[https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/remembering-things-that-havent-happened]

At 22 I started an MFA program in fiction writing because I was going to pen the great American novel, then maybe get a PhD in creative writing, which would inevitably win me a tenured professorship (it was 2008 when you could almost plausibly still believe things like this). I’d wind up in a cute college town with four seasons and crunching fall leaves under my boots and live a cozy, creative life. A year later it dawned on me that academia was a crumbling tower, the people in my MFA program were curiously incurious about reading and writing, and how I imagined things might work was not how any of this was going to work. I fled.