I’ve been writing about the MFA application process for over a decade, ever since we prepared to launch our Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at Mississippi University for Women in 2015, so of course, I was interested when the latest issue of Poets & Writers (September/October 2025) advertised a feature section on choosing and applying for the MFA, along with other advice for writers. And I’m also not surprised that the articles were disappointing. It’s not that they were wrong, but more that they didn’t go into much depth. I usually like Poets & Writers and value their advice, but this time, they didn’t give each topic enough attention and barely scratched the surface.
Lyzette Wanzer, giving advice on how to choose an MFA program, focused more on things like geography or the weather than things like program culture or the kinds of faculty and students a program recruits. Geography can be an interesting factor to consider, but I would rank it pretty low on my list of criteria unless there are reasons you need to be in a program close to home. Your experience in a program will be affected much more by the people you work with than whether there are mountains or snow or city streets and cafes, though those factors may ultimately play a role in your decision.
Similarly, Wanzer mentioned that some programs are fully funded, while others are not, but she also made a distinction between “fully funded” programs and those with graduate assistantships and other forms of aid, which is a little misleading. While it is true that there are some programs that fully scholarship some students (I’m thinking of the Michener program at the University of Texas at Austin and a few others), these are exceedingly rare and extremely competitive. Most programs that are called “fully funded” do rely on assistantships to fund their students, which means that students teach classes, do research (rare in creative writing), or work in writing centers to work their way through grad school. These assistantships come with a stipend and (usually) a tuition waiver. The stipend often isn’t a lot, but will usually allow a person to live without a second job. It’s probably not going to be enough to support a family or live a lavish lifestyle, but you can get by, maybe by renting an apartment with room mates or limiting how often you go out to eat.
You also get valuable teaching experience while on an assistantship, which can be important if you want an academic career. And you should have health insurance and other benefits as an employee of the university. When weighing an offer from an MFA program, it is important to look into the financial implications: what is the cost of living where you will be, what kind of apartment could you afford, will you have other expenses like travel, and what kind of stipend and other benefits does the university provide? These issues get little mention in the Poets & Writers piece on choosing an MFA program, though to be honest, they could have probably added another article just about weighing the offers you get, assuming you’re lucky enough to be accepted into multiple programs.
The choice of where to apply and the choice of which school to choose in the end is very different, though the first influences the latter. The choice of where to apply is aspirational. You probably want to apply to different kinds of schools, some that are close and some that are far, some that are in uban areas and some that are rural, some that are prestigious and some that are hidden gems. Your choice of which one among the programs that have accepsted you to actually attend is much more pragmatic. May you all be so lucky to have two or more to choose between!
Wanzer did mention the differences between traditional MFA programs that involve taking classes on campus and low-residency programs that don’t. She didn’t go into why not being on campus often means that low-residency programs don’t offer much in the way of financial assistance. However, low-residency programs do allow students to keep their current jobs, which often are more lucrative than graduate assistantships. We allow students to live close to family or to stay where they are for all the reasons that you might want or need to do that. There are benefits to both models, as I point out in my post Low-Res or Fully Funded, an MFA Decision. It is also important to think about how you will afford your MFA, especially if choosing a low-res or fully online program.
I don’t mean to be too critical of Wanzer either. She gives some valuable information; there is just so much more to say. But I’ve written on these subjects a lot, and Poets & Writers only gave Wanzer a page in the magazine. Hers is the most detailed of any of the advice articles, which may be why I had more things that I wanted to react to.
Rene Steinke, who I admire greatly, gave advice on how to write your personal statement, though she focused primarily on how to think about and brainstorm to answer the question “why do you want to be a writer?” and by extension “what kind of writer you want to be?” Her piece is pithy, well written, and enigmatic, which befits the challenge of trying to answer those questions. Yet I have argued (more than once) that the statement about why you want to be a writer is often the least interesting or informative part of the personal statement. That might be why Steinke focuses on it, since that is where so many letters fall short. Yet, it’s also important to talk about how you’ve prepared for an MFA in writing or what you’ve written already, and to answer questions like where have you worked, have you published or at least attempted to publish, have you taken workshops, and what kind of writing do you like to read?
Similarly, Dan Beachy-Quick, a poet whose craft essays I’ve often taught, when writing about “How to Matke the Most of Your Time in an MFA,” focuses on immersing yourself in language and learning to value things about literature that your younger self may have scoffed at. Great advice, though I would like to add that probably the best thing you can do to make the most of your time is to develop community. Make lasting friendships and get to know your mentors as people, not just as writers you can learn from and network with. These relationships will stay with you for the rest of your life, which is why when choosing a program, more and more I think you should consider the people and the culture of a program more than anything else.
When I was reading with another poet recently, I was reminded of this when she told a story about a faculty member who criticized her poems for being too personal and who refused to serve on her thesis committee because he couldn’t handle “confessional” poetry, even though she would argue (now — maybe she didn’t have the experience to argue it then, she didn’t say) that her poems weren’t confessional. We’ve all been there, and I understand the stigma that anything with a slight scent of “confessionalism” faced a decade or more ago. I went through something similar with one of my grad school professors, though he didn’t use the term “confessional” with my poems. He was a lit professor, poet, and translator, and I learned only after I graduated that he had said some quite negative remarks about my poetry, not that he ever taught me in a creative writing class or had any reason to even think about my poems (I was in a PhD in Comparative Literature at the time). These are experiences no one needs. It may be true that they are unavoidable, though choosing a program that is a good fit for you can help, and having good and supportive mentors can help you make it through when the nay-sayers inevitably come your way. Having a community of writers can also help you develop the thick skin you will need to handle rejection and to keep writing until you begin to see the successes.
That may be one reason I value Molly McCully Brown’s piece on “How to Think about the Value of a Creative Writing Degree.” She understandably focuses on the writing you will do, the deadlines you’ll face, and the progress you’ll make as a writer, yet she also thinks of it in terms of the readers you will have, the questions you will ask of one another, the community you will build. She does not emphasize the final output, and maybe rightly so. Though an MFA typically leads you to a thesis, which is a book-length project, she ends her piece thinking about all the other “beginnings” you have created during your time in a program. Arguably, one of the main points to the MFA is that thesis, and learning to wrestle with a project that is as unruly and unpredictable as a book is probably going to be your crowning achievement, and may be the main thing that writers seek to get from their MFA. But the value isn’t only the thesis, the publishable manuscript itself, but is learning enough about yourself and about finishing a long project like this that you can do it again—and again and again.
The value of the MFA is not in learning how to knock out a novel or a collection of poems quickly and more efficiently. As McCully Brown suggests, it is to learn to complicate things, to ask more challenging questions, to dig deeper and to push yourself further, and to come through that wilderness to achieve a finished product: novel, collection of poems, stories, or essays, a play or collection of short plays, etc. which you can be proud of and that no one but you could have written. And then to be prepared to take on a new project with equal rigor. And to do it with the friends and other writers whose advice and words you value. Yes, I’m thinking of both the living, breathing community of writers you begin to accumulate in your MFA experience, and those writers you have read who may be long dead or may be the writers you admire from afar but haven’t met yet. You can discover your tradition, your canon, and your compatriots in your MFA journey, which will stay with you and sustain you throughout your writing life.
Can you do those things without an MFA? Of course. Many writers have and many writers will. Can you do them in the same way and with the same level of intensity outside of an MFA experience? Possibly, though it is very hard to replicate on your own. If you’re able to earn your MFA and you’re ready to do it, nothing should hold you back. But financial concerns, life challenges, and other roadblocks often do get in the way, and there should be no stigma against writers who don’t hold the degree. But for those who can make it happen, as my students say over and over, it is a transformative experience when you dedicate those years and that effort to the study of writing with others who are with you on the same (or a parallel) journey.
I’m grateful for Poets & Writers for including this feature section on advice on the writing life. There are other essays that go beyond the MFA experience that I won’t respond to here. All are well-written and provocative. I only wish they were longer. But the nice thing about a magazine format is there is always another issue, and with it the opportunity for more advice. And on my blog, I can keep returning to these same subjects, hopefully with new insights and updated information.
Kendall Dunkelberg 