Q: Elizabeth Clementson wrote a
guest column at MOBYLives putting down writing programs. Steve Almond wrote
a column defending them. This generated a lot of letters.
In the meantime,
Lynn Freed had an excerpt from a forthcoming book appear in Harper's. "Doing
Time: My Years in the Creative Writing Gulag."
A: My reaction to the Freed piece was, how, or why, does she do this for
a living? She is short-changing the students, then blaming what happens to them on
everybody but herself.
As Hemingway said about the man poling his boat in
the opening of Across the River and Into the Trees, if he doesn't want to
do it he should do something else.
Q: Mark Prichard said he found the key in the middle of the essay.
When, as an adult, I found in a Japanese piano teacher a woman of fierce and uncompromising standards, I felt immediately at home. ... I was taking the lessons because I loved to play, because I wanted to play better, and because a weekly lesson with a master of the instrument forced me not only to practice regularly but also to play in a way that would make her less likely to push me off a cliff.
Here's how he explained it.
For fuck's sake -- she's a bottom! She wants only to do well for fierce, uncompromising teacher who might, if she has not practiced her lessons assiduously enough, kill her. Toiling under this strict disciplinarian gives her life meaning. Of course she doesn't like teaching. She can take it, but she can't dish it out.
A: That's funny. And spot on.
Q: You sent MOBYlives an essay on writing programs.
What
happened?
A: Nothing.
Q: Maybe he hasn't gotten around to it yet.
A: A round tuit.
A round tuit looks like Kurt Vonnegut's drawing
of an asshole.
Q: Or a No Oprah logo.
A: Yes.
Q: Lynn Freed sounded like a woman who married a man for his money complaining that he treats her like a whore.
A: A woman who marries a man for his money is a whore.
A man who
works for a company, for a paycheck, is a whore.
But there are degrees of
whoring.
Q: What are they? For a writer?
A: For a writer, from least whoring to most, is technical writing, journalism,
advertising, and teaching creative writing in a university.
Technical writing
is cut-and-dried. It's straightforward. You write a technical manual, or a training
course, and get paid for it.
You don't have to censor yourself. Or flatter
anyone.
Journalism is puff-pieces and self-censorship.
Advertising
is even worse. You're trying to persuade someone that something bad for them, or
for the planet, or for society, is desirable to have, they deserve to have it, and
if they don't have it they are inferior to someone who does.
But teaching
writing in a university is worst of all, because you imply that, if students pay
to take your classes, they can become a writer, like you.
They won't.
At most, they'll become a writing teacher in a university.
They won't become
a novelist or memoir writer who can live off his or her writing because he or she
doesn't have anything to tell readers about life. About integrity. About hardship
and perseverance.
Their idea of hardship is whoring themselves teaching writing,
which they did of their own free will. What Gilbert Sorrentino called "The bittersweet
pain of being a neurotic Jew."
Q: I can see why writing instructors might not want to hear this.
A: Do you see why discussions of writing programs leave it out?
It's the personal compromise that dare not speak its name.
Q: The emperor's clothes.
A: Yes. Once you realize the emperor has no clothes on the discussion takes an ugly turn.
Q: Lynn Freed says "Talent is the naked emperor of writing programs."
A: What does that mean?
The students have no talent?
The
desire to be famous won't give you talent?
Talent is the sine qua non
of a career in writing?
There's nothing about writing you can't learn the
hard way.
If you apply yourself, if you practice, assiduously, you will get
better.
If you get better, others will recognize it. Editors, agents, publishers,
and readers.
What did Tolstoy say? "Vous-voulez écrire? Eh, bien-écrivez,
donc. Écrivez!"
You want to write? Very well then, write. Write!
What did Sinclair Lewis say, at a lecture" "You want to write? Go home
and write."
Quit wasting your time at lectures.
Talent isn't
the naked emperor of writing programs.
The teachers are selling wolftickets
is the naked emperor.
Listen, Lynn Freed was very elitist about her students.
She thought they were hicks. They didn't go to a good university, like she did.
But she is part of the machinery perpetuating the deceit. She is the point man for
the whole Goddamn operation.
Call it a Gulag though she may.
Q: Whew--white folks!
A: Did you know that if you are an undergraduate, taking a creative writing
course, your instructor is going to be an MFA candidate on a teaching assistantship,
in a graduate writing program?
It's going to be the untalented teaching the
untalented. And certifying them to advance to the next level.
Sure you can
advance to the next level. If you have the money.
Money talks and bullshit
walks.
Or, in this case, bullshit passes you with a pencil because you paid
up.
Bullshit whores herself. Then blames you for not having any talent.
Q: Whew--white folks!
A: Emerson said the first thing we ask when we meet a stranger is, "How
does that man earn a blameless livelihood, without dishonest customs?"
That's what I ask of a writer.
Does she teach writing? Does she win grants
and prizes? Are they from networking and mentoring--sucking up to a mentor, rather?
At least Nuala O'Faolain had the honesty to say she slept with a man she considered
a toad because that is how the patronage was handed out. The teaching jobs, the writing
assignments, the book contracts. The prizes, the fellowships.
Q: Whew--white folks!
A: Larry once yelled out, at a party, "I ONLY FUCK MY WIFE."
This was before he quit drinking.
Q: But you are topping from the bottom.
You're saying, "You
can shit on my shoulder, but don't wipe your ass with my hair."
A: It's the paranoia-critical method.