MFA CONNECT A creative writing magazine written by students in creative writing programs.

Thank you for your interest in Texas State’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, cited by the New York Times as a “program that might rival the famed Iowa Writers Workshop.” This is certainly our intention in one respect, but we’re also concerned with the immediate effect that our program will have on you as an incoming writer. We have made it a point to see that you will join a program with a strong sense of community. Each week after workshop students go out together. Students also run a reading series that meets both on and off campus, and have begun a new literary journal called Front Porch. And as our program enrolls fifty to sixty students at any one time, you will likely take away the best gift a good writing program can give you, and that’s a few friends who will be your best readers, editors, and companions for the rest of your writing life.

We are perhaps the most unique program in the country, given our distinguished faculty, our endowed Mitte Chair, our Adjunct Thesis Faculty, our extensive visiting writers series, and our operation of the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center, a National Literary Landmark in which a graduate of the MFA program holds a two-year writer-in-residence position.

In the past few years our endowed Mitte Chair holders have included Tim O’Brien, who has been on the faculty since 1999, Barry Hannah, the poet Ai, and in 2006-2007 Denis Johnson. Many of our visiting writers do a workshop, and all of them do MFA-only Q&A’s during their stays. Some of the writers who have visited in the past two years include Richard Ford, W.S.Merwin, Heather McHugh, Roddy Doyle, Aimee Bender, Charles D’Ambrosio, Spencer Reese, Adam Zagajewski, Abraham Verghese, Denis Johnson, George Saunders, and Carolyn Forche. Our Adjunct Thesis Faculty includes an amazing list of writers who read your completed thesis manuscript and send you written personal comments, essentially offering you a one-to-one reading of the book that you will have written during your time here.

In 2006, the program enrolled fifty-five students, eighty percent of whom were from out of state. Approximately thirty MFA students currently hold TA positions, and another ten hold IA positions. The freshman composition courses that our TA’s teach have been approximately twenty freshmen per class. If you elect to apply for a Teaching Assistantship, and I strongly urge you do, please download and complete the IA/TA and the Texas State Employment application forms. I also suggest that your application statement clearly expresses your desire to teach.

As we are a studio/academic program with a substantial amount of coursework in literature to go along with your workshops, a large number of our students secure teaching jobs each year as they graduate from the program. Since many of you most likely hope to teach after earning your MFA, having our degree rather than a studio-only degree is enormously helpful in this regard. In recent years graduates of the MFA program have been offered teaching positions at such institutions as the University of Texas, San Antonio, the University of North Florida, the University of Arkansas, Monticello, Southern Methodist University, the University of Missouri, Kansas City, Laramie County (Wyoming) Community College, and Harvard University’s Extension Program for Creative Writing.

As for other student support, we regularly nominate fiction and poetry students for national prizes – e.g. poetry graduate Tim O’Connell won a 2005 AWP Intro award. Fiction graduate Stacy Swann won a $57,000 Wallace Stegner Fellowship given by the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. And in 2006 poetry graduate Michelle Detorie won a $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Faculty often advise students on which journals they might submit their work to, and offer guidance on the procedure for submitting work. For the past few summers, MFA students have taught creative writing classes to high school students through the Katherine Anne Porter Young Writers Program, which allows students an additional opportunity to expand their teaching skills. Annually we give two awards to graduates who submit the best thesis manuscript or have the best record of publication: the Rose Award for $5000, and the McCormick Award for $2000. And, while there are no guaranteed positions, several graduates each year have been offered, at the discretion of the Department Chair and based on annual freshman enrollment, adjunct teaching positions.

This web site contains links to all of the information and application forms you will need in order to apply to our program. In brief, our program requires forty-eight credit hours, including twelve hours of workshops, fifteen hours of literature, three hours of form and theory in your genre, three to six hours of the analysis of literary techniques in your genre, nine hours in a minor of your choice, and six hours of thesis. Our workshops enroll a maximum of fourteen students, our seminars a maximum of fifteen students. Graduating students must complete a comprehensive examination, which requires an essay or two that reflects their work and growth as a writer during their time in the program, and give a one-hour oral defense of their thesis.

We like to notify you of your acceptance as early as possible, since we understand the anxiety of waiting for the phone to ring or the letter to arrive in the mail. Generally, we have a list of accepted applicants by late February, and we make our offers for teaching assistantships by mid-March. But if you have any questions after you’ve sent in your application, we’ll be happy to answer them. Please note: all applicants who are accepted into the program will have their application manuscripts considered for the $45,000. Rose Fellowship. No other application is required.

We’ve already had a major impact on the vision of creative writing programs in the 21st century. We hope you’ll come join us and be a part of our future.
Sincerely,

Tom Grimes, MFA Director
mfinearts@txstate.edu