Letters to the Editors
The Los Angeles Review of Books will publish letters to the editors on Saturdays.
This week, three letters and one blog post discussing Mark McGurl’s “The MFA Octopus,” as well as a note from Juan Felipe Herrera.
¤
To the Editors:
I very much enjoyed reading Mark McGurl’s “The MFA Octopus: Four Questions About Creative Writing.”
And I was greatly moved by his statement: “If craft means knowing your business; if it means understanding how stories work, how they are best structured to produce certain effects, what must be put in (including, possibly, lots of research about ‘real things in the world’) and what left out; if it means spending at least as many hours working on your writing as you expect readers to spend reading it, then there can never be enough concern for craft. Far from simply being an expression of shame, or a call to 'workmanlike’ mediocrity, craft is how one earns one’s pride in one’s writing.”
I’m one of the “minor writers” Mr. McGurl mentions, (“accept your fate as yet another minor writer…”) though a different breed than what writing programs are producing. No better, certainly; but less homogenized, less influenced, I believe.
I learned the craft the old fashioned way. Without benefit of classrooms and instructors. Through self study. Reading. Daily exercises. I’m an odd duck in the sense I wrote every day for 20 years without trying to publish. Rarely thinking about publishing. No writing classes beyond high school English. Just a long apprenticeship. What used to be termed “old school.” Though I take no pride in my lack of secondary education, I mention it because it is somewhat rarer than it used to be.
All good wishes,
Bob Thurber
¤
To the Editors:
Thank you for publishing Mark McGurl’s piece on U.S. university writers’ programs, his response to Batuman’s on his earlier book on the same subject.
I only miss some “follow the money” discussion.
From my own years as “contingent labor” at various American colleges and universities, I have seen how so many use these as magnets for the cheap labor to teach required comp and other courses. Paying a few celebrity full-time faculty as draw to the MFA programs, and subsidizing the literary journals – over 300 of them nationwide – which is all that most students will ever “publish” in – still lets most colleges and universities make a huge profit. The grad students do the work of teaching. The profit in tuition differences goes to inflated and ever-more-inflated admin.
Nice, the literary discussion McGurl and Batuman have now had. But some heavier realities impinge. Must the “creative” world ever ignore these as they all go on subsidizing them?
Phil Balla
¤
To the Editors:
The case of the dour Maoist is an interesting one, as Mao, though slightly less dour and certainly less Maoist than our case-study, was himself something of a creative writer. A classical poet of considerable importance, he was indeed ashamed of being a writer, as he confessed to the American reporter Robert Payne in 1946: “My poems are so stupid—you mustn’t take them seriously.” Mao’s own case requires acknowledgement of the pre-workshop workshop, rigorous comparison to and conversation with whichever canon a writer wishes to engage. Elitist? Often. Or perhaps more accurately a function of privilege, of access to the literary life and its velvet sofas. In Mao’s case, as the poor son of a barely literate farmer and illiterate mother, he achieved that by seeking lowly employment at the Beijing National University library, where he read with great discipline, especially the Tang poet Zen Zan. And indeed our Mao did find the educational system of the day to be elitist:
I am in the airport; I ramble. As DeVoto would suggest, this entire argument might be enhanced by the presence of a highball in the right hand (bottle of grenadine souring in the trash), perhaps, for the sake of compromise, perched upon a velvet sofa molding in some Kibera alleyway.
From Nairobi,
David Shook
¤
From A Curmudgeon’s Diary:
In the Los Angeles Review of Books Mark McGurl mounts a stout defense of Master of Fine Arts creative writing programs, which have proliferated like bedbugs from one end of academia to the other. He argues that this explosion of creative writing programs is good; the thousands and thousands of graduates, most with a shiny MFA degree, are enriching American literature and ushering us into a glorious period.
He names about forty impressive novelists who are connected with various creative writing programs, and the list includes Pulitzer winners and winners of most of the rest of the great literary prizes.
He goes on to argue that what people really dread about the explosion of literary novelists is that genius is no longer rare, or confined to a mythic handful. The universities are churning out great writers by the thousands, and some people find that disturbing.
But what he doesn’t discuss is the stratification of American fiction that has occurred because of this explosion. I’ve gone through the entire catalog of creative writing programs listed by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the academic advocacy group touting the programs. What you will not find anywhere is a master of fine arts program that instructs postgraduate students in commercial fiction, especially the genres. This is considered beneath the goals of the program. The goal is art, and very, very fine art, so that automatically excludes the huge body of commercial fiction.
Thus, these programs will lionize the literary novelist Joyce Carol Oates, and scorn the Joyce Carol Oates who writes thrillers and mysteries. What has gone largely unremarked is that this wave of MFA writers is creating a two-tier publishing world, and what is swiftly disappearing is the middlebrow novel that had literary merit as well as popular appeal. There was a time when Pulitzers went to popular fiction, such as Gone With the Wind, and The Caine Mutiny. But no more. The juries and judges, the editors of elite houses, are likely now to be associated with the academic creative writing programs, and that means the middle ground is lost.
There’s plain condescension in this. I have occasion to talk with these literary types now and then, and usually encounter elaborate politeness from them when they learn of my vocation as a writer of genre fiction. They are cordial, courteous, and careful to avert their gaze.
Maybe that’s just fine. The MFA grads are creating their insular literary world, and the rest of us are free to write rich and compelling stories. But I do regret the disappearance of general, mid-level fiction from the publishing world.
Richard S. Wheeler
¤
To the Editors:
Reviewing Nothing
Plain & simple. I am reviewing nothing. ¿Me oyes? Absolutely nada, nada – nada. Obama is reviewing Libya. Libya is reviewing the CIA on their property. The CIA is reviewing the new Arab Spring but it’s almost Summer. WikiLeaks is reviewing ____ ___ ____ can’t reveal it but it’s happening. Pudgy nukes are being reviewed by pudgy dignitaries. The Governator is being reviewed by Twitter. TSA just reviewed Jojo Dooby-Lopez en route to Newark not to mention all algae-based liquids & gels & facial pomades & the epithelium of your local elite mercado veggies. So what does that leave me? Well – there’s stuff. It is probably being reviewed at this very minute by Rubén Martínez. He reviews everything. So I sit back. Reviewing nothing. Poets don’t review anyway. We just wander thrift stores peeling away coats in search of one that resembles Mayakovsky’s wool jacket. Especially the one with a snarl – with the impatience of a machine gun, with a presidential weave, with two or three romantic, secretive, vicious buttons, open at the top, smoldering at the neck – you could almost say global, yet off-axis, post-earthquake & warring unending slaughter & yet still imbued with stillness & awakening. Now, if you happen to have something on that or with that, well, just maybe we got something. Maybe. For the moment – I am reviewing nothing. Plain & simple – nadaah. Oye, wait a minute, ever heard of_____ ___?
Johnny Cilantro (aka Juan Felipe Herrera)
¤
Image: Jan Reymond, L'Arbre de la Connaissance. Photo by timtom.ch.
[HOME] [TABLE of CONTENTS] [DONATE]
We welcome letters to the editors, on this or any other subject, at letters@lareviewofbooks.org.
This week, three letters and one blog post discussing Mark McGurl’s “The MFA Octopus,” as well as a note from Juan Felipe Herrera.
¤
To the Editors:
I very much enjoyed reading Mark McGurl’s “The MFA Octopus: Four Questions About Creative Writing.”
And I was greatly moved by his statement: “If craft means knowing your business; if it means understanding how stories work, how they are best structured to produce certain effects, what must be put in (including, possibly, lots of research about ‘real things in the world’) and what left out; if it means spending at least as many hours working on your writing as you expect readers to spend reading it, then there can never be enough concern for craft. Far from simply being an expression of shame, or a call to 'workmanlike’ mediocrity, craft is how one earns one’s pride in one’s writing.”
I’m one of the “minor writers” Mr. McGurl mentions, (“accept your fate as yet another minor writer…”) though a different breed than what writing programs are producing. No better, certainly; but less homogenized, less influenced, I believe.
I learned the craft the old fashioned way. Without benefit of classrooms and instructors. Through self study. Reading. Daily exercises. I’m an odd duck in the sense I wrote every day for 20 years without trying to publish. Rarely thinking about publishing. No writing classes beyond high school English. Just a long apprenticeship. What used to be termed “old school.” Though I take no pride in my lack of secondary education, I mention it because it is somewhat rarer than it used to be.
All good wishes,
Bob Thurber
¤
To the Editors:
Thank you for publishing Mark McGurl’s piece on U.S. university writers’ programs, his response to Batuman’s on his earlier book on the same subject.
I only miss some “follow the money” discussion.
From my own years as “contingent labor” at various American colleges and universities, I have seen how so many use these as magnets for the cheap labor to teach required comp and other courses. Paying a few celebrity full-time faculty as draw to the MFA programs, and subsidizing the literary journals – over 300 of them nationwide – which is all that most students will ever “publish” in – still lets most colleges and universities make a huge profit. The grad students do the work of teaching. The profit in tuition differences goes to inflated and ever-more-inflated admin.
Nice, the literary discussion McGurl and Batuman have now had. But some heavier realities impinge. Must the “creative” world ever ignore these as they all go on subsidizing them?
Phil Balla
¤
To the Editors:
The case of the dour Maoist is an interesting one, as Mao, though slightly less dour and certainly less Maoist than our case-study, was himself something of a creative writer. A classical poet of considerable importance, he was indeed ashamed of being a writer, as he confessed to the American reporter Robert Payne in 1946: “My poems are so stupid—you mustn’t take them seriously.” Mao’s own case requires acknowledgement of the pre-workshop workshop, rigorous comparison to and conversation with whichever canon a writer wishes to engage. Elitist? Often. Or perhaps more accurately a function of privilege, of access to the literary life and its velvet sofas. In Mao’s case, as the poor son of a barely literate farmer and illiterate mother, he achieved that by seeking lowly employment at the Beijing National University library, where he read with great discipline, especially the Tang poet Zen Zan. And indeed our Mao did find the educational system of the day to be elitist:
For hundreds of years the scholars had moved away from the people, and I began to dream of a time when the scholars would teach the coolies, for surely the coolies deserve teaching as much as the rest.Replace “scholars” with “writers” and “coolies” with the marginalized socioeconomic group of your choice, and you have something resembling Batuman’s caricature of the contemporary MFA. Bourgeois deceit? Sure, for those unwilling to acknowledge and examine the systems they live within. A classical poet, Mao worried that his own poems might “encourage a wrong trend and exercise a bad influence” on the young, who he thought should mostly write in more modern forms. Still, as McGurl argues, it is clear that the current system outputs more than “compilations of ‘socio-political grievances.’” (Or at least some pretty damn good ones.) And in our capitalistic educational system, why not offer something that brings, for so many, some joy into the system? I mean besides the suffocating debt, not payable in poems, and systemic self-propagation, which often results in a poetry more devalued than the Zimbabwean dollar. (And like the Zim. dollar, with an expiration date some three months from now.)
I am in the airport; I ramble. As DeVoto would suggest, this entire argument might be enhanced by the presence of a highball in the right hand (bottle of grenadine souring in the trash), perhaps, for the sake of compromise, perched upon a velvet sofa molding in some Kibera alleyway.
From Nairobi,
David Shook
¤
From A Curmudgeon’s Diary:
In the Los Angeles Review of Books Mark McGurl mounts a stout defense of Master of Fine Arts creative writing programs, which have proliferated like bedbugs from one end of academia to the other. He argues that this explosion of creative writing programs is good; the thousands and thousands of graduates, most with a shiny MFA degree, are enriching American literature and ushering us into a glorious period.
He names about forty impressive novelists who are connected with various creative writing programs, and the list includes Pulitzer winners and winners of most of the rest of the great literary prizes.
He goes on to argue that what people really dread about the explosion of literary novelists is that genius is no longer rare, or confined to a mythic handful. The universities are churning out great writers by the thousands, and some people find that disturbing.
But what he doesn’t discuss is the stratification of American fiction that has occurred because of this explosion. I’ve gone through the entire catalog of creative writing programs listed by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the academic advocacy group touting the programs. What you will not find anywhere is a master of fine arts program that instructs postgraduate students in commercial fiction, especially the genres. This is considered beneath the goals of the program. The goal is art, and very, very fine art, so that automatically excludes the huge body of commercial fiction.
Thus, these programs will lionize the literary novelist Joyce Carol Oates, and scorn the Joyce Carol Oates who writes thrillers and mysteries. What has gone largely unremarked is that this wave of MFA writers is creating a two-tier publishing world, and what is swiftly disappearing is the middlebrow novel that had literary merit as well as popular appeal. There was a time when Pulitzers went to popular fiction, such as Gone With the Wind, and The Caine Mutiny. But no more. The juries and judges, the editors of elite houses, are likely now to be associated with the academic creative writing programs, and that means the middle ground is lost.
There’s plain condescension in this. I have occasion to talk with these literary types now and then, and usually encounter elaborate politeness from them when they learn of my vocation as a writer of genre fiction. They are cordial, courteous, and careful to avert their gaze.
Maybe that’s just fine. The MFA grads are creating their insular literary world, and the rest of us are free to write rich and compelling stories. But I do regret the disappearance of general, mid-level fiction from the publishing world.
Richard S. Wheeler
¤
To the Editors:
Reviewing Nothing
Plain & simple. I am reviewing nothing. ¿Me oyes? Absolutely nada, nada – nada. Obama is reviewing Libya. Libya is reviewing the CIA on their property. The CIA is reviewing the new Arab Spring but it’s almost Summer. WikiLeaks is reviewing ____ ___ ____ can’t reveal it but it’s happening. Pudgy nukes are being reviewed by pudgy dignitaries. The Governator is being reviewed by Twitter. TSA just reviewed Jojo Dooby-Lopez en route to Newark not to mention all algae-based liquids & gels & facial pomades & the epithelium of your local elite mercado veggies. So what does that leave me? Well – there’s stuff. It is probably being reviewed at this very minute by Rubén Martínez. He reviews everything. So I sit back. Reviewing nothing. Poets don’t review anyway. We just wander thrift stores peeling away coats in search of one that resembles Mayakovsky’s wool jacket. Especially the one with a snarl – with the impatience of a machine gun, with a presidential weave, with two or three romantic, secretive, vicious buttons, open at the top, smoldering at the neck – you could almost say global, yet off-axis, post-earthquake & warring unending slaughter & yet still imbued with stillness & awakening. Now, if you happen to have something on that or with that, well, just maybe we got something. Maybe. For the moment – I am reviewing nothing. Plain & simple – nadaah. Oye, wait a minute, ever heard of_____ ___?
Johnny Cilantro (aka Juan Felipe Herrera)
¤
Image: Jan Reymond, L'Arbre de la Connaissance. Photo by timtom.ch.
[HOME] [TABLE of CONTENTS] [DONATE]
We welcome letters to the editors, on this or any other subject, at letters@lareviewofbooks.org.