MFA/MFYOU

When will the annoying to-MFA-or-not-to-MFA prattle end?  Everyone in a MFA program is awful and MFA programs just take your money, you don’t need an MFA to be a writer, only real experience and heart can make you a writer and no amount of MFA will give you that, people with MFAs have a stranglehold on every conceivable publishing avenue, there is a secret syndicate of MFAs who were responsible for the Bay of Pigs and seek to destroy everyone who’s ever put pen to a piece of paper that wasn’t an application to an MFA program, blah blah blah.

Still, the idea behind this new online journal is kind of cute– the editors are a married couple, one enrolled in an MFA program and one working full time.  And to their credit, they don’t seem to skew in one direction of the MFA-or-no nonsense: they want top-quality writing from both ends of the spectrum.  It’s out there, so it just depends on where they solicit and how they market for submissions.  However, take a look at this statement from the website:

So what’s the difference between these two separate paths? What do you gain from an MFA program and what do you gain from doing it on your own? That’s what we hope to find out, and document, on this website.

If they’re successful in finding good writing from both populations, I don’t think that they’ll be able to.