Genre or prison?

[Hey, everyone.  As a way of calling attention to my new blog Payperazzi, I'm double-posting this entry, which I wrote with the other blog in mind and is also posted there.  You can expect that most every week, once a week, I'll be posting to Payperazzi thoughts on writing, teaching, and teaching writing.]

Writer Cathy Day put up a great blog post last week in which she, with some help from Dinty Moore, discussed the reasons why getting a MA in creative writing (as opposed to a MFA)  is not a waste of time or money.   One benefit: The MA program allows young writers a few more years to decide which writing genre defines them.  Having made that decision, these writers are now prepared to apply to MFA programs, which all require you to focus on a single genre and to name that genre on your application.  Cathy is absolutely right that MFA programs typically do require this sort of specialization, but I think it's a fair to ask whether they should.   It's long been noted that the habit of defining writers by single genres is an American mindset, one not imitated by readers and writers in other countries.  It's not uncommon in Britain or Ireland, for example, for an author to write novels, short stories, radio plays, film scripts, and poetry over the course of a career--and maybe at the same time!  In America such a writer is regarded as a curious, almost inexplicable, exception to rule; and the writer might even meet suspicion from the literary policemen of our culture, as if one can't possibly be serious about writing the Great American Novel if one also likes to dabble in sestinas.  It's sort of the capitalistic model applied to a writing career: Do one thing; do it over and over and over again; anything other use of your time represents sinful inefficiency.   Henry Ford built a lot of cars this way.

The problem is, acting as a writer is not the same as being a cog in a manufacturing assembly line.  Practice at one genre inevitably helps one with various aspects of another genre.  What better way for a fiction writer to enhance her dialogue that to write plays?  What better way to for the same writer to practice precision and economy in her descriptions that to write poetry? But even these equations, while true, seem incomplete because they suggest that the only reason a person writes in one genre is to serve the needs of that person's "real" genre.  It's the Henry Ford model all over again, just stated differently.  The fact is that every writer, and I mean every single one, no matter how young or old, has a lot inside of him or her that is begging to be chewed over, imagined, elucidated, and articulated.  These may be subjects of great private and emotional importance or they might be exterior and intellectual or even political concerns.  And to take on one of these different subjects aptly the writer will probably need at one point to embrace another genre than the one he's best known for.   But when the writer does take on the subject, he'll immdiately feel an artistic rush of feeling that makes him say, This is exactly what I need to be writing right at this moment.  And finally what the writer recognizes at the end of the day is growth, both as a person and an artist.

This subject of genre flexibility, as you may have guessed, is one of special concern to me.  Through high school and college I wrote both poetry and fiction.  In graduate school I also discovered that I really liked composing plays.  I focused on poetry for my MFA degree but fiction for my Ph.D dissertation.   During my tenure at UCA, I've taught almost every genre we teach in the creative writing program, and I've published in them all.  Just this past week, I proofread galleys of  a long personal essay on marathon running that I'm publishing in 1966; I proofread galleys of a one-act play that I'm publishing in Foliate Oak; I finished a crown of sonnets that I started in my Wednesday night Topics in Creative Writing class; and I edited a couple short stories that I've written this semester to prepare them to submit to journals. I find it difficult to qualify any of these activities as wasteful or a distraction from what I'm "supposed" to be doing.   I'm supposed to be doing all of them.

At UCA's MFA program we are unique in NOT insisting that our students stick to a single genre.  Admittedly, this is a virtue forced upon us by the fact that we are a new program with relatively few faculty.  The only way to make sure our students get the number of classes they need is for them to take many of the same classes together; this means they are often "forced" to take classes in genres outside of the ones by which they originally defined themselves.  But we're discovering that our students our benefiting in profound and unexpected ways from this arrangement.  Two students who came to the program thinking of themselves as poets--and still very much are--wrote novels in my Novel Writing Workshop class that they now want to revise and use as their theses.  One of these students, having caught the bug, started a second novel almost as soon as she finished the first for me last spring.  Another student who was admitted to the program on the strength of her nonfiction has found that she is growing as a science fiction and fantasy writer, even while she continues to write nonfiction.  Yet another student, a talented and committed young poet, just had his first publication the other day: a piece of nonfiction.  And I know the whole group had their eyes opened last spring by the poetry workshop they took with Terry Wright, our resident master lyricist and current dean.  In a more conventional program, our students would have been denied these formative experiences.  And it's not just that they are growing in other genres, they are growing as writers period.  Including the genre they "specialize" in.

The problem with enforcing genre prisons isn't just that they hamper budding young writers, however.  In my opinion, all writers should see themselves as young writers their whole career; they should welcome each new project as a new challenge; indeed, they should seek out new challenges, even if that means going outside of genre.

Me and my writing machines, Part 2

(This is the continuation of a post about my history with writing machines.  Fiction writer and blogger Cathy Day has issued a challenge for any and all bloggers to document how the technology they use, and how they use the technology, has evolved.  You can check out her story here.  Meanwhile, you can check out the beginning of my story in my previous post.  After you finish this here Part 2, dear reader, why don't you write up your own history with writing machines?  But please do link to mine, if you don't mind.)

By the time I entered graduate school I was a proficient typist but hardly a fast one.  Suddenly, with my Mac's keyboard, I felt like I was zooming.   The idea that I could write faster than I could type was long gone.  It seemed crazy that I ever believed that.  Thing is, though, at George Mason I only used the computer for document creation.  There was no online culture in the late 80s/early 90s-- because there wasn't a world wide web yet.  It took me five years to earn my MFA; then I taught as an adjunct for two years.  Then, in 1993, newly married, I began a second graduate program, this one a Ph.D. program at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.   Of course I brought my Mac with me.  It was still going strong.  Before I left the DC area for Lafayette I ponied up for a personal laser printer.  A computer literate friend of mine sold me on the idea, saying they were the wave of the future.  It sounded like--and was--a much more elegant, even beautiful machine than the terrible dot matrix printers I was used to.  I was so ready to give them up that I essentially succumbed to an indulgence.  The printer looked something like the picture on the left.  I loved having the personal laser printer, but I eventually decided it was a mistake.  The machine was heavy for one; worse, the replacement cartridges were ridiculously expensive, equal to about 1/4 of the cost of the machine itself.

In our first semester at ULL, my wife, in a Research Methods class, learned about something called
e-mail, and her professor insisted the whole class sign up for it.  So I did too.  I sent a few experimental e-mails but didn't really use it much, not until later in our Louisiana stay.  Even then it wasn't something I felt compelled to check regularly.  While we were at ULL the internet started taking babysteps.  America Online and Prodigy got big, and the chat room culture started to develop.  I pretty much ignored all that.  I had classes to complete and stories to write.  (It was a Ph.D. in English, but one that included a large creative writing component.)  In my last year there, I also had an infant son.  If I ever went "online" (and I can't remember the mechanism exactly because when we first started at ULL not only did Google not exist but neither did its immediate predecessors, like Alta Vista) it was to look at the holdings of the LSU library and other libraries.  Meanwhile, I did eventually need to replace my original Mac with the newer, somewhat prettier Mac Classic.  I remember it looking like the one in the picture.  This was during Apple's dark years without Steve Jobs.  Rumors started that their products weren't as pristine as they used to be--and I knew people at ULL that wouldn't think of even going near a Mac--but I remained loyal, if only because all my word processing files were in a program that only worked on Macs.  If I switched to a PC, I could never again open up my files.  All those stories and papers would be lost!  Speaking of lost, I nearly lost my dissertation in 1997 shortly before I was supposed to turn it in.  The file I was using got corrupted and wouldn't open--a common problem back when everything we wrote was stored on 3.5 inch discs.  (A feature of both Macs and PCs back in the 80s and 90s.)  I held my breath and tried to open a backup file I had made (and which was probably stored on the same disc).  Yes!  It worked!  Now I could graduate!

We moved to Arkansas in 1997.  Within a couple years of our coming here, the internet was going gangbusters.  It's all you heard about.  And while I'd started using it for a lot more than checking library holdings, I still wasn't somebody who wanted to be on the computer all day.  If anything, this technological revolution was throwing me a nasty personal challenge.  I'd begun graduate school in a time when most people still didn't own a personal computer; I'd finished it in a time when the internet still didn't rule the world.  I was trying to jumpstart both my career as a teacher and my career as a writer, to say nothing of trying to be an active father--in other words, I had no free time--and suddenly technology I had no experience with was being used regularly in the classroom by several of my colleagues.  Despite the fact that I used a computer everyday, I felt like a Luddite.  I was done with my formal education, and now I had so much more to learn.  I did try; I really did.  I remember one long ago student complimenting me on how capable and willing I was with email.  Hah!  I was stupidly proud of the comment, but of course it seems like not too many years later when we started hearing that "email is for old people."

When I went from being a part time instructor to a full-time one at UCA, I received my own office and my own PC.  So now I worked on both kinds of personal computers, but sharing files was impossible.  Some things were Mac files--mostly my creative output--and some things were PC files: mostly work stuff.  Given how clearly dominant PCs were in both the business and publishing worlds, I realized I might be limiting myself by continuing to only generate short stories on my Mac, but that's what I did.  Meanwhile, about a year or so after they were introduced in 1998 I upgraded to one of the first generation iMacs.  As silly as they look now, those bright boxes with their handles on top were considered revolutionary at the time, and I loved mine.  Not only was it cute--an indigo colored computer!--but it was a workhouse.  The thing never died.  It barely hiccupped.  I wrote my first (never to be published, thank god) novel on it, and my followup (Burnt Norway),  along with an ungodly number of short stories and teacher material of all sorts.  Realizing 3.5 inch discs were both unreliable and on their way out, I started using an external CD-ROM drive and CD-RWs to store backup files of everything.  (My budget version iMac opened most CD-ROMS but not CD-RWs.)  I still have the CD-RWs around, although I never have need for them anymore.  The CD-ROM, you'll recall, was quickly outpaced by the jump drive and then, about two seconds later, by the emminently practical, and more powerful, portable hard drive.

After a while, though, I just could no longer get software to work on my beloved indigo blue iMac.  So about six years ago I upgraded once more to the latest iMac line: those with wide flat screens that sit atop a stem.  (An idea that supposedly came to Steve Jobs as he stared at sunflowers.)  It's a great machine.   I wrote my Van Gogh novel on it, along with the three (mostly top secret) other novels.  It works fantastically well, like Macs usually do; but the best part of all is that when I bought it I could also purchase Word for Mac.  Now I could work in Word regardless of what computer I was using.  This literally changed my life.  No more worries about how to convert when a journal insisted on Word documents (as most did).  No more emailing myself large blocks of text and then playing with them on my work computer.  No, everything was in Word from the get-go.  Things got even better when I signed up for Dropbox two years ago.  Now, I didn't even need a jump drive or portable hard drive to carry my files from computer to computer.  I could just store it to Dropbox and access it anywhere.  What an impossible luxury.  (By the way, the picture on the right shows my actual, lovely, dear current computer--my favorite writing machine of all time!)


My entry into social media and blogging are relatively new developments.  For years I'd heard that "you have to be on Facebook."   I resisted for the longest time but finally signed up a few years ago.  For the first year or so I was barely active at all on it.  Even now, I don't check it everyday.  I'm just not someone who thinks to run to Facebook as soon as something happens to me, even less so as it's happening to me.  Meanwhile, I started on Twitter only last March.  As someone who tends to write too long (sorry!) it's probably good for me that on Twitter you're limited to 140 characters.  I find Twitter interesting, but truth is I don't check it nearly as much as I should.  And I barely ever post.  It's like texting.  I can do it.  I just don't do it very much.  That will probably change, just like everything that's ever gone on between me and writing technology.  One exception to my late adaptor habits: For some reason when the iPads began appearing in 2010 I became very interested very quickly, despite the fact that owning an iPhone has never interested me.   The e-reader component interested me more than anything, along with being able to do things like watch Netflix.  So I eventually bought one.  It's a handy device.  I use it in a variety of ways--checking email, surfing the web, reading iBook files--and it's how I signed on to Twitter.  When I'm on the road, it's how I check on and post to Facebook.  But I don't really write with it.  Some people--some of my students I mean--can type using that tiny little iPad virtual keyboard.  I can't, even though otherwise I can and do type like a demon nowadays.  I've had so much practice.

My biggest online writing presence, something I started with my current iMac, is this blog.  I began it in 2009 during my sabbatical.  At the time I thought it might be interesting to share with the world what I was learning about Van Gogh and how I was using what I was learning in the novel about him I was writing.  Even from the start, however, I did not want the blog to be just about me or  my novel or Van Gogh.  I wanted to discuss historical fiction generally.  And I have, although I've wandered into other subjects from time to time: like what happens in my classes, and what's happening at my university, and what is my history with writing machines!  Finally, the real subject of my blog is writing.  Period.  And that makes sense.  It's what I know the most about.  I love blogging, but typical of me, by the time I started doing it some people began saying that blogs were passé.   Maybe they are.  Maybe Twitter is doing them in.  But as a long form writer, I can't stay away.

Me and my writing machines, Part 1

Cathy Day, through her Big Thing blog, has issued another challenge to the creative writing blogosphere: Give an account of your personal history with writing machines.  Click here to check out Cathy's very thorough, and thoroughly entertaining, history.  Here's mine.  The only writing machines I touched prior to high school were pencils and pens, which must mean that my teachers never required anything that wasn't handwritten, though I can barely recall.  It wasn't until my tenth grade year that I even took a keyboarding class, this at DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Maryland.  Except we didn't call it keyboarding then.  We called it typing.  Because that's what we did: on a collection of clunky old metal machines that were probably donated to the school by their previous users.  The course was "taught" by a chubby, prematurely balding Trinitarian brother with short, fading blonde hair and a rubicund face.   I say "taught" because what his teaching amounted to was mostly calling out sequences for us to pound out on those archaic devices.  (No he didn't blindfold us, but that probably would have been a good idea.)  Sometimes you really did have to pound, because the keys on old, non-electric typewriters got stuck pretty easily.  I suppose the teacher must have graded our work--since I did get a grade--but I can't remember that either.  As fusty and antiquated as a typing class sounds today, I was quite happy to take it, glad for the opportunity, and I can tell you my typing skills improved.  Or, rather, they came into existence for the first time.  This despite an accident that happened that semester as I tried to cut through a piece of frozen hamburger meat with an extremely sharp knife.  (It was such a stupid thing to do I'm not going to say anything more about it except the following.) Yes, I severed myself, nearly slicing my left pinkie to the bone.  (I still bear the scar.)  For weeks I had to keep the finger heavily bandaged and as a result, in typing class, I developed the habit of moving my left hand ring finger over to type As and Qs and Zs.  It's a habit I still have today and can't break.  Part of my permanent muscle memory.

As a result of this class I could begin typing my high school term papers, such as they were, and indeed I did whenever required to during my junior and senior years.  I can't remember much about the typewriter we kept around our house except that it was heavy, black, functional, and decidedly non-electric.  The summer before I left home for college--that is, the University of Virginia in 1979--I bought an electric portable typewriter.  I recall searching the classified ads in the Washington Post and seeing a notice placed by a woman in northern Virginia.  She turned out to be a friendly, cheerful, middle-aged lady with a trim helmet of short gray hair, a kind face, and small, smart glasses.  When I asked why she was getting rid of it, she explained that she was a freelance writer and needed to upgrade.  To what I can't recall, certainly not to a word processor since no one used them then.  So it must have been to a fancier, bigger electric model such as IBM was pumping out.  The machine she sold me--for something like twenty dollars--was a handsome sky blue thing, smart looking and quite compact, fitting easily into what I like to think of as a sleek, contemporary case, although to use that vocabulary today on something as clumsy as a typwriter sure sounds ludicrous.  (In my memory at least it looks a lot like the machine in the picture above.)  That typewriter saw me through all four years of college and several more after as I carried it from address to address to address to address through Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.  I typed dozens of short stories and poems on it as well as academic papers of all kinds.  I was thrilled that it could handle erasable ribbon, given the quantity of my mistakes; but I have to admit that it also frustrated me sometimes.  I remember one time having to manually yank the ribbon through the machine word by word as I typed because something was wrong with the mechanism.  (Black fingers, black fingers.)  I also remember one time during my last semester at UVA when I decided to just write my damn politcal theory term paper--in my small, cramped block print--because, although I was a semi-experienced typist by then, I still thought I could write faster than I could type.  (The TA who read my paper thoroughly enjoyed it except that about 2/3 of the way through he could no longer follow what I was saying, because my handwriting had degenerated so badly.  He apologetically gave me an A-, which was probably a lot better grade than I deserved.)

A few years after I graduated from UVA I started in the MFA program at George Mason University.  I still was working on that typewriter.  In the interim years, I had typed a variety of essays and stories and a lot of really bad poetry on that machine.  Also, of course, job applications, and, for a year and a half or so, a series of feature articles that I wrote on an occasional basis for a newspaper in southern Maryland.  When I started at George Mason most of the other students in my workshop courses were using typewriters too, but the few who typed their poems into computers produced work that looked awfully pretty on the printout.  I remember my poetry professor, Peter Klappert, warning one student not to let the stylish look of the computerized page fool her.  In other words, You're writing the same crap everyone else is, honey, and don't forget it.  (Actually, Peter would never say "honey" to anybody.  He probably wouldn't say "crap" either.  Maybe "garbage.")  I began to notice that the secretaries in the English Department office were typing into word processors instead of typewriters--this was brand new.  Meanwhile, my father, a chemist who had recently started working at a USDA lab in Beltsville, Maryland found himself surrounded by a gang of first generation Mac cultists.  They talked him into buying a Mac for his home office and then Dad, with the righteous dedication of a convert, started pressuring me to buy one.  Any other kind of computer besides a Mac was unthinkable!   In the winter of my third year at George Mason (academic year 1988-89), I gave in--rather willingly, I must say.  At that point the writing was on the wall, so to speak, for the old technology, and truth be told I was sick to death of typewriters.  With student loan money I bought myself a Mac (it pretty much looked liked the one in the picture) and never turned back.

Next post: The rest of the story: a life of both PCs and Apples as the latter gets simultaneously bigger and smaller.  I discover email (gasp), then the internet, then (much later) Facebook, then (only recently) Twitter.

Now for all the reading

Whenever I tell people I'm teaching a novel writing class, the first question that inevitably comes up is, "Does this mean you have to read all your students' novels?"  Well, truth is, different teachers have different approaches to such a class, and so they each will have their own stories to tell--which is why I'm hoping that an AWP panel on this subject, one that has been proposed for the 2014 Seattle conference by fearless novel writing instructor Cathy Day, gets accepted--but the long and short of it is: Yes, that's exactly what it means.  For me, at least, this is what it means.  I don't think it's fair to ask a student to commit to such an ambitious project like finishing the complete a draft of a novel without also offering to read it and give her feedback.  After all, the students are making one heck of an investment of time and personal energy for your class; it's the least you can do for them.  Even if that means extending the spring semester into your summer.

Our spring semester has been over for three weeks, so lately I've been delving into the tall stack of my students's novels.  (Btw, I offered to let them post their novels to our class web site instead of actually giving me a paper copy, but nearly every single one of them preferred to just give me the paper copy.  One student, after she printed out her novel, felt strongly that the next time I teach the class I must insist on them printing out paper copies.  She said doing so was a powerful experience for her.  She hadn't quite understood her accomplishment until she saw how thick was her printed novel.)  As I've noted in the past, it was a mixed group of graduate students and undergrads in the class.  So far, I've read three of the graduate students' novels and four of the undergrads.  (Although two of those undergrad novels I had read mostly while the semester was on, because they were in a peer review group with me.)  As much as I love to read and do read it's a sad fact that I'm not a very fast reader.  This is a great quality to have when one reads poetry--you want to fully and slowly ingest a poem's images and its rhythms--but a bad quality for someone who needs to get through, and comment on, over a dozen books.  And hopefully before the summer is done!  To complicate matters even more, I have to get ready to teach a summer semester course--it begins one week from today--and I need to prepare a study abroad proposal for the summer of 2014.  The good news is that I'm finding, as I found the last time I taught the course, that reading my students' novels seems to go faster than reading other novels.  Of course, they are relatively short novels; but more importantly, I think it matters that I know all the authors and even the conditions under which the novels were written.  That ups the intrinsic interest and allows me to move faster.

So far, just like the last time I taught the course, the results are a fascinating mix.  First, the ranges of styles and subjects is perfectly intriguing.  So far I've encountered a near-future sci-fi story; a fantasy story; a highly literary murder/suspense story set in Little Rock; a coming of age novel about a group of college-aged guys in small town Pennsylvania; a YA novel that details a culture clash between a transgendered protagonist and the bible belt town he lives in; a story about a senior in high school who tries to find her bearings as she negotiates the infamous warfare of friendships and boyfriends; and a historical novel, set in 1930s Arkansas,  about the tragically bad choice one woman makes in husbands.  This kind of variety makes the reading burden much lighter,  and I know that the remaining novels I have yet to read are just as various.  The other thing I'm noting about the novels so far is their overall quality.  You'd think that having to write a draft of a novel in one semester would lead to some mighty bad prose as well as some ridiculous, untenable premises.  While I can't say my students' writing has been error free--this is to be expected in a first draft, after all--I've also encountered some passages of evocative description and many stretches of effective dialogue.  More to the point, except for maybe one of them, none of the books has collapsed under the impossibility of its hurriedly thrown together story.  All three of the novels from my graduate students are quite good and quite well-structured.  Amazingly well-structured, actually, given the furnace of activity in which they were composed, and given how busy the lives of those students are.  But my undergraduates' novels have also evidenced some inventive descriptions as well as very deft plotting.  Even in the one undergraduate novel that evidenced crippling structural issues I saw the author aptly play with situations so that the dramatic tension was usefully ramped up in key scenes, so that the protagonist found herself in hotter and hotter water.  That was very smart fiction writing--and, again, that's in the novel that I thought was the least successful of all I've read so far.

I'm just past the halfway mark with my students' novels, and so I can't yet offer any conclusive take.  But I can tell you that I'm honestly enjoying the experience of reading through them.  It doesn't feel like a burden as much as a chance to get know even better all these interesting people who filled up my classroom this spring.  To get to know them, that is, from the inside.  To get to know their imaginations.  I can also tell you that reading these books gives me hope for the future of novel writing.  One student who eventually soured on the course told me that he thought it was a terrible idea to insist on a draft in one semester; he said that any monkey could type out 55,000 words if  you let it type long enough.  (Yes, that's actually the metaphor he used.)  He was certain that my students' drafts would amount to nothing much better than monkey typing: long enough but artistically wtihout merit.  So far, that has definitively not been the case.  So far I can fairly say that I had some talented novelists in class this semester, people who understood how to form an affecting story over 55-60,000 words.  They are showing that to me every day I read, every page I turn.

Novel writing class returns

After a break of two-and-a-half years, Novel Writing Workshop returns to my university this semester.  In the interim period, dozens of students have asked me about the class and scores of oral histories have been told; a few students lobbied my department's Chair hard for its return; and, not insignificantly, our first collection of graduate students matriculated.  In some ways, it's a very different pedagogical landscape now than when I taught the course a couple years ago.  Then, novel writing workshops were still relatively rare and excitingly new, certainly on the undergraduate level, and the idea that the students would not just start but finish a novel in one semester struck me as potentially hazardous: to GPAs; to other course work; to jobs; to relationships; most of all, to sleep schedules. Yet that's what I asked the students to do.  And nearly all of them succeeded.  Now, novel writing workshops are a considerably less unusual phenomenon.  Indeed, sometimes I think they are everywhere.   Still more typical on the graduate as opposed to the undergraduate level--although one of our graduate students, who was an undergrad a year ago, informs that he took a novel writing course in college--they are, in any case, far more characteristic of creative writing degree programs than in the past.  It can't be coincidental that at the AWP conference in Boston this year, a panel will be held on not just on promoting the idea of the novel writing workshop but on the fact of it; that is, the nuts and bolts of how different experienced instructors of the course have taught it.  I think it's even fair to say that novel writing workshops are becoming the cornerstone of progressive fiction writing programs.  And in part this is because in the last three years those who teach the course have been talking to each other about it--Cathy Day's blog The Big Thing has been especially instructive--pushing each other, motivating each other, spreading the gospel.

So I'm glad it's back at my school, and I know the students are too.  But I admit to being a bit nervous.  In the intervening years since last I taught the course, a mythology has developed around it, a retrospective awe.  Students have told me that for years, ever since they selected our major, they have been eagerly anticipating the chance to experience this one course.  Can this semester possibly meet their high expectations?  Yes, it can.  But, here's the scary part: It's all up to them.  More than any other course I teach, in my novel writing class, the students teach themselves and teach each other.  I offer them a platform through which they can learn about novel writing, but they have to take advantage of it, and they have to encourage each other to take advantage of it.  While I do separate the class into small peer review groups, there will be no full class workshopping.  As I emphasized at our first meeting the other night, the course is about production more than anything else.   The last time I taught the course, again to all undergraduates, the room was fully with unusually mature and unusually talented people.  What the course offered was exactly what most of them were looking for: space, opportunity, deadlines.  Almost entirely seniors, they'd workshopped plenty in their college career.  What they wanted from Novel Writing was something else,  and they were eager to take control of it.  There were certainly bumps along the way that semester, but for the most part--with a notable exception or two--a genuine esprit de corps ruled.

I can only hope my current group has the same experience.  It's a fresh batch, with different backgrounds.  For the first time, graduate students are participating along with undergraduates.  That's a new dynamic for me, and for both of those student populations.  And there's another professor sitting in!  Not even from my own department!  Like last time, we will read Chris Baty's No Plot No Problem (for practical motivation) and a couple of short novels (as models for storytelling over a reasonably short space), and we will periodically break off into peer groups.  But mostly we will be writing.  I'll be writing along with them, which actually is going to be more of a challenge for me this time than last.  Mainly because right now I am in the latter stages of a novel I started early last semester.  I had intended on exploring this novel idea through the Novel Workshop, but when the class was delayed from fall until spring I didn't feel like waiting.  Now I will need to hurry to finish my draft, then immediately start another novel--the subject of which I haven't even clarified for myself yet.   Hard to know what the next few months will bring, but I'm sure it will be an adventure.  There will be exhileration and despair.  There will be careful planning and last second inspiration and a great deal of fatigue.  Some will give up; most, I hope and expect, will soldier on.  Some will get pissed at me and at their peer reviewers.  Some will get pissed at the novels we read.  But if they each individually can hold it together, when the finish line comes they will have learned more than from perhaps any other writing course.  And they will have learned it the best possible way: by doing it themselves.

Publication announcement: I'm happy to report that another chapter from my Van Gogh novel will soon appear in print.  The journal Versal, an international literary magazine based in Amsterdam, is publishing a chapter from the section of the book that details Van Gogh's Paris years.  The point of view character is Suzanne Valadon, a post-Impressionist painter who circulated widely among the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and even modeled for a few of them.  During my research for the novel, I read an account she'd written of seeing Van Gogh at a Paris party.  I used some details from that account to construct the chapter.  The issue of Versal will appear in May, accompanied by a launch party in Amsterdam.  Really sorry to have to miss that one.  While I will be in London in June for the Great Writing Conference, there's simply no way for me to make it to Amsterdam in May.  Ah, well.

AWP Day 1 (10,000 stories)

Here I am at the biggest AWP ever, a scary thought given what a monster the conference always is. This year we've completely taken over not one but two landmark hotels in downtown Chicago, to say nothing of all the conference goers who are staying in other hotels throughout the city or with friends--and that's a considerable number, at least based on one idiosyncratic sample: the people I've talked to. You know AWP is in town when poetry is being broadcast in the elevators, when wine is flowing like tap water, when not businessmen but creative writing teachers occupy the fancy end-of-hallway suites at the Hilton Chicago (yes, we actually got one, by some strange turns of events), when almost everyone you pass in the street looks between 25 and 35 years old and is carrying the signature white canvas bag with red straps as well as a look of quiet, elevated intensity. True story. I was walking down the sidewalk to a breakfast place yesterday morning and happened to pass two women. One woman clearly had the other pinned, talking in a loud, aggressive voice only inches from her face, her hands cutting arcs through the air for emphasis. I came closer, close enough to hear. What was the first woman yelling about? City corruption? The price of gas? The job situation? Hardly. She was describing an exercise she uses in her poetry writing class! How many times do you hear that walking down a city street at 8:00 in the morning?

Welcome to my updates from AWP 2012. It's a different conference for me this year. Normally, my university extends some (rather limited) travel funds with the idea that I go to sessions that will inform my teaching. And I do. Some years my head is so full of session talk there's barely room for a stray thought. This year, however, I received funds to present in a session and to man UCA's bookfair table. We're promoting both our new MFA program, the Arkansas Writers MFA Workshop, and Toad Suck Review, our national literary magazine. This is just to say that I won't be wandering the session hallways as much this year and any report I offer from AWP can't pretend to be comprehensive, just one conference goer's conference story. One of 10,000 such stories being written this weekend.

Yesterday I went to two sessions. My own session, about the value of undergraduate creative writing exchanges, was put in an unncessarily large room, but the crowd was respectable and very interested in the subject. A few of them came up to us afterward and said how thoroughly they enjoyed the session, which was very gratifying. I know how thoroughly unenjoyable some AWP sessions can be, and so as we were talking I kept wondering how we and what we were saying was being received. The other session I attended was about novel writing workshops in MFA programs: how many are actually taught, how they are taught, how they might be better taught. It was a very crowded session with a passionately interested audience. Clearly the subject mattered greatly to them: graduate students who would love to write novels for their MFA theses but currently get very little support for doing so from their workshop classes. Run by Cathy Day, that invaluable agitator for allowing longer forms in workshop classes, it was a fasicnating session, both pragmatic and inspiring. It's fascinating to see the extent to which the idea of a novel writing class has caught on recently. I remember attending a session on the novel writing workshop at the 2005 AWP in Vancouver. The session was run by a British writing program, the one at Bath Spa University, and it seemed like such a novelty. I know most of the American audience members for the session were completely befuddled by the idea. Now, seven years later, novel writing workshops are popping up everywhere, and taught in drastically different ways, and not always in beneficial ways. (I heard some really bizarre anecdotes in the session yesterday.) It's a fertile, exciting time for the Novel Writing Workshop. There's no one fixed pedagogy and there's an awful lot of experimenting going on, mostly by committed, inventive teachers who simply want to give their students a chance to work on novel inside the program curriculum not outside it, as if almost always the case.

The rest of the day I hung out in the bookfair. I saw many of the magazines and programs profiled that I always see profiled at AWP, along with some quirky new ones. I bought the new book of poems by Megan Kaminski, a writer who teaches at the University of Kansas and who introduced UCA to the idea of the undergraduate creative writing exchange. Her book is called Desiring Map (Coconut Books). I also happened upon an enthusiastic indie press called Write Bloody. Among the books they were selling was a volume of zombie poetry. I had to

laugh--and I had to buy it. I know so many people--students, former students, colleagues--who truly get a kick out of all things zombie. Not sure what that says about our times. The book, by the way, features some very serious poems. It was a fun time chatting with folks who came by our table and visiting with folks at other tables. We sold some TSRs and talked up our new MFA. I also ran into several old friends and colleagues, which always happens at AWP, but I will have to talk about that phenomenon in another post, as this one has already gone on too long.

Up to 150

Well, at least the first hundred were fast. This post counts as no. 150 for Creating Van Gogh, a project started back in 2009 and still continuing despite some rather obvious fallow periods. I can't say that when I started Creating Van Gogh, with the specific intention to write about issues I was encountering as I worked through my Van Gogh novel Days on Fire, that I expected it would last into 2012. But I didn't expect it wouldn't either. I was simply ready to get going and see what happened. As I mention above, that first 100--fueled by a fall sabbatical and by constantly encountering new concerns about, and new challenges in, my manuscript--were written in only nine months or so. It's taken me a year and a half to add another fifty posts and reach the "sesquicentennial" mark. Clearly I slowed in my postings after the summer of 2010, but I've also broadened the scope of the blog. Hopefully to good effect. After all, if the purpose of this blog is only to write about the composition of one novel, then after the novel is done there's no point in still going on with it. But that's not the only purpose, and I think there's a good deal to be gained by going on. If nothing else, I've made new friends and colleagues through this blog, one being writer Cathy Day, who is not only writing historical fiction but attempting to remake how creative writing is taught in the academy, a subject of great concern to me too, as you can probably tell by my constant references to the university where I teach. Another such colleague is Erika Dreifus, internet wunderkind, who has not only produced a terrific collection of short historical fiction, Quiet Americans, but who maintains several great web resources for writers, including her blog, Practicing Writing. Creating Van Gogh has also allowed me to raise and explore questions related to historical fiction generally, not just my Van Gogh novel; to discuss various issues going on in the academy and the culture; to recommend books I've enjoyed; to report on conferences like AWP; to tell you about my latest fictional projects; to let off steam (for instance about the debacle of defunding the National Writing Project and other important literacy programs); and even to think through conumdrums like literary agents, as I did in my last post. I've tried not to stray too far the subject of historical fiction, and I've strenuously kept this blog from being about "what I ate for lunch," but I do recognize that to give Creating Van Gogh new life and to keep it going, I can and should comment on several different writing and fictional concerns. Because historical fiction is fiction, first and foremost, and it has a lot more in common with creative writing generally than with history writing. At least that's what I think, and that's what I'm going to keep saying, as long as Creating Van Gogh is around.

Here's hoping for a 150 more posts in the coming years. And let's hope too that they are a fruitful 150. Thanks to everyone who reads.

Interview avec moi

As readers of this blog know, on Monday I shared with you a great interview I conducted with historical fiction writer Erika Dreifus. I thought today I should pass along word that I've been interviewed on another writer's blog. Her name is Cathy Day and the blog is titled The Big Thing. It's a fantastic resource for anyone who teaches, or who is concerned about the teaching of, creative writing in the academy. I actually blogged about The Big Thing a couple weeks ago. Cathy has long been interested in the issue of how to make the creative writing workshop useful to students who want to work in longer forms (like the historical novel). After reading a couple of my December posts about a novel writing class I taught, Cathy contacted me and later decided to interview me for The Big Thing, asking me to explain how and why I structured the class as I did. She divided the interview into multiple parts, the first of which debued yesterday. Check it out!

Check out "The Big Thing"

I returned home yesterday from the AWP Conference with various thoughts stinging my head, particularly about the organization's approach to pedagogy generally and its decision specifically to eliminate pedagogy forum sessions from the conference in 2012 and beyond. I think, however, that I will save those thoughts for a future post. Today I'd like to alert readers to a great and passionate blog titled The Big Thing, created and maintained by Indiana writer Cathy Day. Cathy is and has been extremely concerned about the ways in which the traditional creative writing workshop--regardless of genre--discourages students from tackling larger forms like the novel, the novel-in-stories, the long poem, the linked essay collection, and the book-length memoir. She discusses this subject on her blog and offers ideas to teachers on how to afford space in their classes for the longer forms and ideas to students on how to pursue them. A superb and compelling introduction to Cathy's point of view is her essay "The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia's Novel Crisis," published recently in the online magazine The Millions. Believe me, the piece has generated a lot of buzz. If you are someone who aspires to tackle longer projects like the novel--as I assume you are if you read Creating Van Gogh--and especially if you are someone who either takes or teaches creative writing classes at one level or another, you need to examine Cathy's blog. It is riveting and thoughtful reading, full of useful anger and provocative strategizing. It will make you completely rethink the idea of the creative writing course, in ways both subtle and significant.

New Year Notes and News

I thought it would be a good idea to begin a new year, and another year of Creating Van Gogh, with some short items I've been saving up and which might be of interest to readers of this blog.

* Just the other day, our local paper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, featured a guest column by Chuck Klosterman about the continuing--and growing--popular fascination with zombies. Klosterman referenced the current AMC network series The Walking Dead, and (of course) George Romero's iconic film Night of the Living Dead, but I wish he had mentioned the new novel Brains by my friend and UCA colleague Robin Becker. Narrated by a sentient zombie, a former college English professor, Brains is a decidedly postmodern take on the zombie phenomenon, both sending up and paying homage to its mythology. The book is also a real hoot: chockful of snarky pop culture asides and literary zingers and starring a loveable cast of zombie misfits, each of whom is endowed with a surprising, un-zombie like ability. It's a quick read, one that will actually have you rooting for the zombies rather than the humans. If that sounds entertaining to you--and by no means do you need to be a follower of zombie literature to enjoy the book--give it a shot. Brains has been on the market for only 8 or 9 months and has already earned a devoted following. One might even call it a new "cult classic"!

* Fiction writer/book reviewer/blogging and web site whiz Erika Dreifus has a new collection of short stories coming out this month. The collection, partly historical in nature, is titled Quiet Americans and is published by Last Light Studio Books. In the coming weeks look for my review of Quiet Americans on this blog. Then, after the review appears, I will interview Erika about the writing of historical fiction. That interview, too, will appear on Creating Van Gogh.

* Also this month, I will be interviewed by author and teacher Cathy Day on her blog about issues related to teaching creative writing to undergraduates. When the interview appears, I will let you know about it on this space.

I wish everyone--no matter where on the globe they are accessing this blog--a good and peaceful start to 2011. And I hope many exciting developments come your way in the next year.