Edification – Newsletter #97 – November 21, 2021
Dear Reader,
Happy Sunday!
If you’re a writer on Twitter, chances are you get a glimpse of the periodic “Discourse” ruffling the writing community there. Whether you personally contributed two cents to the “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” or “Cat Person” debates or you just kept your head down, you probably saw enough to get the gist of it anyway. Then the conversations disappear. On to the next.
Discourses hit like a shockwave and everybody settles with the dust, but nobody’s ever exactly the same. There are people side-eying each other forever after. There are a lot of “show us who you really are” opportunities on literary Twitter, and I guess writers are naturally good grudge-holders.
This past week the Discourse revolved around “How the MFA program swallowed literature,” a newsletter essay by Eric Hoel. He makes a number of bold claims right up front, including the perennial favorite of aging people everywhere – they don’t make ‘em like they used to (even as he namedrops Brandon Taylor, nice) – and then goes after “workshopped fiction” produced in MFA programs.
However you feel about this, whether there is genuinely a crisis in literature, whether workshopping makes timid writers (and I would argue that is a fraught line of thinking which can lead in an unsavory rightwing direction), whether there are no more “household names” in writing anymore and whether we need that – whatever you conclusions you draw, it’s worth weighing how that intersects with a whole consolidation of the publishing industry and a change in the ways people read and communicate and share their art.
I will also say the number of writers coming out swinging against MFA programs bums me out. I do not have an MFA. But as someone who came out of fine arts in a period when humanities programs were vilified and put on the chopping blocks, I find arguments against higher education to be anti-intellectual, culturally narrowminded and, frankly, politically dangerous. Writers need to poke their heads out of their holes and look around. Look at the world and its grasses on fire.
This whole situation reminds me a bit of the consolidation of the music and entertainment industries in the nineties. Remember when Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia) ripped through the radio and television markets? Within a few years, hundreds of independent stations had been absorbed – the result of congressional changes to the Telecommunications Act in the period of credit/investing/monopoly deregulation, by the way. The nineties ushered in a golden age of predatory finance that the billionaires are still enjoying today. I’m sure the big five-four-three-two publishing houses look to that feeding frenzy as inspiration, and they are lobbying very hard to get their way.
What a bummer.
Anyway. In the midst of the Discourse about MFA programs, up floats this quote from the Jonathan Franzen novel Crossroads:
“She stood on tiptoe for a kiss that he bent down to give her. He caught an exciting, catfoody whiff of degraded semen from his several deposits of it in her on Monday.”
Franzen is one of the big-name authors Eric Hoel holds up as being part of that previous, 2006-era good-times of literature. Franzen was one of the good ones because he had no MFA. Huzzah!
It feels like just the catfoody synchronicity we deserve.
You will get no argument from me that the publishing industry needs to be shaken to the ground. But we have to be very clear-eyed about what we are fighting. I suspect many MFA-holders will be part of the cavalry when the time comes.
Shew.
In some overtly self-serving news, I’ve been tallying my publications up for the year. This is my first year of really gunning for publication and I’m delighted to report that since March, I have had over thirty works find homes in journals! Poems, essays, stories, in-betweeners. I don’t have my shit together enough to do an extensive end-of-year review, but I’m proud of the progress I’ve made. If I don’t toot this horn, who will?
It’s obvious to me, just looking at my own path, that the writing world is supportive, active, and uplifting. How many editors at the lit mags publishing my stuff have MFAs? Some of them are run by universities. Do they act as gatekeepers, or are they encouraging the voices of marginalized and non-academic people? Are they restricting or expanding the literary world? Could it be more vigorous, more open, freer still? (Of course.)
A lot of it is subjective interpretation, I get that. My vantage is ground level, though, and it’s also informed by a past in visual and music arts – both of which have much, much higher financial barriers to entry.
As we say in the country, “It takes a millionaire to break into farming.”
Try putting together a gallery show of framed art, insuring it, and shipping it before you run through your lottery earnings. Try recording an album on musical instruments you must purchase yourself (and find the time to learn). The privilege is steep.
Literature, maybe because it’s still harder to use as an investment vehicle for hedge funds (like Bain Capital, which incidentally owns iHeartMedia!) and isn’t as easily subordinated to the auction block and the tyranny of private collectors, seems a lot more open. Healthier.
Thriving, even.
All right, that’s enough out of me. Go read a book or something!
Talk soon,
Edie
HURRRAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!! "I’m delighted to report that since March, I have had over thirty works find homes in journals! Poems, essays, stories, in-betweeners."
I'm delighted to read that! My hat is so off to you, Edie. After 20 years of slogging through the Publishious swamp and gathering countless rejections only to have seven pieces published, I've weenied out and stick to Medium and Substack.
You inspire me, though, so I might tiptoe back in. It does grind my gears to have to pay a $3 fee at more and more literary magazines simply to submit.
Making your achievements this year even more impressive! Brava, my friend!