Earlier this year, in its annual publication on the best graduate programs in the country, U.S. News and World Report included an article on the extraordinarily tight job market for academia in the arts and humanities. Less than half of new Ph.D.'s in literature and languages, for example, could expect to find full-time college teaching jobs, it reported. Almost at the same time, the Modern Language Association, the scholarly organization in literature and language, was publishing a 20-plus page report in the October issue of its bi-monthly journal, Publications of Modern Language Association, addressing what it called an "acute. . .academic crisis," which proposed, among other things, that graduate programs look seriously at the job prospects for its students and that, if they determined that their graduates weren't finding appropriate, full-time, tenure-track teaching jobs, they should reduce, significantly, the number of students they accepted into their programs.
While no one apparently has turned the same kind of lens on the job opportunities for graduates of creative writing programs, there's no reason to doubt that prospects for them give any more reason for optimism.
"The prospects of [graduates of creative writing programs] getting teaching positions have never been any good," says Steven Meyer, associate professor and director of the graduate creative writing program at Washington University.
"This has been a problem for 20 years," says David Fenza, executive director of Associated Writing Programs (AWP), a national organization of close to 300 undergraduate and graduate writing programs. "Starting in the late 1970s, the entire market has gone bust, and academe is producing far more graduates in creative writing than it has places for, professionally."
For writers, this gloomy landscape is echoed in what many see as a tightening market for publishing serious literature, given the recent consolidation within the industry, and the fact that the new mega-publishing houses are increasingly driven less by the quality of a line of prose or poetry than by the quality of the bottom-line.
"It's true that the outlets are shrinking and most of the largest publishers are taking fewer chances with new writers," said Meyer.
Despite this, students are still pursuing degrees in creative writing in significant numbers. The most recent statistics available from the AWP, from the early 1990s, showed that, among the 180 member institutions it had at the time, there were close to 10,000 students enrolled as undergraduate majors in creative writing, or as candidates for M.A. , M.F.A., or Ph.D. degrees. While the organization has not done a similar census more recently, its total of member institutions has increased by two-thirds, suggesting that the number of students enrolled in programs that belong to the organization is substantially higher. The AWP presently has 16,000 individual members.
As well, at the same time that the country was seeing considerable reductions in the numbers of possible jobs for graduates of creative writing programs, the number of such programs was exploding. In 1975, there were 56 graduate and 24 undergraduate creative writing programs in the U.S., according to the AWP; currently, there are more than 400 colleges and universities that offer some degree in the discipline; all told, 310 of them offer an undergraduate major in creative writing, while there are 250 institutions that offer graduate degrees. (Some institutions offer both undergraduate and graduate degrees.)
While in a practical sense, it may seem difficult to reconcile this paradox, to understand why students continue to study, in droves, a discipline that will guarantee them little or no material return for their years of study or their thousands of dollars in tuition, it's not all that difficult to understand if you approach it with a different model, say teachers and graduates of these programs.
"It's a mistake to think of writing programs as being equivalent to learning carpentry or glass blowing, as an ends oriented program that will indubitably teach you a skill that will lead you to a job," says Margot Livesey, who teaches fiction writing at both Emerson College in Boston and at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, and has also taught at the University of Iowa, Brandeis, and the University of California-Irvine, among other programs. "A creative writing program is a way for people to put writing at the center of their lives for two or three years, and that is valuable even if they don't go on to glorious publishing career."
Adds AWP's Fenza, "The goal of any creative writing program is to have students become better writers. It is not to get them a job in academe, not to get their work published. Can these programs make a mediocre scribble into an extremely accomplished artist? No, they can't, because it's a combination of factors that allows one to succeed — talent, perseverance, will, quite a catalogue of attributes that we can't supply an individual with. But if someone is determined to develop those attributes, a writing program can certainly expedite their development and help them progress more quickly than they could on their own."
That was one of the principle reasons that Mark Toft, a recent graduate of Washington University's M.F.A. program, and currently assistant to the program's director, said he decided to enroll in the program there.
"I had been working for awhile, in Washington D.C., at the Department of Justice, and I decided I wanted to go back to school," he says. "I thought that it would accelerate my development as a writer, and it did. I am convinced that, in two years, I learned more than I would have in five or six years of working on my own."
Kenneth Cook, who is a professor literature and creative writing, as well as chair of arts and humanities at Prescott College in Arizona, says he pursued his M.F.A. for much the same reason; he earned his degree from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.
"Ten years ago, I was in a Ph.D. program Southern Illinois University-Carbondale," he says. "and I found myself increasingly depressed with my graduate program in literature. I was finding that the emphasis in my courses was on secondary sources, on reading criticism about the works rather than the works themselves, and it was moving me away from the pleasure I found in reading and in creative work. I was also finding that the more critical work I did, the less creative work I was able to do."
Beyond the time, another clear benefit of studying in a program is that it puts a writer into a community of people, both faculty and students, who value the work, itself, a condition not readily found outside the programs.
"It gives you a situation where your work is taken seriously," Cook says. "In the general culture, and often in our families, writing is a negligible thing unless it makes you famous or rich, which doesn't happen often. For me, that community was crucial, and it's crucial to my students; it gives them the notion that writing counts."
Beyond the time and attention it provides to students for their own work, the programs also teach them to become better readers, and better critical thinkers, traits that will benefit them, even if they do not pursue writing once they've finished their degree.
Partly, this comes from the workshop, the center of most creative writing programs, in which students present their work for discussion by the faculty and their peers.
"Sometimes other faculty will complain about the validity of creative writing classes, or snicker about them," Cook says. "They don't think it's academic enough, or they think that it depends more on imagination and intuition than it does on rigorous critical thinking and research, which are the center of other academic disciplines; they think, as do some younger, undergraduate students, that creative writing is an easy course, that all it is is gushing forth your soul on paper, but it's much more.
"There is a tremendous critical thinking aspect to it, because it forces students to figure out how a story works or how it doesn't work, and how to provide different solutions for the problem."
Another quality that students gain is that the programs make them better, more intelligent readers of good work. All creative programs include, in varying degrees, requirements for students to study literature, in addition to doing their own work.
At Webster University, for example, which offers an undergraduate emphasis in creative writing, majors are required to take courses in modern British and American writers; at the Washington Program, MFA candidates take half of their credits in literature courses, and at UMSL, they're required to take 15 of their 39 hours in literature, linguistics or the teaching of writing.
"It's too easy for young writers to have their work talked about ad nauseam," said David Clewell, who heads the program at Webster University. "Writers need to get some sense of what the tradition is all about if they're going to push that tradition into the future."
Even in Clewell's creative writing workshops, he spends half of the time working over serious modern and contemporary works.
For Livesey, this aspect of any creative writing program is essential to what she sees as the programs' ability to help students mature as human beings, as well as develop as writers.
"A creative writing program has much to do with a student's relationship to the self and the world, and with developing a life-long way of engaging in reality, as it were. As teachers, we have to think they are going to benefit from our programs by becoming better readers, and that this will help them develop more inner resources. When people started to learn to read novels in the 18th century, they immediately realized that reading about fictional characters offered something they couldn't find in reading history, biography, or lives of the saints. Those possibilities of the universal which were understood at the time persist. If you read about a person who really lives, you can't pour your own life into that mold. If you read about a fictional character, however, you can, and that longing for that model and that mirror still persist very deeply in us today."
Given all of this, then, it no longer seems so surprising that, every year, thousands of students pursue a track that offers so little material return, and AWP's Fenza expects that trend to continue.
"Pursuing a career in the arts is a very high calling," he says, "and there are always going to be many people, both young and old and middle aged who want to be a part of something more than the buying and selling of consumerist culture, who want to enter an arena where individual choices matter, and that is the business of the making of art, one person makes a decision one word after another word after another, one sentence after another, one paragraph after another. This will always have a great appeal to people, as will the opportunity that writing gives us to examine our lives, and to be able to examine the lives of others, and with some luck, you may say something about our reality that no one has said or seen before. That's something in itself. It's a great human endeavor, and we have to thank our lucky stars that people still want to do this, whether or not it provides them a secure and comfortable life."
originally appeared in The Riverfront Times, St. Louis, Missouri
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