I don’t have an essay in the pretty excellent essay collection MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction (FSG, 2014) but in 2008, four years after I left NYC, two years after I graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with an MFA in fiction, I drank some icy white wine and talked on the phone with a guy I knew a little bit from when I’d lived in NYC before Iowa. He was working on an interview-based article for Vice about the MFA and workshops. We talked for an hour, I got loose and ranted, and he asked questions and sounded like he was listening or at least was still on the line whenever I paused. In exchange for semi-drunkenly rambling about Iowa for an hour, he sent me an ARC of 2666, a signed copy of my former teacher’s latest novel (Home), and the new Leonard Michaels collection. 2666 blew my doors off and I was psyched for the interview to show up in Vice, but then it never seemed to come out. Huh. Too bad. I forgot about it.
Five years later I received an e-mail from an editor at n + 1 saying they’re putting this MFA vs NYC collection together and they’d like to use some quotations (~two tweets worth) from me from the interview, which Vice apparently published at some point, and then months later the friendly people at n + 1 sent an ARC of the book, which I found to be an enjoyable, stimulating, at times pleasurably enervating trip down MFA/NYC lane.
The collection acknowledges of course what many suspect — some writers in the world might not have MFAs and not live in NYC, or might even have MFAs and not live in NYC and yet they still somehow manage to write and publish. But as a former resident of Brooklyn (specifically, Greenpoint about a decade before “Girls,” a few miles north of what Chad Harbach deems the NYC where NYC novelists live: “a small area of west-central Brooklyn bounded by DUMBO and Prospect Heights”) who moved to NYC to meet some writers and, as in an O. Henry story (a refrain twice repeated in MFA vs NYC), immediately wound up dating a doozy of a young writer (no MFA, occasionally visiting NYC from her distant homeland, although she lives there now) and meeting some of her writer friends who I’d heard about more than I’d read, and then a little later on dating another young writer from NYC who despised the city and lived in Iowa City after attending the Workshop, which I eventually wound up attending, participating in the final complete workshop taught by Frank Conroy (his portrait in this is a good one but doesn’t mention how he evoked “magic” and repeated phrases like “respect the experiment” and “protect the edge” when evaluating unconventional work like mine), this book seemed more or less written for me. But there’s enough in here to hold anyone’s attention, probably, as long as you’re interested in a tour of fiction writing sausage factories in this country.
The essays that present NYC as a professional institution — essays by agents and publicists particularly — were illuminating. An excellent agent says he only reads about six novels a year, other than all those he’s evaluating and selling for work. What are the chances therefore that one of these books is Joseph and His Brothers or Extinction, books that might obliterate a market-based perspective of what’s good? He also probably doesn’t read canonically, as DFW and Elif Bautman and others assume that writers in MFA programs don’t do either, which has some merit but isn’t totally true, in my experience.
A NYC blogger writer rarely mentions reading anything at all although she does go on about her internet addiction and her cat’s health issues (and the resulting costs) at length. I particularly liked the transparency in a few essays about finances — making a living writing ain’t easy, apparently.
In general, there’s a sense that everyone in NYC is trying to survive the city’s exaggerated $$$ pressures — and it’s possible that such pressure turns rocks into gems.
I’ve always argued that there’s no reason for the literary industry to remain in NYC since NYC undermines its interests. No one buys hard covers because they’re too expensive but need to be so costly to cover the publisher’s rent. The whole enterprise should really move to rural Pennsylvania or maybe even Iowa City if it wants to prevail and not simply survive.
On the MFA side of things, I most agree with George Saunders:
“You are not going to be doing this workshop crap forever. You are doing it to get a little baptism by fire, purge yourself of certain habits (of sloth, of under-revision, of the sin of thinking you’d made a thing clear when you haven’t) and then you are going to run away from the whole approach like your pants are on fire, and not look back, but return to that sacred land where your writing is private and you don’t have to defend it or explain it one bit.”
Post-NYC and post-MFA, that’s where I stand in this “argument.” At some point, wherever you are, you have to find a way to make enough money to write and read without worrying all the time about distractions.
No longer all that young and certainly not all that wealthy, NYC seems to me too expensive and offers too many obvious distractions for a writer (unless young or wealthy).
Teaching can distract from reading and writing, but you can bring your passion to play and infect young minds so they in turn buy books you and your friends publish. That’s one of the best points in the book, at the end of Harbach’s titular essay: the common ambition and only hope of all writers will be “to make writers of us all.”
All essays in here are worthwhile — some may stand out for you more than others. I was partial to contributions by the editor, Saunders, Eli S. Evans, Keith Gessen, the literary agent Jim Rutman, the one by the publicist in part about Prep, and the one about Gordon Lish. (The DFW essay I’d read before and think it’s so-so for him.)
There’s a good academic/personal mix, although I found the more academic essays a little wonky and maybe even sometimes wrong. Iowa at least doesn’t teach about itself and adverbs.
John Barth in one of his “Fridays” books says somewhere something like “not even at Iowa can you major in Towering Literary Artistry.” For the record, at Iowa I took a seminar with Edward Carey, author of Observatory Mansions and Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City — it was about the use of art in lit. We read Sebald, Bruno Schulz, Chris Ware, Pullmann, Gulliver’s Travels. He jumped up and down about making our stuff WEIRDER. A great class, so up my alley, and so unlike what people think Iowa is. Kevin Brockmeier taught there. Jim Crace visited for two weeks. Ben Marcus was in the running to replace Frank Conroy as director. There’s a long-standing Cheever/Yates-lovin’ conservative streak that runs through it, or at least there was, but then there’s Marilynne Robinson’s not particularly conventional “consciousness” approach and everyone who takes Ethan Canin winds up writing a “deep POV” story. In general, I get a little ornery when people reduce the varied work of 25 writers there each year to “Iowa fiction” or say the program flattens fiction. It’s just not really true, or wasn’t true of my time there at least.
But I suppose I should also at this point complexify the duality emphasized by the subtitle (THE Two Cultures of American Fiction) as THE only two cultures worth discussing. To represent the reality of the “cultures” in play, it seems like it would make sense to introduce another acronym into the mix, especially now, four years after publication, when nothing else more pressing is at stake in the world.
To yin the yang of the reductive MFA/NYC duality, how about we add the acronym FTE, for “full-time employee,” AKA writers with non-academic jobs living somewhere other than NYC?
Having set hours and consistent pay stabilize my schedule and psyche in a generally positive way. In the year after grad school when I taught fiction and lit and non-fiction writing at Temple as an adjunct for a year, I found I could always procrastinate and keep myself from writing by preparing more for classes. And I felt like I was generally too focused on writing, too extended in that direction, talking with students about my primary interest and trying to infect them with my enthusiasm for something that flagged at the time in large part because my passion had become my employment. More importantly, making something like $7K a semester plus whatever freelance editing I managed to find, I was always worried about money and had to take on some credit card debt to make ends meet.
Working as a full-time salaried editor, generally applying advanced ninja editorial skills in an office setting, works for me. In particular, I spend my time out of work reading whatever I want, not the books and stories I’ve assigned or student work. In the first months after I re-entered the corporate editorial world, I remember saying that the great pleasure of having a non-academic editorial job was that I could read the greatest writing ever in the history of the world. I could only expose myself to truth and beauty and bright-shining prose! No more crappy stories written in an hour by stoned students!
About a dozen years later, I miss the classroom and organizing my ideas about fiction, miss the learning and laughing, but not enough to think about trying to teach again.
Anyway, if you’re an FTE somewhere other than NYC and don’t have an MFA yet wonder what such people think, this is an invaluable collection. If you’re an MFA/NYC type already, you can’t help but gaze into the cracked mirror of this collection and struggle a bit to put the pieces (of your history, your thoughts, where you stand on everything) back together again.
Thinking somewhat about this stuff is valuable, sure, no matter where you are these days. But in the end you retreat to that sacred little space where you make your true living when you read and write in peace.
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).