead of making it brighter. 

Something happens, somewhere between saying your first words and graduating high school, that ruins lives and hearts and dreams. (It’s capitalism, really, but allow me my few poetics). When I was eight years old a children’s book author/illustrator visited my school to read to us her new book, “Henry the Tomato”. I never can recall the author’s name but the title is incredibly clear and vivid in my mind, which is an issue since I have been googling it for years to no avail. Basically, it is entirely possible I made some or all of the whole scene up, not especially because I am from a “village” (yes, legally a village) of less than one thousand people where we have truly no claim to anything that would reward attention, so why a writer would be visiting my school is beyond me. I actually don’t even know that I was eight – I was in elementary school, in a school that got torn down many years later, so I could have just as easily been seven, or eight, or nine, or ten, or eleven, though at twelve I would have been in middle school, so we can’t traverse too far.  

The year, the author, the book itself, real or fake, is not really important to this essay. What is important is I also have a faint maybe-memory of writing some proto-fanfiction for Henry the Tomato, for whom I wrote and illustrated, with crayons, several pages of a Bildungsroman where Henry befriends a skateboarding worm named Billy and they beat up a bully together (the image of the bully is lost to me, so feel safe to imagine a cucumber named Jimmy or fork named Tommy or something). The paper fanfiction did not survive my childhood (many things did not), nor did it pass the Bechdel test, but it had other value to it. The fact that it had been constructed with lined notebook paper, a limited assortment of crayon colors, probably had a less than coherent plot, none of that is what I remember from the moment. It was something else entirely, though I find myself unable to tap into it again. Whatever it is, it is something that is crucial to living authentically. I do hope it comes back.  

By Garret Miller

Years ago, I occupied a warehouse for most hours of light. Me and a gaggle of burnouts huddled in the hulls of trailers, dolleying off packaged furniture for assembly and distribution— and I’m unsure that I’ve worked an honest day since the summer eve I marked my last. I moved on from the warehouse, taut and frayed, and dressed deer until I couldn’t stand the smell any longer. It took one day. Then it was maintenance work in a nursing home, and on the easiest days, I’d change a lightbulb. The old blinked between life and death. I thought I may as well have been butchering.
Yes, the scent of processed deer, like stale blood, is intolerable. Worse perhaps, but human and essential and thus endurable, are the wings of a nursing home wherein lie the dying. Many times I’ve walked the halls, heard each knell that marked life, the wet coughs and vague moans, and found in their lapsed silence the simple truth that is suffering. I’ve a good friend who tells me that truth is an illusion—and perhaps it is, but at least this is honest.
I teach now, but I do not work… still I grow tired of the speechmaking, the prescriptive, the arrogant hopefulness and laze of it all. On the topic of THE WRITER’S JOURNEY, here goes: there is never much worth saying. There’s even less to write down. The world has sent me where it pleased, pocked me as it has you, and surely, this will never change. There are some fragments of experience that affect me in profound ways, as there are for you, and in the selfish pursuit that is writing, we dwell. This is fine. The sooner you come to terms with feeling the better. I’ve learned that poetry is prayer… only it still works when faith runs dry. Futile, perhaps, but we all must pass the time somehow. Enough speechmaking. Thoreau loved walks, “journeys”, and his mother loved doing his laundry. That’s a truth that is also an illusion. One resident I was passingly fond of, Ernest, loved Thoreau (false, but he may as well have) and never believed I could fix his sink. He shared a room alongside his wife in Payne, Ohio. You have to be able to rely on yourself, he told me, self-reliance. And I nodded. The leak was as simple as a loose pipe nut. He died a few weeks after his wife.

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.