So, You Have An MFA

Well folks, I was going to write about the latest issue of Poets and Writers called “MFA Nation”, but Jon beat me to it!  (In a way, with the anti-MFA Missouri Review article).  Is it safe to say he “jogged that puppy up” for the time being?

P&W’s “MFA Nation” is still definitely worth checking out—there’s a terrific article about “Life After the MFA” that covers the experience of emerging from a creative writing program—how we’re meant to feel accomplished and “graduated”, but seeing as most of us will never get that opportunity again, we wind up feeling more loss than gain (if the program was a good one).   So the writer’s block many of us report after having graduated may be a form of grief.   Again, a great issue.

Instead I want to write today about ego.   Specifically the games we play as writers to make it seem like we don’t have a healthy sense of ego, even though most of us do.

It’s a given that the writing life requires a good dose of pride to continue being “the writing life”.  We need confidence/ego/unadulterated persistence—whatever we label it—to keep sending work out for publication year after year.  Ego is even, perhaps, how most successful writers “make it”.  They simply continue believing that their work is good enough, that it should be heard; that their story/poem/essay deserves a little space in a journal somewhere, or maybe even a book deal.

I have a friend who is a monster poet.  You may guess who she is: she has six or seven books of poetry, is regularly featured in APR and Poetry, among other top-tier journals.  One of the things I like about her is that she is, sometimes to a fault, honest about what she likes and dislikes, what she thinks works in poetry and what doesn’t.  I don’t always agree with her, but I admire and love that quality in her: that pledge to Blunt, that outspokenness.

But then there’s this.

I don’t do it often, but if I do congratulate her on a recent achievement, my blunt poet friend acts as if I’ve said nothing at all.  There is a silence, and then the conversation meanders clumsily on.  I never did this very often before—congratulating her—but it’s produced enough momentary awkwardness between us that I’ve stopped congratulating her altogether.   Which, in my book, is a damn shame.  She gets up at five everyday to write; she deserves a congratulations now and then.

And furthermore, a big part of me wonders: is this really my friend, or is this how she has been trained to deal with accomplishment by the writing world?  Has she been trained, as professional athletes are trained, to give minimal credit to herself and maximum credit to the team?  Except there is not a lot of team in writing, so…what?  Silence?  And if so, why?  Why can’t we say that yes, we worked hard, and we are thankful that it produced a published result?

Is there is something manufactured in an accomplished writer’s modesty?  Something studied, rather than true?

In “The Gazer Within”, which includes a short autobiography of poet Larry Levis, he lists some of his literary accomplishments.  The section in which they appear in the essay is titled “Luck”.  And a big part of me says Bullshit, Larry.  It was way more than luck, and you know it.

But I come from a state that has a problem with pride, an excess of it.  Folks in Texas generally (and regrettably) never leave Texas.  As the old adage goes, it is somewhat its own country: Texas flags are flown more than the national flag.  People who live in Texas vacation in…Texas.  It’s strange, and mostly bad, and part of me is very relieved I got out.  Incidentally however, I’ve moved to a region of the country that displays the opposite problem, the rural Midwest, which is full of people with a deficiency of pride, people who have been raised to never say that they did anything well.   Is this not equally strange and detrimental?

What follows is what my boyfriend would call a “hypothesis” rather than a “theory”.   Meaning I could be dead wrong, but I might be onto something.

I think the writing world, when it comes to ego, pretends to be like the rural Midwest and sometimes fakes deficiency, when really, often there is a healthy, vibrant, necessary sense of pride in the writers themselves.  And so my question is, why fake it? Like politeness, is modern literary modesty a learned trait?  I am learning from my friend not to say anything—essentially, be silent—about my accomplishments as a writer.   And honestly, I resent that (ah, how the Texan in her roars! )

Pride is counted as one of the seven deadly sins and it can, in a sense, be deadly.  I realize that.  And it’s not that I don’t believe that it frequently rears its ugly head in our writing and broader world.  Keeping within the subject of sports, look at LeBron James vs. Michael Jordan.  Still ultimately, I believe that pride is not a vice, but a tricky virtue.

Having pride in one’s work often means taking the time to do it well, carefully and with heart, and in the writing world, having ego in one’s own work means soldiering on rejection after rejection.   That monster poet I was talking about before? She sent out her first book for six years before it was taken.  I’m sorry, but that requires some amount of pride and persistence.

It’s intriguing to watch my writer-friends, successful, emerging and stuck, on Facebook.   Here’s why:  I think most of us would admit to having sincere hesitation before updating about our most recent publication(s).  Facebook writers, like everyone else, develop habits: some people do self-promotion, some don’t.   Personally I like to see it, but recently I had an experience that made me stop and think about this form of cyber-egoism:  amazingly and suddenly, I had a series of poems taken by a good journal, and a then a great one.   And when the latter contacted me about my poem, you’re damn right that after three years of not being published anywhere, after getting weekly rejections, I felt a sense of overwhelming victory.  And it was in this Texan moment that I posted it on Facebook.  Thirty minutes later in a Midwest fit of shame, I took it down.

But if I’m really honest about that incident, I would say that, in taking the Facebook announcement down, I was faking modesty.  I took it down because, Oh, gosh, everyone’s gonna hate me.  Or I might hurt someone’s feelings.   But where does that leave me?  Somewhere between bragging and faking?   How does one navigate literary accomplishment?

Hurt feelings are something I understand as a writer.  It’s not that I don’t feel deeply jealous, at times, of other writers.  A friend of mine got the Stegner, and OK, that hurt a little because I had earnestly applied also (he, while we’re on the subject, is a person whose modesty always feels authentic, which is somewhat paradoxical—but not really—to what comes next).   Still, joy won out.  As happens with friends, my jealously was quickly overruled by feelings of excitement and happiness on the behalf of his good news.   Yes, I was envious, but I was mostly glad for him.  Proud for him.

When I saw him last March, I asked him: what was the first thing you did when you found out about the fellowship?

“I howled,” he said, “at the top of my lungs.”

And yep, I thought.  That sounds about right.  Now that sounds honest.

As a kind of follow-up to Anna’s post yesterday, here are three articles that have caught my attention this week:

(1) Joseph Epstein, reviewing the Cambridge History of the American Novel for the Wall Street Journal. Epstein’s argument, while not new, is that the hyper-specialization of English departments these days are increasingly irrelevant to the world, and are therefore turning students away. One memorable chunk:

Along with American Studies programs, which are often their subsidiaries, English departments have tended to become intellectual nursing homes where old ideas go to die. If one is still looking for that living relic, the fully subscribed Marxist, one is today less likely to find him in an Economics or History Department than in an English Department, where he will still be taken seriously. He finds a home there because English departments are less concerned with the consideration of literature per se than with what novels, poems, plays and essays—after being properly X-rayed, frisked, padded down, like so many suspicious-looking air travelers—might yield on the subjects of race, class and gender.

I’m not here to defend or argue against Epstein’s analysis. I will say that I’ve experienced plenty of old-fashioned literary analysis in the classroom, and I’ve seen plenty of the ill-effects of theory.

(2) The Missouri Review blog, arguing that getting an MFA is a bad decision because of the post-degree career prospects. This writer’s point seems to be that you can write anywhere, and that if you’re going to an MFA with the idea of teaching, you’re better off going for the PhD track. He’s got a point, and I think the key sentence is about funding, because you absolutely don’t want to go for an MFA without funding. But the whole degree? That leads me to the last article.

(3) Career blogger Penelope Trunk arguing, as she is wont to do, against any kind of graduate school (including law or business). She’s hard to argue against, although plenty have tried (and gotten quite nasty about it).

Synthesis?

I think the challenge here is the strange relationship that art has to commerce. Penelope Trunk is right in that taking three years to get an MFA is foolhardy for the world of commerce, the world of getting a job and making money–be it as a professor or a businessperson or a lawyer or whatever it is people do with their lives. (It’s debatable whether it’s helpful or neutral as far as making connections in the book world to help get your art out there.)

But as an artist, I looked at an MFA as an apprenticeship. It’s helpful to study with a group like that for a few years, funded with a teaching assistantship, so that you can get to work on the 10,000 hours it takes to master something (according to Malcolm Gladwell). But that’s art, not commerce.

The challenge is twofold. First, you have to eat and pay for shelter, so you can’t divorce yourself from the world of commerce. And as you grow older, you tend to take on more responsibilities–you look for things like, say, health insurance.

The second challenge is that art is integrated with commerce. A buddy of mine has an art consulting firm, and that is huge business. And it most certainly is a business. There’s the romantic dream of Being An Artist, and there’s the commercial labor of doing something with your art. So how do you reconcile that?

(Regarding the Epstein article, I see the world of commerce encroaching into academia. Students are paying the bills, and students are demanding more practicality in their degrees. That’s not to excuse theories for their hyper-specialization, but there’s a line there somewhere, where teaching balances out supply and demand. For more fun reading, I recommend The Glass Bead Game.)

Wow, we really do disappear in the summer! I just checked back to the blog after a few weeks to see what I’d been missing….

Anyhow, if anyone happens to read this in the midst of moving, or sunbathing, or reading Gravity’s Rainbow, I’d like to pick your brain. I have an interview on Monday for adjunct teaching (composition), and I know some (several?) of you have been down this road before me.

I’m not exactly sure what I’m asking… but it’s been a few years since I’ve taught composition, I’ve only taught it at Purdue, and I’m wondering about things you’ve discovered recently in the field, or general adjunct insights you might pass along. The interview is at a State University. They do not use literature in their comp courses (so I’ll be tweaking the syllabus I show them accordingly), and they have a two semester series of freshman composition (unlike Purdue’s intensive single semester). Any thoughts? Bits of wisdom?

Thanks, and happy sunbathing!

At the summer camp that I went to as a kid, every afternoon, we’d get two hours of free time that we could spend however we wanted– swimming, hiking, arts and crafts (nerd alert! That’s where I was every afternoon…).  They called this period “Mish Mash,” and commenced it each day by blaring the Soup Dragons’ version of “I’m Free” over the camp loudspeaker.  (By the way, their video for that song is pretty awesome.  Vh1 classic, indeed.  Check it out.)

What is the point of this long-winded, only-slightly interesting camp story?  Only that I feel like for the past few months, we’ve all been engaging in our own kind of mish mash– or I know I have.  Summer will do that to you.  And I know we’re all busy, but I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to during your mish mash period.  News to share?  Publications to brag about?  Rejections to bitch about? Let’s hear it!

I’ll go first:

News:  In mid-May, Ryan was hired for a new job in the English department at University of Alabama in Huntsville.  Cue the champagne toast and my “we don’t have to go through another Pennsylvania winter” dance.  Pennsylvania has been good to us– we loved our jobs at Penn State, and we’ve made some fantastic friends here (some of them readers and skunk poem writers on this very blog).  But– it’s actually a step-up for Ryan, job-wise.  It puts us about 8 hours away from my family.  And Huntsville has an Anthropologie.  Winning!!!

I’ll be teaching creative writing at the university as well– a poetry workshop for undergrads and grad (yikes!) students.  This will be my first creative writing class to focus solely on poetry, which I’m pretty excited about.  There are also several smaller colleges and community colleges in the area, so I’ll probably bite the bullet after a few months and try to secure some adjunct comp classes for the spring semester.  At least “spring semester” won’t feel like a misnomer like it does in Altoona.  ”Spring” semester?  More like, “When Winter Attacks: Winter Harder” semester.

This is kind like opening up a box of worms that I need to address in a full-length post, but in thinking about our move to the South, I’ll be interested to see if my writing changes at all.  I’m originally from Louisiana, and took my first creative writing workshops in Charleston, SC, but I’ve never felt like my voice (both poetic and speaking) was overwhelmingly southern.  These past two years in Pennsylvania, however, I’ve felt strongly influenced by the area around me– the central Pennsylvania landscape sits pretty heavy in many of the poems I’ve written here.  Maybe because it’s so new and strange to me?  Still, I’m wondering if the same thing will happen in Alabama.  Will all of my new work feature southern gothic plantations, sweet tea, bibles, and Jeff Foxworthy?

God I hope so.

Moving on.

Acceptances: I got a few poems taken over at Connotation Press, which is exciting.  They also asked me a few interview questions, one of which included praise for my ability to curse effectively in my poems.  Why thank you, Connotation Press.  I feel like quite the bad-ass now.

Rejections: Too many to count.  Wait, no, let me go count…

At least eight in the past month.  Fantastic.  But, in the spirit of not letting rejections get us down, I’ll share this little ditty.  When we were in Paris in May, we had the fabulous opportunity to hear author Paul Harding read from his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Tinkers (I’m told our very own Brian Beglin pretty much hand-picked him for that prize, but that’s another story for another night at the bar).  Tinkers is a tiny, hardened jewel of a book– every. single. word. in the book seems to matter, if you know what I mean.  The poet in me loved it.  The skeptic in me was kind of amazed that it was chosen for the Pulitzer.   The reader in me wanted to read it four more times, just to pick up on all of the things I was sure I missed in the first reading alone.

Anyway, after the reading, Harding gave a little Q&A session.  Actually, right after the reading, a scarf-wearing, smooth-talking Frenchman read a small excerpt from the novel in French.  If you want your writing to sound exceptionally sexy and intelligent, just have a scarf-wearing, smooth-talking Frenchman read it.  I’m going to remember that if I ever give a reading.

Anyway.

In the Q&A, Harding spent a long time talking about the rejections that the book garnered before finding a publisher.  After enduring a round of rejections the first time he sent the book out, Harding said that he basically put the manuscript in a drawer and didn’t do anything with it for a few years.  Finally, by chance– through a friend of a friend, I believe– it ended up in the hands of an editor who loved it…and the rest, as they say, is history.  So there you go.

Rejections ——-> Buried in a Drawer ———-> Smallish publishing Press ———-> Pulitzer Prize

Keep on trucking.

Okay…so what about you? What have you been up to this summer? Do you have any news, acceptances, rejections, recipes for apple pie, funny stories about summer camp that you’d like to share?   How have you been spending your mish mash?

My blog friend Casey (and sometimes SYHAM reader?) has a book giveaway contest over at his blog. I hate to shoot myself in the foot here, have a bunch of people comment on his post, and dilute my odds of winning Martin’s new book. But, Casey is calling for readers to define Midwest literature, if there is such a thing, and since I love place in fiction I’d love to read what you all have to say (over at Casey’s blog). The contest closes on Friday.

Here’s a fascinating article about self-publishing. In it, James Altucher explains why, after five books with major presses, he used CreateSpace, a self-publishing platform owned by Amazon. An excerpt:

Most importantly, the book industry sells “books”. What they need to do is sell their “authors”. Authors now are brands, they are businesses, they are mini-empires. Publishers do nothing to help 95% of their authors build their platforms and their own brands. This would increase author loyalty and make the lack of a meaningful advance almost worth it.

The author as a “brand” caught my eye. Is that true?

As a copywriter, I’m in the thick of marketing and advertising, so I deal with branding quite frequently. If you’re in business, you have to think about your brand. But in business a brand is pretty simple to define, really. It boils down to positioning — what are you selling and why buy from you? There are more complicated elements, which is why brand strategists make the big bucks, but that’s the essence of branding. Volvo sells safe cars. Ford sells tough trucks.  Lexus sells a luxury lifestyle.

But how do you — and should you — apply this to the author? It’s so crass compared to the high art of crafting literature. One way to resolve that tension might be to think realistically about what advertising does. The best book I’ve read about writing advertising is Luke Sullivan’s Hey Whipple, Squeeze This. In it, Sullivan argues for the proper way to measure an ad campaign. His thesis is that advertising can make consumers try a product once. If the product sucks, advertising can’t fix it. So if you look at a graph of sales, and you see sales spike after an ad campaign, the campaign was successful even if sales then sink. Sales sunk because consumers didn’t like the product after trying it.

With creative writing, the MFA experience (rightly) emphasizes craft because what else is it good for? If you’re writing stinks, no amount of networking and marketing savvy can save you. (Or so goes the theory. It’s an unjust world out there, so plenty of bad books abound.) So it would seem that thoughts of marketing, or branding, or positioning, or whatever, should be considered after the work is done. And at that point?

I don’t know. I thought that was what you went with a big publisher for, so they helped you with the marketing side of things. They get you into book stores, they get you some prestige by having their brand on the spine of your book. So if the author is a brand, what use are publishing houses? I guess the brand cache of publishing houses comes from their authors, so you have the heavy hitters lending weight to the unknowns.

And some publishing houses — particularly small presses — do have a very clear brand. I feel like I know what to expect from a Graywolf book, for instance, or a novel from the University of Tennessee Press. But Altucher makes a good point in that if the onus of selling your book is on you, and if you have a platform for making sales (such as Altucher’s blog and previous books), then it makes sense to take your brand and run with it. The trouble is getting established from the beginning.

BONUS: I don’t really have any questions for discussion with this topic, so I’ll end by pointing to the other interesting article I read today, over at Cracked, which explains among other things how to tell whether or not a woman has regular orgasms by the way she walks. I’ll leave it to you commenters to draw a connection between “the author as brand” and orgasms.

(A.k.a, Ryan stirs up a pointless debate between people who should be on the same side)

I’ve been thinking a lot about academic (i.e. boring) publication in the last few weeks. After spending two years working on an article – first as the final chapter of my dissertation and then as two substantial edits – I recently sent out the finished page proofs to a journal. Finally, I’ll see my work in print. But I’m not sure many other people will. I’m starting to suspect that not many people actually read academic articles (unless they are anthologized in Cross Talk and foisted upon unsuspecting first year graduate students, who of course devour them with enthusiasm instead of figuring out what to say on the first day of class). I had this moment of excitement when sending out the final article, followed by the unsettling realization that my work might only get read by my tenure committee (and perhaps not even then).

Much of the problem is that academic articles usually appeal to a very small subset of specialized nerds who occupy the tiniest intersection of even nerdier Venn diagrams. For instance, the ideal readers for my article are those people interested in Heideggerian dwelling and irony studies and composition theory and Werner Herzog films. They’re a fun crowd, those folks. And there are probably 12 of them in the whole US (22 if you count territories like Guam and Puerto Rico). So the question is, will my article ever get attention from the few people who might actually care about what I have to say? Judging from the fact that I often see articles that don’t cite other relevant work in the field, probably not. If these authors (and their peer reviewers at the journals) aren’t aware of the work, who is?

It’s similar to the reaction I had walking around the AWP bookfair. At first glance, I think – wow, look at all these journals! Despite the popularity of Twilight and Tim Tebow’s Through My Eyes, this incredible output from dedicated, talented writers must mean that America is doing okay, creativity-wise. But then my heart sinks a little and I think, who’s reading all of this? Even if every hipster at the conference pawned their skinny jeans and Be Your Own Pet records (apparently that’s a real band, but I had to Google “hipster bands” to hear about them), then used the money to buy a bunch of journals, there aren’t enough hipsters to go around to read every poem and story in every journal (and that’s the first and last time I’ll complain about a dearth of hipsters). It’s like that depressing stat about how many months it would take you to look at every piece of art in the Louvre for three seconds a pop. There aren’t enough eyeballs for all the great writing out there. Sure, some of the big journals have terrific circulation (though I suspect many subscribers aren’t cracking open their latest issues and reading them cover to cover), but a lot of great work in small, interesting journals gets lost in the shuffle.

This raises two exciting discussion questions. First, who has it worse in the publishing game, MFAs or academics? (It’s important to establish bitching rights – with the caveat that many creative writers also publish academically and thus experience the worst of both realms). For my money, it’s a mixed bag. Academics have something of a built-in audience for most journals. For instance, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, a respected journal in my field with the foresight to reject my work, has a circulation of about 1500, and they’re one of the few rhetoric journal games in town (much like early 20^th century land barons, these journals have ruthlessly crushed their opposition). Plus, though the rejection rates for the journals are high, I still think the competition is lower than that for the top literary journals. But there’s a threshold, as an academic’s audience can really only get so big. At minimum, maybe ten people will read my work. But if I blow up huge, maybe I’ll get twenty readers. No one is going to by rhetorical theory books in the airport. With creative writers, you have stiffer competition and often a less guaranteed audience, but you always have the possibility of hitting it big and getting your book endorsed by whoever is going to tell Americans what to read now that Oprah is off the air.

Second, has anyone you don’t know ever contacted you with feedback about something you’ve written? One of the few productive changes I’ve made from my otherwise crippling insecurity about the fruitlessness of my entire career is to start sending compliments to people whose articles I like. Often, the response to this gesture is enthusiastic. Just the other day, someone wrote back “Who are you? Why did you send me a voodoo doll made from the pages of my own article? And what did you mean when you said you’ll be watching me when I sleep?” It’s nice to know you’re making someone feel appreciated. 

Is this blog settling down? Where is everyone (minus Ruth and Tess)? Beglin? You’re mighty quiet out west…

Anyway, over at The Atlantic, Megan McArdle has an interesting post about politics in art. She’s a bit uncharitable toward us writers, but I think her overall point is sound — namely that art should be divorced from the artist and from politics.

Emily and I recently got into a debate about this after a David Mamet profile in the Wall Street Journal. Mamet has apparently come out as a raging conservative, but the Journal quoted a bit about him saying politics in art was uninteresting, which I agreed with.

But after going on about how politics had no business in art, Emily mentioned “Guernica.”

I sputtered some response.

She mentioned a play we both enjoyed recently, Alan Browne’s “Beirut.”

I sputtered some more.

She mentioned a story I’m currently working on, which is sort of about the financial crisis and political conspiracy.

Game, set, and match.

Maybe it’s semantic, because I feel like there’s something in particular that I’m objecting to, and I think it has something to do with art as a vehicle for advocating policy. I believe advocating policy is antithetical to good art because it uses narrative to produce a polemic — an argument — which by definition is designed to close down discussion.

By contrast, narrative in service of art, I believe, is designed to open up, to embrace complexity and resist easy slogans. Rather than advocating policy, the goal is to reveal nuance. As an example, I was reminded of Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat, which I recently enjoyed and which is a thoroughly political novel, though it’s unclear just where Vargas Llosa’s policies lie. The novel reveals the destructiveness of tyranny, and reveals the destructiveness of the political vacuum that results from revolution. Lose, lose. Most importantly, Vargas Llosa faces the dictator Trujillo head-on, with, if not sympathy, at least a morbid curiosity that keeps us interested in this man who, among other things, rapes teenage virgins. Where is the political argument in that?

Here’s a context-free excerpt from the McArdle blog post:

Authors aren’t good policy architects.  They’re also not good moral philosophers–they’re good at dramatizing moral conundrums, which is not the same thing as resolving them.  Look at how some major authors resolved relatively simple questions like “should I cheat on my wife with this nubile fan?”  ”Would it be a good idea to stick my annoying wife in an asylum for the rest of her life and never visit her?” “Should I use my position as a screenwriter to double as an inept propagandist for the Soviet Union?”  ”Might it be a good idea to abandon my children to whoever will care for them?” “Should I stab my wife if I am mad at her?”  ”Who should I support in World War II–my own country, or the Nazis?”  ”Should I try to get a murderous felon released and feted by the New York literary establishment in the brief time before he kills someone else?”

And, on an completely unrelated note, since so many readers here are poets, here’s William Faulkner on poetry:

Q: What is the best age for writing?

WF: For fiction the best age is from 35-45. Your fire is not all used up and you know more. Fiction is slower. For poetry the best age is from 17 to 26. Poetry writing is more like a skyrocket with all your fire condensed in one rocket.

Hi all!  I’m in the process of moving into a new place, so apologies in advance for the witless, brief nature of this post. But I wanted to share this with everyone before I forget.

Who here has heard of Kickstarter?

If I’m the last idiot in the room not taking advantage of this powerful tool, well…I’m the last idiot in the room.

Kickstarter is “the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world”.  Artists–writers included–can submit a short video description of their current project, the whys and hows, and receive funding from complete strangers (as well as family and friends).  That’s right.  Thousands of dollars of funding.

Here is Kickstarter’s page on the writing/publishing field.

Strangely enough, as I’m a poet, the first thing I thought about was Kickstarter’s ability to fund research for fiction writers. Writers who need to go to the places they’re writing about to immerse and observe for a few weeks. Plane tickets and hotel costs could be somewhat (if not completely) diminished with the help of Kickstarter.   That said, you may notice that it’s memoir, how-to guides and poets that have center stage this month on the writing/publishing page.  So non-fictioneers, you’re in luck too! (Re: “Cooking to Get Laid“)

Short story short, big dollars are available if you can sell your project to the random web visitors of Kickstarter.  So why not give a try?  Get your sexy writer face on (I know you got one) , do a video-description, and you could find your next flight to (insert setting here) funded by kind bibliophiles.

And you know, if you’re doing okay yourself, throw twenty bucks in someone else’s direction.