This is the second in a series of blog posts going over the different parts of my MFA journey from applying to grad school to graduating and all the moments in-between. I’m hoping that by writing this series, I can reflect on my experiences, share what I’ve learned, and help a fellow writer along the way.
To read the first post in the series, check it out here, My MFA Journey: Deciding on a Grad School.
What Schools I Applied To
I only applied to two schools and had four total that I picked out and went over in the first blog. The two schools I applied to in 2023 were Iowa Writers Workshop and Bennington Writing Seminars, both are the oldest schools of their type. IWW is a full residency (on campus) MFA program that’s focused on workshopping fiction. The other big focus of the program is teaching. BWS is a low residency (off campus) MFA program that’s focused on writing and studying fiction through extensive reading, writing, and critical essays.
I went over why I choose each of the schools in my last blog, so I won’t get into it much here, but essentially I choose to apply to each because of their extensive network, skilled faculty, and, for Bennington specifically, the way it focuses on reading and critical analysis as the basis for great writing.
How I Prepared to Apply
The hardest part of my preparation process for applying was writing the personal statements. It’s been years since I’ve applied to school and trying to figure out how I wanted to showcase myself, my talents, where I am at in my career, and how I hope getting an MFA will help me. The samples were easy. I have a lot of stories, both published and unpublished, that have already been edited and critiqued, so I just needed to pick the ones that best aligned with my craft and the types of stories I want to write.
To get in the right mindset for writing my personal statements, I spent a couple months reading other MFA in fiction applicants personal statements. I browsed blogs and graduate student groups to find samples to help inspire and direct me in what type of writing and introspection best worked. I then spent a month for each statement drafting them out and brainstorming them.
Bennington Writing Seminars had the most unique personal statement requirement and asked for a look at my literary life and reading habits. It took some digging and thinking back over my years as a reader and writer to figure out what I wanted to cover in that statement. I ended up charting my reading growth over the years and what originally pulled me to reading and writing. Iowa was a bit more straightforward but even more intimidating because they get thousands of applications, which means they see a lot of great applications. That makes it even harder to write something that will stand out from the crowd.
It took another couple of months to edit and get them into the place I wanted them. I didn’t get additional feedback on the personal statements and trusted my gut that they answered the general questions each school wanted me to cover.
Personal Statements & Samples
I’ve pasted both of the personal statements I sent to each school below with little to no changes. You may notice that some things I repeated, other things I updated, and some things I left out entirely. That’s because some of the personal statement is the same no matter where you apply, but the other parts—the explaining why this school and why this school now—are different for each place.
Iowa Writers Workshop Personal Statements & Samples
I grew up surrounded by the boardwalks and beachfronts of Atlantic City, which meant my Jersey Shore wasn’t just all sun beams and sunscreen. There is darkness in the dunes there. Greed turned America’s Playground into the dumping ground of vice, drugs, and sex work. Walking down the street, sometimes felt like a deal I’d make with death. Maybe I’d make it home, maybe I wouldn’t. I don’t know why every night I did. Even on the nights when my brother and I, as reckless kids, would drift into the development neighborhoods behind my mom’s hair salon to brawl with the kids who hated us because they were on welfare and my mom owned a piece of the dream. Those kids whipped us till we bled. And that blood seeps into my writing.
If I could pinpoint a reason why the darker tales call to me. It’d have to be because home, my home, always found a way of making the dark a small bit of paradise, too. The first story I ever wrote I did it by streetlamp. My mom had finally found a home after we bounced around from motel to nana’s couch to Uncle James’ Galloway home for a couple years. In all the shuffling, there were some apartments and sublets filled with roaches bigger than my palm, but I couldn’t write there. Story didn’t find me until all the dust settled and my mom bought a home for us.
It isn’t a big or perfect home. It is a trailer without the wheels; instead, it squats one-story tall on grey cinderblocks hidden behind cheap paneling. In that home, I began to dream. I’d be reading some compelling book—it was always speculative fiction—and just as the action started to pick up, I woke up to find my hands empty. Finally, one night, the idea of chasing the story back into my sleep wasn’t good enough, I needed to create it.
Beats me breathless what that first story was about. I just remember the yellow light from the streetlamp outside my window falling through the bristles and branches on the tree and then my blinds to lay still but shattered on the page to illuminate my words—whatever they may have been. I filled up countless journals with stories, fan fictions, poems, anything I could imagine, I made reality on the page.
As a queer Black woman who was raised both Muslim and Christian, home is and will always be a place filled with myth and monsters. This shows up in my writing in ways that are almost all to obvious. No matter the story or the world or genre, it all wraps around the theme and tone of home. What makes a home and how does that shape the people who call it such? That’s what sparked my want to pursue a graduate research project, “Imagining the Spirit Home: An Exploration of the Symbolism of Domestic Horror.” I want to explore novels, interactive fiction, video games, and short stories for how storytellers have designed their houses of terror. What items, totems, sacred markers, and archetypes make up the ephemera of not just haunted houses, but houses home to horrors and all the domiciles in-between?
In my sample “To Carve Home in Your Bones,” a girl’s swimming team finds themselves shipwrecked on an island of strange creatures in a world where trauma monsters burst from your skin whenever fear and injury mix. It’s not a story with a happy ending because not all stories have happy endings. “To Carve Home in Your Bones” is an experimental work of literary fiction I needed to write to find my sense of home—to capture that feeling of longing and fear. “Building Blocks,” my other sample, is almost in total opposition to the first story. “Building Blocks” is about striking out to find your own home and community while juggling self-identity in a new world. The science-fiction fantasy story follows a magical house painter on a day at the job as they pine over their home on the moon. “Bringing the Dead Along” is a horror about generational trauma, the Great Migration, and carrying our dead with us in spirits and memorabilia. Together, they show my range in voice, styles, and characters, while exploring themes of home and identity.
I’ve spent the past few years working as a professional writer and editor. I won’t get into it much because you can see all of that on my CV and, hopefully, in my writing samples. With my track record, connections, and publishing history, it may seem like I am where many writers who attend MFAs want to be. Yes, I understand my voice and how to morph it into another’s. Creating worlds comes easy and stories even easier. This isn’t a boast on my craft. I spend hours a week deliberately practicing, doing story generation exercises, and meeting with a local writing group I founded and moderate. I’ve also taken classes through Clarion West and various colleges.
I’m applying to an MFA and more specifically, Iowa Writers’ Workshop, because despite all I’ve accomplished and know I will continue to accomplish, a graduate level study of the craft in a challenging environment is something my craft needs to advance to new, unimagined heights. Heights like that of Carmen Maria Machado, Sherman Alexie, Steven Erikson, and Lan Samantha Chang. The specific community built at Iowa is what I’m after. I’ve built and assisted in writing communities all throughout my life and career, including studying them to see what makes a good writing workshop and community helpful.
Along with my research into what clutters a horror home, I want to use my time and workshop experience to write a novel length work of a horror thriller about a woman addicted to drugs and alcohol who is visited by ghosts that push her to return to her hometown where she works to get clean and solve the cultish murders that have plagued her home for decades. While exploring themes of home and our responsibilities to it, I want to showcase the treatment of violence against women and addiction in America and its ecological connections to government policies, racial divides, and social systems.
I’m applying to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop because I want to write fiction, but not just fiction—speculative fiction; fiction that bends its emotional narrative around things far outside our realms of understanding, the type of stories and characters that feel frighteningly familiar and intriguingly weird (and if I could be so bold to place a pin on the map of narrative to describe exactly the type of stories I want to write: heartbreakingly terrifying). The type that somehow blends the imaginative world building of Rivers Solomon with the dark literary storytelling of Joyce Carol Oates and the all too human characters of Stephen Graham Jones.
While my influences are more story related than author, the writers who have touched me repeatedly in ways that have shaped my craft are Stephen Graham Jones—whose novel Mongrels is currently under the microscope of my Alphasmart as I do a copy work of the entire book—Tom Robbins, Joyce Carol Oates, Dorothy Parker, and Rivers Solomon. Each of these authors has what can only be described as a way of making the dark bearable and beautiful.
Maybe, if the light shines just right, you’ll help bring my voice out in ways that’ll only sharpen my prose and worlds. I want the time, teachings, and churnings only available at Iowa. There’s so much room in my writing and craft to grow under the guidance of the rigorous workshop. I want to grasp and then break what makes stories work for readers, what makes readers change because of stories. In the more technical sense, I want to learn from Iowa how to craft the emotional landscape of my characters on the page while designing original creatures and worlds that reflect our world. That includes using micro-tension, voice, worldbuilding, and research to craft each of my stories.
I want to share in the ways I can help other writers grow from my experience teaching through Clarion West and hosting workshops. The biggest weakness I believe my fellow writing community at Iowa and the University of Iowa community at large can help me with is making unique, clear, and memorable descriptions. I want Iowa. But does Iowa want me?
Samples:
Bennington Writing Seminars Personal Statements & Samples
The first book I remember reading was Hanson: An Unauthorized Biography back in 1998 when I was eight. I bought it for a few bucks at one of the Scholastic Book Fairs that came through my elementary school. Once I finished that book, I jumped on story like a tick. I read and clung to any type. During class, I’d spend the lessons reading through the textbook. Finishing all my textbooks by the first month of school was a badge of honor. While it made class easier, it didn’t satiate my hunger. Luckily, the local library was by the playground where my brother played football. There were no restrictions to the books I could get my hands on at the library. I’d read books on assassinations, vampires, short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Dorothy Parker, and more Goosebumps.
My parents weren’t big readers. They loved music and movies, which are their own types of stories. So, it took me a while to really find my footing in the literary world. It wasn’t till much later that I realized I could write stories. A different hunger awoke in me once I started shaping words and creating worlds. My taste for stories also started leaning a bit darker than most of my peers. I wrote and read all through high school with the sole intention that I would one day be a writer, too. It took me years to realize that dream—about ten years.
Though after college I didn’t have access to literary academia, I still had books and stories. Stories in poems, songs, paintings, books, movies, scripts, and games. Those stories I read at the beginning of my professional writing career were works by Tom Robbins, Dorothy Parker, and Octavia Butler. I also consumed short fiction published in magazines like The New Yorker, Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld Magazine, Interzone Magazine, and whatever else I could find. When I worked two jobs and took nighttime creative writing classes, I used every moment on the bus or walking to grab a few seconds of a story. Without those books, and those authors, I don’t think I would have come to find myself as an author today.
I’d love to use my reading and writing time at Bennington to draft, research, and workshop a novel-length work. To Sleep in the Pines and Never Wake Up is a literary horror thriller about a woman addicted to drugs and alcohol who is visited by ghosts that push her to return to her hometown where she works to get clean and solve the cultish murders that have plagued her home for decades while mending binds with family, past relationships, and building a new love. While exploring themes of home and our responsibilities to it, I want to showcase the treatment of violence against women and addiction in America through its ecological connections to government policies, racial divides, and social systems.
I’m applying to the Bennington Writing Seminars not because of its position or prestigious but because of the reading rigor. I want to write fiction, but not just fiction—fiction that bends its emotional narrative around things far outside our realms of understanding, the type of stories and characters that feel frighteningly familiar and intriguingly weird. And to do all that, I believe the key is in the close study of literature under the guided mentorship of published authors and in a community of writers all pushing toward the same thing: to tell a good story well.
I want the teachings and community only available at Bennington. The biggest weakness I believe my fellow writing community at Bennington College can help me with is making unique, clear, and memorable sentences. There’s so much room in my writing and craft to grow under the guidance of the reading and teachings of the faculty. I want to grasp and then break down what makes stories work for readers and what makes readers change because of stories. In the more technical sense, I want to learn how to craft the emotional landscape of my characters on the page while designing original creatures and worlds that reflect our own in a clear and evocative way.
Samples:
Grad School Decisions
Ultimately, I was accepted to one school, Bennington, during my first cycle and after thinking about it for months, I realized that even if I got into the other schools I wanted to get into, Bennington was more right for me than them. So, I went with Bennington!
For a few months after my acceptance and waiting for Iowa’s decision, I considered waiting till next year and reapplying. There were still two schools on my list of places to apply to (Warren Wilson and Brown University). I could also reapply to Iowa if I didn’t get in and redo the whole application cycle. To stop myself from falling into a hole of applying and reapplying to grad schools in hopes of getting into one of the other ones, I set a hard limit on myself to only do two cycles.
Before I got my Iowa rejection, I journaled and dreamed and thought and talked about the different opportunities each school would give me. Iowa with it’s prestigious, full funding, and age would, for many writers, be the dream school to go to, but when I spoke with people who went there, a lot of there experiences seemed like what they learned wasn’t anything from the teachers or workshops. They learned how to be teachers and social writers within the framework of academia—so lots of teaching.
Brown University, the other full funded and ivy league school, doesn’t have much in the way of an alumni network or social scene for writers. Many writers I spoke to and checked out had similar experiences to Iowa students. Lots of teaching, but Brown offers a lot more in the way of research apprenticeships. Warren Wilson is a low residency school very similar to Bennington, except they don’t have the same reading rubric as Bennington. In the end, Bennington’s framework, teachers, location, structure, and alumni network won me over.
Next in My MFA Journey
In the next post in this series, I’ll share my residency experience! I’m fresh back from it as of last month and am feeling lots of things I’d love to yell about somewhere instead of at my dear new friends. Thanks for reading and sticking around to see where this whole writing thing takes me. I hope I can return the favor someday by writing a story you’ll love.
I’d also love to know if you’ve gone through the MFA process before and what your experience was! I’m going for fiction, but would love to hear from anyone who has attended an MFA program—even if you didn’t finish. Let me know your writing journey and story.
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Aigner Loren Wilson 
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