LIONEL SHRIVER ON MFA PROGRAMMES

It is worth watching this candid monologue from Lionel Shriver, a novelist and regular book critic for The Economist, in which she describes her feelings about graduate writing programmes. "It's a little mystifying why my immediate impulse is to dis MFA programmes," she concedes, after mentioning that she herself attended one and had a fairly good experience there. But her visceral concerns about the "indulgent middle-class gestalt" of it all certainly resonate.

There is "something corrupt, something unwholesome" about a business that sees young, aspiring writers fork over considerable wads of cash in exchange for some encouragement and an atmosphere of literary striving. Few will make it as writers. Even successful writers barely make it as writers. Most of these former MFA students will probably wish they invested their thousands of dollars in an interest-bearing account. Or just stuffed it all under a mattress, near their old dog-eared copy of "This Side of Paradise". (Thanks to GalleyCat for the link.)

Relatedly, do read Ruth Franklin's elegant homage to Shriver in the New Republic, in which she asks why the novelist doesn't get the attention she deserves.

~ EB