New MFA Week is Here

Here we go. It’s New MFA Week. Let’s see how this works out.

Before we go following every tangent that pertains to the MFA experience (and I promise we will follow many tangents), I thought it might be worth pausing to reflect on the nature of the Master of Fine Arts, as a degree and as–yes, I am using this word–a lifestyle.

I’m writing this in a coffeeshop across town from where I live. I spent most of the noon hour doing nothing but walking here, and when I’m done I will walk back. It’s summer, and I’m allowed that kind of inefficiency. But even if it were October, this wouldn’t be an incredibly slothful day for me.

Yes, sometimes I feel like a slacker. On these sorts of days I think of the neuroscience grad student, probably hard at work in a lab of some kind, and of poli-sci., and law, and literature students, and of how they are probably in the library or at least poring over texts somewhere. Busy people, hard at work at tasks pertaining directly, and clearly, to their degrees. It makes me wonder if I shouldn’t also be busy, all or most of the time.

But I think that way less and less often, because my understanding of what we as writing students do has changed since I arrived at Pitt. The obvious reason for our being here is “to write.” It stands to reason that, as graduate students, we should write as constantly and as diligently as the neuroscience student does, uh, whatever neuroscientists do in the lab.

“Diligently,” maybe. But “constantly”? I don’t think so. I write pretty regularly–as close to every day as I can manage–and I’ve come to think that that’s enough, that hour or so each day.

As important as the act of sitting at the desk, opening the notebook or the file, is the act of going off alone. Graduate students have workshops and craft-oriented classes where we think and talk about writing; at Pitt we take a certain number of literature classes, where we talk and think about writing in a different, more oblique way. But it’s in the time between classes, all that fallow empty space, that the writing happens, at whatever level.

A possibly irrelevant aside: on the way to the coffeeshop, on Baum Avenue, I came upon a pick-up truck that had crashed into a parked car and flipped over onto its side. A modest-sized crowd had formed, people who had been in Taco Bell and Ritter’s Diner, along with the usual just-passing-through types, to watch police and EMTs drill and saw their way through the driver’s-side door to free the pick-up driver. For a few minutes, until the driver stood up inside the front seat of the truck and stuck his head through the smashed-out driver’s-side window, I think everyone standing there watching was aware that the driver might be dying inside the truck. When the rescue workers had a neck brace on the man, and got him out and over to a stretcher, the people relaxed a little and the talk, which had mostly been along the lines of “How did it happen?” and “This is bad, huh?” branched out a little: “His insurance is gonna go through the roof,” I heard someone say; other people talked about the weather and, inevitably, the Steelers.

It was a weird moment. I thought, “I’m glad I was here for this.” I thought, too, “I might be able to use this.” Then I continued on my way.

This sort of experience–part of that going-off-alone process–has been a non-negligible part of my experience as an MFA, and I wish I’d understood that better when I first arrived in Pittsburgh to start graduate school. Reading books and writing heroic amounts daily is good, but at a certain point it can deaden one, and obscure the part of writing that is invisible and invaluable: going out and collecting, accruing grist for one’s mill.

My colleagues in the non-fiction wing of the program (and we will hear from one, Katy Rank Lev, tomorrow) may quibble with this summary, but the MFA is a program that is fundamentally about time: time to write, time to think, time to make writing an especially significant part of one’s life. It’s true on the “macro” level as well as on the “micro” level of taking the time to walk, and sit, and (as I’m about to do) look over a few stories to see what can be cut, moved, tightened, and improved. Three years at Pitt has meant three years’ shelter from worrying about my career, my retirement fund, and what I’m doing with my life. What I’m doing with my life right now is pleasantly clear: I’m walking, sitting, thinking, and perhaps later I will be writing.

-Adam