Porter Shreve

Just as any litblogger's blood runs cold when s/he reads a newspaper book review dismissing the impact or relevance of the blogosphere, I have a conniption whenever I come across that tired critique about a debut short story collection seeming "workshoppy" or "another safe product of an MFA program." Not only are these assumptions, but they don't make a concrete point and fall into that general you-know-what-I-mean category that lazy reviewers rely on. So I was glad to read Michelle Herman's letter to the editor of the NYTBR a while back, in which she says what's true for all of us who went through and now teach in graduate creative writing programs: nobody tells us what we can and cannot do or what we can and cannot try; MFA programs, more than anything, are about the unparalleled gift of two (or in the case of Purdue, where I teach, three fully funded) years away from the cubicle or assembly line to immerse in books and craft and find, perhaps for the first time, a community of people who don't consider your love of reading and working out the puzzle of words to be mystifying.

Writers are oddballs, but rarely the same kind of oddball. And in my experience and the experience of nearly every writer I know the only conformity in MFA programs is toward communicating emotions and ideas in language, but only through the particular experience or vision each person brings to the workshop table. Columbia College professor Arielle Greenberg makes an excellent defense of the MFA in poetry here, and Sycamore Review editor Mark Leahy (full disclosure: a former student) gives one of the more thoughtful and thorough assessments I've read here. For my part, as I head back to the classroom for another semester of teaching I can only respond to MFA critics by pointing randomly to the shelf of contemporary fiction at my right elbow: Edwidge Danticat (MFA, Brown), Michael Chabon (MFA, UC-Irvine), T.C. Boyle (MFA, Iowa),  ZZ Packer (MFA, Iowa), David Foster Wallace (MFA, Arizona), Rattawut Lapcharoensap (MFA, Michigan), George Saunders (MFA, Syracuse), Aimee Bender (MFA, UC-Irvine), Jhumpa Lahiri (Creative Writing MA, Boston University), Lorrie Moore (MFA, Cornell), Ana Menendez (MFA, NYU), David Means (MFA, Columbia). If this group is writing "the workshop story," then what exactly is it?