Mfa in environmental and travel writing

[xxflyingsoulxx]

Hey all,

I've thought about a lot since last time I posted in here and have accepted my love and passion for creative writing. I don't think I mentioned this in the last post but ever since I discovered this, I've tried to figure out what to do about it. I've found one school In Seattle called antioch university which has an ma program in

Comments

[roseofjuly]

I tend to be practical-minded, but there is something very special about studying your craft in a community of scholars/researchers for a few years at a time. You get a kind of enrichment that you can't anywhere else, and that's valuable on its own even if no job prospects come out of it.

That said, the primary purpose of a degree program is to get a job/career. And an MFA program will probably have as its primary motivation preparing you for some kind of career. Whether that's a career in creative writing or in teaching and doing scholarship on writing (or a little of both) depends a lot on the program, but they will expect professionalization activities from you.

It's also less free-form. When you are writing for yourself, you can write when the mood hits you, or write on a schedule of your own choosing. When you are writing to meet deadlines in a program, or writing for a specific class, you have to conform to those expectations. You also have to mull over exactly what you believe the MFA can contribute to your education as a writer.

It's certainly not a career killer, and if you have enough money that it's not going to put you in overwhelming debt then I suppose you could go for it. The job market IS really shitty, though, if you intend to teach with the MFA, and especially with a very niche interest like that you may find yourself with only a handful of jobs to compete for.