A few weeks ago, Electric Literature sent me this email:

Want to collaborate on a story with Aimee Bender?  Now’s your chance.

Inspired by the Surrealist word game Exquisite Corpse*, Electric Literature invites you to help compose a collaborative short story. And Aimee Bender is writing the first line.

The Exquisite Shorts project uses  Thubscribes.com, in which up to 100 people will compose a short story in 300 character segments. After Aimee Bender begins the tale, we’ll hand it over to the hivemind. The story won’t end until the 100th entry is written. Please, join in and add your own twist to the tale.

On Wednesday, Nov 17th, at 10 EST, the composition begins!

* Exquisite Corpse is game where each writer can only read the last word given, and adds one word to a sentence.”The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine” (Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau) was the first sentence ever created using the game. (In our experiment, you’ll be able to read the whole story before adding your part.)

So, on Nov. 17, I logged onto Thumbscribes.   Aimee Bender’s entry was first: “She was startled by what she saw on the bridge; it did not seem to have a shape, and yet it was moving toward her, and she found herself inexplicably compelled to stay put.”

There were about forty entries after that.  By the time I finished reading, I didn’t know what to add.  The main character (who remained unnamed throughout all 100 entries) smoked a cigarette and pined for a missing toe, all while standing on a bridge.  I had to wait for “AliAli” to finish before I could contribute.  I was writing another story at the time and it seemed like several minutes passed until the following appeared on the screen:

48. The foaming dervish materialized next to her. “Might as well jump,” he said, shapeshifting into David Lee Roth for one horrifying moment. “Go ahead and jump.”

I stared at the screen for a long time, trying to think of how to follow that.  In the meantime, “allrayxcity” had started typing.

49. Where was her mother when she needed her? She wasn’t a big fan of Mr. Roth’s music. Why was he here? She got out her cell phone. She had never known who her father was. Roth did have quite the pelvic tilt and her mother had been a cigarette girl at Starwood Club in 1976 when he was discovered.

As much as I like that song, I was glad David Lee Roth had been more or less written out of the story.  Looking back, I suppose I could have done more with the paternity-related question.  I should probably have done something with the cell phone.  At the time, I was thinking about how so many people were waiting to shape and direct this character.  I also felt like only a few people had done the setting justice.  So, I wrote:

50. Seagulls wheeled in the sky. She looked at the water below. The wind picked up, and her limbs felt heavy, waterlogged. The wind tugged at her clothing, blew the fabric tight against her body. There is so much desire in the world, she thought, and for this moment she was at the heart of it.

I should pause here to say that I’m a big fan of Electric Literature.  They have a sensible business plan (print on demand, publish the journal in multiple electronic formats) and they have a genuine respect for writers: they pay contributors (a lot), publicize literary events, and they’re doing exciting digital work with their sentence animations and a mysterious video game project.  There’s something playful and optimistic about the journal, and they’re doing it all with style.

At any rate, the collaboration with Aimee Bender was fun.  I didn’t really know what to expect.  I was happy to sit back and watch after my entry, and at times, it felt like watching a tug of war play out as different writers tried to hijack the narrative.  There was a strange accumulation of objects near the end: a giant mirror, poisoned cigarettes.  At any rate, here’s my attempt to form my favorite entries into a coherent narrative:

1. She was startled by what she saw on the bridge; it did not seem to have a shape, and yet it was moving toward her, and she found herself inexplicably compelled to stay put. (by Aimee Bender)

2. She counted things to calm herself. Streetlights almost hidden by fog: 3. Parked cars tipped sideways: 2. Fat shadows so close you could touch them and feel their breath: 1. (by Ian)

5. It was madness to come here, she knew. Yet, she’d been compelled to answer the phone. To obey that seemingly familiar voice charred with static. To agree to this place and time. (by Matt Mullins)

11. It’s a funny thing, fear. Curiosity mixed with repulsion. In the dark, on the bridge, her body electrified by fear, she called out. “Hello?” The air felt hollow with words in it.  (by Anna)

29. “You wanted to meet. Here I am,” she said. The figure shuffled toward the bridge rail. “It wasn’t my fault,” he said. He grabbed the lamp post and pulled himself up on the rail, and balanced there like a tightrope walker. “I had to make a choice. It had nothing to do with you,” she said. (by Christopher Johnston)

50. Seagulls wheeled in the sky. She looked at the water below. The wind picked up, and her limbs felt heavy, waterlogged. The wind tugged at her clothing, blew the fabric tight against her body. There is so much desire in the world, she thought, and for this moment she was at the heart of it. (by me)

52. She should have listened to her mother and gone to college. No matter how fun the party, don’t be the one left when the lights come on. Her lasting memory: one friend after another packing up their bedroom. She’d actually waved goodbye from three driveways. What had she been protecting by staying? (by Gabrielle)

59. So the last time she had tried had been… well, some time. Several years, three hairstyles and eight nervous habits ago. It had been Autumn, a russet, windy autumn, and she’d been babysitting a friend’s purple cocktail the last time she had tried. (by Fiona Wright)

60. The friend never came back, so she just took care of the cocktail. And then she felt lonely, so she drank another. And so on. She was supposed to let someone complete her and she ended with finding herself doubled in the mirrors, and everybody else was doubled. (by Chiara Reali)

97. There was something uncanny about the figure. Something almost too familiar. Her hands trembled. She was drawn to the figure, as if by some strange gravity, as if the figure itself was a black hole, and her entire life she had been drifting, unknowingly, towards its terrible center.  (by Requiem102)

100. The fog peeled back and her father stood tall arms open to embrace. She stepped forward then stopped, “Why am I letting him in?” Her feet picked up the pace, her heart & head followed, her arms fit through his like a tongue & groove carving. “This time let him stay.”  (by Dindy)

The entire story can be found here.

Call For Submissions: The Fourth River Online

Submission Guidelines

The Fourth River Online is the literary journal of Chatham University’s MFA Program. We are looking for submissions that explore the relationship between people and their environments, both natural and built, urban, rural or wild.

Recent contributors to the print journal include Astrid Cabral, Laila al-Atrash, Hillary Wentworth, Michael Byers, and Evan Morgan Williams. Our contributors have published in Birmingham Poetry Review, Glimmer Train, Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness, and The Missouri Review; they have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and Best American Travel Writing. The Fourth River Online uses the same editorial staff and guidelines as the print version, and we look forward to providing contributor interviews and features on the site’s front page.

The Fourth River Online accepts unpublished poetry, literary short fiction, and creative nonfiction. Please send up to three poems or one prose piece up to 4,000 words.

• Reading Period: November 30-March 31, 2011
• We accept simultaneous submissions if indicated on the cover letter; please let us know immediately if a piece is accepted elsewhere.
• The Fourth River Online website goes live in the summer of 2011
• We do not publish writing for children or Young Adult audiences

Submission Address: 4thriversubmissions@gmail.com

Please attach all submissions as Microsoft Word or PDF documents. Poems can be in a single document. Include the cover letter in the document itself.
Please indicate your name, genre, and title in the email subject line. For example, John Smith’s short story “Red Bird” would appear as “Smith, fiction, “Red Bird.”

We look forward to reading your work!

The Third Coast Magazine Poetry and Fiction Contests.
Deadline: Dec. 1, 2010. Contest winners in each genre receive $1000 & publication. Reading Fee $15. All entrants receive a one-year subscription to Third Coast.

Judges: Brad Watson (Fiction) & Natasha Trethewey (Poetry)

Brad Watson won the Sue Kauffman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts & Letters for his first collection, Last Days of the Dog-Men. His first novel, The Heaven of Mercury, was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award. Watson’s most recent collection of stories is Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (2010).

Natasha Trethewey is the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her book Native Guard. Her first poetry collection, Domestic Work, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and her second collection, Bellocq’s Ophelia, was named a Notable Book for 2003. Trethewey’s most recent work is a book of creative non-fiction, titled Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf (2010).

Guidelines: Submit one previously unpublished story of up to 9,000 words or three previously unpublished poems with SASE and a $15 reading fee payable to Third Coast. For more information click here.

In case you missed it, you can catch up on the series here: part one, part two, and part three (by guest blogger Adam Reger).

Today, guest blogger Salvatore Pane puts on his cape in order to explain why people keep declaring that fiction is dead:

I’m writing this 30 minutes after the end of LeBron James’ THE DECISION Special on ESPN. I’ve been a basketball follower my entire life. I’m a diehard New York Knicks fan, which explains my currently petulant mood, but the idea I couldn’t help shake during the entire drama-less, lifeless special was how on earth did a championship-less free agent drum up this much nationwide interest and why can’t contemporary fiction do the same? Don’t worry, I’m going to come back to this point again later.

I’ve written about the various tirades decrying the death of fiction many times before, and like Robert and Adam and Carolyn already pointed out, these rants are usually the products of aging writers frightened by technology and the rise of the all-too-dreaded narrative nonfiction. I don’t want to repeat things I’ve already written, so instead, I’m going to pick up a thread started by Adam: the idea that literary fiction isn’t being crowded out of the cultural limelight by creative nonfiction but by video games, television, movies and the myriad forms of entertainment that have emerged in the past hundred years or so.

Compare an issue of Amazing Spider-Man produced today to one forty years ago. How about movies? Check out Inglorious Basterds and then watch an early talkie. Video games? Video games. Look at Modern Warfare 2 then Commando for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Do a side-by-side of The Wire and Leave it to Beaver. These forms of entertainment haven’t just become slightly more sophisticated over the years, they’ve developed their own working languages; they’ve evolved. As funny as it is to say, these forms of entertainment are the new kids on the bock, and of course they’re going to weazle in on the culture at large’s time to read fiction. And to double back to the spectacle that was ESPN’s two-year long coverage of LBJ’s impulse decision to play for Miami, there are just so many other media distractions. Why should I read contemporary fiction when I can play Advance Wars: Days of Ruin for three hours on my Nintendo DS (something I’m guilty of doing this very day!) or watch nonstop debate over why Stephen Strasburg deserves to be on the all star roster?

I can’t remember who said it, but I was reading a recent interview with a writer who said that novels are beginning to occupy the same cultural space that short stories held in the 1980’s–and that short stories are becoming the new poems of the 2010’s. This seems like a fair assessment to me. In the 80’s, a few writers made their livings composing short stories. Today, a few writers make their livings composing novels (George Saunders and a few others notwithstanding). Lee Siegel referred to Harper’s and The Atlantic as “little literary magazines.” This line of thinking is absolutely insane. Neither Harper’s nor The Atlantic claim to be revolutionary or little. They’re the vanguard, much more in line with The New Yorker than McSweeney’s. The reason why I don’t think fiction is dead is because of the wealth of activity and aesthetic diversity I find online. Sites like HTMLGIANT, The Rumpus, Maud Newton’s blog The Millions and The New Republic’s The Book are fast becoming the cultural meeting grounds for the new literati even if the outgoing generation, Siegel included, is unaware. Flash fiction is well on its way to becoming the most innovative genre in contemporary American fiction and the work being published in places like PANK, The Collagist, Pear Noir!, elimae, Caketrain, Annalemma and many others shows firsthand that there’s a burgeoning scene of emerging writers who are not just rehashing trends and styles that have come before.

For much of my “WRITING CAREER,” and I use those words in the loosest possible sense, I always thought that I was doing my work in a kind of void. Sure, I knew people through my MFA program or undergrad institution who were writing, but I never really felt part of a large, nationwide (or global) community. That is no longer the case. We as writers and readers have so many great outlets now for networking and meeting other writers and readers interested in similar material. The enthusiasm I see day in and day out on these websites is more than enough to convince me that fiction is not even close to dying, and although our place on the cultural totem pole may be shifting, new writers are emerging and the work they’re doing is unquestionably important.

______________________

Salvatore Pane was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  After college, he attended the University of Pittsburgh where he received his MFA in Creative Writing.

His fiction has been published by PANK, Quick Fiction, Weave, We Are Champion, Corium Magazine, The Catalonian Review, The Boston Literary Magazine and Folio and is in current consideration for the 2011 Pushcart Prize. He won the 2010 Turow-Kinder Award in Fiction judged by Stewart O’ Nan with an excerpt from his novel-in-progress, The Collected Works of the Digital Narcissist. Salvatore also writes comic books. His debut, a 110-page original graphic novel, The Black List, is forthcoming from Arcana Studios. He co-wrote it with Mark Kleman. Lamair Nash supplied the art.  You can visit his blog here.

Today, we have guest blogger Adam Reger’s take:

Robert asked me to speak to the larger question of why people feel the need, every couple months, to declare fiction dead. But the specific impetus is Lee Siegel’s recent New York Observer screed, so that seems a good enough jumping-off point. Sifting through the mess of this piece, two main answers to Robert’s question occur to me.

Also, though, I’m using the Siegel piece as my reference point because I’m not sure I’ve ever bothered to read one of these tirades before, at least not in full. They’ve always seemed needlessly negative, irrational, shrill, and depressingly unconstructive, which is about how I found Mr. Siegel’s piece. I’m not going to spend any time taking down the piece because a former classmate, Carolyn Kellogg, has already done this, surpassingly well, here.

But I will point out a classic rhetorical error that Mr. Siegel makes, and that Ms. Kellogg calls him on, because I think it’s at the heart of the first part of the broader trend. Because non-fiction is rising in popularity, Siegel argues, fiction must be on the way out. While the argument makes some sense—people have only so much reading time and available cash, and there are only so many readers out there—it’s a fallacy to assume that the two modes can’t co-exist, or that this trend goes only one way and is irreversible.

I’d guess that this kernel of logic, plus a healthy fear for one’s livelihood as a writer, is at the heart of most declarations of fiction’s morbidity. Mr. Siegel doesn’t mention films, television, or video games. But any time I myself have wondered if I’ve made a terrible choice in committing myself to writing fiction, it’s these other modes of entertainment, more profitable and so much less demanding of the consumer’s patience and mental energies, that have unnerved me. For that matter, I’ve more than a few times failed even to crack whatever book I was reading on a given day because I’d come home to find an appealing Netflix selection in the mail, or there was a crucial NBA Finals game on that night, or whatever. The fear of competition is for real.

And so, the reasoning goes, fiction must be on the way out. Its cut of the entertainment pie will continue shrinking; eventually, it will dwindle to nothing. I don’t buy the logic, personally, but I can sympathize with this reflex: spotting a trend, we quite naturally take it to its direst conclusion. (It’s a very different realm, but these fiction-is-dead declarations remind me a little of the articles and books that occasionally pop up declaring that America is over. Sometimes they hail China or India as the world’s new superpowers, but their main thrust is generally that America is in bad decline. If we could pinpoint why exactly Americans have such an appetite for this kind of prognostication, we’d probably also understand the basic impulse behind foreseeing the end of fiction. There does seem to be a propensity for fiction writers to declare fiction dead, rather than targeting poetry or interpretive dance. Could the impulse be nothing more than a form of self-obsession? I don’t think I’d bet against it.)

The second reason, to my mind, is even more prosaic. Fiction’s not dying, but it is changing. I have little doubt that some overtired copy editor gave Siegel’s piece the title “Where Have All the Mailers Gone?” but that title is revealing. Mourning the absence of a Norman Mailer from the literary scene to me implies also missing a bygone literary scene where a few big magazines—The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic—published big-name writers, and that’s what you talked about as a reader.  Ditto a small number of big-name book publishers.

It was probably far easier to keep track of what was happening at the top of the literary food chain—but also far more difficult to get there, to gain access to that handful of big magazines. There’s been a significant shift in this area: there still exists a pyramid of literary outlets, but the base is far wider, the slope upward less severe. If you’re only reading The New Yorker, it’s no wonder you’d complain about the lack of a response to its “20 under 40” list, oblivious to the half-dozen or so that have appeared on the internet and elsewhere. It’s no wonder, in fact, that you’d miss nearly all of the vitality and community whose absence you’re bemoaning.

There’s a parallel between literature and news in the age of the internet: increasingly, we’re able to decide where to get ours. This isn’t new, exactly—people have always been able to forgo ABC’s Nightly News in favor of Rush Limbaugh, and the same with Ploughshares over The Atlantic—but the internet has accelerated the process. It’s not only possible but easy for an avid reader to subsist on a diet of Pank, Annalemma, Juked, etc. etc., without feeling even the slightest obligation to read the Jonathan Franzen story in The New Yorker.

I’d submit that this is good news for fiction, far better than it is for the world of news media. Whereas most writers create stories for the love of it, because on some level they need to, most news stories exist mainly because a reporter was paid to write them. If the new world order is writing and html coding and desktop publishing (and distribution) carried out above all as labors of love, I’d say fiction is in fine shape. Whatever the hell Lee Siegel was trying to say by declaring fiction “no longer a vocation” but rather “a profession,” it’s telling that he seems to think that fiction will die without a dedicated class of professional (perhaps I should say “vocational”) artists devoting themselves to it. Story and self-expression through language remain with us because they serve basic needs. If you really want to foster a sense of vitality and urgency, you could do worse than to force fiction into the avocation corner, where those who practice it are those who can’t imagine not writing.

But with reference to the question at hand, it’s no wonder these developments should present as the death of fiction: for people tuned in to the same handful of outlets where they got their Updike and Roth for several decades, fiction—and especially its vitality, the “mischievous” spirit Siegel mourns—must look like it’s disappearing. But that’s not the same as dying.

______________

Adam Reger earned his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 2008.   He has published fiction in Pear Noir!, White Whale Review, Juked, and New Orleans Review.   His blog shines a powder-blue spotlight on issues such as literary tattoos, Freemasons, and recordings of people laughing.

Related links: The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Pank, Annalemma, Juked.

I read on CNN.com today about a website where you type in a few paragraphs of your own writing and, after running some computations, this website informs you which famous author you write like.  (There are fifty to choose from, ranging from James Joyce to Dan Brown.)  Of course, I couldn’t resist, so I typed in the opening paragraph of my story “Clear Blue Michigan Sky”:

Sometimes, office ladies visit our scrapyard.  It’s better than ice cream or the blues, watching us and realizing life could be worse.  So welcome to evening shift at a GM plant: Gauntlet of Monotony to us, General Motors to you.  This particular office lady is watching the cranes lift and sort hot metal pipes.  It’s almost like an art exhibit, kinetic sculpture, and there’s a lot to admire, from the barnlike warehouses to miles of steel rails.  If she waits long enough, a cargo train will steam through the yard.

Steelhead arrives as the shift begins and flicks a cigarette at the office lady’s shoes.  She hops back.  Mr. Head is a new breed of American peasant, a punching bag of a man with a dry, cracked face and a white mustache colored from smoking.  He’s in his early fifties, never left Michigan and damn proud of it.  “You got no business here,” he says by way of hello.  But if she hears, she doesn’t acknowledge.  I like her a little more, wish she hadn’t flinched.

“She’s just looking,” I say.

I hit “Analyze” and this appeared on the screen:   

For good measure, I typed in the query letter I’d sent along with “Clear Blue Michigan Sky” and hit “Analyze.”  The result: “I write like David Foster Wallace.”

How exactly does this site work?  You might think it randomly generates an author name after you hit “Analyze.”  According to the author, the site uses an algorithm-based program.  From an interview reposted on the website:

Actually, the algorithm is not a rocket science, and you can find it on every computer today. It’s a Bayesian classifier, which is widely used to fight spam on the Internet. Take for example the “Mark as spam” button in Gmail or Outlook. When you receive a message that you think is spam, you click this button, and the internal database gets trained to recognize future messages similar to this one as spam. This is basically how “I Write Like” works on my side: I feed it with “Frankenstein” and tell it, “This is Mary Shelley. Recognize works similar to this as Mary Shelley.” Of course, the algorithm is slightly different from the one used to detect spam, because it takes into account more stylistic features of the text, such as the number of words in sentences, the number of commas, semicolons, and whether the sentence is a direct speech or a quotation.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.  When you’re ready to see which famous author you write like, click here.

The original article at CNN.com can be found here. An interview with the site’s creator can be found at The Awl.

Why Bury Fiction? Part Two of a Series.

Why Do People Keep Declaring Fiction Dead? Reason #2: They Hate Creative Writing Programs.

The general public has an ingrained concept of who a creative writer is. To the public, writers are typically bespectacled weirdos or seasoned rustics who, after decades of toiling in restaurants, tanneries, or oil rigs, pen their hard-earned tales. Decades after dying in poverty, these writers are celebrated as geniuses. There’s an irresistible romance to this kind of life (at least, to someone who hasn’t actually lived the humiliating grind of poverty), and it’s understandable that people don’t want to let go.

But creative writing programs aren’t really new, as Kurt Vonnegut writes in a 1999 New York Times article “Despite Tough Guys, Life Is Not the Only School for Real Novelists.” He writes about how, after being asked whether one could really teach creative writing, he responded,

Listen, there were creative writing teachers long before there were creative writing courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors. The Times guy who wondered if anybody could be taught how to write was taught by an editor. The tough guy […] like me, handed in manuscripts to his publisher that were as much in need of repairs as what I got from students at the workshop. If the tough guy was Thomas Wolfe or Ernest Hemingway, he had the same creative writing teacher who suggested, on the basis of his long experience, how the writer might clean up the messes on paper that he had made. He was Maxwell Perkins, reputedly one of the greatest editors of fiction who ever lived.

So there you have it: A creative writing course provides experienced editors for inspired amateurs. What could be simpler or more dignified? Or fun?

Of course, there are more writers nowadays, and fewer editors. But writing communities have existed for years. The most famous examples that spring to mind are George Eliot’s correspondence with Henry James, and Hemingway’s critical exchanges with Fitzgerald. Many writers of the “Lost Generation” critiqued and supported each other’s work. Creative writing programs simply codify this experience while providing some measure of shelter and support.

In his 1982 (!) speech “Poetry and Ambition,” Donald Hall declares,

The United States invented mass quick-consumption and we are very good at it. We are not famous for making Ferraris and Rolls Royces; we are famous for the people’s car, the Model T, the Model A—”transportation,” as we call it: the particular abstracted into the utilitarian generality—and two in every garage. Quality is all very well but it is not democratic; if we insist on hand-building Rolls Royces most of us will walk to work. Democracy demands the interchangeable part and the worker on the production line; Thomas Jefferson may have had other notions but de Tocqueville was our prophet. Or take American cuisine: it has never added a sauce to the world’s palate, but our fast-food industry overruns the planet.

Thus: Our poems, in their charming and interchangeable quantity, do not presume to the status of “Lycidas”—for that would be elitist and un-American. We write and publish the McPoem —ten billion served—which becomes our contribution to the history of literature as the Model T is our contribution to a history which runs from bare feet past elephant and rickshaw to the vehicles of space. Pull in any time day or night, park by the busload, and the McPoem waits on the steam shelf for us, wrapped and protected, indistinguishable, undistinguished, and reliable—the good old McPoem identical from coast to coast and in all the little towns between, subject to the quality control of the least common denominator.

And every year, Ronald McDonald takes the Pulitzer.

How do you build a character with internal monologue? someone asks. How do you set up an unreliable narrator? How do you shape the narrative arc?

I shake my head. Despite all my years in creative-writing classrooms, I still have no idea how to pretend to unravel the mystery. These concerns are red herrings, I say. So are the relative merits of the first, second, third persons, active and passive voice. I tell them about W. C. Fields–how I had heard that after reading an analysis of his juggling he couldn’t juggle for six years. They laugh. They know the feeling, they say.

And I feel like a fraud. Week after week in come their stories–some just committed to page, some rewritten so many times and under the aegis of so many different workshops that the writer himself has lost all sense of the authenticity of the piece. What can I do about this? How can I help someone breathe life into a flat and pointless piece of writing? I cannot. If there are teachers who know how to work from the abstract to the concrete, I am not one of them.

So what can I do in a world in which bad stories may well be written by likable people? I can forget the writers. I do forget them as I sit reading paragraph after paragraph of mediocre writing, my blood rising yet again at the presumption of an audience, any audience, for this, let alone the serious attention of an irascible writer with one foot nailed to the ground for the duration of the semester.

The story is, in fact, the second draft that I have seen, and it has been completely transformed. The student has not followed any of my suggestions; he’s done better, much better. I find myself envying him his furious youth, his selfish, single-minded determination.

And then, one day, in comes a story with an opening paragraph so good that it fills me with a rush of hope, hope not so much for the writer as for myself. Reading on, page after page, I feel lifting from me the awful burden of having to take seriously a piece of writing that should be consigned to the bin.

I included those last two paragraphs because Freed’s depiction isn’t completely negative. But in case you missed it, Lynn Freed’s self-portrait of a creative writing instructor who doesn’t necessarily enjoy or believe in her job set off a long, vitriolic debate. Had more people actually read the whole thing, the ensuing conversation might have had fewer exclamation points and swears. I’m late to the party and don’t have much to add except that, for the sake of fairness, Freed should have written about one of many creative writing instructors who are both effective teachers and enjoy their fairly easy, well-paying jobs. Or at least acknowledged that such teachers exist.

Creative writing programs don’t fare much better when artists portray them.

Take Francine Prose’s novel Blue Angel, whose protagonist is a writing professor who is a burned out husk of a novelist. He leads workshops where painfully talentless pupils trade feeble opinions about dorm-life stories featuring stereotypes and bestiality. Spoiler alert—when the professor finally discovers a talented student, he begins an inappropriate relationship with her.

As my friend and former professor Cathy Day points out, nothing is actually taught in Blue Angel’s fictional fiction workshop, and the students don’t learn anything. Absent are the carefully crafted lesson plans, skill-developing exercises, analytic assignments and individual critiques which are a hallmark of Cathy’s pedagogy (which, incidentally, is informed by decades of training and experience).

Margo Rabb’s short story “How To Tell a Story” features Chester Charles, a writing professor who is described by the narrator as sporting a “camel-colored, elbow-patched cardigan, which he wears every day (do they give you a crate of these the moment you receive tenure?) Chester is rumored to be about fifty, though he looks ninety. He carries a donut-shaped hemorrhoid pillow around with him everywhere, to sit on during our three-hour class. Rumor has it he was once nominated for a National Book Award; I’ve searched for his books in five bookstores, and all are out of print.”

Chester Charles leads workshops which are toxic, soul-rending analyses of autobiographical stories. All in pursuit of an MFA—or, as one character calls it, the “Master of Fucking Around.” Academically and socially, there is a lot of screwing around in this program.

More recently, there’s John McNally’s After the Workshop, a novel about a dysfunctional writing program which also features a burned out novelist. Set in Iowa, by the way.

So, to recap, here is how creative writing programs are being portrayed: our classes are lead by fashion-challenged male professors who are burned-out novelists. After all, those who can’t do, teach, right? Being workshopped is basically, as Rabb writes, “being a piece of raw steak fed to starving bears, all of them clawing you, chewing you up, and then spitting you out. And afterward, you’re supposed to say ‘Thank you.’”

By all accounts, the stories churned out by MFA students will be bland and formulaic; their sheer quantity will crowd and pollute the once-great arena of North American Letters.

And finally, according to the misconceptions, most creative writing students are talentless hacks who are basically being defrauded. The few talented students are doomed to a life of sexual harassment and, if they’re lucky, will land a teaching job at a creative writing program where they’ll lose their fashion sense, be sapped of their creative energies, and bilk more students in a horrific accelerating cycle.

With that kind of public image, it’s no wonder people are so eager to announce the death of fiction. As I’m reading this, it seems like one anxiety people have about creative writing relates to decline and decay—perhaps mirroring a larger anxiety about our own culture. Maybe the greatest anxiety is about suit jackets and industrialization closing in on our artists, perhaps the one virgin field we have left in this country. I’m not sure why these fears are being projected so brightly on the field of creative writing. Obviously, not everyone buys into this negative image, though; in the time it took you to read this sentence, a college somewhere started an MFA program, and five hundred students applied to it.

Reason #3 People Keep Declaring Fiction Dead: It’s Too Insular.

When I wrote book reports in middle school, publishers listed offices in TORONTO SEATTLE CHICAGO NEW YORK. In high school, they listed CHICAGO NEW YORK, and today, simply NEW YORK. It was a slow-motion retreat and we ended up with our backs to the ocean—or, at least, the East River. I think many people are worried that most or all contemporary fiction is being filtered through a specific, insular, Manhattan sensibility. This fear informs Siegel’s comments about fear of alienating New York editors and agents and “literary triumph” consisting of “publishing one or two pieces in The New Yorker each year.”

But if there is a New York sensibility, it has a surprising degree of variety.  After all, Deborah Treisman, Fiction Editor of The New Yorker, was born in England. She attended college in California and worked at The Threepenny Review, which is located out of Berkeley, about as far from Manhattan as one can get. Cressida Leyshon grew up in Bristol, England, and was an editorial assistant at London-based Granta before becoming The New Yorker’s Deputy Fiction Editor.

Outside of New York, there’s Heidi Pitlor, series editor of The Best American Short Stories series, who was was raised in Concord, Massachusetts, educated in Canada, and received her MFA from Emerson. The most “New York” of the premier editors is Laura Furman, series editor of the O. Henry Prize Stories, who was born and raised in New York, with a story published in The New Yorker. More recently, though, she’s lived in Rome and is currently teaching at the University of Texas at Austin.

Alas: The practice of fiction is no longer a vocation. It has become a profession, and professions are not characterized by creative mischief. Artistic vocations are about embracing more and more of the world with your will; professions are insular affairs that are all about the profession. The carefulness, the cautiousness, the professionalism that keeps contemporary fiction from being meaningful to the most intellectually engaged people is also what is stifling any kind of response to The New Yorker.

Although Carolyn Kellogg’s response argues that vocation and profession mean the same thing (with dictionary definitions to boot), I think Siegel is defining “vocation” as something akin to joining the priesthood and “profession” as something akin to being an insurance salesperson. Years ago, writers got kicked out of institutions (Mark Twain and Charles Dickens dropped out of elementary school, Edgar Allan Poe got kicked out of West Point, Jack London dropped out of UC Berkeley).

Now, writers are vital parts of those institutions, especially academia. This is nothing new, of course: James Joyce and Herman Melville were teachers, Virginia Woolf lectured at Cambridge, Mark Twain accepted an honorary degree from Oxford. I suppose Siegel is arguing that because writers nowadays are more involved with academia, they are less likely to take professional risks. Although his evidence for this is shaky (there are plenty of alternate “Best Writers Under __ Lists” and writers of all eras knew better than to antagonize the leading literary journals), the “vocation versus profession” argument is faulty in another way. I’m not sure “artistic risks” (such as writing a formally innovative story) are affected by not taking “professional risks” (such as publicly criticizing an employer’s hiring decision).

As a reader, I don’t mind “creative mischief” at all. In fact, I would agree that being mischievous or innovative or even dangerous in one’s writing is probably integral to fiction’s survival. As a former writing student, I’m happy that various forms of “mischief” have been quietly eliminated from creative writing programs and replaced with professionalism and sobriety.

Returning to the concept of vocation, Lynn Freed also discusses it in “Doing Time”:

Talent is the naked emperor of writing programs. How, for instance, does one approach the subject of talent in a workshop that may well be devoid of even one student showing a hint of it? Mentioning talent serves only to make everyone nervous. (Do I have it? Does she? Anyway, who is she to judge? I just got a personal rejection from The New Yorker.) Mentioning vocation, on the other hand, is likely to make everyone feel comfortable. In a world that confuses the calling to write with the desire to be a writer, vocation is just another word for ambition.

I partially agree with Freed—nine times out of ten, ambition is a faulty substitute for talent. But Freed’s article is often based on the premise that one needs talent to be a successful writer. The truth, as we all know, is that it takes very little talent to pen a wildly successful novel.

If you’re a writer, I guess this simple truth is either horribly depressing or strangely liberating. Something to feed anyone’s ambition, at any rate. But quick, let me say something positive to conclude this post, something appropriate to the concept of true vocation: there’s a certain faith to what we’re doing in creative writing programs—a faith that good writing finds a home, a faith that talent can be perfectly sharpened given enough time and guidance. And, ultimately, a faith that we live in an era filled with worthy stories, whose truths are still valid and useful.

Does anyone feel better?

Next week, guest blogger Adam Reger will solve all of your problems. Stay tuned.