A Fucking MFA
MFA Program Application Essay
Alisa Lynn Fucking Valdés
Jesus. How do you write a thing like this? I’ve written so many other things. But never a
thing like this. An essay, is it? Okay. About? Me. Shit. Why must I do that, again? To let you
know why I might be an appropriate person to allow into the MFA program in creative writing.
Right. Cool, cool. Christ. Sober, I suppose? I should be sober when I do this? Alright. I will do
my best.
I suppose I should be honest. My main motivation for doing this, for applying to your
MFA program, is the fact that every university creative writing teaching job I have ever applied for has an algorithm that pretty much throws my application away because I lack - clears throat, adjusts bow tie - an MFA in creative writing. I have lots of other things going for me. Just not that.
I have a master’s in a closely related field - journalism - from Columbia, where I focused
on literary nonfiction. I was the youngest staff writer ever hired by The Boston Globe, and spent eight years writing for two of the nation’s top newspapers. Nominated for the Pulitzer in features three times. The Los Angeles Times was the other newspaper, if that matters. I was the first reporter to cover the Latin Grammys. I got to sit in a limo with Enrique Iglesias. He was taller than I expected, and hated his dad. We had that last bit in common. I hate his dad too.
Good times.
What else? I got writing awards at both papers. National awards. One of them was for an
essay I wrote, making fun of the “comedian” Gallagher, before everyone realized he was a raging racist. I’m not saying I’m proud I trashed him, but, yeah, maybe a little. Apparently that essay is one of Jimmy Kimmel’s favorite things to read. I just got interviewed, all these years later, for a documentary about what a dick Gallagher is, and the producer told me he found out about me from Jimmy.
Weird planet, ours.
I left newspapers to write novels when I was expecting my son, twenty-three years ago. I
had always felt more like a novelist than a journalist, but I’d gone into journalism because it
seemed like a safer bet for making money writing than being a novelist. I’m from New Mexico
and the only novelist I knew in person was John Nichols and he lived in a shack and had
maggots in his hair. I didn’t want to be like that. Journalism was a great training ground for
writing quickly and well, for listening to people, for making complicated things easy to
understand. Every creative writer should be a journalist first, except if they do that, they’ll never be able to get a job teaching creative writing unless they get an MFA.
Anyway.
As soon as I saw that positive pregnancy test, standing in a bathroom stall at the Rubio’s
fish taco place in Aliso Viejo, I knew I had to quit my day job at the Times and write my novel
before the baby arrived. Otherwise, I told myself, I’d never have time to write again. So I did
that. I quit. Moved to the middle of New Mexico. Went broke. Wrote a goddamned novel. It went to a six-publisher bidding war, got me a $475,000 advance, debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, landed my face on the cover of Time magazine as one of the 25 Most Influential Hispanics in America - which only meant it was all the more frustrating when I realize I actually had absolutely zero influence on anybody at all.
The book was called The Dirty Girls Social Club. It wasn’t actually smut. It was about a
bunch of Latina friends who meet in college and call themselves “sucias” in solidarity with one of them, whose traditional Puerto Rican mother has accused her of being a sucia for moving out (to go to college) before she was married. If she was a sucia, they were all sucias. This didn’t stop lots of people, men mostly, from assuming the book was trash. The fact that lots of people liked it only solidified that conviction for certain dudes. Whatever. The book earned out, keeps selling. It’s been optioned for TV or film six times, but never gets made for a bunch of reasons, most of them racism and sexism.
Que mas? I wrote and sold a bunch more books after that, but none were as successful.
That’s the reverse of the way you should conduct your literary career, by the way. Just for the
record. My thirteenth novel just came out, after a ten-year hiatus. It’s a thriller, my first thriller,
about a Latina game warden in New Mexico who goes up against white supremacist terrorists hiding out in the national forest. It’s selling well, getting great reviews, just got optioned for a TV series by the actress NAME REDACTED FOR NOW. Maybe there will be a resurrection of Alisa Valdes, if the show actually gets made. Optioned books rarely get made into actual shows, though. I’ve learned this the very hard way. Jury’s still out. It was a two-book deal, so there is another coming next year. I just turned it in. So there’s that.
Speaking of TV, I’ve been hired to develop and write scripts for NBC, Lifetime and
Nickelodeon. None of my shows ever went into production. But I got paid for them, got invited
to join the Writers Guild of America for a while, then disinvited when I was no longer getting
paid to write scripts.
Oh. I’m also currently under contract to write my first stage musical, for Urban Theater, a
Puerto Rican theater in Chicago. I should mention I’m also a musician. Jazz saxophonist. I went to Berklee College of Music for undergrad, and am the only graduate of the school who was ever brought back there as a writer in residence for words rather than music.
So, yeah. I do all these things. I’m a hard worker. I work well on my own. Tons of
motivation, creative, imaginative. Terrible at many, many things, but none of them are writing. I have done all these things, and there’s a compelling body of evidence to indicate I know how to write and might be good at teaching it. But I still can’t get any university or college in the nation to take my application to teach creative writing seriously.
Because I lack a fucking MFA.
So, I’d like to get a fucking MFA.
I would also like a drink.
That is all.