Interesting Article: MFA vs NYC

I thought it was a very interesting take -- I'm not familiar enough with current literary trends to make any assessment of it's validity, but it lays out a very strong -- and fascinating -- case.

I googled the author of the article, just to see what he's been up to:

Five months ago, Chad Harbach was an out-of-work copy editor with an unpaid position at a literary journal and an unpublished novel: 475 pages centering on a baseball team at a fictional Wisconsin college.

A few weeks ago, Hachette Book Group’s Little, Brown agreed to pay about $650,000 for it, according to two people briefed on the sale.

Click to expand...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...g-cheap-sells-baseball-novel-for-650-000.html

In terms of getting any of my writing published, all I know is:

My M.F.A. from Iowa hasn't helped me at all.

N.Y.C. hasn't helped me at all, either.

Large grains of truth, large chunks of assumption about things he cannot know, a lumping of far too many things together, assuming a sameness and unity that simply doesn't exist. MFA programs, NYC writers and publishers, etc., are not all as he portrays them. From my experience, he's seeing the loud but minority influence of all.

But a good read. The large grains of truth are truths many have no experience with, simply because most are only MFA writers, only NYC writers, or neither.