Low-Residency Blogging Writing School

Once upon a time I completed half of a low-residency MFA program which in reality more accurately resembled the Correspondence Writing Schools on the back of cereal packages. It was one of the best programs in the country. A lot of people liked it. It made me crazy, literally. The interpersonal dynamics among the staff was worse than any dysfunctional family I've treated in therapy. As if in proof, the director shot himself to death right after I left the program, broken and miserable with no one taking any responsibility for how I had been treated there leading up to being placed on academic probation. At first I complained to the deans of Bennington, but then I let it go. I did not have the emotional strength to stand up for myself and there was no point since I knew I would never go back. I had always succeeded academically. I had always been told I was a good writer. This was an untenable blow. It felt unrecoverable.

The main elements of the program was writing a book review a week and a story a month that would be mailed to a teacher for feedback. There were five residencies in the two years where you spent ten days attending seminars mostly presented by peers' theses, which included their fiction/non-fiction writing and a literary analysis. Teachers only presented once.

It was pretty boring. The social butterflies, as they always do, thrived. Certain of them had tables in the cafeteria that were theirs and you could only sit there by invitation. I mostly chose a corner table all by myself or with another loner who didn't make me feel pressured to talk. I ate ice cream every day.

I had always thought an MFA would be validating and cool to have. Earlier in life, when I was an art history major and then attended art classes in New York City, my goal was to attend the MFA program in painting at Yale. But then I got more practical and through additional classes and research assistant jobs, I prepared myself for graduate school in psychology and went to Harvard for a Ph.D. It was a kind of dream come true in terms of intellectual validation. Actually, it was a dream I had never dared to have. I thought you had to be much smarter than me to get into Harvard. Most of the graduate students went around pinching ourselves, all but the most conceited.  I feel incredibly lucky for that opportunity.

But about ten years ago I started itching again for an MFA, this time in writing. I was feeling bored with my work as a psychologist and felt I was still an artist at heart. Of course being a therapist is more art than science, and fulfills that need to some extent. But my eldest was leaving for college in Chicago and I felt bereft and in need of something to fill the gap.

That particular program was recommended by a writing teacher and was also easy to drive to, only two hours away.  My induction to the dynamics of the program was the orientation, where the soon-to-be-dead director mocked me for mentioning Harvard in my introduction to the group. I felt humiliated, only to discover later that he had some minor Harvard masters degree that he would bring up whenever possible. My Ph.D. trumped him and he couldn't tolerate it.

There were other crazy things about the program. The two teachers I had never spoke to each other and merely criticized each other. They were both so narcissistic that I learned nothing from them. They had completely different policies about what was acceptable according to the "school," policies that were written down nowhere and completely opposite from each other.

After two semesters in the program I had the most serious bipolar episode I have ever had, a mixed episode of severe, unrelenting depression and hypomanic agitation and insomnia. I was sick for months, of course as usual pulling it together to get to work but other than that not functioning at all. That's the thing about bipolar: although it is a biologically based illness, episodes can be triggered by stressful life events. I tried to apply for a sick leave, but the dean I spoke to refused, which is completely illegal as I was considered to have a "disability." But I was way too sick to advocate for myself. The suicide of the director that summer was a manifestation of the school's complete ignorance and denial about mental illness. In my opinion, he was bipolar, but of course I would think that. I will never really know.

During that period I discovered blogging and that's what eventually pulled me out of it. The freedom was exhilarating. I made a lot of mistakes, writing things that attracted really crazy and mean people, but I shut down blog after blog until I found a balance.

Right now I'm in a period of transition. I've been writing a lot of personal things, and I want to write more fiction, but I want a balance of both. And I want to try to publish and work more on my memoir/novel.

I wish I had more readers. It's incredibly validating getting helpful comments. I think you are supposed to comment more on other blogs for that, and right now I don't have the energy to go blog-hunting.

But regardless, however many readers I now have is still more than the number of readers in the MFA program, where only one teacher's opinions counted and two one-week seminars of peers in the course of the  year.  After I left the program, I took all the batches of student comments and dumped them, unread, in the trash.  I couldn't stand any of their writing. I couldn't stand my teachers' writing for that matter. How was I to take their critiques seriously?  I never had a sense of any of them as people the way I do with fellow bloggers. They all seemed extremely pretentious. They were less real to me than the bloggers I socialize with who are so much more helpful with my writing and more profound thinkers. The whole experience of the Low-Residency MFA Program was surreal. I'm left feeling very puzzled over how anyone gets anything out of one. Am I that different from other people?