Writing magazines and why I'm quitting them

All about the MFAs.
Here’s why I may kill my subscription to “Poets & Writers,” and why, at the very least, I plan to unsubscribe from various writing-related emails. They’re selling products, intentionally trying to get excited writers to toss their money into the wind, and boring the hell out of me. Plain and simple. They’re killing my literary bloodlust.
Here’s why I joined these email lists, and subscribed to Poets & Writers, in the first place. I love writing. I love hearing about other authors, their stories, what their stories led them to write this year, or why they haven’t written in years, what people can expect from royalty rights, news on the writing front, upcoming books, street level writers, and much more.
But what I get these days is quite different. These days I see stories on how to get an MFA (master of fine arts), how to get your writing to the next level by attending very expensive workshops in some far away, super-luxurious place, and more fluff on MFA creationism. A look at the sheer volume of MFA and workshop ads tells me why the magazines are filled with these kinds of stories.
In front of my eyes, the idea of what it is to write grows bastardized and commercialized. Soon, I’ll have to earn more than 20k a year to write. No poor people can do it anymore, not if you’re to believe the ads that your writing will only go to the next level with an MFA or a certificate of writing from Writer’s Digest.
I counted around thirty ads for various MFA programs in a single issue – pretty awesome for their sales folks. There were about ten ads for various conferences, institutes and writers workshops as well. That’s not counting the classified sections, which also offers various calls for submissions. Of course, in today’s world, those calls focus more on the gender, sexual orientation, or race of the writer before the story itself is considered.

On Feb. 3, I got an email (perhaps more, I delete them quickly) from Writer’s Digest University for an advanced novel writing class. Basically it’s for writers who want feedback on their work, especially those who need a stopwatch (in the form of someone getting paid to stay on top of you), and you get to believe you’re a novelist “who wants to make real progress towards publication.”
“Hurry, Only 16 Seats Left,” it proclaimed.
Another email, from LitReactor, that same day, asked “Are you ready to get serious about your writing goals?” Apparently, their workshops, with no less than five in the queue for mid-February to late March, and paying for them, are the only way to get serious about writing. To their credit, they didn’t capitalize every letter in their tag line like the folks at Writer’s Digest University. Thanks for that.
Be a pro, spend.Spending money, getting some form of certificate or another, is a sure-fire way to become the next Hemingway, London, Angelou, Rowling, or Franzen. Those authors did nothing more than post writing-related jpgs on social media. They did nothing more than dole cash for critiques and peer-oriented chat groups, while letting some best-selling author they’ve never heard of send them template-generated reminder notes when it’s time to have the next chapter jerked off. They wrote their best work in a Florida hotel complex while wearing sunhats and attending classes on strong character development.
Would that my mom still lived, she’d take a first read for me free of charge. But she’s dead. That lesson, for me, proved far more valuable to my writing. And it didn’t cost a dime.
What did cost a pretty penny was losing my home to foreclosure, and the divorce; those cost a lot mentally.
Maybe scraping by, fearful of every dollar, is something our new generation of writers need not concern themselves with.
And perhaps the next “Blackboard Jungle” (Evan Hunter’s, or Ed McBain’s, novel, of which the film is based) will have something to do with cyber-bullying among privileged dot-comers and how terrible it felt. Surely one needs an MFA, and debt, to write that.