MFA: More Fine Associations

CulturalWeekly: Recently, I spent a week at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier as part of a writers’ conference. It was the first time I was exposed to the workshop style that defines the American MFA. There have been articles upon articles written about this phenomenon, and they have, for the most part focused on the aesthetic question of whether the MFA produces good work. Occasionally this has been framed around liberal individuals instead – good writers not good work. But for the most part, people have attended less to the peripheral offerings that the MFA encourages or, to put it somewhat differently, its social relations.