Instead of asking people to loan me money for school, I’m now asking them to simply give me money. To that extent, I’ve created a fundraising page on fundable, and if you can spare $10, please pledge towards my goal. Since I can’t get a loan and there is no way my parents can pay my tuition, I’ll have to rely on the kindness of strangers.

You can check out his fundraising site directly here. At time of writing, Denis only had $10 in contributions. Is this because his campaign is brand new (launched 7/13/09) or because there’s a recession on, or because this idea simply isn’t going to work?

There’s also this article, over at Publisher’s Weekly, about writer and blogger Dianna Zandt, who, after signing a deal for her first book that provided no advance, decided to “crowdfund” the money she needed to write over the summer. It helps that her topic is “…writing about the power of social media to shift perceptions and cultural values.” She’s been pretty successful so far, it seems – you can read her thoughts and feedback on the process (plus tips for others who are considering going the the same route) here.

What do you think? Are Denis and Deanna smart to try this approach? Is their initiative laudable? Do their requests for funds seem justified to you? And is this a sign of things to come?

Genoways argues that these literary outlets are essential for academic depth and breadth, as training grounds for future writers and editors, as homes for innovative writing, and, not least, as valuable PR for the institutions that create them. “If not for Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, and The Oxford American,” he writes, “I would never think of Kenyon College or Washington & Lee University or the University of Central Arkansas. The excellence of these publications gives their universities a national profile.”

University sponsored lit mags are also MFA recruitment tools. LSU’s MFA website states: “LSU has an extraordinary English Department, and LSU Press has made important contributions to American poetry and fiction. The MFA program offers opportunities to gain editorial experience by working for our many magazines and publications. The New Delta Review, The Southern Review, and The Corpse . (If you are interested in editorial experience and would like to be considered for an assistantship at a particular review you are advised to make your interest clear in your application letter.)”

And if The Southern Review folds, LSU? Then what?

You can read the original posts here and here.

Massive lay-off and some resignations, and entire trade divisions being wiped out. As gloomy as this might seem — especially for young writers, signing up for MFA programs and laboring over yet-to-be-sold first books — you can be sure of one thing: The human need for story will never diminish. How people buy and consume those stories, though, is likely to change, perhaps beyond recognition. This metamorphosis is going to be painful (what metamorphosis isn’t?) but whatever emerges might well be stronger, more efficient and actually better for writers.

In the meantime, information is power, people! KNOW what you are getting into. Be informed. To that end, here’s a helpful links round up. All hail the death of book publishing as we know it!

Read Galley Cat for breaking news. In particular here, here and here.

Things are not much better in the UK, in case you were wondering.

The Times weighs in, with some good common sense, about what new technologies mean for the demise — or not — of the book.

Booksquare has their own, ballsy take on the situation.

Then, if you really want to shock yourself, read this:

This is from ereads.com. I was moving through this article going, u-huh, u-huh, yup, this writer has it right, yup, makes sense….and then the zinger. Christ. I’m not going to reveal the zinger. Go read it for yourself. Suffice it to say, it actually made me feel better about the publishing meltdown. These lessons have to be learned.

I’d like to serve up, today, some luscious literary links.

First up, David Gessner, in the New York Times magazine, on what it’s really like to be an MFA writing professor. Times have changed since his day:

I attended graduate school at the University of Colorado in the early 1990s, and only one professor there ever learned my name; the rest, most of whom were granted their positions in the 1960s after the publication of a chapbook or two, approached their jobs with all the liveliness and enthusiasm of members of the Politburo. Iowa, of course, set the standard for the genius approach to writing in which the great man or woman allows the eager young to gather round, where they are to learn by osmosis.

Gessner teaches at UNC-Wilmington, in case you are interested. At the end of the piece, Gessner worries that he might be intentionally sabotaging his teaching career by publishing his thoughts about it, especially a few weeks before he goes up for tenure. But if I were applying for nonfiction programs right now, his essay would make me add Wilmington to my list, if it wasn’t already on there.  Just so you know, tenure committee.

Then there’s New York magazine on the end of book publishing as we know it. Cheery!

Lately, the whole, hoary concept of paying writers advances against royalties has come under question. Following their down payments to authors, publishers don’t have to pay a cent in royalties, which are usually 15 percent of the hardcover price, 7.5 for paperbacks, until that signing bonus is earned back. The system is supposed to be mutually beneficial; the publishers guarantee writers a certain income, and then both parties share in the proceeds beyond that level. But it only works for publishers if they’re conservative in their expectations. As auctions over hot books have grown more frequent, prudence has gone out the window— paying a $1 million advance to a 26-year-old first-time novelist becomes a public-relations gambit as much as an investment in that writer’s future.

That money has to come from somewhere, so publishers have cracked down on their non-star writers. The advances you don’t hear about have been dropping precipitously. For every Pretty Young Debut Novelist who snags that seven-figure prize, ten solid literary novelists have seen advances slashed for their third books.

That’s it! It’s all Jonathan Safran Foer’s fault!

Finally, Wired magazine is blogging the development of one of their stories, from the pitch to the “get” to the copy edit, with all the emails in between. It’s a great primer for anyone interested in the actual process an idea goes through to wind up on the pages of a mainstream magazine. Read it here.

Aravind Adiga — The White Tiger
Sebastian Barry — The Secret Scripture
Amitav Ghosh — Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant — The Clothes on Their Backs
Philip Hensher — The Northern Clemency
Steve Toltz —  A Fraction of the Whole

Two first time novelists, one woman, and no Rushdie.

The two first-timers, Aravind Adiga and Steve Toltz, are currently getting the best odds, though how the bookies calculate these things I have no idea. Here’s a link to The Guardian’s “condensed read” version of the books. And here’s an absolutely fascinating article, also from The Guardian, in which Man Booker judges from previous years talk about their experiences. Warning, folks: It ain’t pretty.

Fist fights, politics, authors getting dismissed out of hand, deals being struck. A judge threatening to throw himself off a balcony. Another resigning in a huff. Bitter arguments. And very little actual literary discussion, it seems. This, from judges of an award that The New York Times says is “…considered by many to be the most prestigious award for literary fiction in the English-speaking world.” Here are some teasers from The Guardian article:

George Steiner, a judge from 1972, called his whole Booker experience “very grim.”

Paul Bailey from 1982 said: “There are many things I regret doing, and being a judge for the Booker prize is one of them.” He also calls the award process “…a perfect recipe for envy, back-biting and self-glorification.”

Hilary Mantel, from 1990, says: “‘I’m glad I was a Booker judge relatively early in my career. It stopped me thinking that literary prizes are about literary value.”

Even the great literary critic James Wood, a judge from 1994, has this to offer: “Some wonderful books win the Booker, of course, just as the flypaper occasionally catches some really large flies. But it means – or should mean – nothing in literary terms.”

Ouch! And it goes on:

Jonathan Coe, 1996: “Anyone who sets great store by the choices of Booker prize panels should remember this: the process consists of nothing more rigorous than five people sitting in a room together for a few hours, swapping personal opinions.”

Several judges claim that they started reading more nonfiction after being forced to plow through so many novels. Several also say that no one ever changes their mind about their choices, and it all comes down to a numbers game. It’s not all bad — some of the judges seemed to have enjoyed the experience, and believed in the process, and even (shock! horror!) supported the final choice. But I don’t think anyone who reads this article could look on the literary prize-giving process in quite the same way afterward.

I certainly feel a little disillusioned, but ultimately, knowledge is power. That’s what it’s like out there, people. Every time you send out work to residencies, for fellowships or awards, or even for MFA applications, a similar process applies. Know that it’s a crap shoot and keep writing and sending out work anyway. That’s the only reasonable response to an unreasonable world.

One good thing I got from from the article: recommondations for two books I haven’t yet read, but which I now intend to (I’ll be adding them to my scarily long Amazon “to buy later” queue). They are JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower — the first is an overlooked “Best of Booker” contender, the second an overlooked non-winner, and both are referenced by enough of the judges to make me think I should check them out. I’ll report back as soon as I get to them. Should be by at least 2010.

How do you believe in your own writing? I don’t mean after it’s finished, but while you’re writing it? Is there a way to work with the imaginary reader instead of fighting with him/her?

Tennis takes the opportunity, in his answer, to wax rhapsodic about releasing yourself from your own judgment, and while he has certainly been taken to task for completely failing to answer his readers’ questions in the past, he has something valid to offer here, I think. You have to enjoy the exuberance of his response, at least.

We cannot judge harshly without also living in fear of being judged. And it is that creeping fear of being judged ourselves that can prevent us from writing fluidly and with ease and courage. So I say step out there and be really, really bad if you want. Who cares? Step out there and write the worst prose imaginable! So what? There’s no law. Do it with gusto. Write the worst possible prose. Write poems that are so bad you can smell them. Do it. Look around. Have you been arrested? Have you been fired? Are you being held up to public ridicule? No. It’s safe. It’s safe to write whatever you want. And you never know. Some of the most awful stuff might be the best. You don’t know. You can’t judge your own work or control how others respond to it.

I have to disagree slightly with the last bit, though. It certainly is hard to see your own work with any degree of objectivity, but with enough careful attention to craft I believe you can tell, in general terms, if your writing is hitting the mark or not. You’ll still need some trusted external readers to be sure, but your own responses will be truer and more reliable. That’s been my experience anyway, and it’s something I try and instill in my students. Through workshopping, writing, and reading great work, you are effectively educating your own internal imaginary reader, to phrase it in the letter writer’s own terms. Turning him or her into a useful friend, instead of a foe. There’s nothing more enabling than that. It’s practical and learnable and it works.

Which is not to say that there isn’t room, sometimes, for a more esoteric response. Looking through some other Cary Tennis columns for this blog post, I came across this one, from 2007, in which an MFA student from “a certain rather prestigious MFA program” asks: what am I doing here?

Cary’s response, in which he confesses that he was once an MFA candidate too, is rather brilliant:

So what I learned in my trek from brilliant insufferable little grad school shit to person with enough humility to sit quietly in a room with dogs — and patiently let them nose my hands as I try to work the keyboard — is that writing is not about face. It is about soul. It is a tool for becoming who you are.

I like that. Writing is a tool for becoming who you are. Right on, Cary.

This, apparently, is how Junot Diaz received word of his big win.

I used a Junot Diaz story in one of my workshops last week — “Fiesta, 1980″ from the story collection Drown. It chronicles the experiences of an adolescent Dominican boy as he navigates his nausea and family life during a trip to a party in the Bronx, with flashbacks that reveal the deeper dynamics behind the up-front action. We spent a lot of time talking about point of view in the workshop. It’s a first person retrospective piece that sometimes brings the reader in close to the 12-year-old protagonist’s experience, and other times privileges the adult narrator. The shift between the two is sometimes smooth, sometimes jarring. Diaz gives us a few lines of the protagonist’s dialogue, only to puncture the illusion of our closeness to the character by throwing in adult words or perceptions. In this way, we are both inside and outside of the protagonist’s mind at the same time. The narrator is effectively treating his younger self as a character. This is a technique called indirect interior monologue — and in the first person, it’s more often employed in memoir and personal essays, when writers often have to recreate some version of their younger selves on the page. See this great essay by David Jauss for more on indirect interior monologue and other techniques of point of view. It’s technical, but worth it.

In the meantime here’s a link to an interview with Diaz, (from which the opening quote of this blog entry is taken) conducted by Meghan O’Rourke, Slate’s culture editor, and Deborah Landau, the director of NYU’s MFA writing program. (Try as I might, I couldn’t embed the damn thing. Anyone with the know-how, please help me!)

O’Rourke looks comfortable on camera. Landau, not so much. But it’s still a good interview, not least because it gives a good feel for how Diaz really thinks and talks. Just how autobiographical is Diaz’s work? That’s something else we discussed in our workshop. The point of view in “Fiesta, 1980″ certainly leads us to read it as nonfiction, and “Junot” would seem to have so much in common with his protagonist “Junior” (also the protagonist of his Oscar Wao book?) that it’s not hard to make the imaginative leap and think it’s as much memoir as fiction. But, of course, that’s pure speculation.

It’s interesting that NYU is teaming up with Slate to produce this kind of content: a service to writing students and interested Slate readers alike, and an indication that NYU’s program is at least trying to utilize new media technology as part of its offerings, which is more than can be said for some other MFA programs.

Kealey offers lots of great things in this interview, but one of my favorites is this quote, from Doris Lessing:

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust your own judgment, learn inner dependence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad.

Which is kinda like learning to identify and trust your own inner instincts, something I posted about a few days ago.

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?

Sure it is, though some more realistic — and recent — role models might help. Kiran Desai, graduate of my alma mater, Columbia, and 2006 Man-Booker Prize winner. There’s one. Joshua Ferris, author of And Then We Came To The End and recent graduate of UC Irvine might be another. Or even the legions of writers and MFA graduates who might be less celebrated but are, nonetheless, hacking out a living, somehow, in the creative world. But not the following crop — also taken from the above-named website.

Whether you wish to follow the career paths of celebrated creative writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, or Lewis Carroll, or pursue a more conventional writing career, a diverse assortment of opportunities await the creative writing graduate. Some of these employment opportunities include: technical writing, drama and screenplay writing, editing, administration, college teaching, and popular fiction writing.

Per-lease! We can all look forward to lucrative careers in “administration” or “popular fiction writing” post MFA? Whoever wrote this blurb obviously has no clue. Rush on over to Tom Kealey’s MFA blog for some more hands-on and practical advice