Hello and welcome back to Life After the MFA! The resources we’ve collected for this installment highlight the importance of staying focused, believing in the process, and riding the ups and downs of a career in writing. We’re also covering how to maintain a balance between writing, working, and all other aspects of living a life.

First off, what do you do when you feel stuck in your writing career? In “How to Grow a Writing Life,” published in AWP’s The Writer’s Notebook, Leslie Pietrzyk takes stock of what got her through the rocky years between the publication of her second book and her story collection, This Angel on My Chest. During that time, she reckoned with what she refers to as her “Dark Night of the Soul,” which took on many forms and led her to writing from a more intimate place. Pietrzyk catalogues the things she tried to push her writing forward until she finally got her “yes.”

In “The Last Word: The Slick Writer,” available in The Writer’s Chronicle Features Archive, Benjamin Percy explains how writing for the “slicks,” or glossy magazines like GQ or Vanity Fair, both funded and deepened his writing life:

On assignment, I’ve wrestled John Irving, traveled to Tokyo, gone hang gliding, climbed one of the tallest old-growth trees in the country, and spent the night in it. I value these experiences purely for the adventure, yes, but I’m also eager for an education, for images and characters and emotions and plot points that might trigger something in my imagination and eventually feed their way into my novels or short stories or screenplays.

But how do we both foster this deepening in our writing and balance everything else? Kirsten Clodfelter explores how MFA grads have transitioned into the workforce without losing sight of their passion in “Seeking the Work-Life-Writing Balance Post-MFA,” published in The Writer’s Notebook.

While it can be difficult to remain focused when facing the demands of work and life, sometimes what we need is a reminder of our passion to reinvigorate the dedication the work requires. In “The ‘Keep’ Pile,” published at The Millions, Elise Juska recounts a dive into her past, spawned by her mother’s dedication to decluttering Juska’s childhood home. This allows her to reflect and realize that “[a] conviction is forming: I need to strike a new balance. Make more time for writing again. Pare down outside obligations, difficult as it will be.”

We will end this installment with Ted Solotaroff’s in-depth discussion about the necessity of durability for writers who go on to lifelong literary careers. “Writing in the Cold,” originally published in 1987 in Granta and reprinted in AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle Features Archive, reflects on the promising young writers that Solotaroff published while editor of New American Review and for whom careers never materialized. He imagines that many were not prepared for the long, difficult road of a writing life and the inevitability and frequency of rejection:

My own sense is that young fiction writers should separate the necessity to write fiction from what it is often confused with—the desire to publish it. This helps to keep the writer’s mind where it belongs—on his own work—and where it doesn’t—on the market, which is next to useless, and on writers who are succeeding, which is discouraging.

We wish you well as you strike this difficult post-MFA balance. In our next installment, we turn our attention toward mentorship—how to locate the right mentor and how to foster a continued relationship.

Warm Wishes,

Your Membership Team