MFA vs. POC

This is a condensed version of the introduction to “Dismantle: An Anthology of Writing from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop,” which will be published this week.

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When I was in my mid-twenties I decided to apply for an MFA in creative writing. Part of it was I wanted to get serious with my writing—whatever that meant. Part of it was that my body was getting worn out from delivering pool tables. Part of it was a worrying sense I had that I was going to need a lot more sophistication if I was ever going to be any good at writing. And part of it was I didn’t know I had other options.

These days there are all sorts of writing workshops: part-time, full-time, low-residency, and more resources online than you can shake a stick at. These days you got fifth graders that can talk your ears off about MFAs. This is the Age of the Writing Program—but in the early 90s none of that had come to pass. I barely knew what an MFA was. My professor told me some stuff, but these things are like the Matrix—no one can really tell you what they are; you have to experience them for yourself. Still, I was pretty dumb about the whole thing. I never visited the schools I applied to, didn’t look up their faculty or try to communicate with any of their students. I went after it with about the same amount of foresight that my parents brought to their immigration—which from my perspective seemed to be none.

I applied blindly and not very widely.

Six programs, and out of some strange pocket of luck that the Universe reserves for total fools I got into one: Cornell. The plan was to spend two years in workshop, learning all I could about fiction in what I assumed was going to be a supportive environment.

I should have known better but hey I was young; I was naïve.

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I didn’t have a great workshop experience. Not at all. In fact by the start of my second year I was like: get me the fuck out of here.

So what was the problem?

Oh just the standard problem of MFA programs.

That shit was too white.

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Some of you understand completely. And some of you ask: Too white … how?

Too white as in Cornell had almost no POC—no people of color—in it. Too white as in the MFA had no faculty of color in the fiction program—like none—and neither the faculty nor the administration saw that lack of color as a big problem. (At least the students are diverse, they told us.) Too white as in my workshop reproduced exactly the dominant culture’s blind spots and assumptions around race and racism (and sexism and heteronormativity, etc). In my workshop there was an almost lunatical belief that race was no longer a major social force (it’s class!). In my workshop we never explored our racial identities or how they impacted our writing—at all. Never got any kind of instruction in that area—at all. Shit, in my workshop we never talked about race except on the rare occasion someone wanted to argue that “race discussions” were exactly the discussion a serious writer should not be having.

From what I saw the plurality of students and faculty had been educated exclusively in the tradition of writers like William Gaddis, Francine Prose, or Alice Munro—and not at all in the traditions of Toni Morrison, Cherrie Moraga, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Arundhati Roy, Edwidge Danticat, Alice Walker, or Jamaica Kincaid. In my workshop the default subject position of reading and writing—of Literature with a capital L—was white, straight and male. This white straight male default was of course not biased in any way by its white straight maleness—no way! Race was the unfortunate condition of nonwhite people that had nothing to do with white people and as such was not a natural part of the Universal of Literature, and anyone that tried to introduce racial consciousness to the Great (White) Universal of Literature would be seen as politicizing the Pure Art and betraying the (White) Universal (no race) ideal of True Literature.

In my workshop what was defended was not the writing of people of color but the right of the white writer to write about people of color without considering the critiques of people of color.

Oh, yes: too white indeed. I could write pages on the unbearable too-whiteness of my workshop—I could write folio, octavo and duodecimo on its terrible whiteness—but you get the idea.

Simply put: I was a person of color in a workshop whose theory of reality did not include my most fundamental experiences as a person of color—that did not in other words include me.

No wonder I was unhappy in workshop. No wonder me and some of the other Calibans in the program—my Diné buddy, who I’ll call Ichabod, and this Caribbean-American sister, who I’ll call Athena—talked constantly about the workshop’s race problem, about the shit our peers said to us (shit like: Why is there even Spanish in this story? Or: I don’t want to write about race, I want to write about real literature.) No wonder we all talked at one time or another of dropping out.

Some of you are probably saying: Fool, what did you expect?

That’s a good question. I guess I assumed that a graduate program full of artists dedicated to seeing beyond the world’s masks would be better on the race front—that despite all my previous experience with white-majority institutions the workshop would be an exception. What can I tell you? In those days I must have needed that little fantasy, that little hope that somewhere shit might be better.

Like I said: I was young.

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It’s been twenty years since my workshop days and yet from what I gather a lot of shit remains more or less the same. I’ve worked in two MFA programs and visited at least 30 others and the signs are all there. The lack of diversity of the faculty. Many of the students’ lack of awareness of the lens of race, the vast silence on these matters in many workshop. I can’t tell you how often students of color seek me out during my visits or approach me after readings in order to share with me the racist nonsense they’re facing in their programs, from both their peers and their professors. In the last 17 years I must have had at least three hundred of these conversations, minimum. I remember one young MFA’r describing how a fellow writer (white) went through his story and erased all the ‘big’ words because, said the peer, that’s not the way ‘Spanish’ people talk. This white peer, of course, had never lived in Latin America or Spain or in any US Latino community—he just knew. The workshop professor never corrected or even questioned said peer either. Just let the idiocy ride. Another young sister told me that in the entire two years of her workshop the only time people of color showed up in her white peer’s stories was when crime or drugs were somehow involved. And when she tried to bring up the issue in class, tried to suggest readings that might illuminate the madness, her peers shut her down, saying Our workshop is about writing, not political correctness. As always race was the student of color’s problem, not the white class’s. Many of the writers I’ve talked to often finish up by telling me they’re considering quitting their programs. Of course I tell them not to. If you can, please hang in there. We need your work. Desperately.

Sometimes they say: You did an MFA. Did you ever think about dropping out?

All the time.

Why didn’t you?

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Another good question. I’m not sure I have a real answer. Answers yes but An Answer: no. Maybe it was immigrant shit. Maybe it was characterlogical—I was just a stubborn fuck. Maybe it was the fact that I didn’t want to move back to my mother’s basement for anything. Maybe I just got lucky—I didn’t snap or fall into a deep depression or get completely demoralized.

In all honesty I probably would have blown it eventually, the way I was drinking and acting out, but then at the start of my second year something happened. A massive Latino student movement sparked up on campus. That shit almost never happens but there it was, the real deal and, desperate for anything like a community, I jumped right the fuck in. That solidarity more or less saved my life. Made everything in workshop bearable because I suddenly had a group of people on campus who pulled for me, a group of people who saw me. Not a bad movement either—we scored some solids against the University and that also gives you a ton of heart. (One of our crowning triumphs, something I still take pride in, was that we were able to push through our first fiction faculty of color in the MFA program, Helena Maria Viramontes—how perfect is that? If I wrote it in a book no one would believe it—too pat—but that’s exactly what happened. Helena came to campus too late for me but not for all the other students who have since benefited from her genius. Helena was exactly the faculty I had dreamed about during my MFA; she came out of the tradition of Chicana feminist artists, of women of color artists, the tradition of resistance, and in her workshop you better believe race existed and was not an interloper or an aberration from True Literature; it’s a social force which all of us must learn to bear witness to.)

I think in the end it probably was the organizing. Got me refocused, gave me hope and energy. I did it; I graduated. My boy, Ichabod got through too—mostly by spending nearly every weekend away at the various upstate New York reservations. Athena, though, did not make it.

Talk about tragedy. Athena was a truly gifted writer. Wrote about her Island and its diaspora, their beauty and agonies with a clarity and sympathy I’ve never seen matched. She was also about the only ally I had in my actual workshop and one of the people in workshop who had the greatest impact on how I write today.

She was tough and she was smart and she’d read loads but in the end, the whiteness of the workshop just wore her out. These people are killing me, she told me repeatedly.

Word, I said. Word.

I thought that she was in the same place as all of us but one day she announced that she was quitting for real.

I’m done, she said.

Maybe she just decided to do other things. Maybe there were problems at home. Maybe she was tired.

I cannot honestly say.

Of course I tried to get her to stay. Shit, I would have gotten on my knees if I thought it would have changed her mind. Selfish shit really; I just didn’t want to be alone in that workshop but she didn’t change her mind. When push came to shove, none of us Calibans were close enough, I guess, to really make an intervention. Instead of pulling together we Calibans had all descended into our own spaces, taking the bus home every chance we got.

Early that fall (I think) Athena moved home; and I have never heard from her again. Shortly after a second writer of color left our workshop but I didn’t know him at all (see how awesomely close we were) so I’m not going to speculate on the reasons. Still. The fact that we lost two writers of color in less than two years should tell you something.

Every now and then I search for signs of her writing on the Internet, but I don’t think she’s ever published anything. Breaks my heart because she was amazing.

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Twenty years since the workshop and what I’m left with now is not bitterness or anger but an abiding sense of loss. Lost time, lost opportunities, lost people. When I think on it now what’s most clear to me is how easily ours could have been a dope workshop. What might have been if we’d had one sympathetic faculty in our fiction program. If we Calibans hadn’t all retreated into our separate bolt holes. If we’d actually been there for each other. What might have been if the other writers of color in the workshop—the ones who were like I don’t want to write about race—had at least been open to discussing why that might be the case. I wonder what work might have been produced had we writers of colors been able to talk across our connections and divides, if we’d all felt safe and accounted for in the workshop, if we’d all been each other’s witnesses. What might have been.

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Lately I’ve been reading about MFA vs NYC. But for many of us it’s MFA vs POC.

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To fast-foward: in the end I became a published writer and one of the first things I did with that privilege was join some comrades to help found a workshop for writers of color. The Voices of Our Nation Workshop. A kind of Cave Canum, but for all genres and all people of color. Something right out of my wildest MFA dreams, where writers of colors could gather to develop our art in a safe supportive environment. Where our ideas, critiques, concerns, our craft and, above all, our experiences would be privileged rather than marginalized; encouraged rather than ignored; discussed intelligently rather than trivialized. Where our contributions were not an adjunct to Literature but its core.

We’re on our fourteenth year now and the workshop has become a lot of things. We’re a thriving community of artists. We’re a space of learning, of personal growth and yes, at times, of healing. For many of our participants we’re a much-needed antidote to the oppressive biases of mainstream workshops.

But the workshop is deeper things too. Silent things we almost never talk about. For me it’s an attempt to do over that lousy MFA I had. To create in the present a fix to a past that can never be altered.

It’s also about Athena. I guess there’s a simplistic foolish part of me that believes that if Athena had only had a workshop like ours she would never have quit. The workshop would have given her enough light to make it through. And we’d all be reading her today.

I guess I’m hoping one day she’ll find us. And if there are other Athenas out there—which I know there are—I hope they find us too.

Junot Díaz is the author of “Drown,” “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” and “This Is How You Lose Her.” He is a co-founder of the Voices of Our Nation Workshop.

Photograph of Toni Morrison by Daniel Boczarski/FilmMagic/Getty