The MFA dance

Reading about Nurse Fusion's MFA residency adventures, particularly the overload of information, reminds me about my own MFA dance and how different it was from most. This is because, in fact, I "became a writer" during the year before I entered the program, which gave me a different head-set than most candidates. In that year, spent here in Portland, I began making money as a writer, first as editor of a biweekly trade newspaper and later as a freelancer for Northwest Magazine, while at the same time writing my ass off and sending literary short fiction everywhere -- and finally getting stories accepted. By the time I entered the MFA program (in fiction -- later I would switch to playwriting), I had published stories in several top literary magazines and, in fact, had "credits" as good as some of my teachers. This gave me greater confidence, and I think more arrogance, than I would have had if I were unpublished. In fact, the week I arrived on campus, I had a piece in The New Republic, and the very first words spoken to me by the chair of the department were, "How nice to see your piece in The New Republic this week, Mr. Deemer!" I missed the obvious clue that there was nowhere to go but down after this. (The same week my advisor asked me if I was familiar with The New Republic magazine, and I said, Yes, I have a piece in it this week.)

I learned a ton in the MFA program despite whatever arrogance I brought to the program as "a professional writer". I had great teachers and great learning experiences drinking and talking long hours with colleagues. But the fact that I was already publishing with regularity did set me apart.

The year out of school, between the PhD and MFA programs I left and entered in order, was as important a learning experience as the MFA work. Most educational was editing the silly rag called the Northwest Mobile Home News. This was an ad rag, really, put together by one man who did it all. He hired me to write the damn thing so he could hit the road and sell ads throughout the region. He gave me a crash course in how to paste up and deliver the paper to the printer, left it to me to fill it with copy, and took off! I had an office and total freedom. What I did, in an effort to make the newspaper interesting, was create a number of bylines and columnists -- I wrote under about six names! -- and so was writing from different perspectives in different voices. A reader would think we had a large staff of writers. I did it all. I started interviewing people in the industry -- I got to interview Sen. Wayne Morse the first time in this job -- and I believe I turned the rag into something far better than it was. Since I was in the office alone all day, I also spent time doing my literary work there. And I was making a living wage doing all this. It was a great school-of-hard-knocks crash course in writing, publishing, and the real world.

By the time I reentered school on an MFA program, I considered myself "a writer," rather than a wanna-be writer, and had the credits and income to prove it. My teachers soon began treating me more as a colleague than a student -- being older, I was the same age as the younger faculty -- and as a T.A. I began teaching classes as well. I learned a ton, yes, but the power relationships were very different from those I witnessed between teacher and beginning students.

I recommend that beginning writers take a leap and learn to survive in the world as a writer. I don't recommend it as a career -- commercial writing gets old quickly, at least to me, but one learns skills and gains "real world" knowledge that can be used later in an artistic career (even though much of what you learn is pretty depressing about our culture). I admire freelance writers -- it's the hardest job there is. I survived as a freelancer at several different periods in my career, most recently in the 1980s, and I never want to work that hard again.