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 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.

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.