Blurb:

First published in the Australian anthology Writing for the Curious: Why Study Writing? (Kishor Vaidya, ed.), this chapter flashes back on how I marketed the idea of an MFA program in creative writing first to my college and finally to the state department of Higher Education. Arguments by pedagogy specialist Stephen Healey, first published in The Writer’s Chronicle, are employed, and the importance of predicting job opportunities via the collection of data is stressed. Excerpts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Institute of Education Sciences, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the MFA proposal I authored are offered as effective examples of how to package talking points in order to transform programmatic visions into tangible realities.