In the basement of the newly remodeled University of Michigan Museum of Art, a sizable crowd has gathered in a sleek, sterile-looking auditorium. It’s a Friday night in Ann Arbor, and you can almost hear the sound of cheap beers cracking open throughout the city. But for those sitting in UMMA’s Helmut Stern Auditorium, the only sound that echoes is the voice of Kyle Booten, who is center-stage, reciting his ambitious, abstract brand of poetry.

Booten — along with a large percentage of his audience — is a student in the University’s MFA program. The atmosphere is warm and congenial, and the sense of community among those assembled is akin to that of a congenial family reunion. As the night wears on, it becomes clear that the University’s MFA students are unlike most other graduate students.

Short for Master of Fine Arts, an MFA program is an often overlooked and misunderstood two-year graduate program in which students prepare for careers writing poetry, fiction or both. The MFA program was first introduced at the University of Iowa 70 years ago. Now MFA degrees are offered at more than 150 universities across the nation. Despite the success of the MFA movement, it's been surrounded by a fair degree of controversy.

Most of the flak arises from the very nature of an MFA program. In essence, it attempts to teach something historically considered unteachable: creative writing.

For more pragmatic types, it may be hard to fathom how or why such programs exist. Unlike in law or medical school, there is no standardized set of information students must master before graduating from an MFA program. The idea of teaching something as slippery and subjective as creative writing seems to some an impossible or even absurd undertaking.

Quotes abound by writers and professors who decry the utility of MFA programs. The New Yorker’s Louis Menand complains that “Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem.”

The idea is reductive, yes, but not so far off. The crux of any MFA program is the writing workshop, in which students — most of whom have never been published — read and critique each other’s work in a small, generally supportive classroom setting. This is, so to speak, how the magic happens.

Steely eyed skeptics can lambaste the system all they want, but what they can’t deny is that stand-out MFA programs like Michigan’s have left an indelible mark on American fiction. A lot of today’s best and most influential writers have cut their teeth in these graduate programs: Recent Pulitzer Prize winners Junot Diaz, Richard Russo and Michael Chabon have all sprung out of MFA systems — not to mention the countless other MFA-holders who dominate the shelves of Borders.

Nowhere is the virtue of the MFA known better than at Michigan. The University’s program is widely considered to be the world’s second best (the MFA’s birthplace, Iowa, still holds the No. 1 spot). The University of Michigan has produced a parade of successful writers, including the Whiting Writer’s Award winner Patrick O’Keefe and Uwem Akpan, whose short story collection just achieved the literary equivalent of winning the lottery, becoming the newest addition to Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. But what, exactly, makes Michigan such an elite place to study creative writing?

Well, for one, the faculty.

According to Eileen Pollack, the director of the University’s MFA program, “The faculty (members) are not only accomplished writers, but dedicated teachers. Some programs hire superstar writers who teach one course a year and are never around. All our teachers are full-time.”

What really separates Michigan’s MFA program from the others, though, is the funding. In an almost too-good-to-be-true scenario, the University makes sure all its MFA students are provided for while they pursue their degree.