The last time I interviewed Chad Harbach, a co-founding editor of the literary magazine n+1, we were immersed in talk of America's pastime, surrounded by baseball memorabilia in the heart of Greenwich Village. The subject was his breakout novel, The Art of Fielding, named one of the top ten books of the year by The New York Times and Book of the Year by Amazon in 2011.

This week, he joined me by phone from Virginia, where he lives when he’s not on the road or in Brooklyn working on an upcoming issue of n+1. Just back from the AWP Conference in Seattle, where he launched his new book, MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction, he told me about the experience of collecting and editing its essays by MFA professors and students, and New York editors, publicists, and agents.

I wish I could have considered this chorus of voices before deciding to enroll in an MFA program myself in 2004. From addressing the harsh realities of making a living as a writer in today’s economic and creative climate, and the blissful alignment of choices that can lead to necessary time and space for writing, MFA vs. NYC provides a vital service in creating a dialogue around a question that will never be fully resolved.

Biographile: For people who might not be familiar with the origins of this book, can you explain how it came about?

Chad Harbach: The title essay was a piece that I wrote for n+1 about three years ago, and then it was also published on Slate. When it came out, people clearly wanted to talk about it and all these topics that kind of grounded the essay. There were a lot of people writing to me, and a lot of people blogging about it. Over the past few years, n+1 has started to publish more and more books, and this just seemed like a fruitful topic.

BIOG: This is the first in a series of n+1 books published in collaboration with FSG [Farrar, Straus, and Giroux], right?

CH: Yes, the first one.

BIOG: How did the collaboration with them come about? And why this subject for the debut title in the series?

CH: The two things were kind of happening in parallel. We were having very slowly moving chats with FSG about doing a book series, and on another track, I started working on this book at least two years ago. Throughout that time, we were going back and forth with FSG about how to work together, and we came to this co-publishing arrangement. This coming to be the first book with them was just a matter of timing.

BIOG: How did you develop the list of contributors for MFA vs. NYC?

CH: I wanted to do a sort of panoramic look at the situation, and I wanted people who were coming at it from a pretty diverse set of experiences. As with all n+1 projects, a certain number of writers come from within the n+1 group.

BIOG: Like [n+1 cofounder] Keith Gessen and Emily Gould?

CH: Yeah, Keith and Emily, and Carla Blumenkranz. I really wanted Emily to write about being on the wrong side of a book advance, so to speak, and the real sort of nitty-gritty economics of trying to be a working writer. A certain number of contributors to the book are people who work in publishing: agents, editors, and publishers. I felt like there was this great opportunity to hear from people in the industry talk about its dynamics from within, so I went to people who aren’t necessarily writers, like literary agent Jim Rutman, who hadn’t really published anything before.

BIOG: The piece by Jynne Martin [director of publicity at Riverhead books] is one of my favorites. Her passion is so genuine, it’s contagious. There’s something about the book, in general, that feels really fresh. Even though there are plenty of essay anthologies around particular subjects, there’s something unique about its overall tone around a debate.

CH: I definitely did not want people to be writing directly in response to my essay at all. They may have liked it or hated it, but it did give the book a sort of anchor for people who were writing about very different worlds, from traditional MFA programs to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest.

BIOG: Something about that Amazon contest essay was so sad, which makes me wonder … as an author whose great success is largely due to Amazon, how do you navigate between appreciation for that and criticism of their practices, as raised in George Packer’s recent New Yorker piece, and elsewhere?

CH: I can’t think of a time that I’ve felt constrained in terms of what to say about them. It’s certainly true that they picked my book as their Book of the Year…

BIOG: No big deal [laughs].

CH: So they were very instrumental in the success of my book. I haven’t read the Packer piece yet, but I understand that part of it is about the Amazon editorial office. Those are the people who picked my book, and they’re just one tiny corner of Amazon that I feel warmly towards. But that doesn’t prevent me from being critical of all the sort of larger destructive things that Amazon does.

BIOG: A major benefit of MFA programs, as they’re presented in this book, is the sense of community that they can provide. Would you advise someone considering applying to an MFA program to first create a non-academic literary community, as you guys have with n+1? I'm wondering if the two have supported one another -- your working community and your MFA community.

CH: Yes, absolutely, there are a few things an MFA program can provide. One of them is, like you say, a community. Hopefully there are young people associated with n+1 who feel like they have that community outside of a formal program. In some cases, if you live in a place where you’re the only person doing the kind of work you do, with a certain sensibility, it may be very hard to find a community to support that. There’s the Internet, but to me, that’s not the same as an actual physical community of people. If you’re lucky enough to go to a program where you’re funded, then an MFA can provide you time and money, and of course, that is great. Being a student in a funded MFA program is a wonderful subsidy for young artists.

BIOG: Until I read Alexander Chee’s essay in your book, I had no idea that there were bidding wars among MFA programs for top prospects. Maybe I'm naïve, or just incredulous because I'm among those who have taken out student loans toward an MFA, but I was shocked to learn that the University of Iowa lured him away from UMass with more money.

CH: That was the early ‘90s, almost the pre-business days of the MFA. But, yeah [laughs], he kind of accidentally got Iowa to bump up their offer to him. I like your question, because even if you go to an MFA program, that’s only two years, and you’re still going to have this question of what community will sustain you for the other seventy-seven years of your life.

BIOG: It’s pretty incredible what you guys have done with n+1. Not that it’s easy to create a great publication on a regular basis, but I’m sort of surprised that it doesn’t happen more often -- young people coming together to create something really substantial from the ground up. You guys are pretty open about how destitute you've been, and I guess there aren't many people willing to put in that kind of work without financial payoff for so long.

CH: Right. But it seems like there are a lot of young magazines in New York now -- much more so now than when we started.

BIOG: Have you heard any talk about this book's potential impact on the structure of MFA programs and the funding that they do or don't provide? Basically, I’m wondering what kind of political or institutional influence it could have. Or is it too early to tell?

CH: It’s definitely too early to tell, because the book just came out last week [laughs]. I think a lot of the conversation that’s happening is among people who haven’t actually read it. I’ll be interested to hear what the discussion is like once people have actually digested it.

BIOG: What surprised you most in collecting and editing material for the book?

CH: Man, it’s hard to remember, because I worked with these writers for such a long time [laughs]. Anything that surprised me no longer does, but I really love the last piece in the book by Eli Evans. He’s about my age, and he’s a very talented writer who went and got an MFA very soon after college. He was on a kind of fast track, and when he finished the MFA program, he had an agent for a book that he was working on. And then for the next, like, ten years -- he is an incredibly devoted writer and incredibly hard-working -- he wrote novel after novel, and none of them have been published. So, in this piece, he tells this kind of harrowing tale of all these unpublished books. It’s not surprising that there are talented people who go really unrewarded by the system, but it’s also kind of harrowing to read about it from the inside.

BIOG: I remember thinking: what an interesting choice for the last essay in the book. It’s sobering, you know?

CH: Yes, absolutely.

BIOG: Was putting this book together a welcome change of pace from writing fiction? Or were you writing fiction concurrently?

CH: It was a good project for me, because I was doing a lot of traveling for The Art of Fielding. For me, writing fiction is kind of an all-day, all or nothing activity, so this was a project that worked well with traveling around all the time last year.

BIOG: What are you up to these days, aside from some travel for this book?

CH: I’m working on n+1 and trying to write a novel.