by Martin Cozza

People think a lot about getting an MFA in creative writing. Then sometimes they take the plunge and quit the job, accept the austere living, do what it takes to set aside two or three years, and enter an MFA program. Then they go through the program: reading, writing, reading, writing, critiquing and being critiqued, basking in the praise and stinging from the anti-praise, hoping for that faculty member or visiting writer to slip them the name of an agent, trying not to be too disappointed when they don’t. Then, it’s over. The diploma comes in the mail, maybe (like mine) in a cardboard tube. Open it. Unroll it. Ta-da!

For the large majority of MFA-holders who don’t get that quick book contract and teaching job, what comes next is a little like floating in the silence and darkness of outer space after a dramatic, explosive, exhilarating, long-awaited blastoff. All those spectators drop away to nothing. Now it’s just you and your instruments: pen, paper, laptop, coffee cup, whatever. You float. You work. Then you discover there are planets out here, and their gravity pulls you toward them, out of that first trajectory. There are marvelous planets, full of nourishment and surprises. Planet Love. Planet Kids. Planet House and Home. There are not-so-marvelous planets, but their gravity is strong. Planet Boring Job. Planet Car, or, worse, Planet Minivan. Planet Broken-down Minivan. Planet Health-Insurance-Out-of-Pocket Maximum. Planet Gas Bill.

I’m writing to you now from Planet Gas Bill, with the following report. I have sent out my missives in a little unmanned craft, off to that original destination in the distance. (What was it again? Literary stardom? Something? What was I thinking?) They disappear into the black, and much, much later they come back: Thank you for sending us your work. It does not meet our current editorial needs. Yours was one of many fine submissions. Again and again. Then rarely, shockingly, alien life forms appear: We love the piece and would like to publish it in our spring issue if it is still available. Please sign and return the enclosed contract. Please accept two issues of the journal as payment for your contribution.

I do! I do accept two issues of the journal as payment! The piece is published, and then . . . the quiet returns.

The post-MFA quiet is a little quieter than the pre-MFA quiet. You no longer have that arrow in your quiver: I’ll just get my MFA, and that will propel me to superstardom! No, now you’re on your own. Of course, we all know that the end of an MFA program isn’t the end of all support for your writing short of a book contract. There are grants, and writing contests, and great writers’ colonies and conferences, but all of these are either fiercely competitive, short-lived, or cost money you may not have. The post-MFA writing life is a fragmented life. Progress is slow and comes in bits often separated by months or even years. But I’ve learned that each bit counts—each publication, whether it’s online at a friend’s webzine or over the transom at a print journal, each grant that might buy you a month of writing time, each meeting of your writers’ group, each contact collected at a conference or in a class. Each one reestablishes your legitimacy, if only to yourself. Each one could lead to another. It happens.

About three years after I finished my MFA, I called the director of my former program, the late Frank Conroy, to ask a question. Frank was notoriously tough in workshop and notoriously hard to get to know, but he cared about us, it turned out, and wanted us to succeed, and he honored the writing life and craft and recognized the absurd difficulty of doing it well—indeed, of doing it at all. One of his key lessons in workshop had to do with self-discipline, with the importance of an almost religious dedication to work. “Three hours a day,” he’d say, admonishing us to have a strict writing schedule, even if we felt we had nothing to say. Three hours a day becomes impossible when you have kids and have to make money and feel the need to sleep, and we were talking about this. He revised his mantra a bit: “It’s all about time management.” Duly noted.

His last words to me in that conversation—his last words to me ever, it turned out—were, “Keep up the faith, man.” I loved that: Keep up the faith. Not just “keep the faith,” which is passive in its way, an act of possessing something, but “keep up the faith,” more of an action. It suggests an act you have to do over and over, something that takes work and focus, like keeping a balloon up in the air. So there you have it. Keep up the faith.

Martin Cozza’s fiction has appeared in the Missouri Review, Colorado Review, Columbia, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in Best American Fantasy. He has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has held a residency at Yaddo and several Minnesota State Arts Board fellowships. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and children. Martin is a participant in the Loft Mentor Series this year, a great cure for his post-MFA isolation.