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The tuition reduction PocketMFA offers.
Make your success inevitable.
Most writers struggle to find professional success on their own—that’s why there are over 250 Master of Fine Arts programs in the United States. Use the DIY PocketMFA to make your own program, on your terms, in your time, and according to your needs. All at a fraction of the price.
What makes the DIY PocketMFA different from MFA programs or other online classes?
“From the beginning, our goal has been to make graduate level mentorship, community, and instruction affordable and available to more writers. We are proud to make the bet that there are thousands of writers like you, serious and talented, for whom the ivory tower model does not fit, but who still deserve the same quality of educational experience. We have taken all the best features of MFA programs and online instruction, and we’ve combined them into a unique experience in a new category all its own, accessible and available to all writers: the DIY PocketMFA.
The backbone of the DIY PocketMFA is pairing you alongside an expert author within a deep, long-term mentorship. Every month, your mentor will:
- Connect sincerely with your writing
- Respect and guide your journey as a professional author
- Inspire your confidence with genuine feedback on your efforts
Our aim, unlike the typical online course or workshop, is to build up the whole of a writer’s skillset: craft, community, process, and publishing. We’ve spent years of research and experimentation to develop our unique Whole Writer Curriculum—both here at PocketMFA and at Antioch University, where I direct their Post-MFA Certificate in the Teaching of Creative Writing.” — Joshua Roark, Founder and Director of PocketMFA
Are you ready to write with confidence and excitement?
The average MFA costs more than $50,000 in 2026. How is PocketMFA doing this so affordably?
Becoming the writer you want to be will make your life better.
You’re an emerging writer and you’re frustrated by the journey.
You’re experiencing the same headaches we all experience:
- rejection from a magazine, press, agent, or publisher
- looking at your work and knowing it can be better, but not knowing how to to make it so
- feeling overwhelmed with all the unknowns of the publishing industry
- seeing a book at the store and knowing your book could do better
- looking up MFAs and finding them too expensive, too exclusive, too disruptive
- sitting down to edit and not knowing what to do next
- receiving feedback that does nothing to actually help
So you google your options, but nothing grabs you.
You browse bookstores and goodreads for great craft books. You read blogs, you watch youtube tutorials, you listen to podcasts, you subscribe to another writer on substack, you check in on the old writing group that fell apart last year…
But you always end up right where you began, stuck. Either you are in that place Ira Glass famously called the taste gap, where your current skills have not yet caught up with your refined taste, or your skills are the best they’ve ever been, but you can’t see clearly the next step toward building professional success.
Until you discover PocketMFA, your forever home as a professional writer.
You join and meet your mentor—that first feedback and guidance gives you a burst of inspiration you haven’t felt in years. You join in on a PocketMFA virtual writing sprint, or a writer’s group, or an open mic night, and you finally meet people that see and understand your seriousness as an author. And you continue, month after month, building your skills, uncovering the mystery of publishing and your genuine desires from it, creating a real writing community around you and envisioning a rich, meaningful career ahead of you. Eventually, you look back, and you don’t know how you could be a writer any other way.
How do DIY PocketMFA writers learn to succeed?
We deliver a new method of online learning: the Whole Writer Curriculum.
At PocketMFA, you’ll develop a broad skillset through our Whole Writer Curriculum. This means that our instruction opportunities are not just around voice, description, forms, or other craft elements of your genre (though those are the biggest part of what we do!)—we also want to push you to develop a sustainable process, build a rich and authentic creative community, and strategically achieve your professional goals of publication.
This is functionally achieved through our 1-on-1 Mentorships, the active PocketMFA writing community, and our rich catalogue of graduate-level, asynchronous courses.
We’ve created the first-of-its-kind program that enables you to functionally build your own MFA at a fraction of the cost of a traditional institution, all the while prioritizing a more natural and organic pace than the two-year terminal degree.
Want to get into the details of our modified Critical Response Process for feedback? Our Dramatic Questions Pedagogy for instruction? Or just to chat about the latest ideas from the wonderful pedagogy researchers Chavez, Salesses, or Bain? Set up a call with Joshua Roark, our founder and chief pedagogy nerd to learn more.