Last time, I suggested that one way to show what kind of writer you’d like to be is to include a discussion of literary magazines in your statement of purpose or cover letter. Yet it occurs to me that literary magazines have another value for the MFA applicant.
Most programs publish a magazine, so if you are researching programs and trying to get a good idea of the kind of writing they like, you shoudl read their magazine. Most of these magazines are edited by students in the program, so the selections they make about the writers to accept for their magazine will tell a lot about the kind of writers in the program. I often suggest that prospecitve students read back issues of Ponder Review or Poetry South, which are available for free online in our archives. You can tell a lot from the selections we have made.
But you can dig deeper than just the work published. Consider the submission guidelines and the different tiers of rejection notices by looking them up at rejectionwiki.org. We prefer to use the term “decline” or “return” when we don ‘t accept a writer’s work. How a magazine handles this can give you insights into the program’s culture.
Or read a recent masthead to see who the graduate students working on the magazine have been. Then search to see where they’ve published or what they are doing today, especially if you’re looking at an issue from a few years back. In addition to looking up what and where faculty have published, it can be instructive to see where current and former students are active. This take a fair amount of digging, and you might not find everything, but the magazine editors are a great place to start.
Common advice for applicants is to research the faculty at the programs they want to apply to. That’s important because you’re likely to work with those faculty, but it’s equally important to try to get a sense of the students in a program, and the literary magazine may be the best place to learn about them. And if you end up enrolling in that program, one of the most valuable experiences you have may be working on that magazine. Is it run as part of a class or staffed by graduate assistants or volunteers? And if you’re headed to #AWP26, you can see copies of many magazines and even meet some of their staffs at the Book Fair.
Kendall Dunkelberg 