You’re Jonathan Franzen or You’re Nobody
“I write because I’ve always wanted to know what bankruptcy feels like.”John Winters gives his sobering reaction to the hotly debated “MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction,” in his essay,...
View ArticleThe Eternal Question: To MFA or Not?
Writers who are currently trying to decide whether an MFA is right for them will find that the questions being raised today are not unlike those addressed by Flannery O’Connor:What first stuns the...
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MFA vs NYC edited by Chad Harbach
A brief refresher in philosophy and linguistics: Any category we make in order to understand an object or experience will itself change the object or experience. A succinct explanation of this...
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The Rumpus Interview with Chad Harbach
If you had to pick an epigraph for Chad Harbach’s latest project, the essay collection MFA vs NYC, you could do worse than choose this passage from his bestselling novel The Art Of Fielding:Literature...
View ArticleLiterature vs. NYC
Independent publishers are producing literature, Chris Fischbach writes in the Virginia Quarterly Review, which is not the same thing as what commercial publishers are printing. Fischbach (a publisher...
View ArticleAn Ideal MFA
How would a writer without an MFA imagine an ideal Creative Writing degree program? Over at Ploughshares, Rebecca Makkai invites you to consider her optimal 2015/2016 course catalog, warning that “the...
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MFA vs. SNL
First there was MFA vs. PhD, a debate over what kind of graduate degree an aspiring writer should pursue. Then came MFA vs. NYC, a critique that divided literary culture geographically, between New...
View ArticleThis Ain’t a Zine It’s an Arms Race
Die publishing industry; zines forever! Liska Jakobs reports live from last weekend’s LA Zine Fest, where DIY publishing continues to flourish even as the contradictions of modern capitalism reveal...
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