a close read of my MFA statement of purpose

lol

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

Hello friends—

The other day, I was helping a friend with his applications for graduate school, specifically his statement of purpose. I still don’t really understand what a statement of purpose is or what it is for, so my help to my friend was mostly in the form of tightening up the sentences and with creating a sense of drive within the piece as a whole. I thought it would be helpful to show him an example of a statement of purpose, so I dug deep into my Google Drive to find the statement I wrote when I applied to MFA programs, thinking at least I could use it to show him what not to do. I opened the document and found, among other things, a really frank record of my goals and ambitions for my creative life. And I thought it might be interesting to revisit what I was trying to do in seeking formal writing education. That’s what a statement of purpose is, I think, right? Your reason for pursuing the degree.

I had written statements of purpose to get into PhD programs in biochemistry five or so years before I applied to the MFA. In those research-oriented programs, it is much easier to draw parallels between your interests and your goals. I was interested broadly in the chemical underpinnings of complex biological processes, but looking to shift from the physical side to the more biological. When I look back at the work I did during my abandoned doctorate in biochemistry, I more or less ended up doing just that. It was easy to see how the strengths of a particular set of faculty at particular programs aligned or did not align to my interests and research goals. It was easy to craft my statement for department. Even though, of course, all of this changes in the doing. You get to a place thinking you will study neurodegeneration with specific applications, and instead you end up studying stem cell fate decisions in the context of the C. elegans germline. But the broad strokes usually guide you in the right direction.

In writing, this all feels more mysterious. For one thing, the notion of purpose in one’s writing is so slippery and strange that it feels cringe to go around professing it toward other people. We are taught to have a natural suspicion of people with goals in their creative work, and some would have you believe that all artists share the same single pursuit: trust and honesty. The notion of purpose is also haunted by that most nefarious of specters: politics. And so the statement of purpose for MFA programs in creative writing seems to be a dubious genre in which we are meant to recycle and repurpose the usual platitudes one finds in craft talks from the late mid-century, all about beauty and art and self-expression, or else we risk billing ourselves as propagandists and socialists.

I don’t mean to say that this is what a statement of purpose actually is for. I guess I am trying to recreate the atmosphere of my own thinking when I sat down to write my statement of purpose. That feeling of not quite knowing what to say or how to say it without getting myself dinged. I think I was trying to imagine what a person on the other side would want to read in order to accept me, and in that way, I was trying to biomimicry my way out of science and into art. If only I could fake it well enough to deceive those dastardly gatekeepers. I remember that in the end I got very sick of trying to come up with something dishonest enough to feel honest, so I reverted to type and wrote a very science-y statement of purpose.

Here is the opening paragraph:

I write stories about queer black boys because stories are how we learn to move through the world and because no one tells queer black boys what they can expect from this life. I’m interested in queering narrative spaces—that is, I don’t want to solely write about people who identify as queer, but I want also to bring a queer lens to stories that have traditionally been thought of as the province of heteronormative writers. More than anything, I want to expand the vocabulary we have for intimacy and love between men because it is a vast and unarticulated realm in literature. I think one of the necessary ways that our culture has to change to combat toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and racism is to give men a language for their experiences in an emotional context, particularly in male-male relationships. This tension between what is experienced and what is expressed drives my work and informs many of my stories.

In my defense, it was 2016, and I was spending quite a lot of time in the earnest, representation-centric side of the internet. I had read very little contemporary fiction, and my dominant literary inputs were Cheever, Leonard Michaels, Updike, Mavis Gallant, Ann Beattie, Saul Bellow, André Gide, Stendhal, Mauriac, and Bernard Malamud. I had consumed very little queer writing, and wanted only to write stories that expressed something of the local texture of my own life as a young gay man who had learned how to be gay from superclips of gay storylines form foreign soap operas. I wanted to write about gay things in a way that I had seen Ann Beattie write about restless yuppies and directionless people, where the charge of the story came from the careful and close attention to the everyday stuff of life. I think just after I sent off this application, I discovered Michael Cunningham and found my way through him to Woolf. But at the time, I felt like I was on a high dry rock and sick of waiting for someone to write Ann Beattie stories about people like me. So much so that I decided I would do it myself.

Also, it was a time when I felt a lot of frustration about the underlying assumptions I could feel in the shows and movies and books I read. I felt overwhelmed by the arrogance of these people, these white people, assuming with very little difficulty a centrality of their own experience while for me that act of centrality was only ever a translation, a second-rate one at that. I was tired of having to relate to art that had so little generosity of spirit in it, having to do all this work just to get down inside the subjectivity of someone for whom I might as well have been a dot on the far edge of the cosmos. I do wonder sometimes if that frustration and anger I felt and that many other people felt at that time is the cruel grandmother of the entitlement so many people feel these days toward television, film, novels, comics, etc. I wonder if the version of myself who felt so angry in 2016 and decided to simply stop taking in art that I found boring or exhausting due to whiteness, if that version of myself would today do what I did then and just sit down and write. Or would that version of myself just sit on the internet all day and complain about the status of representation.  

At that time, it was possible to complain your way into social prominence and into book deals or at least into blogs that you could one day hopefully convert into a book deal. It was time of high grievance. And so I am not surprised that my statement of purpose begins with this straightforward declaration of representation hunger. I don’t know that I feel the same thing in quite the same intensity now. I mean, certainly, I write what I want and what I want to write is stories about gay black men. I am not trying to represent anyone. This is just what brings me pleasure. And I don’t find that I owe a particular duty to anyone or anything in my writing of them. I think the way I meant that first line then was “no one tells queer black boys what they can expect from this life” that I wanted my work to be a corrective. Just at that moment, actually, a great deal of voices rose out of the internet to spend quite a lot of time and energy telling queer black boys what they can expect from the world. Like, a lot. To the point of it turning into a scheme of self-victimization.

It's actually kind of wild.

I do think that my work more or less achieved the other goals set out in that paragraph. For example, I think my work has very much been interested in finding language for the intimate relationships between men. I am not creating such a vocabulary, I don’t think. I would not make such a claim. But I do think that in my work, I am writing about interactions and kinds of interactions that feel true to me and which I have not seen written about very much before. I also think that in my steadfast dedication to domestic realism—the Cheever of it all, my problematic ancestress—I am importing queer life into a space that Updike once said was incompatible with queer characters. That also is not very new. But it is something I wanted to do and I have done it.

The final sentence there though is the truest. ”This tension between what is experienced and what is expressed drives my work and informs many of my stories.” This has more or less been my subject from the very outset. I think a month or so after I wrote this statement, I would sit down to write the stories that became my collection Filthy Animals and three months after that, I would write my debut novel Real Life. I have been haunted by this idea that people often lie about their feelings for a long time. I don’t mean merely that they are dishonest to the people in their lives. I mean also that they are often dishonest to themselves. And also that we sometimes experience things we simply cannot express. I am most interested in this failure of language. I imagine that this is because I crave self-destruction and there can be no greater self-destruction for the writer than to run headlong toward the experiences and places that render language utterly silent or impossible.

I come by it honestly though—it’s there in James, in Wharton, in Austen, in Proust. It’s there in Ibsen and Chekhov and Beckett. In Gallant and Beattie and Munro. In my work, I am driven to force my characters into experiences and corners where they must express and yet they cannot express. I am moved by unbearable tension. I am moved by periods of charged silence, and I spend a long time trying to imagine ways to capture the failure of language in language. I wish that I could write happier things filled with a profusion of chatter. But I think the cast of my mind is darker, colder, and my imagination is filled with affective and expressive gaps. It’s how I was raised—a series of rageful quiets and half-truths. I feel very weird most days because I have faith in language and yet a total suspicion of language because I have seen people wield it to terrifying ends. My own mother used language to steal from me. Constantly. Money, property, peace of mind. But maybe that is not a lack of faith in language. Or even a lack of faith in human nature. I think I have an absolute faith in human nature—to deceive, to trick, to malign, to curse. What I lack faith in is the myth of some essential goodness. Now that feels like a pile of shit. And maybe what’s under that is a belief in language’s absolute power to shape reality.

There, I’ve convinced myself. What a useful trick.

Later in my statement of purpose, I write about what a weird time it is to pursue creative writing and how I envision the purpose of the writer in society:

At the moment, there is a lot of discussion in the culture about the relevance or necessity of the MFA. It might seem odd that someone whose undergraduate and graduate training has thus far been in biomedical research and chemistry might want to pursue a graduate level writing degree during such a time. I would like to address these two considerations simultaneously: there is no better or greater time than now to be a writer. We are at a moment in our history when we need writers more than ever. We need people to tell stories, to feed our souls, to ask the difficult questions, and to hold up a mirror to oppression and violence. This is the time to do the work that writers do. On a more practical level, while I have had some success, there is so much about the craft of writing that I need to learn. The MFA offers time and space not only to write but to think intensely about writing and its purpose.

I read this paragraph a few days ago and I was struck by the moral clarity of this young man. It was bracing. Yeah, he’s making some points, I thought to myself. This is the time to do what writers do. I am…somewhat skeptical on the first two points of feeding souls and telling stories, but that is what it is, a certain 2016 romanticism if you will, whomst among us. But then that bit about asking difficult questions and holding up a mirror to oppression and violence. This is the time to do just that. To speak out about the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza which is itself merely a horrifying deepening of an already ghastly humanitarian crisis. The cruel terrorism of Hamas. The cruel terrorism of the IDF. The war in Ukraine. The rising tide of antisemitism flooding the streets of American cities. The de rigueur islamophobia coursing through our public policies and discourse. The virulent assaults on queer lives, particularly our trans family. The corroding of civil liberties at every turn. The rampant wage theft by a new generation of robber barons. The hardening of American hearts to suffering of all kinds. The ascendent and unfolding climate crisis that is going to consume us all and deepen every inequity already present in this country. This is a world in peril at every level imaginable—and perhaps that is not new, perhaps one can imagine a degree of peril being a constant function, a straight lin, and if that is a useful fiction for you, let me offer you another.

If it is true that what we are experiencing at this moment in time is but an excess of awareness of th suffering of our fellow humans and all the creatures of the earth, if the problem is indeed merely that we can now know about suffering on the other side of the world, then doesn’t say that the world we inherited all of its illusions of prosperity and material comfort is in fact the product of a lack of action brought about by ignorance. And so what are we supposed to do? Stick our head in the sand? Just because you don’t know your neighbor’s house is on fire doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do anything about it. I am being unclear. Let me try again. If it is true that what we are experiencing is merely an excess of awareness and that the world has always been this place of profound human suffering and that we are merely the inheritors of benevolent ignorance, then don’t we still have an obligation, now that we know, to do something about it? In other words, the solution for an excess of awareness cannot simply be the same inaction that came about because of ignorance. The only people who can make that argument are the people who benefited—in the form of stability, capital gain, material comfort, political ascendency—from inaction and ignorance. For a whole other segment of creation, the price of that inaction was very high—death due to famine, due to war, due to regimes of terror.

What I mean is, does knowledge call us to act? Do we or do we not have a moral obligation?

I am struck by the moral clarity of my 2016 self. I imagine he would say, Hell yeah, absolutely. I don’t know that I have the same certainty. I know too much about what I don’t know now. But I do agree with him that this is the time to do what writers do. To hold up a mirror the world. You are free not to, of course. You have a choice. But as always, your silence benefits some and costs others everything.

The rest of my statement of purposed touched on my influences and my experiences in the literary world. I felt that I had to situate myself within that context so that they would see me not as an interloper but as someone passionate about literature. I mentioned that I worked for a literary magazine and that I had published some pieces online and in small journals. I had not yet written a full manuscript, but had tried and failed to write several. As I said before, months later, I’d have two manuscripts written, but I did not know that then. The whole thrust of the statement seems to be written to give the sense that I had a concrete understanding of my shortcomings and a desire to learn.

In writing about my favorite writers, I said:

My influences include Mavis Gallant, James Baldwin, Garth Greenwell, and André Aciman. Growing up queer and black in the South, I felt at all times a kind of exile from my family, from my friends, and from the place of my birth. I always felt on the outside of things. I think each of these writers captures that feeling so beautifully. They articulate something that is almost impossible to articulate—what it is to be in a place and outside of a place, what is to love a place and to not be loved in return by that place, what is to exist at all times as both a self and a shadow-self. They write about exiles, about outsiders, about queer people in search of family and in search of themselves. I don’t need to expound upon the influence of these writers with respect to the literary canon because that is well-established. So instead, I’ll stress their importance to me personally. It was André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name that first taught me that queer love and queer desire didn’t have to be a filthy secret. It was James Baldwin that broadened that lesson for me, that gave me a mirror for the first time in my life for awkward queer boys. And a mirror is also a window. Baldwin, writing outside of America, gave me a language for expatriation, for escape. Mavis Gallant writes of difficult people in difficult situations, of the jagged family. I don’t think there’s a writer who better understands the subtle ways in which we maim each other. Garth Greenwell’s work is a light that illuminates a new way forward, a new queer art, one that doesn’t need to feign neutrality in order to be accepted or understood. It’s an unabashed queer gaze, and it’s one that emboldens me to center my own experience in my art and to do good by writing the truth.

I had forgotten I wrote about Garth in my statement of purpose. We were not friends then. I had read and admired What Belongs to You. I think I wrote a short Tumblr post about that book. The André Aciman stuff really took me back. I sometimes think that if anyone wants to get my vibe, all they need to do is read André and Mavis Gallant, and they’d be all set. I remember the first I leant a friend Call Me by Your Name, and they gave it back and said, “wow, you really copied him a lot.” I stand by it. André’s work has been perhaps the single greatest influence on me. Not just that novel, but all of his work, including his sublime essays. I don’t think I understood that what I was feeling at home in Alabama was a kind of spiritual exile until I read his False Papers. One day I will have to write a very long piece on him because he is…he truly is everything to me. His influence over my work is total.

But also reading this over, I realize how grateful I was for books like Call Me by Your Name and What Belongs to You. Two books that made my own work seem possible. But also that, as a reader, just broadened and deepened the world. It also strikes me that in writing this statement of purpose, it was one of the first times I ever wrote about books and my relationship to them. Up til then, I had only written short stories and science writing. And some essays here or there. But very little about books themselves.

I only wrote the one MFA statement of purpose because I only ever applied to one program. In looking back, I sort of wish I had applied to different programs. 2016 me was very hopeful about what he was going to get out of that experience. He did not get it. Not really. But, he did end up doing many of the things he described wanting to do in his work. And perhaps that is the best thing an MFA program can do: not get in the way of a writer’s ambitions for their work and to make those ambitions possible. As a teacher, that’s all I want. To help myself understand what they want from their work and to help them achieve those goals. But primarily, I just want to get out of the way and to do no harm.

And perhaps, then, my MFA experience was not as bad as I remember it being. Maybe it was a success after all.

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