I started this Substack a little over a year ago (!). Since then, a few things have happened which has resulted in this blog languishing dormant for more a year. Life, as it so often does, got in the way.
If anyone was clamoring for another post, for some reason, I apologize. This blog has been a bit like that skateboard or electric guitar you get when you are fourteen, use once or twice, and then let sit to collect dust until your mom finally decides to give it away in a fit of Kondo-like decluttering. Well, not anymore!
My goal going forward is to shake the dust off this account and try to post more regularly, if only to attempt to document this period in my life and in hopes that another writer out there might take something from it as well. Thanks for reading.
Welcome Back Shoppers,
Since my last post (back in January 2024) a few things have happened. I, among other things, quit my fulltime job in publishing, moved neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and started an MFA at Hunter College. In short, I left the stable, bowl-lunch-fed confines of the nine to five and reentered the gig economy to “pursue my dreams.” And I’m here today to report back a little about what it’s been like so far, a semester and a half in.
First, let me just say, it’s different out here y’all (AKA: harder). I work three part time jobs currently— as a barista, tutor, and writer assistant— and am making little more than half of what I was making at my last job. For anyone on the job hunt, or who is working in the service/gig economy now and trying to make ends meet, you know what I’m talking about. The grind is a grind, now with more of a je ne sais quois “empire-in-decline” flavor. As one example, if a chronic lack of tipping is a “recession indicator,” then I’m afraid we are definitely in a recession.
I’m not saying anything new here. Prices are high and wages are low. But to witness it this year firsthand how little your money goes in this city, when eggs are $10 a carton, has been a bit of a rude awakening. It is glaringly apparent that the gig economy of 2022, back when I was working part time as a barista in Grand Central and part time at literary magazine and living rather comfortably paying a shocking $700 in rent, is very much not the same one we live in now in 2025.
Maybe I was naive, necessarily deluded, to make the decision to leave a stable job and pursue that famously financially sound of endeavors, the MFA. That all being said, besides the money issue, I’m having a great time. Hunter is the first institution I’ve attended I would gladly donate money to as an alum, should ever make it big. There is something special about participating in an institution you actually believe in. The idea is almost quaint. In short, I am broke but happy, creatively fulfilled.
Speaking of gigs, I write this from my current temp gig (shh…don’t tell my boss) at the reception desk of a commercial plaza in Brooklyn. The office is windowless and nondescript but pleasant. It looks like the set of Severance, as I hear many visitors comment on and which I still have not seen. But picture that show in your mind, as I write this. It’s a pretty sweet gig, as far as this kind of thing goes, and a good set up for someone like me, a writer who is also in school. Unfortunately, as is the nature of temping, it cannot last. So, enjoy it while you can.
In a lot of ways, my life this past year has had a kind of 2010s veneer. I like to joke that I’m living in a kind of late aughts period piece, a Girls rip off. The classic signifiers are all there: barista job, MFA, Brooklyn, practically to the point of parody. Except, obviously, this is not 2011, the media jobs have all dried up, Trump is president, and no one like me can afford to live in Williamsburg anyone. Maybe because of this sort of Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court experience I’ve been having, of living in another time period layered awkwardly over our current one, I’ve been thinking about a well-known little collection of essays that caused a minor stir when it came out. Of course, I was unaware of it at the time, since I was, let’s see, just starting high school. I’m talking about the collection of essays, MFA vs. NYC, compiled and published via n+1 in 2014.
I read that book at a critical time in my life, around 2021, when I was about to graduate, had been waitlisted by the one writing program I’d applied to, and was debating whether I wanted to stay in New York. At the time staying seemed like an unfeasible proposition, considering I had a degree in English and virtually no hard skills to speak of. I had received some strange idea while in school that you could only afford to live in New York after college if you worked in finance or consulting. Which of course is false.
I read the collection with the air of someone consulting a pack of Tarot cards, seeking answers, direction. What I found was a helpful, but definitely dated, loose collection of essays about different perspectives on a debate that, although perhaps less relevant than it was back then, still seems to rear its head from time to time. If you are at a similar juncture in your life, I’d say the essays are still worth a read.
Chad Harbach’s titular 2010 n+1 article is still worth reading today and it is valuable for the online debates it spawned and its historicizing of that largely unique American Institution the “MFA”. Many of its diagnoses still ring true, depressingly so. See the following, for example:
Staffed by writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any; freed from pedagogical urgency by the tenuousness of the link between fiction writing and employment; and populated by ever younger, often immediately postcollegiate students, MFA programs today serve less as hotbeds of fierce stylistic inculcation, or finishing schools for almost-ready writers (in the way of, say, Iowa in the ‘70s), and more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market.
As a naive aspiring writer fresh out of college, I remember Harbach’s article being helpful for me to understand what my options were and to get some kind of sense of what I could expect from the two forking paths presented to me (namely, in MFA-land, insularity, stability, the support of a University, a stipend, etc., and in NYC-land, “real-world experience,” precarity, and the promise of connections). It was also helpful for me to understand the MFA as less of some kind of Bunyanesque salvific destination but more as a kind of Post-War commodity.
What did I do with what I gained from reading these essays? Well, I tried, and am trying, to do both. To do the fully funded MFA program in NYC. I am trying to have my cake and eat it to. I had suspected that, because of the existence of programs like Hunter, this binary was a false one. There was more out there than Iowa, contrary to the popular imagination.
As Leslie Jamison writes in her 2014 article in The New Republic,
The ‘MFA vs. NYC’ distinction is both more and less than a binary…It’s less than a binary because its cultures are heavily cross-bred, and it’s more than a binary because each of these distinct ‘cultures’ is in fact composed of multiple forms of attachment to a single economic engine (the university or the publishing industry).
In my experience, this still is 100% true. The MFA’s still in a sense, orient themselves to New York, and each year New York receives an influx of recent MFA grads, looking to make a name for themselves in this city, moving into apartments in increasingly further afield neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The central poles are still there, but there is much interchange and paths within and around them.
What did I do with what I gained from reading these essays? Well, I tried, and am trying, to do both. To do the fully funded MFA program in NYC. I am trying to have my cake and eat it to. There’s more out there than Iowa, contrary to the popular imagination.
Hunter, so far in my experience, is a bit of an oddity in that it is an MFA program in New York City that seems almost uniquely unconcerned with the big machine of publishing. This is not entirely true, we’ve had agents and editors visit the program, but I think my professors would agree when I say that instruction on how to commercial success is very much not the point of the program. This, in my view, is mostly a good thing. Any MFA (especially a paid one) that promises to get you published is nothing better than a snake oil salesman, in my opinion.
Hunter instead is styled more as a kind of artist workshop, a place to, hopefully, experiment and develop one’s craft. And for this, I have been extremely grateful. When I left publishing, after watching how the sausage is made, so to speak, I did not want to see another sausage (to extend this unfortunate food metaphor), for a long time. I couldn’t erase what I knew and was grateful for what I had gleaned about the opaque publishing process, but I could, at least, pretend that this world did not exist for two years. And for the most part, so far, I’ve been successful at this. I’ve been able to focus on the writing and leave the problems of what comes after for later.
I know that this outside world is there, and there are occasional reminders of its existence, but workshop has been a safe space mostly from that world. For an hour or so a week, I get to dedicate myself solely to my peers’ and my own work. And that, especially in the current political climate, feels increasingly like a luxury.
I’d like to end this post with a request: MFA vs. NYC is in need, I think, of a reissue. A new edition, one updated for the current academic and economic moment, that can speak frankly about the financial realities of both avenues, and, critique the very suggestion of this binary. Us writers would benefit from the reminder that there are more than two paths out there. That it is not a case of Either/Or.
Okay, that’s all for now.
Until next time,
Thomas
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Have a Nice Day! :)
Nice read! I also attended the MFA program at Hunter and it was such a good opportunity