MFA and the Name of the Publishing Game by Annastacia Stegall
Your work is really marketable, you know, with the #MeToo movement and all.
Yes, a male poetry professor actually said this to me my first semester in a MFA creative writing program. In hindsight, one goal of every MFA from a technical standpoint is to create authors that are marketable. More money equals bigger names equals a successful branding for the program equals more applicants equals more funding—the arts survive! Pass GO and collect 200 dollars!
I graduated from my MFA program in Spring of 2024 with my master’s in creative writing with a focus on poetry. In the Summer of 2025, I was notified by a small independent press that they would love to publish my manuscript—Tears, Bra, and All—which I wrote throughout my time in the MFA, news the press asked me to wait to share until Fall. So, I kept a tight lip in fear of feeling braggy and instead, treated myself to my first Michelin star restaurant, Bell’s in Los Alamos. The food came in glorious waves—from sweet sea urchin coating the tongue, to a strawberry crisp topped with stinky cheese florets to end the night.
You\’re only getting published because you are a woman that had bad things happen to you.
Yes, a male student in my MFA program actually said these words to me once the publication was announced. This is a response that I still, somehow, wasn\’t prepared for. I had simply taken the #MeToo marketability comment from the poetry professor and labeled it as disgusting. Sexist. Decided never to take his class again. It did not once occur to me that this sexist rhetoric would be passed along to others, as though we were playing the childhood game of telephone. Which is a way of saying that sexism in our culture has been whispered from ear to ear to ear, slightly different phrases that all relatively chisel the same stone—
The #MeToo movement is marketable, her writing is so angry, she is attention seeking, confessional.
The big sculpture—I, and other women, are only getting published because of x, y, or z. Not because we are “good authors,” but because we are “victims.” IPSV (Intimate Partner Sexual Violence), domestic violence, rape, stalking, the list goes on. I put the word “victim” in quotes here to highlight the ongoing debate between victimhood and survivorship, illustrating how words matter. The statement you\’re only getting published because you are a woman that had bad things happen to you inherently labels me, and other women who write about these personal experiences, as victims. It removes the aspect of writing as an act of reclaiming agency and focuses on shock value alone. As if to say—
Of course you are getting published, True Crime is in right now. The story is enticing, not the writing of a survivor regaining agency, itself.
I will state the obvious: this opinion undermines my skill. Or the other obvious: men, specifically white men, have used this dangerous language for ages. This statement, that a woman is only publishable if violence has been done to her, is a hop, skip, and jump away from anti-DEI rhetoric. White men can’t get published nowadays because publishers encourage, and only want to publish, marginalized voices. Or the other obvious: this statement puts me in a box as an author. My book is a #MeToo memoir and only that. Similarly, the #MeToo movement is my only audience, whatever that means, and it is a big audience at that: thus, I am marketable! It equates me with what has happened to me as if that is all I am.
I could spin the wheel while considering each one of these obviouses and listen to it rattle and click over and over as one does while watching Wheel of Fortune, waiting for anything said to stick, followed by a crowd\’s cheer. Instead, I would like to focus on the hand doing the spinning itself—the MFA’s focus on marketability.
I decided to get my master’s in creative writing because of two things. One, I love reading and writing, and two, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life yet. Obtaining a masters in something that I loved doing anyways seemed like a good middle step and it was a middle step I was privileged to have. Something I could use as an in-between time that could also potentially help me figure out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was there to simply enhance my reading and writing skills. Anything else that happened throughout the duration of the program was just an extra perk, a collection of dice rumbling across the table and the brief stillness in the air before yelling Yahtzee!
I do, however, believe that there was an unspoken focus on getting students published by professors. The your work is really marketable, you know, with the #MeToo movement comment, and conversations I’ve had with a friend of a friend of a friend, about how white men in the MFA program have stated that they have considered publishing anonymously so that they have a “higher chance” of being published. This rhetoric all but connects-the-dots. The MFA was a game to be played and there were, in my experience, metaphorical winners and losers. I had apparently won, but only because I cheated the system with a tragic story. How else could a woman possibly be published?
About the Author
Annastacia Stegall (she/her) is a poet and MFA graduate from Eastern Washington University. She currently serves as a lecturer at Gonzaga University, teaching English Composition. Her work has appeared in publications such as Peatsmoke, #Ranger, Afflatus Apparatus (A2), Bifrost, and Expressions. Annastacia resides in the Inland Northwest with her feisty cat, Roscoe. Find her on Instagram at anna_stegall.
