2013: Historical year for historical fiction

I've been thinking for several years now that we are living through a golden age for historical fiction.  Of course I realize that almost since novels have been written writers have played with the idea of setting their stories in earlier historical periods.  But I can't think of an era in which the ambition to do so is as widely embraced by solid, literary writers--even young literary writers--as it is now.  Again, I'm talking about literary historical fiction, not historical romance novels or historical mysteries, which have been popular for decades and will continue to be so.  I'm referring to literary fiction written by mainstream contemporary authors, authors who aspire to write serious, realistic books regardless of the era their books are set in, but who happen more and more to be setting their novels in the past.  And there may be no more evident proof for this trend than the awards-giving season just passed.  Four of the six books shortlisted for the 2013 Man-Booker Prize are historical fictions (including the eventual winner).  At least two of the five finalists for our own 2013 National Book Award are historical fictions (including the eventual winner).  And if you are of the ilk (as many are) to argue that historical fiction isn't just a matter of an author writing about a period of time before he or she was born but writing about an era of special historical interest (even if the author lived through it) or a period far enough in the past that it must be approached as an historical period not merely "the way we live now," then we should also count Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers (set in 70s New York) as historical fiction, bringing the total for National Book Award finalist up to 3 out of 5.  Furthermore, just last week I was listening to the radio show Here and Now on NPR while book reviewer Lynn Neary offered up her unranked recommendations for the best fictional reading of 2013.  Neary named seven books in all, six of which--that's right six out of seven--qualify as historical fictions.  And she didn't even include two of the more prominent historical novels from 2013: Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland and Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries.   Both of those are quite accomplished books, with The Luminaries, in my opinion, ranking as completely spectacular, one of the most memorable reading experiences I've had in a long time.  (Soon to come on this blog will be my own proselytizing  review of the book.) 

So what's going on?  Accepting my premise that we're living through a golden age of literary historical fiction, naturally leads to the question of Why.  Why are so many literary writers, both the young and the established, turning to previous eras for inspiration?  One obvious reason is implicit encouragement from publishers.  Just as, in the years following the astonishing success of the Harry Potter series and then the Twilight series, many writers thought to try their hand at YA--and, by the way, in college writing programs these days it's not uncommon to meet student writers seeking to specialize exclusively in YA, an unknown trend when I was a student in  a college writing program--as publishers let go their prejudice against historical fiction as a merely a matter of pretty costumes and exotic houses, as more of these books get published and earn acclaim for their authors, up-and-coming authors become increasingly influenced by and enthusiastic about the genre.   This simply must be the core reason.   

But it's not the only reason.  One can be successful (or not) and earn acclaim (or not) with almost any kind of book.  I think just as important a compulsion is the sense that writing historical fiction marks one as a writer who likes to take on serious, ambitious, even lofty challenges.  Every good literary novel will be serious, of course, but there's something about a historical novel that strikes readers, rightly or wrongly, as especially serious, and writers can't help but be influenced by this realization.  Perhaps it's all the research that typically accompanies the writing of a historical novel; perhaps it's the challenge of using that research to credibly represent the past; perhaps it's the challenge of turning that research into story.  For whatever reason, writing a historical novel is a special pleasure for those who do so.  It touches on so many different parts of our imaginative and intellectual  and even academic selves.  Every fiction one writes is (or can be) a source of pleasure, but the satisfaction of composing a good, successful historical fiction is unique. 

And I think maybe this leads to a final reason for historical fiction's emergence, a reason that ties back to the first I mentioned.  In an era in which--as agents and publishers have been telling us for too many years--the reading of literary fiction is on the decline and the selling of literary fiction is as hard as it's ever been, having a historical premise for a story sets it apart, makes it seem unique, gives it a recognizable and extremely useful identity: to agents, to publishers, to marketers, to booksellers, and to readers.   Finally, it might just be that historical fiction not only is a unique satisfaction for the one who writes it but makes for a more unique,  sexy novel on the bookstore shelf.  As a lover of the genre, if this means an increase in the number of good, commercially viable literary historical novels, I'm all for it.  After all, it's lead us to this current Golden Age, and I couldn't be happier.  

Sidelight: In case anyone reading this blog is a fan of sonnets as well as of historical fiction, you should check out my other blog, Payperazzi, in which I am currently providing a report on last semester's Sonnet Writing Workshop class, including the e-anthology we put together.  

The Circuitous Tale of a (finally) Successful Book (Part 2)

[Readers: This is a continuation of a post I started last week in which I tell the tale of how a short story collection was finally accepted by a publisher, something like twelve or thirteen years after it was begun.]



The hardest part of the writing life is not the writing itself.  Not that the writing is easy.  It certainly isn't, but it's also uniquely entertaining and deeply nourishing.  Writing really is its own reward--which is why so many people are called to do it, even in our supposedly post-literate society--even if it's not done perfectly well, but especially when it is done perfectly well.  No, the hardest part of the writing life is not the writing but all the infernal roadblocks between what you've written and the audience it might move.  The hardest part is knowing that what you've produced is solid, very solid, as solid as you are capable of making writing be, and yet you still hear a seeming unending series of "no"s from publishers, editors, and agents.  To be honest, often times, those "no"s end up being terrifically helpful.  They force you back to a project and make you reexamine a project, and as a result you realize weaknesses you just didn't see the first time around.  Now having seen them, you can properly address them.  Reexamining your work and making it better is almost always a valuable expenditure of time.  But then there are the occasions when you've already spent so much time on a project, months or years or even decades, when you've already reexamined it a hundred or a thousand times over, when you finally say to yourself: No, this is how the manuscript must be; this is how it should be published.

I reached that point with the manuscript of Island Fog a year ago.  An earlier version of the book (see my last post) I had circulated among small presses and entered into contests, all to no avail.  But now I knew why.  That earlier book was never the real book. This one was.  It had a lot going for it: Its stride spanned four different centuries of Nantucket history, realistically (I think) evoking those different periods; it had engaging dramas; and it contained some of the best writing I've ever produced, including my favorite piece of fiction I've ever written, the novella that is the title story of the collection.  That story is set on 21st century Nantucket and is introduced as a realistic story with a realistic setting, but it quickly spins into something else, something I won't call magical--because it isn't--but is certainly mysterious and probably indebted to John Fowles's spectacularly disorienting novel The Magus.  Its smoke and mirrors effects, its purposeful air of mystery, its thoroughly confused young protagonist, its borderline inexplicable and never exactly explained developments might remind one of Fowles's 1966 masterwork.  An editor at a magazine I once submitted it to wondered if the story was science fiction, which at the time astounded me because at no point during the creative process did I have science fiction in mind.  I guess she took literally a comment the narrator makes that the protagonist Doug had entered a kind of alternative Nantucket entirely cut off from the other, more familiar Nantucket he once knew, even more cut off from the familiar world of his college life and his family.  No, it's not sci-fi; it's just weird.

While still trying (and succeeding) to publish individual pieces of the collection, and reading from the stories at two different international writing conferences, I also tried to find a home for the book as a whole.  I got very serious at the last AWP, circulating among the tables rented by various small presses, describing the book and inquiring about their submission policies.  I also consulted some extremely helpful databases, the most helpful being the Poets & Writers database of small and alternative presses.  In that way, I educated myself on the small presses that publish fiction in this country, and I began to sort out which ones might be good fits for my book.  I submitted to several included in the P and W database as well as to a few that I learned about at AWP.   It's a great feeling to place your manuscript directly into the hands of someone who can make a decision about it, independent of an agent.  One frustration for the literary fiction writer, however, when dealing with small presses is that they tend to emphasize poetry and academic nonfiction, because these genres are largely ignored by mainstream publishers.  "You fiction writers always get those huge deals from the New York presses," I've had said to me by small press editors on several different occasions.  Huge deals?  Who are you talking about?  Most fiction writers are lucky if a person at a NYC press actually reads a single page of his book much less offers him a "huge deal."  No, the truth is that for many literary fiction writers the small press is just as much the inevitable fit as for poets and critics.  Because as with poetry and criticism, that's where the best, most daring work gets done.

I received many positive comments about the collection from various presses.  I got very very close with one, but finally they wanted the stories to be linked even more they are, linked in the manner of a novel-in-stories, which my book isn't and can't be.  With palpable regret they declined taking on the manuscript, but they did encourage me to try again another time with another book.  (I probably will.)  The positive responses I was getting told me I was on to something, that this new version of Island Fog was holding its own, bearing weight, if you will.  I just needed to keep trying.  One of the presses I tried at was Dialogos/Lavender Ink, run by Bill Lavender, a man I'd met two or three times at readings and at AWP, but no one I could say I actually knew.  I followed the same protocol everyone else must who submits to his press and I hoped for the best.

And then it happened.  Bill sent me a tidy little email one morning in late September, about six months after I'd submitted, inquiring if the book was still available.  Because his press was considering publishing it.  I responded immediately: Yes, it is still available; thank you for your interest.  Another month or two went by as I busied myself with all the usual activities of my writing and teaching and family life and tried not to wonder too much what Dialogos/Lavender Ink was thinking.  Finally, in mid-November I shot an email to Bill asking him if the press was still interested in my book.  I didn't expect an immediate reply.  And I had several errands to run just then. As it turned out, I didn't check back on my email until the next day.  When I did check I saw that Bill had replied within an hour of my emailing him.  His reply: Yes, we want it.  And in a followup message he had sent me a contractual agreement.  Just like that, early on a Saturday morning, sitting on my living room couch, the wait was over.  Island Fog the book was no longer an idea but an actuality--not a potential project anymore but a real one with an established publisher.

Afterword: At the moment I am seriously editing each of the stories in the collection.  (Bill needs the final version by February.)  This is crucial and very satisfying work.  You have no idea how good it feels just to worry about the writing itself and not selling the writing.  Of course, all that other kind of work awaits me when I put my next book on the market. : )

The Circuitous Tale of a (Finally) Successful Book, Part 1

I've mentioned here and there on this blog that I've created a collection of stories--half historical in nature--all set on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.  I received the wonderful news not long ago that the book has been accepted for publication by Dialogos/Lavender Ink, a press run by the legendary poet and novelist Bill Lavender, who worked for so long for the University of New Orleans press.  (Yes, that's him in the picture.) As a general rule I hesitate to say that everything happens when it's supposed to--because that's kind of like saying everything happens according to God's will (which is a lie)--but in the case of Island Fog being accepted for publication, I have to say that I am glad it's happening now rather than, say, five years ago.  And thus begins my tale of how this collection came to be.  I'm going to break it into two parts, because the tale will take some time.

I started several of the stories in Island Fog perhaps twelve or thirteen years ago--during a trip I made with my family to Nantucket.  As is my wont, I was up before everyone else each day, trying to get a little writing done along with downing some come-alive coffee.  I hadn't planned on writing about Nantucket before I went, but ideas for stories just started coming to me.  In fact, I had so many story ideas--and was so afraid I might lose them--that I did something I've never done before: I started a brand new story each day of that vacation, writing as far into a story as I could before the family awoke and then leaving that story behind to begin a new story the next day.  In this fashion I laid down the tracks for the stories that now make up the second half of my present book.  But I hardly thought of them as a book back then.  They were just stories I wanted to nail in place in order to get back to later.  And I did, struggling mightily to read my atrocious handwriting, which turns from ordinary small/bad to illegible during the fury of engaged composing.

Eventually, I finished every one of those stories and in the years that followed I edited them mercilessly, revised a few significantly, and kept sending them out to various magazines.  A few were accepted and were long ago published (but not the title story, one of my favorites, which is one of the many reasons I'm so happy the book will appear).  A story about a plumber who hears some painful facts about his wife's death during a breakfast at a diner was published in 2005 in the now defunct Dana Literary Society Online Journal; a story about a couple struggling through the emotional fallout of several failed pregnancies was published in the journal Oasis, also in 2005; a story about a ghost tour leader haunted by his former male lover was accepted by Seattle Review and, after a wait of numerous years, finally appeared in 2009. 

It wasn't too long after the Nantucket stories began to be accepted by journals that it occurred to me I had a neat little set that could form a solid portion of a story collection.  Not enough pages to make a whole collection, but perhaps a half.  So I gathered together some non-Nanucket stories I thought worked all right together and combined them with the Nantucket stories to make a book I called--tah-dah!--Island Fog.  To the non-Nantucket stories I added the section header "Off-Island"--using stories that I thought had an enhanced sense of place--and the Nantucket stories were given the section header "On-Island."  Very clever, I thought.  The headers, and the organizational strategy they highlighted, would make this disparate group of fictions seem to belong together.  Well, in truth they didn't.   At least not enough to convince me or any of the many contests and small presses I submitted the book to.  Not knowing what to do, deciding the collection was a misft, I finally put it aside.  I didn't do anything with it for a long time except to occasionally submit one of the Nantucket pieces to a seemingly appropriate journal.

Well, what should happen except that I returned to Nantucket in 2011--for the first time in several years--having more or less finished my Van Gogh novel, having started this blog, and suddenly having historical fiction on the brain.  Lots of new ideas for Nantucket stories came to me, except this time all of them were historical in nature.  Like the first time, I started as many of the stories as I could while I was on the island, but I think I only managed to get three underway.  Later I drafted a fourth and, still later, a fifth. Certain characters I just could not get out of my head.  I had to write them: a retired whale ship captain who long ago was stranded at sea and forced into cannibalism (inspired, I know, by the real life story of George Pollard, commander of the Essex); a whaling widow who feels the first inklings of lesbianism; an African-American schoolteacher walking through some mid-island streets on a foggy afternoon, early in the twentieth century; a self-satisfied twelve year old, the son of a sheep farmer, who has befriended a half-Indian boy early in the nineteenth century.  I fleshed out these characters' stories, having a ball with them, and at some point--I can't remember when-- it occurred to me: I've got a new Island Fog book now.  The real Island Fog.

Next post: The process of getting done, getting it out, and getting it accepted.

Echols visit affects

[Hey Creating Van Gogh readers.  Like last week, I am dual posting this entry on Creating Van Gogh and my new blog Payperazzi.  That's because the post continues, and concludes, a string of posts I started last summer on CVG regarding Damien Echols and his visit to UCA.  In the future, I'll restrict this blog to what you would expect to hear about: historical fiction.  Payperazzi, meanwhile, will continue to embrace subjects related to the writing life generally and the teaching of creative writing.]

In my lifetime I've been to scores, maybe even hundreds, of writer events: readings and craft lectures and question-and-answer sessions and presentations of all sorts.  To be frank, not all of these events prove to be worth the time and effort.  Sometimes the writers are dull; sometimes they are distracted; sometimes they are borderline jerky.  Other times, of course, the writers are on point, engaged, animated, excellent.  Attending those events proves to be quite a valuable investment.   But--again, just to be frank--I can't really claim that even the most excellent of writer events is actually life-changing.  Not for me; not for the writer; not for the audience.  Until now.  Having attended and participated in a two-hour long Q & A last Monday featuring Damien Echols and about fifty UCA Writing students, and then, later that evening, helping to moderate his public appearance at the Reynolds Performance Hall, I can tell you that lives were most certainly changed by Echols's visit, especially his own.

When Echols was released from death row in August, 2011 he and his wife Lorri Davis immediately left Arkansas, crossing the river into Memphis where they spent a night in a hotel celebrating with friends.  The next morning they boarded a private plane for Seattle, where they passed a weekend and then traveled to New York, moving into an apartment that a friend graciously lent to them.  There they lived for a year until problems with the building forced all its occupants out; then Echols and Davis moved to eastern Massachusetts, where they still live.  Not once during this two year period did Echols consider returning to his home state, even for a brief visit.  He was all but certain he never wanted to return.  And who can blame him.  As his puts it now, because it's literally true, "the state of Arkansas tried to murder me." (For a crime, I remind everyone, he did not commit.)  During his visit to our campus he admitted that not until just a couple months ago was he sure that he'd actually be able to go through with his agreed upon gig as artist-in-residence at UCA.

I am so glad he did.  He talked eloquently and graphically about the brutal beatings he endured in prison, especially early in his tenure, when no one was paying much attention to him and his case.  Guards beat him so badly he pissed blood.  Except for the fact that another prisoner mentioned the beatings to a Roman Catholic deacon in the habit of visiting the prison, and the fact that this deacon warned the prison authorities he would squeal to the public if the beatings did not stop, Echols would have died there.  Already on death row, awaiting execution, his life held no value for anyone at the prison except to serve as a punching bag.   He also talked eloquently about the challenge of keeping up a literary life behind bars: denied access to pen and paper except for gifts given to him from those on the outside; having to writing lying in bed--a concrete slab with a wafer thin pad stretched across it--because of the absence of any chairs; forced by guards to write only with the narrow ink-filled plastic tube on the inside of a pen because they removed the pen's hard outer shell; wrapping the tube with wadded toilet paper to give himself a firmer grip on it.  Of course these were not the only challenges.   He talked of others: the fact that prison lights are almost never extinguished; the facts of rats and crickets and mosquitoes as one's constant companions; the fact of almost unending screams, requiring him to keep a small tv on constantly as white noise; the lack of basic nutrition and medical care; the absence of physical contact with other people and the world at large.  Echols related that one visitor to his cell told him that conditions there did not even meet the basic requirements of the Geneva Convention for housing prisoners of war.

The students and the evening audience at the Reynolds were spellbound and immensely supportive.  At the Reynolds, Echols received standing ovations both at the begininng and end of his talk.  Reading the reaction papers my students wrote in the days following I could tell how deeply affected they'd been.  This was not just mere appreciation for a celebrated visting writer who said some smart things.  This was respect and even awe for a man who lived through hell and survived, even flourished, as an artist.  I think it's safe to say that none of the students in attendance felt they wasted their time; and none of them will soon forget Echols's visit.  I know I won't.  But even more gratifying was an e-mail I received on Wednesday from David Jauss, a writer and teacher who lives in Little Rock and who for years has been an adamant agitator on the behalf of the West Memphis Three.  That's David on the right.  (I learned on Monday night that David was the one who transcribed the thousands of pages of Damien's journal writing that Lorri managed to smuggle out of prison for him.)  David and a few other advocates had dinner in Little Rock with Damien and Lorri last Tuesday night.  David told me that at the dinner Damien repeatedly mentioned how moved he'd been by his reception at UCA, how glad he was that he'd decided to come.  Echoing something he said to the Reynolds audience on Monday night,  Damien told the dinner group that he would remember the visit for the rest of his life.  That alone made me feel fantastic, assured me that we'd done a good job hosting and interviewing him.  But then David said something even more important: Damien and Lorri now want to make regular visits to Arkansas.  It is difficult to overstate what a profound psychological shift that is for Damien Echols and what an important step it can be for his healing, for his resurrection as a whole person, and for the cause--ongoing--of legally exonerating the West Memphis Three.  As David said to end his email, "And that's all thanks to UCA."  Well, it's thanks to a lot of people: to everyone who came and listened and asked and applauded.  But it's also proof that sometimes literary events can matter as much as life itself.

Damien Echols live!

[This entry is being dual posted on Creating Van Gogh and my other blog, Payperazzi.  While the subeject of a visiting writer to my campus fits the themes of Payperazzi better, I began posting about Damien Echols's visit to UCA on CVG last summer.  So I figured I should continue that string.}

After months of working out the logistics--dates, times, locations, content--and months of media attention, public questioning, public support, pockets of alarm and even broader acclaim, Damien Echols's appearance on the campus of University of Central Arkansas is finally happening tonight.  For making this all come to pass, many thanks are owed to Dean Terry Wright and Associate Dean Gayle Seymour of the College of Fine Arts and Communication; also to Associate Professor of Writing Francie Bolter--who has spent innumerable hours ironing out the many nagging details of Echols's vist.  Thanks goes too to University president Tom Courtway and Provost Steve Runge for supporting this important artist-in-residence event, and to the UCA Police Department, which has taken security concerns very seriously.  Very very seriously indeed.  Let me just say that the University of Central Arkansas is lucky to have such a superbly trained and thoroughly professional force on its campus.  (Other locations in this state are not so fortunate.)   The greatest thanks of all, however, goes to Mr. Echols himself: first for surviving the ordeal of being falsely accused, absurdly convicted, and made to sit on death row for eighteen years, for surviving that and being able to tell his story as compellingly as he does in his memoir Life After Death; and of course for being willing to return to his home state for this very special visit to my campus.

A couple months ago I mentioned on this blog (follow this link to the post) that Echols's looming visit to UCA had resulted in some fervent, hateful, spitting emails from certain elements of the Arkansas public to certain people at my university.  Reading those emails one could sense the mania, the literally hysterical blindness that led to the conviction of the West Memphis Three in the first place.  After all, their conviction came about despite the fact that there was no physical evidence against them; none at all.  And several of the key "eyewitnesses" against the Three, including the most damning ones, have long since admitted that the accounts they gave in court were complete fabrications set up by the West Memphis police either through coercion or bribery.  The paper thin case against the Three was--from the start--nothing but a cage of lies and panic, and, when you get right down to it, an inexplicable fixation by authorites to "get" Damien Echols.  So much so that when seven years ago DNA tests were finally conducted on hairs found on the bodies of the victims, and those tests proved that none of the Three were involved--and in fact proved that a stepfather to one of the boys was involved, a man with a history of violence toward children--the authorities in West Memphis did not feel compelled to reopen the case.  They preferred to let Damien Echols rot on Death Row.  To say the least, the vendetta was personal.

I'm happy to report now that those early angry e-mails to UCA have turned into a tidal wave of support.  So many  people have taken me aside, or emailed me, or e-mailed Dr. Bolter, to say how proud they are that UCA invited Mr. Echols, and how happy they are to see him free and thriving.  The UCA Police report nothing but supportive phone calls to their office.  Meanwhile, our students, most of whom have at least heard of the West Memphis Three case, are eager and curious to hear from a man who had to endure what he did and who still managed to keep on writing.  Writing quite brilliantly, in fact.  In terms of what a person has to fight through to keep flourising as an artist there's only one case that I can think of that tops Echols's, and that's the case of Christy Brown, the Irishman born with cerebral palsy in the 1930s and who from simple determination and the ability to control one part of his body--his left foot--made a career for himself as a novelist, poet, painter, and memoirist.  (He had to type, write, and draw exclusively with that foot, a feat brilliantly mimicked by Daniel Day-Lewis in the 1989 film My Left Foot.)  And this issue is crucial, because as all of us in the Department of Writing have been saying since we first thought of bringing Mr. Echols here, we aren't interested in rehashing the 1993 Robin Hood Hills murders or the subsequent police investigation.  Those subjects have been rehashed to death.  Instead, we are eager to meet a living man and listen to him talk about writing: about what writing can mean for a person and how a person manages to keep doing it despite the most oppressive of conditions.  We are eager too to meet his wife Lorri Davis, she who meant so much to Mr. Echols while he was in prison and obviously means so much to him now, who arguably saved him, and without question is responsible for bringing the lion's share of his writing out into the world.  We have Lorri Davis to thank for keeping that writing alive for the rest of us to cherish.  If this seems like a perfectly innocuous, completely understandable reason to want to bring a visting writer to campus--well, it is.  But if we have to employ UCA police as armed security personnel both inside and outside site where Mr. Echols will speak, we will. Because Echols has something to say, and after years of enduring brutal oppression and unthinkable prejudice, he darn well has a right to say it.  I for one am looking forward to tonight.

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.

Moving on over---to a new blog!

Hey everyone.  Thought I should formally notify Creating Van Gogh aficionados that my long-anticipated (at least in my own brain) new blog is finally up and running.  Just two posts at present, but those will build I'm sure.  After much back and forth I named the new blog Payperazzi.  My first thought, "Paperazzi," was a name already taken, so I used "pay" instead.  Cute, huh?  Wasn't sure about that, but then I realized that perhaps it's indeed appropriate.  First off, most writing isn't done on paper anymore.   That's a simple fact.   So why would I want to sound like a dinosaur that eats trees and asks others to?  More to the point, the idea behind the new blog is that it enables me to speak more frequently and more directly to issues, opinions, myths, and outcomes associated with teaching writing in higher education.  In other words, as a literal writing professional I get "pay"d to teach writing--and being a teacher of writing gives me a certain vantage point on, and entry point into,  discussions of what's right and wrong in the writing life of the nation these days, and the writing life of the nation's students these days.  I'm sure you've heard such discussions yourself; perhaps you've contributed to them; and perhaps, like me, you're sick of them!  But there's so much arrogant misinformation passing as wisdom these days that I feel obliged to speak up, speak out, share stories, and shed some light.  Hopefully, that's what Payperazzi will accomplish.  So move on over (follow this link to the new blog) and stay tuned.