The question of whether or not creative writing can be taught in a classroom is as contentious and unanswerable as “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” MFA writing programs have always incited criticism, especially recently—most notably in Mark McGurl’s “The Program Era,” which was released in April. As Louis Menand notes in his New Yorker review of the book, McGurl’s underlying message is that “teaching creative writing should always be a scandal.”
