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Embracing Your Writing Life After MFA Rejections
IF YOU'VE been rejected from an MFA program, the experience may have left you stumped about how to move forward as a writer-or, worse, questioning your abilities. You wouldn't be the first writer to feel this way. A rejection from an MFA program comes with a particular sting and creates a particular dilemma: Should you brush yourself off and try again, or are these rejections a meaningful judgment of your talents as an artist? The answer is almost certainly the first: If the MFA still calls to you, reapply. Admissions committees change, your work evolves, and no one cloistered group of academics gets to decide if your work matters. It does. But it's also worth remembering that there is more than one way to learn to be a writer. "The main thing is to just keep writing," says Sakinah Hofler, a fiction writer, poet, and playwright in New Jersey who has been where you are now. Other writers agree. Some of their stories of persistence follow-may they remind you that your rejections are not a judgment of your worth or worthiness and that there are many ways to pursue your work.
Hofler loved reading as a child and longed to become a writer, but she didn't know how. When the YA novelist Ann M. Martin (The Baby-Sitters Club series) answered a young Hofler's fan letter explaining that writers were often "starving artists," Hofler balked. "I wanted to eat," she jokes. So she became a chemical engineer, but her dream of becoming a writer persisted. She longed for what an MFA program might offer: time, mentorship, and a consistent writing community. In 2010, all eight programs to which she applied rejected her. She laughs about it now but admits she felt sad back then, especially when three thin envelopes arrived on the same day rather than the thick acceptance packets she'd hoped for. "I knew before even opening them," she says.
Still, Hofler was determined to find the literary community she craved. She gave herself five years to pivot from engineering and used the community she found through the Gotham Writers Workshop as a sounding board for her short story drafts. She reduced her social life with coworkers,...