Hi from Richard Grayson

Thanks to Jeff for asking me to guest-post while he's taking a well-deserved summer break -- although I have to admit that my assumption was that I was going to be one of a vast number of substitutes.  I feel hesitant about "introducing myself" other than to say that I'm a writer who was lucky enough to start publishing stories in literary (we used to mostly say "little") magazines in 1975 and probably as some fluke got a book of short stories published from a New York commercial house in 1979.  You can find out more about me than anyone would want to from my static mess of a website.

I asked Jeff what I should post about, and here's what he told me:

Hey Richard, It's really up to you what you post about.  Literary content is great, but feel free to stray from that and post whatever you feel like writing about.

So we'll see.  I'm an old man, at least in blogosphere terms, and am having old-man difficulties as I attempt this first post (how do I get that quote indentation to end?  why did I get that unexpected formatting result?  having gone outside this "post body" area, how do I get the cursor back in when it doesn't seem to want to go? I also got a new computer last week and still am using training wheels for it) -- so I ask for your patience.

I'd been doing business-type stuff today, and after I got home (temporary home: an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn) in time for what I call "dinner" (a microwaved Amy's Breakfast Burrito and some passion fruit), I lay down for what I thought would be fifteen minutes before I went to KGB to hear Ned Vizzini and Mike Edison read at 7 p.m.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up after 10 p.m.  Well, I'd been up since 2:30 a.m. (it's an old-man insomnia thing), having slept for three hours last night (anxieties about what I'd post about here); in any case, I cannot report on the reading, but knowing Ned and Mike's work, I'm sure it was wonderful. 

KGB was founded and is owned by my Brooklyn College MFA classmate Denis Woychuk, also a fellow lawyer and the author of a terrific memoir about his career representing the criminally insane, Attorney for the Damned.

Denis and I were in the small first class of BC's MFA program, starting it back in the first days of the Ford administration.  There were not even 50 graduate programs in creative writing in 1974; now there may be as many as 350, according to Edward J. Delaney's piece in the July Atlantic, "Writers in Training."

For me, the MFA program was two years in which I was able to find time to write and was able to take myself seriously as a writer, but I don't think any of us -- all working-class New York City kids, the first in our families to even get bachelor's degrees -- really expected the kind of things out of it that grad students do today.

Of course we paid $45 a credit back in the days when financial aid, if we needed it, consisted of grants, not loans. I was living at home, working at $2-an-hour jobs, and my parents paid the entire $1,620 that the degree cost me.

Today some MFA programs cost as much as law schools.  I went to a state law school, starting in 1991, and my $2,500-a-term tuition was covered by a scholarship, but the law school where I was an administrator until a couple of years ago cost about $100,000.  And I'm sure few of you have heard of the school, good as it is.

At least when you graduate from law school, you have the chance for a lucrative career.  And, as Delaney points out, there's a clear measure of a law school's success -- one which, as a director of academic support, kept me up worrying many nights: the bar passage rate.

What's the equivalent measure of an MFA program's success?  And does a graduate come out of it with anything more than a nice hobby?

UPDATE: Those of us in legal education have long decried the U.S. News rankings which have become the tail wagging the law school dog.  It's disheartening to see creative writing programs now subject to endless discussions of the Atlantic's rankings.  But, hey, it sells magazines.

Comments

[George Kaplan]

You've got a typo there: it's not h-o-b-b-y - it's s-o-l-e- -p-r-o-p-i-e-t-o-r-s-h-i-p. Not that an MFA is needed for either.

Not sure you can measure an art school's success except by maybe word on the street, and that could lag dangerously. Publications may have more to do with the recruits and that depends mostly on faculty, I think. Then again, one's fellow students can be more important than faculty so maybe publications could be a measure. Chicken or egg.

[Richard Grayson]

The Brooklyn College MFA was invaluable for me, both in terms of the time it gave me and the people I met there who became friends and mentors. But it was a very different time, with different attitudes hard to comprehend by young writers and would-be writers today. What my classmates and I worried most about was selling out. I fretted that my first book was being published by a commercial publisher rather than a small press, worrying that people would think badly of me.

I'm currently a faculty member at an art school considered one of the best in the country, but of course all I do is try to do is help teach young animators, photographers, sculptors, etc. how to write a coherent argumentative essay and distinguish between "it's" and "its," and I force them to read Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Voltaire and Virginia Woolf. Some of my former students when I taught there in the late 1970s/early 1980s I do know about from seeing their gallery shows reviewed, and the school has lots of really famous graduates -- and dropouts. Like a lot of creative writing MFA programs, it can be a very nurturing place.