MFA Gobbledygook

Blogging about MFA programs is one of the stated aims of the Boolah Blog. Why? Because I teach MFA prep classes, through Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, and I also offer MFA consultations for aspiring MFA students, and so I try and keep up with news and developments within that world.

It so happens that I have a new MFA prep class starting this evening and so I diligently started searching around on the Interweb, looking for any new resources that might have sprung up since I last checked. In doing so, I came across one of those grad school aggregate sites — you know, some enterprising soul forked out large sums of cash for a sexy url (OK, it’s gradschools.com, but I’m not going to link to it) and then gathered together a bunch of half-assed information so that they can flog advertising to prospective students. And how do I know it’s half-assed? Because this is what they say about MFA programs (messed up punctuation is in the original):

Harry Potter, Gone With the Wind, The Catcher in the Rye, or The Tales & Poetry of Edgar Allen Poe – whatever the choiceof genre, creative writers have indelibly imprinted the human race throughout the ages.

Leaving the tortured syntax aside, great list guys! Harry Potter — a hugely successful series, yes, but not literary masterpieces, and not the high-minded adult fiction that most MFA students aspire to (though there are a few great programs that focus on children’s and YA book writing). Gone with the Wind? Also hugely successful, but the only novel that Mitchell published in her life time. J.D. Salinger? Famous recluse. About the most unlikely writer you’d ever expect to find either in an MFA program or endorsing one. And Poe? Hugely influential, but most of his acclaim came after death. From his Wikipage:

Poe, throughout his attempts at pursuing a successful literary career, would be forced to constantly make humiliating pleas for money and other assistance for the rest of his life.

Ah yes. Sounds like the life of a writer, sure enough, but not the shiny dream that prospective MFA students are pursuing. Is that dream possible? Continue reading MFA Gobbledygook

Juicy Links. And Kindleporn.

The links section to the right is currently in progress. As soon as I get the time I’m going to be adding more: more people I know and love, more literary sites, more good stuff.

In the meantime, here’s a few interesting snippets for you to peruse.

This article about Kindleporn just throws up so many weird questions. Does the design of the Kindle facilitate easy one-handed operation? Are there now authors out there who are packaging their erotica into Kindle-page sized chunks? How should a Kindle be cleaned? The mind boggles.

Then there’s this: Robert Downey Jr. Postpones Candid Memoir. S’up Bob? Got creatively blocked, did you? Was your memoir so unbelievably candid that you were afraid of what your family and friends might think? Or was it just too much of a literary challenge? You should have called me, dude! I could have helped you with those issues. I do that kind of thing all the time!

Finally, literary tattoos. Try not to read the comments at the end from all those uptight and morally indignant Telegraph readers, just look at the pictures.

I do have a tattoo, and it does have words in it, but it’s not a literary quote. And that’s all I’m going to say about it. If I were to get a literary tattoo, though, it might be this quote from Thomas Mann, which is currently one of my favorites:

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Actually, I think all writers need to have this tattooed on their bodies somewhere, because it’s so easy to forget. We think that, because it’s difficult, we must somehow be doing it wrong, and there are other writers out there who find writing easy, and they are the real writers and we are not. Mann’s quote reminds us that, in fact, the opposite is closer to the truth.

What about you? What literary tattoo would you get?

The Warwick Prize For Writing

I take it back. A couple of posts ago I said that the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction was the most lucrative award for fact-based writing in the world. Then I go and find out about Warwick Prize for Writing. I hadn’t heard about it before because it’s brand new — the debut biennial award will be given in 2009, when some lucky writer will be £50,000 (or $100,000) richer. But here’s what makes this award particularly interesting:

1) It’s open to all genres, from poetry to scientific writing, other forms of nonfiction (creative or otherwise) to fiction.

2) It’s open to all forms of publishing, from internet based works to self-published books to works in translation and co-authored books.

Presumably illustrated books and kids books could be included too — why not? Everything else is.

3) It’s international — work must have been published in English, anywhere in the world, within a two-year time frame.

And here’s the clincher:

4) The theme for the inaugural award is, wait for it, complexity. The banner from the top of this post is borrowed from their website. The message it contains might not be cheery, but it’s certainly interesting, and, well, not easy.

So, to summarize, this is an intellectually rigorous award, available to all writers published in English, regardless of form or genre, and open to experimental work. The judges are interested, as it says in their FAQs, in exploring “what literature is, and what new shapes and forms it might be taking.”

Wowzers. In this era of “high concept” pitches for fiction and nonfiction alike, that’s like getting a lungful of sweet Alpine air.

The final thing I love about this award is that it’s democratic too. According to booktrade.info, “…all members of the University of Warwick Staff – from nursery staff and gardeners to professors and porters – are invited to make a nomination for a prize entry by August.”

This is complexity for the masses, people — as all great literature should be.

Salman Rushdie's Signing Rate

Oh Salman.

It’s hard to know how to read this letter of yours. Is it carefully constructed to imitate the tone of a curmudgeonly and egocentric fool, which would make it a masterpiece of parody and indicate that you have a sly and self-deprecating sense of humor? Or are you — could you really be — such a petty kind of man, one who would take an attack on his signing rate to be an excuse to start a pissing contest on the letters page of a national UK paper with a bombastic and loud-mouthed writer like Malcolm Gluck? Which is it? I just can’t tell!

Here’s a link to the “controversy.”

And here’s the letter in its entirety, as sent to The Guardian newspaper:

It’s always a delight to return to London from an arduous two-month book tour of North America to find myself being accused of “illusions” – that is, lying – in your letters columns. The weirdest part of Malcolm Gluck’s unpleasant little missive (July 17) is that he begins by saying it’s impossible that I could have signed my name 1,000 times in an hour and ends up by revealing that he did it himself. Anyone who has ever attempted to sign a lot of books quickly knows, as Gluck says, that the key is to have the support of bookstore staff experienced in the construction of a smooth “assembly line”. He tells us he had the assistance of such staff when he did it, but refuses to believe that I could have.

So let me be clear: I did not initial the books, but signed my full name; I did have the support of experienced staff at Ingrams book distributors in Nashville (and at many other US bookstores), who will confirm that among the fastest present-day signers of books are President Jimmy Carter, the novelist Amy Tan, and myself. I understand that Mr Gluck may be miffed that his own accomplishment has been equalled or bettered. That does not entitle him to accuse another writer of untruthfulness, without a shred of evidence to support the accusation. And, if memory serves, I actually signed the 1,000 books in Nashville in 57 minutes as against his 1,001 in 59, so his record is toast.
Salman Rushdie
London

The REAL New Kings — And Queens — of Nonfiction

Kelly Nuxoll has written an informative and thoughtful article for Poets and Writers magazine about citizen journalism, making the case that what she and her fellow citizen journalists do is more akin to creative nonfiction than it is to traditional political commentary. The immediacy of it gives it power — one of Kelly’s colleagues, writing for the Huffington Post, was the woman who broke the “Obama thinks that voters are bitter” furor. I advise you to read the whole of Kelly’s article to see her argument in full.

The online version of the magazine includes Kelly’s “Postcard from the Campaign Trail” that expands on her thoughts, and includes this paragraph:

I have an MFA in creative nonfiction: Reported, first-person pieces are what I do. I disclose information and use language to reveal my bias, and I expect the reader to take my work for what it is—the perspective of a single individual. I also take my task very seriously. I’m the eyes and ears for all the people who aren’t in the room, and I try to convey both the substance of what happens and also the mood, the setting, my own reaction and those of the people around me. These, the devices of fiction, are important in making a scene come alive. But they are especially critical in describing a presidential campaign, which can be sanitized by sound bites or spun into unrecognizable fluff by a press office. As citizens in a democracy, we need all the information we can get about the candidates and the apparatus that surrounds them. Creative nonfiction offers a lens that is colored by voice, tone, and critical intelligence.

Kelly’s thoughts remind me that, after all this time, creative nonfiction is still a term that a lot of people have problems understanding. I’ve had to define it innumerable times, sometimes even to people who work in publishing. Continue reading The REAL New Kings — And Queens — of Nonfiction

Nonfiction Writing Awards

The winner of the UK based and BBC Radio Four sponsored Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction was announced a coupe of days ago: The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale. The author receives £30,000, or $60,000 at today’s crapulous exchange rate. I think this makes it the richest purse for nonfiction in the world. Even the Pultizer prize winners only get a measly $10,000.

Being Brits, the organizers have to hyphenate nonfiction — something I choose not to do as I have been living in the States for nearly ten years now and besides, “non-fiction” just seems so…formal. Plus it puts more emphasis on the components of the word, which makes it seem like a reaction of a genre, defined in opposition to the “true art” of fiction. Am I the only one to hear the implied slur in that, or am I just being over sensitive?

I have actually been looking for an alternative to “nonfiction” for some time. Faction? Reality prose? Both gross — any better suggestions, anyone?

How to Survive as a Writer

A post is brewing in my mind that would develop my last post about intuition and craft (or should that be intuition v. craft?) I need another few days to gestate it, so for now I’ll just direct you to this essay about writing and money by Keith Gessen from n+1 magazine, the literary publication where he is an editor and co-founder. These are uncertain economic times, and Gesson has some clear-eyed and sobering observations on the compromises that writers have to make to get by. He says:

There are four ways to survive as a writer in the US in 2006: the university; journalism; odd jobs; and independent wealth. I have tried the first three. Each has its costs.

I think this is as true in 2008 (year of posting) as it was in 2006. Hell, I think it was true in 1906 too, and is likely to hold in the future, indefinitely.

A lot of the people I work with, either as a coach, editor or teacher, state that it is their aim to make a living as a writer. Continue reading How to Survive as a Writer

Assessing Your Own Writing

A commentator (OK, it was my wonderful sister, Anna) asked a very pertinent question in response to the last blog post: How do you know if your work really is a piece of shit?

Anne Enright says you must not to listen to that internal voice, but instead practice some “mood management.” You must “…wrestle [your emotions] down to something roughly the size of the page.” While I do think that this is solid advice, there are ways that you can, with some practice, learn to assess your own work.

These methods I’ll call developing your intuition, developing your powers of assessment, and building an external feedback loop. Continue reading Assessing Your Own Writing

Anne Enright: The Thing You Have Written Is A Piece Of Shit

The title of this post is a line from this forthright essay about the writing process by Anne Enright, taken from the Guardian books section. Read the whole essay to see the line in context, but here’s the opening paragraph as a teaser:

It doesn’t matter what you think about your work. This is one of the weirdest lessons a writer has to learn, that the emotions that push you to write better, with greater accuracy, truth, verve, wit; the despair that makes you cast your eyes to the ceiling and then plunge back to the keyboard; the running pleasure of one good word being followed by a better; the glee as you set a time bomb ticking in the text; the glorious megalomania with which you set out to describe and yes! conquer! the! world! … are all completely redundant once the piece is finished.

Enright won the Man Booker Prize in October 2007 for her fourth book The Gathering, which introduced her to a whole new audience. The Times book blog Paper Cuts posted something about her back then, and the tenor of the comments – most of them asinine in the extreme – is indicative of her reception. She got in a lot of trouble for her essay about the McCanns in the London Review of Books. UK media commentator Janet Street Porter – a woman who might be described as shrill if she wasn’t simultaneously so horsey – encouraged the public to boycott Enright’s books.

I find Enright’s essays (and check out her others in the LRB while you are over there – one on religion and her children, and one on breastfeeding) to be refreshingly honest and powerfully written. I think this is why she provokes so much ire: she writes about the things we think and feel but are afraid to express. Which, in my book, makes her a good writer. Which takes us back to: The thing you have written is a piece of shit. What writer hasn’t thought this, at one point or another, about their own work? Enright’s point is that you can’t let that voice dictate to you or you’d never write another word. I couldn’t agree more.

Quantifying the Unquantifiable

I admit it: part of the reason I started this blog is because I spend an hour an unreasonable amount of time every morning looking around various literary websites and blogs*, and I needed a way to justify that investment – plus I wanted a place to put all the thoughts that were prompted by what I read.

So here are two things I looked at this morning, which seem to work together nicely. Over at the New York Times Paper Cuts blog, Barry Gewen offers his assessment of Judge Richard A. Posner – not a cultural critic that I have ever sampled, admittedly, though Gewen does a pretty good job of convincing me that I should. What struck me about the post were these lines:

Posner likes to quantify, and sometimes he tries to quantify what isn’t quantifiable. David Brooks caught the problem perfectly in his review of Posner’s magnificently wrong-headed book “Public Intellectuals”: “Watching Posner try to apply economic laws to public debate is a bit like watching a Martian trying to use statistics to explain a senior prom. He is able to detect a few crude patterns, but he’s missing the fraught complexity of the thing.”

Then, over at the Syntax of Things, I came across this video, which kind of blew my mind.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4515877390655740878&q=booklamp&ei=Ukt2SJLLAoL6-gHNnIW-DA]

Half of me thinks this is a brilliant, if totally geekish idea. The other half thinks: There is no way on this earth that such a technology could work or help in anyway whatsoever. So BookLamp might be able to tell me if a book is plot heavy or light on dialogue, but it can’t come close, presumably, to judging the quality of a book’s style. It must miss the fraught complexity of the thing, no? And isn’t that why we need good critics? And isn’t that complexity, the kind that resists being reduced to a statistic, the kind that authors strive for? Could this technology possibly work on poetry? I think not.

Actually, after thinking about it, the bigger half (and I know there’s no such thing) thinks that BookLamp is a totally wrong-headed idea, but there’s a little geek in me that thinks it’s kinda cool and that there’s probably a use for it somewhere. Assessing the appeal of books just isn’t it.

*OK, so maybe I check People.com too. And, um, realitytvworld.com. But that’s because, with as little posturing as possible, I cast myself in the tradition of those who think so-called “low” and “middle brow” art as worthy of cultural discussion and assessment as that stuffy old high brow stuff. If this approach was good enough for Orwell, it’s good enough for me.