You Don't Get What You Don't Pay For
Teacher / Poet #44
You Don’t Get What You Don’t Pay For
I mean that I still owe money on the education I received from Hamline University’s MFA program.
The last loan I took out for my education at Hamline was in 2016, the year I graduated with my masters in creative writing, which means that for the past 9 years–off and on thanks to the pandemic–I’ve been paying that loan off, and still will be for years into the future.
And I have zero regrets about that.
You don’t get what you don’t pay for.
I mean I took the little extra money I had left over after teaching high school English classes and I put that toward learning the craft of writing personal essays and poetry. And in the process, not only did I deepen my understanding of the craft and vision necessary to write with intention and purpose, but I met a tribe of fellow artists, editors, publishers, poets, and writers.
Why do I say all of this now? In March of 2025?
Hamline University is planning on ‘sunsetting’ its MFA in Creative Writing program, which is the gentle way of saying they’ve got the knife out and are ready to insert it into a vital community’s still-beating heart.
You don’t get what you don’t pay for.
Or “budgets are moral documents” as someone wise (perhaps Martin Luther King) once said. That is, they reflect the priorities of the organization. And what the incoming interim administration at Hamline intends to communicate to those who might attend classes and take courses at that institution is that they do not value the artistry of the written word. Or not nearly to the extent that it has been previously valued for the past two decades.
I’ve written about the education I received at Hamline in more detail before on this platform (see my essay on Deborah Keenan), but I’ll say it more succinctly here and now: I’ve taught high school English for nearly 20 years. I wouldn’t have survived as a teacher had I not been in Hamline’s MFA program.
Because of the MFA program at Hamline, I have worked confidently as a teacher who employs creative writing on a regular basis in the classes I teach.
Because of the MFA program at Hamline, I regularly facilitate conversations, correspondence, and in-person visits between the students I teach and living writers.
In addition to the benefits I’ve reaped as a classroom teacher because of this program, there is also the gift this education has been in my career as a writer, editor, and publisher.
I wrote and published the entire manuscript of my first collection of poems, Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota), while a student at Hamline. The poets I studied under gave me the confidence to speak a difficult truth to the church I still love and struggle with. They helped me find form to do more than simply vent anger and sadness in the midst of the clergy sex abuse crisis that manifested here after Jennifer Haselberger’s whistleblowing in 2013.
I had the privilege of working as assistant poetry editor at The Water ~ Stone Review literary journal during my time in the program. My experience working here gave me practice at sorting through submissions for publication, making community editorial decisions about publication, and working with writers to bring their work to press. This experience gave me confidence to work as a freelance editor, as well as communications manager for a graduate school when my wife and I lived in Chicago 2016-2018.
Because of the MFA program at Hamline, I have met countless other laborers in the vineyard of word-artistry. And these fellow laborers have helped me publish books I’ve written, edit books others have written, and even get paid some money in the process.
Finally, and most recently, it is in no small part because of Hamline’s MFA program that I have had the confidence to start a publishing company and keep my day job as a high school teacher while doing so.
Of course, regardless of the existence or nonexistence of MFA programs, artists are always going to be making and creating art and connecting with each other. They have done this since the beginning of time, and I presume will continue to do so until its end.
Could I have published a book, smuggled creative writing into my high school teaching practice, and started a publishing company without the support of Hamline’s MFA program?
Yes. But the word I keep coming back to as I’ve been writing this note of gratitude and fury is confidence. It’s something that is so vital to the work I do with young writers in the classroom, but it’s equally so with not-so-young writers like me, and the ones that have congregated in Hamline’s halls these past two decades. We gave each other, and continue to give each other, confidence, to write the truths we needed to.
If you’re reading this and wondering what you might do, please do consider writing your own note of confidence and support of Hamline’s MFA in Creative Writing program to administrators at Hamline. Perhaps this disastrous decision to ‘sunset’ a fruitful program can be reversed.
Here are relevant contacts below:
Interim President, Dr. Kathleen Murray
kmurray09@hamline.edu
Interim Provost, Andy Rundquist
arundquist@hamline.edu
Hamline Board of Trustees
Doron Clark, Chair
doronclark@gmail.com
Andrea Mowery, Vice Chair
amowery01@hamline.edu
Gwen Lerner
Notes & Connections
-For a deeper dive into the specifics of this planned “sunset,” check out Hamline’s student newspaper, The Oracle, and its recent article by Taylor Tadych here.
-In an educational environment that is increasingly dangerous for young people to speak up against injustice (see the federal government’s targeting of universities and more importantly individual students for speaking out about the genocide in Gaza), consider supporting individual writer/activists who are not afraid to speak truth to power. I was surprised and delighted to find out that Columbia undergrad Harmony Solomon Cruz Bustamante used my poem “Good Teaching” in a recent presentation she gave on subversive pedagogy. And was delighted to read her thoughtful and provocative essays on her own Substack, “The Song of Solomon” . (See what she did there with the title?) Check her work out, support a young writer.
-The book I quote from in the video at the top of this issue, Hope: The Autobiography by Pope Francis I read cover to cover in two days. I know other commentators and reviewers, and notably Catholic ones, have thrown some shade at it. I’d recommend you to check it out and judge for yourself. It’s a truly nourishing and prophetic word, and in a time where we all need one.