In February of 2015, the novelist and short-story writer Ryan Boudinot wrote an essay for Seattle news website *The Stranger* titled, “Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One.” It was an essay that managed to piss off the entire literary internet all at once. “Writers are born with talent,” declared Boudinot early in the piece. “Either you have a propensity for creative expression or you don’t.” From there, he makes all manner of declarations about who’s a writer and who’s not, who has potential and who doesn’t. Of the budding memoirist, he wrote: “For the most part, MFA students who choose to write memoirs are narcissists using the genre as therapy. They want someone to feel sorry for them, and they believe that the supposed candor of their reflective essay excuses its technical faults. Just because you were abused as a child does not make your inability to stick with the same verb tense for more than two sentences any more bearable.…