Dear Friends:
Last night it took me an hour to fall asleep. This is unusual. My mind wouldn’t stop moving, and no matter where I turned it—the house of my guest family in Germany, by second book, a vest I used to wear weekly—things slid quickly to regrets.
As they do. How do you sleep at night? asked accusatorially is essentially a question of why you don’t regret the actions you’ve taken. They come at us at night, regrets, our eyes unshut and shifting around the room from one black depthlessness to another.
This week’s Main Matter is the longest of my gradschool series, and I guess I regret that, too. I didn’t think Letters of Recommendation would give me to much to prise apart, but that’s the thing about LORs: nobody thinks much of them.
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements: Disneyland Edition
1. The Potato Chips at the Jolly Holiday Bakery Cafe
With a lack of any plans or invitations, N & I took ourselves to Disneyland for Thanksgiving, where we knew it’d be all dolled up with holiday decor. In the spirit of the day, we went to the (apparently Mary Poppins–themed?) Jolly Holiday Bakery Cafe for its Thanks-Mas Sandwich: turkey, cranberries, and stuffing on toasted rye bread with gravy on the side. It came, as you can see, with a little paper bag of potato chips:
I watched multiple people there drink the remains of their gravy from the cup, but the total star of the show was the chips. Think of placing a Lays chip in your mouth: a disc of salt engineered to dissolve at the precise second you want another. The chips at JHBC were like someone had just moments before sliced an actual potato and fried it up crisp. We didn’t finish ours, took them back to the hotel, and they were still good the next day. I had some Monday: still crisp and delicious! Maybe this is Disneyland’s parkwide potato chip, but leave it to those bastards to imagineer everything better.
2. Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance
N’s the Star Wars guy in this household, and online guides said to book Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run first, bc of lines, so we headed straight to Galaxy’s Edge when we arrived. N loved it, getting excited that they even had a moisture vaporator, which had to be explained to me. Anyway, MF:SR was fun, but basically a trumped up version of their age-old Star Tours ride in Tomorrowland. The real treat is Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, an immersive, experiential ride that has a story to tell. Look: my skepticism about Disney and Star Wars is immense, but I gasped multiple times at how lifelike and great everything was, and before the day was over, N & I did it all again. Also: it’s very fun to be scolded in front of your group by a 20something theatre major playing a First Order minion.
Recommendation Letters
This Main Matter is the last in a series of three posts on applying to gradschools, specifically MFA in Writing programs, which I’ve taught in for 13 years and have directed one for 5. Find the first two posts here:
Some of us are seeking letters of recommendation this fall: for gradschool, for jobs, for residencies, etc. Some of us are writing such letters. Some of us are in both camps. I’m hoping this overview can help us all, God help us all.
How Are LORs Used?
Again, nobody agrees, so read the guidelines closely, and take note of what they want before you think about whom to ask for letters. Iowa wants letters from ‘instructors or colleagues who are best able to assess your potential for graduate study and teaching’. UMass doesn’t exactly say what it wants, but it says that, ‘If you have additional recommenders who may not be familiar with your creative writing, but are able to speak to your abilities or potential as a teacher, you may submit additional letters,’ implying they want letters from people who can speak to your writing. Vanderbilt, unhelpfully, wants ‘Three letters of recommendation’. That’s all a lot of programs say, as though it’s self-evident.
It’s not.
Those of us in the business of reading LORs do well to ask ourselves such things as, What are LORs for? How long or short should they be? What function do they serve in the overall assessment of an applicant? Why require three?
These are not questions you letter-seekers can answer. If all you’ve got is that they want three, you’re going to have to figure out what you want LORs to do for your application. In other words, what can letters convey that your writing sample and your SOP can’t?
What Should LORs Discuss?
The bulk of any LOR should show ‘objectively’ the kind of student you’ve been in and out of the classroom.
Think of it like secondary characters in a first-person narrative: no ‘I’ can be fully objective about themselves, so it helps readers to watch someone else come in to the room and expose a new facet of our protagonist. Were you talkative in classes, or more reserved? How did you approach your writing assignments, and how did your work stand out from your peers’? How were you among those peers? What did you work to learn, or unlearn, during the course?
LORs that focus on this are like candy to me. LORs that focus on the applicant’s writing—despite what UMass seems to want—are gruel. Second only to the backs of my eyelids, my eyes have looked more than anything at student writing. I’m able to come to my own conclusions about its merits and potential, thanks. (And I’ve 100% already come to these conclusions before reading any LOR.)
Counterpoint: Your writing sample may not show the growth you’ve undergone in the last year or so. It may not, given length requirements, be able to convey the interesting thing your novel does in later chapters, say. You can (and should) talk about your writing in your SOP, but a LOR can be a good place for a writing teacher not necessarily to brag about how good your writing is, but to put it into a certain context, one that shows you standing out from other writers.
Because some programs choose to make their grad students teach while learning, they may want LORs that can speak to your ability to teach a classroom of students who may not be much younger than you. So if there’s anything in your classroom or workplace performance that shows organization, leadership, or communication skills, that’s all great great stuff to put in the LOR.
When Not to Recommend, and How
If you’re asked to write a LOR by someone you can’t in good conscience recommend for gradschool, but don’t feel comfortable declining their request for an LOR (and especially if they don’t waive their right to view, which see below), please be diplomatic in conveying their unfitness, or difficulty, or outright terribleness. It does us all good to be honest about this: some students are just terrible in classes. They bully other students with their opinions, they laugh out loud at peer feedback, they inexplicably BCC faculty and students on emails sent to other students, they only do the reading when they can find the book on tape, etc.
These students’ ambition and confidence leads them to insist on LORs for the gradschools they want to get into. The way to handle this is to be honest and specific about their horribleness in ways the applicant (a) can’t argue with, as facts, and (b) may even feel flattered by:
Applicant was an outspoken voice in workshops each week, often being the first to comment in any group discussion. With a strong, unwavering commitment to their voice and vision, they didn’t let other traditions, schools, or styles of writing—e.g., minimalism, imagism, decolonized craft—get in the way. Juggling a number of courses and personal responsibilities, Applicant felt comfortable routinely asking for extensions on deadlines.
Etc. Make it clear to those of us reading between the lines that the applicant’s a bullet we’d do our students a big service to dodge.
How To Find Recommenders?
Easy: find people you’ve developed good mutually respectful relationships with.1 Note: these don’t always have to be classroom teachers.
One common obstacle for gradschool applicants over 30 or so is getting back in touch with teachers they haven’t seen in years, sometimes decades. If you’ve been working in the quote-unquote real world, then seek recommenders who foremost can write well, using specifics and concrete examples,2 about your working relationship: What is it like to work on a project with you? How have you gone about solving problems? Where in your job has your recommender seen evidence of your creativity?
For those of you who are still connected with teachers, think twice about going for Big Names. I once read a LOR written by Salman Rushdie that arrived as a PDF of a 4-sentence email and was about as useful as a paper dildo. There are undoubtedly people on admissions committees who’d be powerfully awed by such a LOR; I’m happy not to count myself among them.
Instead, find people who know you well enough to be specific in their letter. And find those people early. Two months before a deadline is a perfectly good time to email them requesting a letter. (Some laden teachers may want more time.) And keep that email simple:
Hi, Name:
I’m applying to MFA programs this fall, and I’m emailing to ask if you’d be willing to write me a letter of recommendation. I learned a lot from you in That Class I Took, and I thought we developed a good working relationship. I’m hoping my letters can provide details on The Thing I Want My LORs To Do.
If you’re able to write me a letter, thank you in advance. If there’s anything I can send that will help (writing sample, CV, etc.), please let me know. My earliest application deadline is Deadline, and I’ll be in touch soon about how to submit. And if you’re too busy to write a letter at this time, I understand and hope all is well.
Take care:
Etc.
Now, you’ve set yourself two tasks once you’ve sent your request email. One is to follow up with instructions on how LORs should be submitted.3 The other is to follow up yourself with a reminder before the deadline.
Everyone’s busy, and nobody’s good at inboxes. So if you haven’t received notice that a program has received your letters, don’t be shy about nudging your recommenders. I love a nudge. I never don’t appreciate getting a nudge, so nudge us if deadlines are making you nervous.4
Finally, most application portals will give you the option to waive your ability to view your LORs. Nobody likes to waive rights, but I urge you to waive this one. Again, let me try to emphasize this as much as I can:
Waive your right to view your LORs!
Your recommenders will know whether you’ll be viewing your letters before they write and upload them. Admissions committees will thus know whether or not these letters were written in confidence. This is, to be sure, the shittiest part of the whole gradschool application process, but it remains in place, and if you don’t waive this right, it creates (again, shittily) an aura of mistrust that will sour the stomachs of the admissions committee.
What Not to Discuss in an LOR
Letter seekers, this is out of your control, unless you feel comfortable guiding your recommender’s hand in this way. (Good luck.) Letter writers, you likely don’t need advice on how to write well, but here’s some advice on what you can skip to make your job of writing letters all that easier:
Please no accolades about the recommendee’s writing. Unless, per the counterpoint above, it’s safe to assume app readers will miss something about what it demonstrates re the applicant’s success—in graduate school. You might think they’re already on their way to becoming a successful novelist, but does this mean they’ll stay engaged in peer feedback, or seek out courses on new kinds of writing they might learn from? Now: if the applicant is writing within a certain cultural idiom or literary tradition you can assume most app readers won’t be familiar with (73% of college faculty are white people, e.g.), then your LOR can do a lot to help the admissions committee see the promise and merit they may have been blind to.
Skip giving your opinions on gradschool or MFA programs. We get this from time to time, even from people who teach. Here’s a recent fave:
This is not the fault of the applicant, but shit like this is about you, the letter writer, and there’s just no reason to be writing in a letter of recommendation anything about yourself, your thoughts, your career, etc. (Unless you’re writing about how you know the applicant and the relationship you’ve developed since then.) Which leads me to:
Please can the language about the selectivity or prestige of the institution you teach for or work in. We see this from time to time, too, especially from CW teachers at undergrad institutions where students have to apply to get into their advanced workshop. Ostensibly, this says something about the applicant’s talent or promise, but if 13 years of teaching in higher ed has taught me anything, it’s that tenured professors get lazier over the years, so all this might mean is that the applicant’s writing was the most legible to you. Tastes aren’t universal. That’s as true of writing as it is of what ‘good student’ means—which is more evidence for why the best thing you can put in an LOR are concrete details about the applicant’s work and behavior in and out of the classroom. You know: show don’t tell.
Confidential Matters
I’ll end this by contradicting myself: maybe applicants shouldn’t waive their right to view LORs. I think about every applicant to gradschool wanting this thing—entrance, access—that for one reason or another they’ve decided will improve their life, and we on admissions committees being The Deciders, working in shadow.
That’s unavoidable as long as the demand from applicants outnumbers the supply from grad programs—which it still does: in 2022, gradschool applications were up 3.9 percent while enrollment dropped 4.3 percent (PDF). But by giving the option to make LORs confidential or not, and favoring the former over the later, and especially by forcing the applicant themselves to make this decision, we only emphasize the power imbalance and shadowy nature of higher ed.
So maybe this is a call to be more open and honest in the planning stages. Letter seekers: if you’re not 100 percent sure that someone will write you a glowing recommendation, seek another recommender. Letter writers: if you don’t feel confident that the applicant will not just succeed in gradschool but also contribute to others’ learning, find a polite way to decline.
The weird thing about gradschool—the last bit of education that’s not compulsory5—is that we need to make it open to everyone, even though it’s not for everyone. Many may disagree, but I’ve spent most of my academic life in public schools.6 In a sane world, all of this, all of the learning and growth and community and access you imagine gaining in gradschool, would be free, paid for by a government of the people who fairly tax the billionaires whose wealth we’ve all made for them.
For now we have this system: competitive, shadowy, uncertain. I’ve tried in these posts to shed some light where it isn’t often shed. As ready as I am to talk about something else for a while, I’m happy to continue that transparency in the comments.
This week’s thing I did not buy at the antique store are these Kiss figurines in a chicken broth box:
If a short list of names doesn’t immediately present itself, ask yourself why not, and then ask yourself how gradschool will be any different.
That is, using nouns and verbs and rarely (if ever) adjectives.
Often a program’s application system will generate these emails automatically; all you have to do is enter the proper email addresses.
Yes, most programs will be fine if LORs come in after the deadline, but if they say anything about not being fine with this, then what does that bullheaded thinking tell you about who you’ll be working with?
I’ve taught for 10 years at an expensive, private university, but given that we don’t provide tuition remission in exchange for low-level teaching, we’re an un-elite safety school for many of our applicants.
Pip! Pip! I sit on the admissions committee at an expensive private law school, and academic LORs typically follow this format:
First paragraph: why the author of the LOR is so great
Second paragraph: explanation of the class in which the author of the LOR taught applicant and how the class is so very challenging and/or unique in concept because of the author's academic prowess
Third paragraph (shortest): the grade the applicant received in the class and more descriptors of why that class was so amazing/challenging owing to the author's genius
Fourth paragraph: recommendation comes here couched alongside why the author is to be trusted for having this opinion and bestowing it upon the applicant.
-fin-
I'd take a 4-sentence Salman Rushdie email pdf over this malarkey 7/7 days of the week. Potato/tomato.