No NYC, no MFA
About finding literary community outside NYC
Years ago, in n+1, writer Chad Harbach published the essay “MFA vs. NYC,” where he outlined the argument that the American literary scene actually consisted of two tracks: the NYC publishing culture and the academia-minded MFA crowd. A subsequent book compiled Harbach’s essay and that of other writers and industry professionals, including David Foster Wallace and Alexander Chee, to probe the future of the American literary scene and the choices facing young writers today.
But this Substack post isn’t about that choice. I don’t have an MFA,1 and while I lived in NYC, I really became a writer after I left the city. In other words: no MFA, no NYC. So this post is about how I am trying to figure out what a writing life looks like outside a major “literary city” and outside an organized degree program.
I newly moved to Houston, but I used to live in New York. For whatever reason, many friends who make up my existing “community of writers” live in New York City. I visited last week and met up with a few such friends. As they described their busy calendars, I felt quite jealous. They go to several book launches a week, for both big splashy lead title books and small, indie cult books; they spend afternoons browsing some of the coolest bookstores in the country; they go to house parties with other writers; they live in the same cities as their agents and publishers. (Some of them also have MFAs, too!) I strolled the crowded, cozy aisles of the Strand and marveled at the New York Public Library’s exhibit on A Century of the New Yorker and thought about the literary abundance in the city and how much I longed for that in Houston.
I was on vacation, so I might be wearing rose-tinted glasses. Probably some of my longing has to do with the post-school malaise struggle to make adult friends in a new city. And other writers have extolled the negatives of being a writer in NYC.2 Chee says that New York provides “a lot of opportunities to write, but also a lot of opportunities not to write, or to write the wrong things.” Rachel Kushner writes that the writers “who form a scene in Brooklyn, say, are subtly comparing their share of the social rewards of success, rewards in which I personally have no interest.” Maybe they’re right; I wouldn’t know!
But such commentary does gesture at important questions. What are we looking for, when we say we want literary community? Are we looking for shortcuts to editors and publishers, someone to fall in love with us at a house party and then fast-track our book? Are we looking for more famous writers to blurb our work? Acquaintances with inside-baseball on the industry? People to beta read our novels and workshop our short stories? Endless book talks? Motivation to write? Friends?
In other words: What does your ideal writers’ life look like?
When it comes to writing output, Texas has been unbeatable for me. I’ve written the most words I’ve ever written on wind-burnt plains and in swampy bayous, in cities far from the maddening crowd. In other words: the actual writing.3 As Chee notes: “PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.” Or as Otessa Mosfegh says regarding the concept of a literary scene: “The writers should be home, writing.”
At the NYPL exhibit on the New Yorker, I was also struck by how much writing community existed via correspondence, even before the internet. E.B. White wrote a letter to Nabokov asking for facts about spiders for the manuscript that would become Charlotte’s Web. My best beta readers don’t live in my city; they send me wonderful critiques via email. I guess I don’t need to leave Houston for that.
So when I really distill my longing, I’m not looking for motivation to write. I don’t think I’m looking for shortcuts in the industry or famous writers to befriend, either. I just want to peel away from the page and find some people to get coffee with and talk about craft every so often. And if that’s all I want, why can’t I find it here? There are great writers in Texas and a great history of writing, including the fantastic longform journalism being put out by Austin-based Texas Monthly, greats June Arnold4 and Larry McMurtry, and contemporary writers like Bryan Washington. Inprint Houston does fantastic work supporting literature in the city, local indie Brazos Bookstore punches above its weight, and only a few hours away in Austin lies the University of Texas’s Michener Center for Writers, which offers one of the best, fully-funded MFA degrees in the country. There are readers here, like there are anywhere else. Words, and lovers of words, do not cease to exist outside the coasts.
So I’m going to do my best. I’m going to be patient. Next week, I’m going to a get-together that Brazos Bookstore hosts for authors. I’m going to invite a new friend to write with me in a coffee shop. And of course that’s really it: I’m going to write, and write, and write. Maybe I’ll find some of my people here.
Sincerely,
Nina
I have nothing against MFAs! Sometimes I idly dream of one. But I have already spent three years’ and the requisite amount of tuition getting a JD (which I love), so I have no more degree-granting plans anytime soon.
I don’t know anything about the “scene” in LA, but Otessa Mosfegh recently wrote about it.
Maybe to discuss another time: the lower cost of living and slower pace in Texas has also allowed me to have a little more pocket change and time to spend on my writer education, like an online class or two.
June Arnold did move from Houston to Greenwich Village. Wikipedia says she moved to “pursued her writing career . . . outside the confines of Houston society and the status quo.”
Substack comments are the new New York cafe for meeting writer friends
Also no MFA and no NYC! Sometimes I think about doing an MFA in New York but this is a good reminder that you can be a writer anywhere with any degree :)