Truth or Fiction?
The JTS MFA in Three Acts
The JTS MFA in Creative Writing is built around conversation about hard truths and strange fictions—about writing, teaching, failure, ambition, and why anyone keeps doing this in the first place. This three-part online series invites you into those conversations, with faculty and students speaking honestly about craft, community, and what it really means to commit to the work.
Just What the World Needs: Another MFA Program! (Shalom Auslander and Lisa Springer)
How to Write. Maybe (Etgar Keret and Rachel Kadish)
Just What the World Needs:
Another MFA Program!
Flannery O’Connor, asked if she thought writing programs ruined writers, responded, “Not enough of them.” So why add yet another MFA to the pile? And why JTS? Author and core faculty member Shalom Auslander and Dean Lisa Springer discuss the unique approach of the JTS MFA in Creative Writing, one rooted in and informed by our people’s historically “outsider” status, a program that eschews dogma and reverence and seeks instead to encourage the bravery and play that results in vibrant, disruptive, groundbreaking work. Or, at the very least, doesn’t put folks to sleep.
How to Write. Maybe.
The first question prospective students ask is if writing can even be taught. The second question is, “Can I have the number of your agent?” JTS MFA in Creative Writing Director Etgar Keret and core faculty member Rachel Kadish tackle the first question (and maybe the second, but probably not) as they discuss the mechanics of writing—voice, story, revision, depression, anxiety, and coffee—and how they each approach what can be taught, and what can’t.
