In response to the quote at Maud's, Ed lashes out at any workshop back-patting.
So why the contentment? Why the entitlement? Why the anti-snark movements?The answer lies somewhere within the atavistic feel-good jungles that have permeated almost every facet of the liberal arts. The air stinks of softness. Nurture is certainly necessary, but there comes a point when the writer must understand that it's a tough racket. If a writing instructor doesn't have the effrontery to call a piece of shit by its true name, then he has no business instructing.
But, back to the original quote: "I think everything I learned at Iowa is wrong." Learning is an individual process, and I've seen my writing go astray many times, in ways that comment more on my tastes and blindspots than my teachers' lessons. But, Iowa has a certain track record, and we could refer to it as proof that the workshop either 1) imparts the "right" teachings, or 2) attracts the best young writers (with some exceptions). In the '90s, for example, Iowa Writers' Workshop graduates won 9 of the 20 Pulitzers awarded for fiction and poetry. And tonight, at the local bookstore, current MFA students Daniel Alarcon and Yiyun Li gave a reading; in the past six months, both published stories in the New Yorker, and Li recently won The Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for new writers.
From the same blog Maud quoted:
I've heard scattered disparagings of the MFA program at Iowa over the past couple of years, even from people who benefited from it immeasurably, whether through the opportunities it provides, or through betterment of their own work. I chalk those comments up, especially now, to a guilty embarrassment of riches. Unlike many of Notre Dame's aspirants, we did not go to the program under false pretenses--we wanted to write and, generally, they wanted us to write better. Nobody there gave a damn if our critical chops were well-sharpened. They cared about the text, the work, the life. It was assumed that to write one must read, and well; only from those hedging literary bets against the Universe, or those wishing to be seen as more-realistic-than-thou, did I hear equivocating bullshit like Saturday's patter between O'Rourke and Feldman.
So, to be honest, I don't doubt my program's ability to produce (or at least attract and then release unharmed) successful literary writers. I often find my classmates' writing dull, but no more so than the writing in most literary journals. To my mind, what's much more interesting than the tired diatribes about writing workshops (are they too "soft"? too homogenizing? too prone to "committee-think"?) are the distinctly American sentiments behind such diatribes: an oversensitivity to ideas of autonomy and individuality, a self-satisfied "realism" lourded over others, and a disgust towards any form of "entitlement," even if it's only the entitlement to perservere and continue writing.
In the post that I quoted from above, the author continues:
It seems to me like there are two easily recognizable classes of people in the academic writing world--the first being them who consider it their primary duty to scream warnings of failure and to spread the idea that our art is dead in every way save theoretical (Bloom would tell us [via this, my artful paraphrase below] that this is a ploy in the immortality game by which luxury-car driving, "still-struggling" writers, enjoying some hard-won measure of success, scare off usurpers. I think, having suffered conversations with one or two such Cassandras, I agree).The second kind is the journeyman writer who--while recognizing that art is an immortality game, does not concede that it is necessarily a zero-sum one--buttresses his own chances at forever through both his own hard-work, and also through the mentoring and encouragment of others. Iowa was, in my experience, chock-full of the second kind, students and faculty alike. It's a shame that the MFA industry builds on Iowa as a model in every way but the right ones.
According to Kingsley Amis much of what's gone wrong in the world since WWII can be summed up in the word "workshop".
Posted by: David on January 30, 2004 12:21 AM"Entitlement" isn't the word I'd use. It's really about preparation. If you train to be a paratrooper, you don't theorize about how you do it on the ground. You don't sit around nurturing people about the way to land or books you need to read. You get up in a plane, jump out and do it.
Now jumping out of a plane is a pretty serious business. And the paratrooper instructor needs to convey in very clear terms just how to do it. Sometimes with encouragement, but ultimately with hard process. Some aspiring paratroopers won't get over their fears. Some will. But in the end, only certain people can become effective paratroopers. Because ultimately they have the guts to jump out of the plane.
Posted by: Ed on January 30, 2004 09:51 AMEd,
I later realized that you might misread this post as being directed towards you, or attacking your pov. Not at all; I just wanted to say that, when it comes to Iowa, the workshops are not masturbatory.
The rest of my post (especially the last paragraphs) was about horribly discouraging writers I've encountered (and, I sometimes fear, was among when I taught fiction).
I graduated from the University of Michigan's MFA program in 1996, where I studied with two very encouraging and helpful teachers, Charles Baxter and Nicholas Delbanco. There's much I could say about the value of that program against the tuition cost, but I'd just like to contribute that what I found most helpful about the program was having the latitude and freedom to explore different styles and approaches to telling stories: if anything, the program helped me bring into clearer focus what I want to accomplish stylistically as a writer, and to see what kind of writer I'm not. And if that works toward my one day getting published, then it was worth it, in my book. I'm glad to find this discussion.
Posted by: TSL on January 30, 2004 12:16 PMI don’t think there’s a problem though with writing programs excerpt for the awareness in breeds in young writers about the game. Any writer who is thinking about the machinations of the business, the agents they need to woo and the style they should emulate to land a book deal, is probably not producing very innovative work. And the readers, and the end of the widget chain, pay for it in frustration. I’m happy that Concho is going back to the time machine story. We need more of those, and had he trusted his instincts and written it to begin with, he might have gottengatton a book contract. Time machines are big right now.
I cannot produce the exact source, but I remember reading Flannery O'Connor writing that no author was more mad for the dollar than Flaubert. O'Connor also said, with a pithy hauteur, that one could make plenty of money by writing provided one wrote badly enough. How one reconciles those two statements, I don't know: perhaps, like Whitman, O'Connor contradicts herself and doesn't care.
Having spent fruitless time and energy trying to convince the heads of my MFA program that more attention needed to be paid to the business end of writing (as opposed to their None), I've given up. There are simply too many artists out there who -- for reasons related to ego, self-styled integrity, or allegiance to received ideas -- abide inflexibly by the axiom "Art good, Money bad." I wish them, and all of us, the best.
For my part, I like to think of Keats' injunction to poets to develop a negative capability: i.e., the ability to entertain two contradictory ideas in the mind simultaneously. It takes a certain talent. Hence, I believe it is possible for an artist of any kind to devote attention to energy to the considerations of Art and the considerations of Commerce, and not lose the soul in the process.
Posted by: TSL on February 1, 2004 07:36 AMTSL / Tim,
From the book I'm currently reading, The Midnight Disease: "When two people are given a project, one paid to do it and the other not, the former's creativity seems to be inhibited by the reward." (And the author goes on to say that "the inihbiting effect of external rewards seems to be greater on girls than on boys.")
Natalie:
An excellent book dedicated to exploring and defending the thesis you cite is Punished By Rewards (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) by Alfie Kohn. It's a good read, and you raise an interesting point.
I'm too focused on my own writing and work to be concerned with what motivates other writers or to suggest that writers "should" write for this reason or toward that goal. As for me, I don't believe the considerations of Art (i.e., personal expression) and Commerce (i.e., marketability and profitability) are always incompatible or wholly mutually exclusive.
As long as I have your ear, I really enjoy your site. I tune in daily. Keep up the great work.
Posted by: TSL on February 2, 2004 07:57 AM