There were lots of Twitter jokes last week about the resurging “MFA discourse” after author and scientist Erik Hoel published How the MFA Swallowed Literature. For anyone active in the literary/MFA community, it is merely the latest critique of MFA programs, a well-worn punching bag at this point. Hoel selects the year 2006 as the point at which everything went downhill. The core of his argument: “Workshop-trained writers are often, not always, but often, intrinsically defensive. This single fact explains almost all defining features of contemporary literature. What you’re looking at on the shelf are not so much books as battlements. Consider the minimalism of many current novels, their brevity—all to shrink the attack surface.”
A good rebuttal comes from novelist Lincoln Michel (an MFA grad), who says MFAs, once upon a time, used to be blamed for producing elitist, postmodern literature that no one wanted to read. Now MFAs are getting blamed for easy-to-read minimalism. Michel writes, “MFAs become a stand-in for whatever trend in literature someone dislikes. I’ve seen MFAs blamed for hysterical realism, dirty realism, McSweeney’s-style fabulism, autofiction, ‘identity novels,’ and everything else in-between. … The truth is not that MFA programs steer publishing, but that trends in publishing steer the writing in MFA programs.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
