Sometime last winter, the wonderful writer Brian Evenson, who also happens to be the director of the Creative Writing program at Brown, posted on his Facebook page an 11-point list, Advice for Future MFA Applicants. “Please feel free to steal, revise, mutilate, or dispute,” he wrote, so I saved it and indeed shared it with my Creative Writing students that semester.
Just the other day someone contacted me about crafting a personal statement for an MFA application and I went looking for this list on my very cluttered computer. Fortunately, though, Los Angeles Times were clever enough to publish it on their site. So here it is, available to all prospective MFA applicants.