How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the em-dash.
One day the postman shows up like he’s delivering a cease-and-desist from God, and in his hands is this ornate Liberty University parchment announcing I’ve now got an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. An M.F.A. new letter to hang around my neck like a medal or a millstone, depending on how much coffee has hit the bloodstream.
Naturally, the world expects the usual performance: modest nod, grateful smile, a quick genuflection to the altar of credentialism. But after a few decades of watching academia inflate titles the way children inflate balloons before letting them squeal around the room, I’ve learned to treat letters the way a good engineer treats noise: measure it, filter it, and don’t confuse it with signal.
Still, I’ll admit there was a moment. A small, quiet, suspicious moment. The kind where you stare at the thing and think: right then, so this is what it looks like when a university says “congratulations” instead of “revise and resubmit until the heat death of the sun.” And then, like poor Dr Strangelove, I felt the involuntary grin crawl across the face. Not because I’ve joined the priesthood of creative writing, but because the whole affair is so beautifully absurd.
There’s a particular species of critic who believes creative work only becomes real when a committee in robes says so. Another species believes any committee in robes is proof the work has been domesticated. Both are wrong in the same way a man is wrong when he thinks a map is the territory. The map can be useful.
The territory still bites.
So yes, I’ve got an MFA now. I’m told it stands for Master of Fine Arts, which is already funny because art isn’t mastered in the way plumbing is mastered, and anyone who says otherwise has either never made art or never met a pipe. But fine: call it a master’s degree. I’ll call it what it is — a formal note that I can write, I have written, and I will keep writing whether or not anyone stamps it.
And that’s the trick, isn’t it. Not the letter. The learning to love the bomb. The bomb in this case being the thing I’ve always used anyway: craft, discipline, the slow ugly labour of putting a thought into words and making it stand up straight. I stopped worrying about whether I was “allowed” to do it years ago. I certainly won’t start now.
If the MFA means anything, it means this: the paperwork caught up with the practice. The seal arrived after the engine was already running. And if someone wants to treat that as a cue to sneer, or worship, or mistake it for a personality, they can. The rest of us have work to do.
S. Tominaga, AKA CSW
Dic. 8, 2025
https://x.com/i/status/1997982236818489644
https://t.me/S_Tominaga/5115
One day the postman shows up like he’s delivering a cease-and-desist from God, and in his hands is this ornate Liberty University parchment announcing I’ve now got an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. An M.F.A. new letter to hang around my neck like a medal or a millstone, depending on how much coffee has hit the bloodstream.
Naturally, the world expects the usual performance: modest nod, grateful smile, a quick genuflection to the altar of credentialism. But after a few decades of watching academia inflate titles the way children inflate balloons before letting them squeal around the room, I’ve learned to treat letters the way a good engineer treats noise: measure it, filter it, and don’t confuse it with signal.
Still, I’ll admit there was a moment. A small, quiet, suspicious moment. The kind where you stare at the thing and think: right then, so this is what it looks like when a university says “congratulations” instead of “revise and resubmit until the heat death of the sun.” And then, like poor Dr Strangelove, I felt the involuntary grin crawl across the face. Not because I’ve joined the priesthood of creative writing, but because the whole affair is so beautifully absurd.
There’s a particular species of critic who believes creative work only becomes real when a committee in robes says so. Another species believes any committee in robes is proof the work has been domesticated. Both are wrong in the same way a man is wrong when he thinks a map is the territory. The map can be useful.
The territory still bites.
So yes, I’ve got an MFA now. I’m told it stands for Master of Fine Arts, which is already funny because art isn’t mastered in the way plumbing is mastered, and anyone who says otherwise has either never made art or never met a pipe. But fine: call it a master’s degree. I’ll call it what it is — a formal note that I can write, I have written, and I will keep writing whether or not anyone stamps it.
And that’s the trick, isn’t it. Not the letter. The learning to love the bomb. The bomb in this case being the thing I’ve always used anyway: craft, discipline, the slow ugly labour of putting a thought into words and making it stand up straight. I stopped worrying about whether I was “allowed” to do it years ago. I certainly won’t start now.
If the MFA means anything, it means this: the paperwork caught up with the practice. The seal arrived after the engine was already running. And if someone wants to treat that as a cue to sneer, or worship, or mistake it for a personality, they can. The rest of us have work to do.
S. Tominaga, AKA CSW
Dic. 8, 2025
https://x.com/i/status/1997982236818489644
https://t.me/S_Tominaga/5115
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