I was living in New York City, eight months from earning an MFA in creative writing, when a friend suggested I take a class with the poet Larry Fagin. She said it would salvage an education from what we mutually agreed was a broken program. I’d stopped attending fiction workshops a month before, unable to sit through abstract critiques from a professor who either hadn’t read submissions or didn’t have time to write meaningful comments. Many of my classmates seemed more interested in explaining what they thought literature should or shouldn’t be, instead of investigating the problems a particular story presented. The blanket support the program offered seemed more damaging than helpful to most of us—especially those, including me, who simply needed to be told that our manuscripts were lousy and our best bet for writing something of substance would be to throw them out and start over…
