by Writing Workshops Staff
2 weeks ago
In a kitchen in Brooklyn, eight writers sat around a table in 2002 and talked about how fiction gets made. There was no syllabus, no institutional affiliation, no degree waiting at the end. Julia Fierro, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, had posted a Craigslist ad looking for other writers who cared about the sentence-level work of storytelling. She needed community. She needed craft-obsessed conversation. Two decades later, the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop has served as a creative home to over ten thousand writers, produced National Book Award winners, and been named a top MFA alternative by Poets & Writers.
Fierro's story is not unique. Across the country, independent writing programs have been quietly building something that traditional MFA programs often promise but struggle to deliver: sustained creative community anchored in the close study of how writing works. These programs have become serious forces in American literary culture. Their alumni sign with agents, win major prizes, and publish with the same houses that recruit from the most prestigious graduate programs. And The Writer's Chronicle, the flagship publication of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), recently took notice.
The Writer's Chronicle devoted its Big Conversation column to independent writing programs as alternatives to the traditional MFA, bringing together four leaders who have shaped this movement from different corners of the literary world. WritingWorkshops.com founder Blake Kimzey moderated the discussion alongside Rebecca Makkai, the New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer finalist who serves as artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago; Julia Fierro, who built Sackett Street from that Brooklyn kitchen into one of the most respected independent workshops in the country; and G. E. Patterson, poet and senior director of craft at Minneapolis's Loft Literary Center, one of the nation's oldest and largest independent literary centers. The conversation ran nearly three hours and became the second most-read piece in The Writer's Chronicle across all of 2025.
The readership numbers confirmed what many writers already sensed: there is real hunger for information about alternatives to the traditional MFA path. Writers want to know what these programs offer, how they differ from graduate school, and whether the community and craft education they provide can match (or exceed) what a two- or three-year degree program delivers.
The answer, based on decades of collective evidence from organizations like these, is a resounding yes.
What Independent Writing Programs Get Right
The most striking theme from the Writer's Chronicle conversation was how similarly these programs began, and how differently they've evolved. Fierro started Sackett Street because she was lonely for craft-focused conversation after her MFA. Makkai came to StoryStudio as an instructor after publishing her first novel, eventually taking on the artistic director role and helping transition the organization from a for-profit workshop to a major nonprofit. Patterson grew up reading the writers who founded the Loft in the 1970s, when poets gathered above a Minneapolis bookstore and someone suggested the attendees might contribute a dollar to help keep the lights on. And Kimzey, who went through the MFA program at UC Irvine, traces the founding impulse for WritingWorkshops.com back even further, to a community college Introduction to Fiction class he took three semesters in a row. He found himself, on the other side of his MFA, trying to recapture the joy of that earlier experience.
Each origin story shares a common element: the programs grew from genuine need rather than institutional mandate. Nobody sat in a provost's office and decided the world needed another creative writing program. These organizations emerged because writers needed something specific, and nobody was providing it.
That need-driven origin shapes everything about how independent programs operate. When Makkai described StoryStudio's yearlong novel workshops, she emphasized something MFA programs structurally cannot offer: the freedom to experiment. A four-week class. A yearlong drafting intensive. A bridge program for novelists who need more time. A monthlong publishing course. If a format doesn't work, it gets rethought the next year. No tenure-track professor needs to be reassigned. No department chair needs to approve a curriculum change. The nimbleness is the point.
Patterson made a similar observation about the Loft's teaching model. Most of their classes originate as proposals from teaching artists who come to the organization with ideas they're passionate about. The feedback loop stays open: what does the instructor want to change next time? What are students requesting? This kind of responsive programming simply doesn't exist in most graduate programs, where the curriculum is fixed by committee and updated on an academic calendar that moves at geological speed.
The Craft Focus That MFA Programs Often Miss
Fierro told a story in the conversation that crystallized something familiar to anyone who has spent time in both academic and independent writing spaces. Early in her teaching career, she ran into a fellow professor carrying Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. She mentioned she loved the book because it was teaching her to write close third-person point of view. The professor looked at her blankly. He was using it for a class about capitalism.
Neither approach is wrong, but they represent fundamentally different orientations toward literature. Independent writing programs tend to privilege the question how was this made? over what does this mean? That distinction matters enormously for working writers. A student trying to figure out how to handle multiple timelines in a novel needs someone who can crack open the architecture of a book like The Great Believers or A Visit from the Goon Squad and show how the machinery works. Literary theory has its place, but it rarely helps a writer solve the problem of a sagging second act.
This craft orientation also means that independent programs can teach forms that MFA curricula often ignore. The novel is the most obvious example. As Makkai pointed out, most MFA workshops follow a semester-long model where everyone gets workshopped twice. That format essentially demands short stories. If you submit a novel chapter, the feedback tends to be variations on "I wish we knew more about the uncle," because nobody has read the other chapters. It's not helpful feedback. It's a structural limitation of the format masquerading as editorial guidance.
Independent programs have solved this by designing workshops specifically for novelists: yearlong drafting cohorts, revision intensives, manuscript mentorships. WritingWorkshops.com's IndieMFA programs were designed with this exact gap in mind, giving writers the sustained attention, craft instruction, and community of a graduate program without requiring them to relocate, leave their jobs, or take on significant debt.
Our IndieMFA programs offer the rigor and community of a graduate writing program on your schedule and at a fraction of the cost. Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry tracks available.
Explore IndieMFA Programs →Who Thrives in Independent Programs
Makkai shared a story during the conversation that every independent program director would recognize. A student walks in having never taken a creative writing class since college. She's in her mid-twenties, figuring out her next move, considering law school. She takes an intro workshop. Then another. Then another. Eventually she gets her MFA, publishes multiple books, and starts teaching at the very program where she took that first class. The writer Makkai was describing is Julia Fine, whose novels have earned wide acclaim.
But the pipeline from intro student to published author isn't the only success story. Makkai also mentioned, almost as an aside, that Gillian Flynn once casually revealed she'd been a StoryStudio student. These kinds of surprises are common in the independent program world, because the barrier to entry is low enough that writers at all stages walk through the door.
There's another student profile that every panelist recognized immediately: the person around fifty-five or sixty who loved writing in college, got pushed toward a more "practical" career, built that career, raised a family, made partner at the law firm, and then woke up one morning wondering if it was too late to write the novel they'd always wanted to write. It is not too late. Independent programs exist for precisely this kind of writer, the person whose creative life doesn't fit the biographical template of a twenty-four-year-old entering a two-year residential program.
Patterson brought up something equally important: that many of the Loft's yearlong program participants already hold MFAs. They've completed graduate school but find themselves stuck, often still polishing the same thesis manuscript years later. They come to independent programs not because they lack training but because they need a different kind of support. They need permission to start something new. They need a community that values generative momentum over the endless refinement of a single project.
Kimzey noted that WritingWorkshops.com sees all of these writers: first-timers nervous about sharing their work, published authors looking to push into unfamiliar genres, MFA graduates who want craft instruction that goes deeper than what their programs offered, career-changers who've spent decades in other fields and carry extraordinary material. What unites them isn't background or publication history. It's the willingness to sit in a room, whether physical or virtual, and do the hard, specific, exhilarating work of learning how sentences and paragraphs and chapters get built.
From first drafts to final revisions, our online workshops bring you into a craft-focused community taught by National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer finalists, and New York Times bestselling authors.
Browse Online Workshops →The Cost Question
Any honest conversation about MFA alternatives has to address money. The average MFA program in the United States costs tens of thousands of dollars per year, and while fully funded programs exist, they remain fiercely competitive and geographically limited. Writers who don't get into a funded program face an impossible calculus: take on massive debt for a degree that confers no clear professional advantage, or walk away from the community and instruction they were seeking in the first place.
Independent programs rewrite that equation. Makkai described StoryStudio's deliberate strategy of keeping yearlong novel workshop costs low enough to attract forty or fifty applicants for twelve spots, which lets the program be selective about the projects it takes on while remaining financially accessible. The Loft offers access funds that don't require applicants to prove their financial need, removing one of the bureaucratic barriers that Patterson noted keeps many writers out of traditional higher education. Fierro has become blunt in her advice to students who get accepted to expensive MFA programs: if you don't have the money, don't go into debt for it.
None of this means independent programs are free or that running them is easy. Fierro was candid about the challenge of balancing affordability for students with fair compensation for teaching artists. It's a tension every organization in this space faces. But the scale of the financial risk is categorically different. A four-week online workshop or a yearlong IndieMFA program represents a fraction of what a single semester of graduate tuition costs at most universities. For writers who need instruction and community but can't afford to pause their careers or relocate, the math isn't close.
Community Is the Point
If there was a single idea that unified every voice in the Writer's Chronicle conversation, it was this: the most important thing independent writing programs build is community. Not credentials. Not connections (though those follow). Not a line on a CV. Community.
Patterson traced the Loft's founding ethos back to its literal origin above a bookstore, where poets gathered because they valued something the broader culture wasn't providing. Makkai talked about StoryStudio's write-ins and write-outs at local brew pubs, about getting into underserved Chicago neighborhoods, about finding people before they even know they're writers. Fierro described telling her online students in small towns that they can start their own reading series, even if only four people show up and all of them are family. Kimzey spoke about building WritingWorkshops.com as a way to recapture the joy he first found in a community college classroom, the sense of writers gathering not to credential themselves but to look at the work with genuine excitement and push it forward.
The mission of WritingWorkshops.com has always been to bring writers out of the wilderness and into community. The Writer's Chronicle conversation confirmed that this same impulse drives every serious independent writing program in the country.
This emphasis on community has practical consequences for the quality of writing that independent programs produce. Patterson made an observation about self-reliance that the other panelists immediately echoed. Writers need to become their own editors, their own advocates, their own first readers. The workshop can't do that work for them forever. What it can do is build the analytical muscles that make self-reliance possible. If you can identify what's working in another writer's prose and articulate why, you develop the same ability with your own work. The classroom becomes a training ground for the solitary hours at the desk that constitute the actual writing life.
This is why independent programs invest so heavily in generative workshops alongside traditional critique models. Some of the Loft's most popular teaching artists focus exclusively on in-class writing, building new work from scratch in a shared space rather than evaluating manuscripts that arrive polished and defended. The approach reflects something Patterson attributed to Borges: the belief that we are all always beginning.
Proof of Concept
The results speak for themselves. Alumni of independent writing programs are publishing with major houses, winning national awards, earning admission to the most competitive graduate programs, and residencies in the country.
WritingWorkshops.com students have signed with agents, sold debut books to Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, St. Martin's, and Amistad, been named a National Book Award finalist, been selected for the TODAY book club, won the Halifax Prize from American Short Fiction, won the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books, earned admission to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Michener Center, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia, and received fellowships from Tin House, Sewanee, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. They've also won the James Patterson "Go Finish Your Book" Grant, been named PEN America Emerging Voices Fellows, published essays in The New York Times, won the $3,500 Tom Howard Fiction Contest, been named NBCC Emerging Critics Fellows, and more.
StoryStudio Chicago counts among its alumni novelists published by Flatiron, W. W. Norton, and other major presses. Sackett Street has produced National Book Award winners and alumni who now teach in the MFA programs where many of them once dreamed of studying. The Loft's Mentor Series, now in its fifth decade, has connected emerging Minnesota writers with some of the most celebrated authors of the last half century.
The old argument that MFA programs hold a monopoly on the networks and institutional support that lead to publication no longer holds up against the evidence. As Kimzey put it in the conversation, the community is happening because independent programs are building it, without the academic hierarchies that can make traditional programs feel more like credentialing exercises than creative incubators.
What This Means for Your Writing Life
If you're weighing your options as a writer, the landscape has never been more welcoming. You don't need to choose between an MFA and nothing. The independent writing program ecosystem offers craft instruction from published, award-winning authors; sustained community with writers at every stage; flexibility to learn on your own schedule; and a fraction of the financial burden that graduate school requires.
Makkai put it well when she advised writers, especially those who don't live in a city with a major literary center, to follow every independent program they can find, keep the emails coming, and look for the class that fits: the right schedule, the right subject, the right instructor. Sometimes you'll commit deeply to one organization. Sometimes you'll sample from many. Either way, you're building a writing life on your own terms.
That freedom is what independent programs were designed to protect. Not every writer fits the biographical template of a traditional MFA student. Not every writer can relocate, take on debt, or dedicate two years exclusively to a degree. But every writer deserves access to rigorous craft instruction and a community that takes their work seriously. That's what organizations like WritingWorkshops.com, StoryStudio Chicago, Sackett Street, the Loft Literary Center, and dozens of others across the country exist to provide.
The fact that The Writer's Chronicle, the publication most closely associated with traditional MFA culture through its parent organization AWP, chose to spotlight this movement (and that the piece became one of their most widely read of the year) signals something important. Independent writing programs aren't a niche alternative anymore. They're a central part of how American writers learn, grow, and find their communities.
If you're ready to find yours, we're here.
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