I meant to write something about graduation, but graduations are vacuums; we celebrate an ending and new absence, and I watch my classmates at parties turn into ghosts. What doesn’t disappear turns lighter; I become more careless, and have to trust my instincts in the absence of routine’s gravity.

Here’s some proof of my classmates’ existence, though. I’ve been collecting links, tracking their appearances online:

• Pete Coco’s weblog, Impeccable Jones, has become a group blog with a new, sleek, design. He also recently started Babies are Fireproof for Iowa classmates to stay in touch. (This post, in response to the NY Times article about that Princeton undergrad’s senior thesis on NYer story acceptances, points out that one can look up any Princeton grad’s senior thesis. For ex., Donald Rumsfeld , class of ‘54, penned “The Steel Seizure Case of 1952 and Its Effects on Presidential Powers.” Jonathan Safran Foer, class of ‘99, wrote “Before Reading The Book of Antecedents: Intention, Literary Interpretation, and the Hypothesized Author.”)

• Maud accidentally posted, and then took down, her interview with Paris Review editor Brigid Hughes. She meant to have Brigid proof the post before it went live — and whenever that happens, you’ll get to see many, many mentions of Iowa classmate Yiyun Li.

• Before Yiyun won the Plimpton Prize and got into into the New Yorker, Daniel Alarcon (also class of ‘04) placed a story in last summer’s fiction debut issue. Last week, on the website Get Underground, I found this: “I recently listened to Daniel Alarcon read a piece of his fiction; he is an unforgettable genius.” Damn, boy.

• Last month, Jane Roper’s translation of “workshop speak” made the blogging rounds.

• Paula Morris has a piece about Salman Rushdie’s visit to Iowa in the New Zealand Listener. “Salman Rushdie stands in the middle of my living room, sloshing back red wine and gossiping about Hugh Grant with a gaggle of over-excited students.”

• Sean Bernard, who graduated from the Workshop in ‘03, has a confusing critique of Iowa’s MFA program in American Book Review. The essay got passed around in the Workshop for its mention of Vinnie Wilhelm (‘04), one of the nicest, and best, writers most of us know.

  The concept is that twenty months in the Midwest somehow “forms” a student of the Workshop. The timing of the twenty months hardly matters; in theory, those spent in 1987 -1989 are exactly equal to those spent right now, which means that writer Vinnie Wilhelm, class of 2004, despite his obsessions with nudity and farting, will one day write novels eerily similar to John Irving’s.

  But the most confusing sentence in the essay is probably this: “Aesthetic diversity is the only way to ensure artistic diversity.” The italics are Sean’s.

  
  Related: Robert Birnbaum interviews Jim Harrison for The Morning News. They spend some time discussing MFA programs:

  JH: … I tell young writers, “You know, part of being a writer is to know how this works. And rather than you trying to throw yourself in my lap, why don’t you go, save your coin and go to New York and live in the Bronx cheaply and find out how it works.” I had that advantage when we lived in Boston, in the ‘60s, the only job I could get was as a salesman for a book wholesaler. I just drove around and talked to bookstores and public libraries and school librarians. And that was a very healthy thing to see in the warehouse how this happens. Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works. Sometimes in literary biography you forget that the publisher isn’t the main thing. They like to think they are—when you are in New York and you see these people, it’s amazing. But, there are good and bad ones, historically, obviously. It’s important for writers to know that just like a farmer growing 80 acres of something and then not knowing what can be done with it, “How am I going to get rid of my chickens, my milk?” On and on.

  RB: Isn’t what all these writing programs are about?

  JH: Yes, but they are singularly unrealistic.

  RB: There are people who complain that they are more about the vocational aspects of writing than the writing.

  JH: I’m not that familiar with them but I do see—I mean, are there 25,000 MFA manuscripts wandering around out there? We have really made the MFA, as I have pointed out before, almost part of the civil service. We started with two really good one ones, Iowa and Stanford, you know, Stegner’s program.

  RB: Didn’t Montana have a good program early on?

  JH: Yeah, but now suddenly—you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too. So they all want, if it works, a department like that. The trouble is there’s not enough appropriate staff to go round. I am for a novelist, for a poet, well read. I really keep up. I see whole staffs that I don’t know the work of any of them. And I wonder where they came from. There is this problem of doubting that it can be taught. I only taught in that great period at Stonybrook. And I didn’t teach writing. I taught modern poetics. I have never been able to find the sheet of paper but I had this idea of how to construct a good MFA program. OK, at that time in the ‘60s, there was Ben DeMott and R.V. Cassill and we had a meeting in New York trying to figure out how we could get universities to hire writers [laughs]—because they needed jobs. OK, it got out of control. I had the idea—you meet up for a month in a location, right? You have your journal and then you get to the main 300 books in the modernist tradition. Or whatever. Then the student spends a year in the country, preferably at menial labor. Comes back for a month. Then he spends a year in the city and comes back for a month and then the end of it the third year, several months with the teachers, just to make sure it isn’t one of those grade school-high school-college MFAs. Because that’s only a narrow experience. You know how [Ezra] Pound talked about the grave danger of starting from too narrow a base. Then you really tip over very easily. It’s like the one-book wonder. What you are doing, where are you going to go?

  Posted by nchicha on June 08, 2004, 08:15 AM | TrackBack (48)
  Comments

  Thanks for the plug, Nathalie. But alas, in Poland, you not only have to pay to use the toilets, but to use the internet as well (So maybe that’s reasonable— or at least half of it may be). Anyway, I’ll be blogging aplenty upon my return to the US early next week.

  Posted by P.Coco at June 9, 2004 07:48 AM

  I just read Maud’s Brigid Hughes interview, and while I’m a big fan of Maud’s blog, this post really pissed me off. I can appreciate that there’s some resentment towards the Workshop among the wider world of aspiring writers, and I think a lot of it is probably legitimate. But the questions Maud posed to Hughes insinuate that one can not be both “an Iowa student” and “a new, undiscovered writer.” I have a feeling this would come as something of a shock to our fellow Iowa classmates, who collect stacks of rejection slips from even the most minor lit mags. Also, I don’t understand the idea that someone like Yiyun is starting from a place of privilege simply because she attends Iowa — aren’t we all essentially submitting to the slush pile when we apply to Iowa? It’s not like Iowa students were (all) born with literary pedigrees. I laughed out loud at Maud’s thirteenth question: “Did any letters from professors or telephone calls from established writers accompany or pave the way for the submission?” Ha! Oh, Maud, if you knew anything at all about the Writers’ Workshop you would understand how funny that is.
  

  Posted by Lila at June 9, 2004 10:43 AM

  Congratulations! Is that your diploma? What next?

  I thought of you on every page of this book, even though I didn’t figure you spent your time in Iowa cultivating blood feuds and cussing out the locals.

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