Melville and His MFA by Sea

There has been a recent discourse on Substack about the uses and disuses of an MFA. Do you need one? Is it, actually, bad to have one? Is MFA-literature a genre, in the same way that horror or fantasy, or romance are? Is there a cabal of evil MFAers who are strangling contemporary literature in the cradle by refusing to publish anything other than their narrow circle of friends? Does getting an MFA ruin your writing? And so on. The true answer—as true answers tend to be—is boring. Having or n...