It was a discussion about the downsides of the MFA approach that prompted Joe to describe his experiences at Stanford to me.
How did we get on the topic?
I had said that I thought the guy who wrote the SPADE & ARCHER review in the NY Times and was concerned that Joe's sentence:
"His powerful, conical, almost bearlike body kept his gray woolen suit coat from fitting well."
shouldn't have the word "woolen" in it was surely a product of an MFA program.
Full disclosure: I went to Stanford for other degrees, but was rejected from Columbia's MFA program, which I applied to b/c Chandler's first biographer, Frank MacShane, was running it at the time.
(But at least I got a nicer note from MacShane than Gores did from Stanford!)
--MC
--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, Don Lee <donthepoet@...> wrote:
>
> Again, just my perspective, but MFA programs (too often) generate writers who write for non-paying lit journals, publishing in which is how you build a vita to get a job teaching writing in the MFA programs that will hire you to teach students to write "workshop" stories so they can get published in non-paying lit journals, which... Well, you get the point.
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