Feb. 8

Creative Writing in the Academy

By Oronte

You’re right. Writers in the university are often neurotics, and under-educated. They’re prima donnas. Their imbalanced juices make them sanguine, choleric, or melancholic, though rarely phlegmatic. I’ve known a terraphage, a coke hound, and one guy who found his calling after water-skiing into a dock piling. Writers are knock-kneed, pigeon-toed, nearsighted, humpbacked fancy dressers, bare-knuckle fighters and ballroom dancers. Writers are moody and vindictive.

We’ve got your dog.

Creative writing has always been an awkward fit on campus. Scholars hate writers because writers aren’t scholarly; writers resent scholars because scholars impress writers’ “texts” as fodder for their campaigns, or worse, ignore them. Also, scholars are seeing writers’ ex-wives, and while everybody acts like they’re cool with that, they’re not.

The act of putting writers in the academy meant, of course, that they needed to be professionalized, the way one professionalizes a cow with an electric prod when it won’t get on the cattle car bound for the packing house. The demands have escalated, so now it’s beginning to take a Ph.D. to get hired, where once it was an MFA, and before that, an MA, and before that, a long cold ride on the rails with the hobos.

(I take an unhealthy glee in telling students that Hemingway’s mom and dad wanted him to go to college at the University of Illinois but that he did some other stuff instead. I keep that information warm, close to my bosom, until the perfect moment.)

Just because you brand an animal as part of the herd doesn’t mean it won’t gallop off alone for the nearest waterhole at the first opportunity, such as during the first class meeting. College teaching may be the new form of patronage in the arts, but writers will be writers, not provosts, and god knows what they’re telling your kids. They should be teaching in convict settlements or madhouses.

Despite all this, properly-run creative writing classes, sheerly by accident, have become the keepers of the flame of true knowledge in academe. O! you future hog cloners, microchip designers, traders in wheat; players of the football with your husky, brawling big shoulders! Come to Introductory Narrative Writing and sing so proud to be alive under the terrible burden of destiny!

As a younger man I used to ask students, “Why did you come to college?” expecting to hear them quote Hegel, perhaps: “Education is the art of making man ethical.” What they told me was, “To learn to do my own laundry.” I was deeply hurt. Now I understand they wanted autonomy in whatever form they understood it.

What better place to catch up on your intellectual autonomy than in the creative writing classroom, where an author always owns her own work? The responsibility to make something unique and good is hers alone, as she writes her way to an understanding of the one thing I cannot understand for her. Half my job is asking questions of those who can’t generate questions, in order to model the will to curiosity.

I did this recently for a student in an intermediate nonfiction class with two pre-reqs. She couldn’t find enough interest in her own topic to be curious about all the paths leading from it to the infinite world, so I did my thing, using my best material. I could play the Copa with this stuff. When I’d generated enough questions and topics to fill a stadium, I stopped, panting, and grinned in triumph. She looked at me for a moment then said, “So…you want me to write about the airport?”

Because I’m ambitious for them, because I had a bad cold, because I was irritated at my life’s energy draining from me uselessly, I went to her class and told them they had to kick it in, this was the real thing, and they must set themselves free. They bent their heads to their doodling in embarrassment for me. They’re all rotten to the core, I decided, don’t have what it takes or won’t take the one thing that creative writing in the academy has to offer, the chance to see for oneself.

After class, the young woman from office hours brought me her revised annotated bibliography, which revealed much hard work and a brilliant developing theme of an immigrant family, who’d once worked the earth, living in the only place they could afford in a new city, under the roar and stink of a jetway. To celebrate, I stole the Chancellor’s car.

Comments

You’re all right, man.

Adam, at 8:10 am EST on February 13, 2008

No, you, sir, are the one who is, in the end, and after all, all right.

Oronte, at 9:30 am EST on February 13, 2008

As a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, I learned early to distrust, and eventually to despise, virtually every member of our then-well-known writing program. Why? Simply because the program unerringly attracted the swaggering and the talentless, all of whom should either, as you suggest, have been out “riding the rails,” or if too timid to acquire the experience necessary to a true writer, at least spending their nights sweating to produce the three unpublishable novels that would finally convince them of their talentlessness. Instead, in a sad waste of experience, money, and time, the program, and those like it, cozened these poor suckers into considering themselves Writers from the day they entered, and to waste two years or more within the program’s bubbling cauldron of gossip, cliqueishness, and an unjustified, if swaggering, self-regard. All this — from “students” whose seminar papers displayed a tin ear for and an unfamiliarity with the English language, and produced, for example, numerous errors in syntax, a general disrespect for nuance, a near-universal lack of sensibility and critical tact, a startling inability to hone in on those Jamesian “telling details” that give good criticism, no less than good novels, the ability to show, not tell. In addition, we all — budding scholars and their professors alike — felt an open-mouthed astonishment at their resistance to reading any text written after 1950, no doubt a misreading of their mentors’ attitudes But startling, surely, given their predecessors’ habits of gobbling up all the older literature they could find. In short, writing programs have become cash cows for universities: after all, virtually every graduate student harbors in her heart that special, fictional “dysfunctional family story” she yearns to exhibit to her peers. But to allow her to means simply to waste time and money, and to commit the universities concerned to an unethical exploitation of their writing program students — first, by encouraging them to believe they possess the talent they only crave, and second, by condemning them to service in the unrewarding slave labor pit known as “teaching E-comp.” Let us liberate talent, and perhaps, literature itself, by abolishing these secure berths that allow their occupants to prolong their adolescence just a bit longer. If, as we should, we abolish writing programs, talent will still out: Dickens achieved his status as the greatest novelist in English by observing, experiencing, and by being gifted with that unteachable and unquantifiable magic, the true talent, that no “program” can teach. Out, out, damned spot! Buttonhole your friends should you find you can make them listen. But leave the task of loving, transmitting, and preserving literature (in part from the cold capitalist winds that now blow not only within but also without the universities’ walls) to those of us who truly care about great writing, not about displaying our egos.

Jill Levin, at 8:15 pm EST on February 17, 2008

A cash cow?

Wash U’s MFA is fully funded, generously fully funded at that. Further, folks don’t teach until their fourth semester there — and after that, only 2 courses per year. Aside from the indentured servitude of teaching comp (albeit an incredibly light load), how, again, is that program generating revenue for the university, let alone functioning as a “cash cow” ?

nik de dominic, at 7:45 pm EDT on October 1, 2008