After a brief but torrential thunderstorm in mid-June, eight writers of poetry and prose, myself included, huddled around a picnic table crowded with three-buck beer and leaves of printed-out poems, stories, and essays in the concrete garden of a Brooklyn bar. It had been almost a year since I'd taken a seat at a table with other writers to talk about the stuff, the meat of our writing—inspirations, obsessions, discoveries—and the project at hand every time each of us settles in to confront the blank page. All of us had spent an intense two years together at the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, a small liberal arts school nestled in woody Bronxville, north of New York City. Many of us had migrated to the city after graduation, and while we saw one another often enough, touching base at parties and readings, our writing lives had become privatized, with only the most dramatic aspects—I haven't been excited by a word in three months! My thesis is moldering!—shared among us. So, about thirteen months after graduating, a group of friends and I, guided by our assiduous organizer, Hossannah Asuncion, decided to create a new program in order to reestablish the connection that the MFA experience had provided. We would get together once a month to check in with one another, warm ourselves up with a few brief free-writes, and discuss a predetermined topic on which we had all read a few essays before meeting. We could also bring works-in-progress to share, though workshop-style critiquing would not be on the agenda—our gatherings would celebrate our writing as art, and our work as artists. Perhaps the shocking burst of rain was an apt metaphor for the two brief years we'd been ensconced in, and saturated by, a lively stream of words. The way whole days of digging in to work felt like a deluge after which the world often shone. The way words became new again in the voice of a classmate, and how the dross would be purged by the workshop process, revealing the tender bones and pulse of a piece. A creative writing program had offered to many of us an ideal experience—and then it was over. Of course, a workshop-heavy curriculum can have debilitating effects as well: Participants can tire of their work's being scrutinized in its infancy; differences in critical approaches can stifle discussion; and the compounded anxieties of the final semester can weigh on relationships, especially as solitary time to write becomes precious and staunchly defended. I'm sure the capacity for inducing this exhaustion informs our universities' having limited the MFA track to two or three years. After a while we're inundated and need to move out on our own. But writing programs don't tend to teach the skill set required to work fruitfully—and joyfully—beyond their gilt walls.
The MFA experience does not necessarily prepare us to be writers in the world. Our time as students is set apart as a sacrosanct period during which we perform the very important work of honing and polishing our craft, but little guidance is given as to how we might preserve that sacred lifestyle (as well as the more profane, yet necessary, moments of criticism and editing) once outside the bubble. On the other hand, no one could have told us then that our devotions would flag and that distractions—such as earning a living and making our way in the world—would threaten to prevent us from writing altogether.
This is not to say that constant connection to a writing community is necessary, or even entirely healthy. Once I'd successfully cast off those workshops and conferences, a momentary sense of liberation washed over me. When my thesis crossed over into the hands of my advisers, I was immediately walloped by a profound exhaustion, and there was freedom in that fatigue. I needed a break from the intensity of the MFA experience—from workshops, and even from writing. The project I had immersed myself in for two years (at times a desperate, sinking immersion) had worn me out, and I required some time to let the omnipresent criticism, however sparkling or seductively constructive, settle within me. It was like recovery after a marathon, when my legs were ripped and clunky and I needed to cross-train for a while, to teach myself how to move again. But the respite from writing and talking about writing soon devolved into a drab routine. Instead of slowly starting over, I had let myself stiffen, and the loss of my teammates—and our shared field—made the process of resuming the race profoundly difficult.
Excuses abounded. At first, no amount of time seemed long enough to sit and work, and when I'd attempt to write in short spurts, the words danced only on the surface of ideas and questions. Sometimes language simply felt inert. I often had the sense that I was playing with plastic blocks rather than textured, living things. Some pleasure had seeped out of the project of making art with words—a joy that I have discovered came from sharing both my poetry and the process of writing it. While I can't say this perception was common to all my peers, it seems that each of us has experienced an occasion—however extended—of craving community.
In Asuncion's experience, it has been a struggle to continue the writer's life after leaving an MFA program. In a society that often diminishes the value of the written word, students of fine writing can find their ventures trivialized as flighty or idealistic. "More often than not, I feel like the world is telling me that doing an MFA program was a bad decision," she says. "And more often than not, I'm like, ‘Yeah, time to start studying for the LSATs.'"
"I often feel stuck in my writing life," fellow salon member Rena Priest recently told me. "I have long patches of time where nothing I write is satisfying to me, and I have periods where nothing I read is resonating. When I am with other writers talking about writing and all the triumphs and struggles it involves, the ennui recedes." For Hila Ratzabi, another member of our group, connecting with other writers forces her to think about writing and to return it to the forefront of her mind where it belongs—but from which it can quietly slip as the static of the world interferes with our creative frequencies. "Thinking and talking about writing are not the same as writing, but having a community where it's safe to say, ‘I haven't written in months, and it sucks, but here's who I read when I can't write' is a blessing," Ratzabi says.
Without the meeting of friends and colleagues to help reframe myself in my project—and in the living portrait of us all doing this work together—writing began to feel like a secret game of limited consequence. I felt as if my contributions to anything larger than myself were nil. In fact, at our second salon, the question was posed, "To whom do you write?" For several months, I noticed, I had been writing primarily to words themselves, fiddling with language with nothing much at stake. My work on the page was reflective of my practice: scrawling on the train or for a few minutes at lunchtime, or making mental notes while running. I didn't feel I had an audience, and, curiously, my writing had even receded from conversation with my imaginary listeners, Dickinson and Stein among them. During my time at graduate school, the writing process itself had induced an exceptional sense of accomplishment, a purposefulness that comes from knowing that one is doing the work that one is supposed to be doing.
At times, the validation that we achieve through being and acting—in this case, writing—genuinely wavers, and we are compelled to look to one another not for appraisal but for support. Asuncion, who had rounded us up with the aid of a Google group she and others had created for Sarah Lawrence MFA alums, was inspired to start the salon by a similar series of gatherings she'd been attending that had been organized by Kundiman, the Asian American poets organization, whose members began running informal salons in January. She experienced the salon format as more of a generative field than an editing session for pieces in assorted stages of existence. Asuncion herself has written several pieces this year as a result of short salon exercises. For our group, exercises have ranged from creating a portrait based on a character we frequently noticed at our meeting spot—the mustachioed fellow leaning over his Belgian ale doesn't know how many weird narratives were spun about him—to drafting radical rewrites of work we'd each brought to the table. But most central to the salon, and for me its most vital aspect, is topical discussion.
I have always thrived in arenas that celebrate and engage ideas in all their intricacy and malleability, particularly ideas relating to perceptions of language. While not all classrooms are equally conducive to such vigorous exploration, the MFA roundtable at which I participated provided such a space and, ultimately, fed my writing. The salon reinvigorated that part of me that had been too easily neglected after leaving school, quelled by the seeming urgency of daily routines and pursuits unrelated to writing. In several of our conversations we've discussed how we can each create a space, physical and mental, where writing matters and can thrive after the intensity of the MFA experience. I've found that before establishing that room of one's own, separate from the mesh of the world, one needs to acknowledge that each of us is not alone in our endeavor; we are part of both a tradition and a living multitude of others.
As the very act of coming together on equal terms for a salon has reminded us that we are not isolated as writers, the material of our discourse has illuminated the fact that, despite having distinct styles and drives, we share a mutual human project. For discussion during our second meeting, Asuncion chose two essays on spirituality: Federico García Lorca's 1933 lecture "Theory and Play of the Duende" and Fanny Howe's "A Leaf on the Half-Shadow," published in the journal English Language Notes in 2006. These works stimulated a conversation that took off from group members' personal accounts of having sensed attunement to the spiritual while engaged in the process of writing—feeling the pull of flow, not knowing from where words were arriving; being moored in a mind state so lush and tangible, but beyond the realm of the known; approaching meditative clarity while working. My most gratifying writing hasn't been fed by my head, but by a universal, oceanic "something" exterior to ego. Without clear language to discuss phenomena such as this, experiences can feel ephemeral, or even inconsequential. But gathering with a group that understands and empathizes with the challenges posed by the shifting creative mind, and the elations that arise from meeting those challenges, I see that the importance of my work becomes more resonant.
In her essay "Survival in Two Worlds at Once: Federico García Lorca and Duende," Tracy K. Smith writes, "There are two worlds that exist together, and there is one that pushes against the other, that claims the other doesn't, or need not, exist." She refers to the capacity of duende, or the dark spirit (which some in our salon group perceived as death itself, the palpable movement of our own mortality within us), to both pull us toward and repel us from what some might call a higher state, a vaster consciousness, a discovery. In some ways, our lives outside of writing facilitate that centrifugal pushing away, and as I and many of my compatriots have found, a community that validates the opposite—a fearless movement toward the dark other—encourages the writing to approach those uncomfortable places. Talking about the act of writing has helped each of us to realize how much that wilder world does need to exist, and to negotiate its importance in our lives.
According to that Psych 101 standard, Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, when certain basic human requirements are met, our minds are free to explore more philosophical realms. Granted, as graduate students none of us was living a plush life, but we were able to focus less on the minutiae of survival and ego-driven pursuits (notwithstanding the occasional lovesick breakdown or ravenous scavenge for leftovers after a school event) and more on larger pursuits. There was art to be served, and it was our one and only job to serve it. In some respect, many of us joined an MFA program believing that if we wanted our writing to evolve from the fruit of our labor into art, it had to enter the public realm. It had to take a place at the table and enter into discourse with all of the other works that have been and continue to be written. While submitting pieces for publication and seeking opportunities to read remain excellent means of propelling the work into the world, nothing beats offering the tiny body of a poem or story to the live hands of a reader, or feeling that your quietest, most shuttered of lives is in conversation with another. Our postprogram salon has offered us not only a lively arena for sharing our writing with others, but, more important, it's given us a renewed opportunity to share our writing selves with a community of kindred minds each encountering distinct but similar challenges, as emerging artists in the wider world.
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Send us a glimpse of your post-MFA story: your toughest—or brightest—transitioning moment, the virtues and vices of your program in retrospect, or a way you found to keep your community solid. Include "Post-MFA Story" in the subject line of an e-mail to editor@pw.org.
Jean Hartig is the editorial assistant of Poets & Writers Magazine. Her chapbook, Ave, Materia, won the Poetry Society of America's New York City Chapbook Contest and is forthcoming in 2009.
As an MFA student, helping to put out a literary magazine—whether you’re an editor, a reader, or a publicity volunteer—offers a valuable glimpse into the realm of professional publishing and another means of learning about your community of writers. If, as part of your graduate experience, you’re interested in contributing your time or writing to a school-sponsored journal, check out this listing of institutions whose MFA programs produce literary magazines. University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
Black Warrior Review
University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Permafrost
American University, Washington, D.C.
Folio
University of Arizona, Tucson
Sonora Review
Arizona State University, Tempe
Hayden’s Ferry Review
Ashland University, Ohio
River Teeth
University of Baltimore
Passager Journal
Boise State University, Idaho
cold-drill
The Idaho Review
Bowling Green State University, Ohio
Mid-American Review
Brooklyn College, CUNY
The Brooklyn Review
Butler University, Indianapolis
Booth
University of California, Irvine
Faultline
University of California, Riverside,
Palm Desert Graduate Center
The Coachella Review
California College of the Arts, San Francisco
Eleven Eleven
California Institute of the Arts, Valencia
Black Clock
Sprawl
California State University, Fresno
The Normal School
California State University, Long Beach
RipRap
California State University, San Bernardino
Pacific Review
University of Central Florida, Orlando
The Cypress Dome
The Florida Review
Chapman University, Orange, California
Elephant Tree
Chatham University, Pittsburgh
The Fourth River
City College of New York, CUNY
Fiction
Global City Review
Promethean
Colorado State University, Fort Collins
Colorado Review
The Freestone
Columbia College, Chicago
F Magazine
Hair Trigger
Columbia University, New York City
Columbia
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
EPOCH
Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond
Aurora
Jelly Bucket
Eastern Washington University, Spokane
Willow Springs
Emerson College, Boston
Ploughshares
Redivider
Fairfield University, Connecticut
Dogwood
Fairleigh Dickinson University,
Madison, New Jersey
The Literary Review
University of Florida, Gainesville
Subtropics
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Coastlines
Florida International University, Miami
Gulf Stream Magazine
Florida State University, Tallahassee
The Kudzu Review
The Southeast Review
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
Phoebe
So to Speak
Georgia College & State University,
Milledgeville
Arts & Letters
Flannery O’Connor Review
Georgia State University, Atlanta
Five Points
New South
Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont,
and Port Townsend, Washington
Pitkin Review
Hamline University
Water-Stone Review
Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia
The Hollins Critic
University of Houston, Texas
Gulf Coast
Hunter College, CUNY
The Olivetree Review
University of Idaho, Moscow
Fugue
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ninth Letter
Indiana University, Bloomington
Indiana Review
University of Iowa, Iowa City
The Iowa Review
Iowa State University, Ames
Flyway
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
and Washington, D.C.
The Hopkins Review
University of Kansas, Lawrence
Cottonwood
Lindenwood University, St. Charles, Missouri
Untamed Ink
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
Exquisite Corpse
New Delta Review
The Southern Review
Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York
Inkwell
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
CRATE
jubilat
The Massachusetts Review
University of Massachusetts, Boston
Breakwater Review
University of Memphis
The Pinch
Mills College, Oakland
580 Split
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Dislocate
Minnesota State University, Mankato
Blue Earth Review
Minnesota State University, Moorhead
Red Weather
University of Mississippi, Oxford
The Yalobusha Review
University of Missouri, Columbia
Center
The Missouri Review
University of Missouri, Kansas City
New Letters
University of Missouri, Saint Louis
Natural Bridge
University of Montana, Missoula
CutBank
Murray State University, Kentucky
New Madrid
Naropa University, Jack Kerouac School
of Disembodied Poetics, Boulder, Colorado
Bombay Gin
not enough night
University of Nebraska, Lincoln (PhD)
Prairie Schooner
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Interim
University of New Hampshire, Durham
Barnstorm
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Blue Mesa Review
New Mexico State University, Las Cruces
Puerto del Sol
University of New Orleans
Bayou
The New School University, New York City
LIT
New York University, New York City
Washington Square Review
University of North Carolina, Greensboro
The Greensboro Review
storySouth
University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Ecotone
North Carolina State University, Raleigh
Free Verse
Northeast Ohio Universities Consortium (NEOMFA)
Luna Negra
Penguin Review
Rubbertop Review
Whiskey Island Magazine
Northern Michigan University, Marquette
Passages North
University of North Texas, Denton
American Literary Review
North Texas Review
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
The Bend
Notre Dame Review
Re:Visions
Ohio State University, Columbus
The Journal
University of Oregon, Eugene
Northwest Review
Oregon State University, Corvallis
Prism
Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles
OR
Pacific Lutheran University’s
Rainier Writing Workshop, Tacoma
A River & Sound Review
Pacific University, Forest Grove, Oregon
Silk Road
University of Pittsburgh
Collision
Hot Metal Bridge
No
Portland State University, Oregon
Oregon Literary Review
Pathos Lit Mag
The Portland Review
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Louisiana
Sycamore Review
Queens College, CUNY
Ozone Park
Roosevelt University, Chicago
Oyez Review
Rosemont College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
Parlor
Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey
StoryQuarterly
Saint Mary’s College of California, Moraga
Mary
San Diego State University
Fiction International
Poetry International
University of San Francisco
Switchback
San Francisco State University
Fourteen Hills
Transfer
San Jose State University, California
Reed Magazine
Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York
Lumina
Seattle Pacific University
Image
University of South Carolina
Yemassee
Southern Connecticut State University,
New Haven
Connecticut Review
Noctua Review
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Crab Orchard Review
University of Southern Maine, Portland
Words and Images
Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester
Amoskeag
University of South Florida, Tampa
Saw Palm
Spalding University, Louisville
The Louisville Review
Stony Brook Southampton, SUNY
The Southampton Review
Syracuse University, New York
Salt Hill
University of Texas, El Paso
Rio Grande Review
University of Texas, James A. Michener
Center for Writers, Austin
Bat City Review
University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg
gallery
Texas State University, San Marcos
Front Porch
University of Utah, Salt Lake City
Quarterly West
Western Humanities Review
Vanderbilt University, Nashville
The Vanderbilt Review
Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier
Hunger Mountain
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Meridian
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
Blackbird
Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University, Blacksburg
The New River
Western Connecticut State University, Danbury
Black & White
Connecticut Review
Sentence
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo
Third Coast
University of Washington, Seattle
The Seattle Review
If this link ever stops working, below is a list of the top 50 MFA programs for Creative Writing in the US (Seth Abramson's list as published in Poets & Writers magazine).Rank | School | Votes (of 508) | Poetry Rank | Fiction Rank | Nonfiction Rank | Total Funding Rank | Annual Funding Rank | ||
| 1 | University of Iowa in Iowa City | 253 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 21 | 22 | ||
| 2 | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor | 169 | 3 | 2 | * | 16 | 4 | ||
| 3 | University of Virginia, Charlottesville | 144 | 2 | 4 | * | 21 | 21 | ||
| 4 | University of Massachusetts, Amherst | 132 | 4 | 5 | * | 40 | 41 | ||
| 4 | University of Texas, Austin | 132 | 5 | 6 | * | 1 | 1 | ||
| 6 | University of Wisconsin, Madison | 129 | 6 | 11 | * | 21 | 22 | ||
| 7 | Brown University in Providence | 127 | 8 | 3 | * | 19 | 20 | ||
| 8 | New York University in New York City | 125 | 7 | 7 | * | + | + | ||
| 9 | Cornell University in Ithaca, New York | 110 | 9 | 7 | * | 10 | 2 | ||
| 10 | University of Oregon, Eugene | 104 | 15 | 12 | * | 27 | 29 | ||
| 11 | Syracuse University in New York | 97 | 20 | 10 | * | 5 | 7 | ||
| 12 | Indiana University, Bloomington | 93 | 13 | 14 | * | 6 | 8 | ||
| 13 | University of California, Irvine | 91 | 26 | 9 | * | 26 | 28 | ||
| 14 | University of Minnesota, Minneapolis | 85 | 17 | 14 | 8 | 29 | 27 | ||
| 15 | Brooklyn College, CUNY | 81 | 39 | 13 | * | * | * | ||
| 16 | University of Montana, Missoula | 78 | 17 | 17 | 17 | 47 | 46 | ||
| 17 | Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore | 77 | 11 | 16 | * | 30 | 30 | ||
| 18 | Vanderbilt University in Nashville | 76 | 13 | 18 | 23 | 25 | 26 | ||
| 19 | University of North Carolina, Greensboro | 75 | 10 | 19 | * | 33 | 31 | ||
| 20 | Washington University, St. Louis | 70 | 15 | 24 | * | 12 | 3 | ||
| 21 | University of Florida, Gainesville | 67 | 22 | 21 | * | 13 | 16 | ||
| 22 | Columbia University in New York City | 66 | 38 | 19 | 10 | * | * | ||
| 23 | University of Notre Dame in Indiana | 62 | 34 | 22 | 12 | + | + | ||
| 24 | Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia | 56 | 32 | 26 | 4 | + | + | ||
| 24 | University of North Carolina, Wilmington | 56 | 22 | 25 | 5 | 41 | 42 | ||
| 26 | Arizona State University, Tempe | 55 | 19 | 28 | 35 | 15 | 18 | ||
| 26 | Hunter College, CUNY | 55 | 45 | 22 | 6 | * | * | ||
| 26 | University of Houston in Texas | 55 | 11 | 34 | 18 | 34 | 34 | ||
| 29 | Colorado State University, Fort Collins | 53 | 20 | 34 | * | 42 | 43 | ||
| 29 | The New School in New York City | 53 | 47 | 27 | 3 | * | * | ||
| 31 | Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York | 52 | 27 | 33 | 8 | * | * | ||
| 31 | University of Washington, Seattle | 52 | 27 | 28 | * | * | * | ||
| 33 | University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa | 51 | 25 | 31 | 29 | 2 | 18 | ||
| 34 | University of Arizona, Tucson | 49 | 32 | 28 | 2 | + | + | ||
| 35 | Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana | 45 | 22 | 40 | * | 9 | 10 | ||
| 36 | University of Arkansas, Fayetteville | 41 | 31 | 45 | * | 17 | 24 | ||
| 37 | George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia | 40 | 39 | 34 | 12 | + | + | ||
| 38 | Boston University in Massachusetts | 39 | 39 | 38 | * | + | + | ||
| 39 | University of Nevada, Las Vegas | 38 | 48 | 31 | * | 35 | 35 | ||
| 40 | Ohio State University, Columbus | 35 | 27 | + | 35 | 7 | 9 | ||
| 41 | University of Maryland, College Park | 34 | 37 | 44 | * | * | * | ||
| 42 | Florida State University, Tallahassee | 33 | 39 | + | * | 38 | 38 | ||
| 42 | Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge | 33 | * | 46 | * | 3 | 5 | ||
| 42 | Rutgers University, Newark in New Jersey | 33 | * | 37 | 12 | * | * | ||
| 42 | University of New Hampshire, Durham | 33 | 39 | 40 | 7 | * | * | ||
| 46 | Pennsylvania State University, University Park | 32 | 45 | 46 | 11 | 28 | 14 | ||
| 47 | Southern Illinois University, Carbondale | 31 | 27 | 48 | * | 14 | 17 | ||
| 47 | Texas State University, San Marcos | 31 | * | 40 | * | + | + | ||
| 49 | University of Mississippi, Oxford | 31 | + | 40 | * | 18 | 25 | ||
| 50 | University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | 30 | 34 | + | * | 4 | 6 | ||
| 50 | Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond | 30 | + | 38 | * | 31 | 32 | ||
| 50 | Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg | 30 | 34 | + | * | 8 | 10 |
Note: An honorable mention goes to Bowling Green State University, a two-year program in Ohio that ranks among the top fifty programs in selectivity (#47), total funding (#46), annual funding (#45), and poetry (#48), and received pluses in overall votes and fiction. For a ranking of the additional eighty-eight full-residency MFA programs, click here.
Authors used to expect to struggle as they gained experience. But now it is sell - or else.In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student working on short stories and flirting with the idea of a novel, I came across an essay that was being passed around my circle of friends. It was titled "Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years," and the author was the legendary editor and founder of New American Review, Ted Solotaroff.
Ten years! In the cold! Solotaroff wondered where all the talented young writers he had known or published when he was first editing New American Review had gone. Only a few had flourished. Some, he speculated, had ended up teaching, publishing occasionally in small journals. But most had just . . . given up. "It doesn't appear to be a matter of talent itself," he wrote. "Some of the most natural writers, the ones who seemed to shake their prose or poetry out of their sleeves, are among the disappeared. As far as I can tell, the decisive factor is what I call endurability: that is, the ability to deal effectively with uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment, from within as well as from without."
writer's apprenticeship -- or perhaps, the writer's lot -- is this miserable trifecta: uncertainty, rejection, disappointment. In the 20 years that I've been publishing books, I have fared better than most. I sold my first novel while still in graduate school and published six more books, pretty much one every three years, like clockwork. I have made my living as a writer, living off my advances while supplementing my income by teaching and writing for newspapers and magazines.
As smooth as this trajectory might seem, however, my internal life as a writer has been a constant battle with the small, whispering voice (well, sometimes it shouts) that tells me I can't do it. This time, the voice taunts me, you will fall flat on your face. Every single piece of writing I have ever completed -- whether a novel, a memoir, an essay, short story or review -- has begun as a wrestling match between hopelessness and something else, some other quality that all writers, if they are to keep going, must possess.
Call it stubbornness, stamina, a take-no-prisoners determination, but a writer at work reminds me of nothing so much as a terrier with a bone: gnawing, biting, chewing, until finally there is nothing left to do but fall away.
I have taught in MFA programs for many years now, and I begin my first class of each semester by looking around the workshop table at my students' eager faces and then telling them they are pursuing a degree that will entitle them to nothing. I don't do this to be sadistic or because I want to be an unpopular professor; I tell them this because it's the truth. They are embarking on a life in which apprenticeship doesn't mean a cushy summer internship in an air-conditioned office but rather a solitary, poverty-inducing, soul-scorching voyage whose destination is unknown and unknowable.
If they were enrolled in medical school, in all likelihood they would wind up doctors. If in law school, better than even odds, they'd become lawyers. But writing school guarantees them little other than debt.
Rereading Solotaroff's essay, as I did recently, I found that he was writing of a time that now seems quaint, almost innocent. By the 1980s, he bemoaned, the expectations young writers had of their future lives had "been formed by the mass marketing and subsidization of culture and by the creative writing industry. Their career models are not, say, Henry Miller or William Faulkner, but John Irving or Ann Beattie."
With the exception of Irving, most of the writers referenced by Solotaroff (Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Joan Chase, Douglas Unger, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Alan Hewat) would draw blank looks from my students, and the creative writing industry of the mid-1980s now seems like a few mom-and-pop shops scattered on a highway lined with strip malls and mega-stores. Today's young writers don't peruse the dusty shelves of previous generations. Instead, they are besotted with the latest success stories: The 18-year-old who receives a million dollars for his first novel; the blogger who stumbles into a book deal; the graduate student who sets out to write a bestselling thriller -- and did.
The 5,000 students graduating each year from creative writing programs (not to mention the thousands more who attend literary festivals and conferences) do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. I see it in their faces: the almost evangelical belief in the possibility of the instant score. And why not? They are, after all, the product of a moment that doesn't reward persistence, that doesn't see the value in delaying recognition, that doesn't trust in the process but only the outcome. As an acquaintance recently said to me: "So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?"
The emphasis is on publishing, not on creating. On being a writer, not on writing itself. The publishing industry -- always the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media -- has the same blockbuster-or-bust mentality of television networks and movie studios. There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all. There is no time to write in the cold, much less for 10 years.
I recently had the honor of acting as guest editor for the anthology "Best New American Voices 2010," the latest volume in a long-running annual series that contains some of the finest writing culled from students in graduate programs and conferences. Joshua Ferris, Nam Le, Julie Orringer and Maile Meloy are just a few of the writers published in previous editions, but now the series is coming to an end. Presumably, it wasn't selling, and its publisher could no longer justify bringing it out. Important and serious and just plain good books, the kind that require years spent in the trough of false starts and discarded pages -- these books need to be written far away from this culture of mega-hits, and yet that culture is so pervasive that one wonders how a young writer is meant to be strong enough to face it down.
The new bottom line
At the risk of sounding like I'm writing from my rocking chair, things were different when I started. My first three books sold, in combination, fewer than 15,000 copies in hardcover. My editor at the time told me there were 4,000 serious readers in America, and if I reached them, I was doing a good job. As naïve as this may sound, it never occurred to me that my modest sales record might one day spell the end of my career. I felt cared for, respected. I continued to be published, and eventually, my sales improved. I wrote a bestselling memoir, appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and published a subsequent novel that found a pretty wide readership. My timing has been good thus far -- and lucky.
But in the last several years, I've watched friends and colleagues suddenly find themselves without publishers after having brought out many books. Writers now use words like "track" and "mid-list" and "brand" and "platform." They tweet and blog and make Facebook friends in the time they used to spend writing. Authors who stumble can find themselves quickly in dire straits. How, under these conditions, can a writer take the risks required to create something original and resonant and true?
Perhaps there is a clue to be found near the end of Solotaroff's essay: "Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger."
The writer who has experienced this even for a moment becomes hooked on it and is willing to withstand the rest. Insecurity, rejection and disappointment are a price to pay, but those of us who have served our time in the frozen tundra will tell you that we'd do it all over again if we had to. And we do. Each time we sit down to create something, we are risking our whole selves. But when the result is the transformation of anger, disappointment, sorrow, self-pity, guilt, perverseness and wounded innocence into something deep and concrete and abiding -- that is a personal and artistic triumph well worth the long and solitary trip.
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Shapiro's new book, "Devotion: A Memoir," is just out. She will read at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena on Feb. 24 and Diesel Books in Brentwood on Feb. 26.
--LA Times, February 07, 2010, By Dani Shapiro
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