HTMLGIANT Features

The Writerly Ego; or, Letters from the “Cream of the Cream”

As many of you have probably seen already, Gawker posted an e-mail that the writer—I mean, she’s got this really sweet blue website and a whole mess of books with silly names, so she must be a writer—Janette Turner Hospital sent to her former MFA program at the University of South Carolina.

If you haven’t read yet, click through before you go any farther. It’s great. It’s astonishing. It deserves a blurb from Nicole Krauss. It’s one of the most obnoxious pieces of writing I’ve ever seen. In the e-mail, Turner essentially tells the students of South Carolina to carpool (because, I mean, who south of New Jersey has their own car? Am I right?) to NYC immediately (because, I mean, everywhere’s close to New York City, it’s the center of the literary world, and centers, and radii, and you understand—) so that they can see all of these mindblowing writers do these mindblowing things in mindblowing places like the Upper West Side (Upper Manhattan! she’s got jokes!) and Central Park (where people jog! really, this time it’s not even a joke!). Oh, and in case you didn’t know, Columbia students take advantage of all of these things, multiple times a week, and their brains feed on this hive mind of authorial brilliance like parasites. No kidding, multiple times a week. Oh, and the Columbia MFA? Pretty much the greatest thing since Raymond Carver (sample triumph: “Students take workshops and literature courses in equal measure.” NO THEY DO NOT.).

There are a few questions that come out of reading this golden nugget of the epistolary form, almost all beginning with the word why. Why is she sending this to a bunch of people trying to write in South Carolina? Why is she acting like she’s the first outsider to ever set foot in the creative Mecca of New York, the first to discover all these great places that are beyond second nature to thousands and thousands of people already? Why is she so condescending and conceited? Is it because she’s been reviewed in the New York Times? Is she trying to provoke anything here other than jealousy, or trying to do anything aside from boosting herself up in the minds of people who probably had never heard of her and didn’t much care either way? Why doesn’t she mention the fact that Columbia costs an obscene amount to attend? As a professional writer, can’t she come up with better similes than, “At both places the crackle of intellectual energy in the air is almost visible, like blue fire,” and, “Agents and editors hover like major-league recruiters at college championships”?

This post is partly to spark some discussion of these questions, and partly a way to express my own puzzlement, and to draw together her outburst with one that I experienced last year, from another writer who seems to value Pulitzers in fiction overmuch (read William Gass’ “Pulitzer: The Peoples’ Prize” if you don’t catch this barb).

I’m an undergraduate at Duke University. Despite being the college of Reynolds Price and William Styron, and having a decent history of people, not to mention a current community in the Triangle area, who genuinely care about writing, and are really, really good at it, we don’t have a creative writing focus or minor—definitely no major. As the best substitute, I’m an English major working on a creative writing distinction thesis, which is the school’s throwing the dog a stick. In my pursuit of what Duke more or less treats as a hobby, I’ve taken many of the creative writing classes offered, mostly in fiction, one in poetry, and last year I took a course with Oscar Hijuelos.

In case you weren’t aware—and let me tell you, Professor Hijuelos would be a little pissed-off to hear you weren’t—Oscar won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1990 (only twenty years ago!) for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Assigned the book in another English class, I got about halfway through before I gave up: though Hijuelos is a pretty stylist, characterized by a pleasant sort of loping, flamenco prose, there’s only so many pages of gratuitous anal sex and twilit self-pity you can take before it overwhelms the story of poor Cuban musicians. Still, I took his class in the spring semester of my junior year, called “Works in Progress,” because, dammit, the guy won a Pulitzer, and I’ve always got something in progress, whether it’s working or not.

Hijuelos did not teach. He just didn’t. He’d tell us to make our writing “breathe” more, and then he’d compliment everyone equally, as long as you turned in pages when you were supposed to. I won’t get into it, we’ve all had bad classes. Moving on. End of the semester, I got an A-. Nice. I e-mailed him, curious to see why that was my grade—he’d provided zero feedback on the final packet I’d turned in, and, having missed class toward the end of the semester due to a family emergency, I wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything more I could do, or anything I hadn’t completed, or whether he wanted me to rewrite my submissions from earlier in the semester instead of just submitting them again (I hadn’t, because of the absence)—and this was the response he sent me.

The reason I did not suggest rewrites is because the kind of rewriting your work needs would take weeks, not days, and a whole revamping in terms of technique and choices:I don’t know who has been whispering in your ear that you are a young Nabokov, but, at this point, a little humility on your part would go a long way towards your future development as a writer, if that’s what you are interested in: so, if I were you, I would definitely be delighted with an A- — I know I would have at your age studying with a writer of my experience; and, by the way, I’m sorry you were going through so much with family issues etc., but my grade took that into consideration, if anything– and worked to your benefit.

“A writer of my experience” was the clincher. I knew I needed work, that wasn’t even a question, and God knows I had never claimed to be a Nabokov, young, old, dead, drunk, of any variety; but why he felt the need to build himself up in an e-mail to a kid who was just asking about his grade in an academic class, I couldn’t understand. It was a level of hubris, and/or complete lack of self-esteem, that scared me severely.

Fortunately, most writers I’ve met have been gracious, kind, modest, and a million other things I’d love to elaborate on. I worked in New York this summer, for the magazine A Public Space, and couldn’t have had a better experience. I went to some of those readings Turner’s bragging about, and they were fun, for sure.

But then there’s these two instances, and I know many more that plenty of people can describe in detail, along with how hurt/angry/astonished they made them feel, and I wonder if it’s just symptoms of humanity that are present in any sort of trade or practice, or if it has somehow to do with the structure of the writing community in contemporary society—one that, from my young vantage point, I see as mostly laudable; I though Lincoln Michel’s response to Batuman’s critique of the MFA was far better than its source material—and if so, how can it be weeded out? Is there a panacea? Or as long as we’ve got human ego, are we doomed to missives like these?

Kevin Lincoln is a senior at Duke University and lives in Durham, NC. Follow him on Twitter (http://twitter.com/KTLincoln), e-mail him at kevin.t.lincoln@gmail.com.

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77 Comments

  1. Anonymous

      Wow. As someone who’s teaching undergrad writing, I’d just like to say that I wish people who teach actually cared about teaching versus self-aggrandizement. Teaching writing is delicate and can be truly inspiring–particularly when you love what you do and students can see that. Why try to make people feel like idiots? I teach in a town with absolutely no literary scene. My college doesn’t have a creative writing major and very few creative writing opportunities. So what do we do? We create them–my students and I. Not everybody’s going to become a great writer, but the least I can do is throw them a bone. If you’re going to teach, for god’s sake be a teacher. In the end, no one’s looking for an unattainable god. They want to learn shit. I want to learn shit. We all want to feel part of something. To all the shitty teachers out there, I’ll quote my dad, “Fuck ’em and feed ’em beans.”

  2. alex crowley

      classic Dukie, “here’s an analysis of this terrible piece of writi… wait, now i have an opportunity to talk about myself and Duke! blah blah blah…”

  3. Mike Meginnis

      I think though that we’re at risk of demanding perfect behavior, which is impossible, but also common at HTMLGiant, in a weird way — lots of purity contests. I suspect our post’s author’s e-mail, which he doesn’t provide us, showed some of the attitude I dislike in my students too. But students have attitude. This is the province of students. And professors have attitudes too, and that’s okay. But the interesting thing, and the disturbing thing, is the underlying impulse, the need this writer and other writers show to build themselves up at cost to others, when esteem is, theoretically, unlimited, and free.

  4. alexisorgera

      Wow. As someone who’s teaching undergrad writing, I’d just like to say that I wish people who teach actually cared about teaching versus self-aggrandizement. Teaching writing is delicate and can be truly inspiring–particularly when you love what you do and students can see that. Why try to make people feel like idiots? I teach in a town with absolutely no literary scene. My college doesn’t have a creative writing major and very few creative writing opportunities. So what do we do? We create them–my students and I. Not everybody’s going to become a great writer, but the least I can do is throw them a bone. If you’re going to teach, for god’s sake be a teacher. In the end, no one’s looking for an unattainable god. They want to learn shit. I want to learn shit. We all want to feel part of something. To all the shitty teachers out there, I’ll quote my dad, “Fuck ’em and feed ’em beans.”

      ps-Good post!

  5. Karl

      I loved Mambo Kings, when I read it 20 years or so ago. And anyway, what’s wrong with an A-? As a life-long C student, I would have been delighted.

  6. ryder

      It doesn’t just stop at the undergrad level. We had a creative writing prof who served as chair for people’s creative dissertations and s/he couldn’t be bothered to read their dissertations until another student called this prof out in front of other English profs. All the prof cared about was getting published and trying to be the next Robert Olen Butler…

  7. R. Ridge

      This post starts off real good, Kevin. You bring up some damn fine points re Hospital. However, you lose me when you try to draw a parallel Hospital’s rant and Hijuelos’ justifiable smackdown. You emailed the dude after the semester ended about an A-. A freakin’ A-! He went ballistic, and naturally, because he gave you an A-. Have some stones. Take the grade and move on. Posting his email to you in a public forum strikes me as tacky. This isn’t Rate My Professor.

  8. KTLincoln

      I should clarify, it seems. I was happy with the A-, I just wanted feedback to see how I could improve—keep in mind, he gave me no—zero—response or commentary on my work of an entire semester, just slapped a grade on it and moved on.

      I wasn’t complaining about an A-, I just wanted to know what I could do to be better in the future. I mean, we’re all trying to be A writers, if you’re gonna put a grade on it right? And if I’m taking a class with this illustrious professor, I want him to guide me in some way; otherwise, why am I in the class? I’ll take an A- GRADE any day of the week, though.

  9. Matt

      Kevin, the email was entertaining, but there’s pretty good proof that it was a hoax. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/columbia-fiction-professo_b_746769.html

      Also, Kevin, I’m sorry to hear about your experiences with the undergraduate writing experience at Duke. I’ve been disappointed by the lack of publicity writers get when they visit Duke, and I have no clue why they don’t have a minor in creative writing. I went through the poetry minor at UNC, and it was a fantastic time–the courses were rigorous and abundant, and the professors were extremely caring. If you get a chance, try to take a class down the road before you leave the Triangle.

  10. Mike Meginnis

      I often feel awash in this nonsense. I do not see a cure. If you name it, they will weep and gnash and threaten you. You have to try not to end up with these people, and, when inevitably you do, lie back and take it. They are unreachable. They are probably trying their best. They are probably just damaged. We all are. It’s okay.

  11. Alexisorgera

      I don’t think the prof’s response is justifiable–even if Kevin WAS grade-grubbing.
      Again, he’s got a teaching opportunity, and uses it to tell the kid he is more work than he’s worth. That said, that while I believe that you should never say anything in an email that you wouldn’t say publicly, posting it ethically questionable, don’t you think?

  12. ryder

      How is it a hoax? The article just states her facts are not true…

  13. Matt

      I was under the impression that Abramson was saying the facts were so off base that there was no way Hospital could have written it. If I misread him, I apologize.

  14. scobie

      Totally agree; the letter’s not a hoax in the sense of Hitler’s diaries being printed on Duke of Hazard stationery; rather, it’s just that Hospital is talking crap in addition to smack. And I loved how this guy tied this in to his own experiences with Hijulos. He sounds like a jerk who was hardly helpful; I’m sure his students would prefer criticism and feedback over a good grade; but he seems to think it was all about just being in his presence (i.e. reflected glory) rather than, you know, him teaching kids a few things.

  15. alexisorgera

      No, he’s just saying that she pretty much made up all the “facts” to suit her agenda, which I still don’t understand.

  16. Roxane

      I hate to be the bitch in the room but as a teacher, if an undergraduatd e-mailed me about an A-, I’d respond similarly and I have to say, criticism is well and good but a Pulitzer is a Pulitzer. If I won one, I’d have it tattooed somewhere very visible.This is not to say you did not have a bad experience or that fancy writers are beyond reproach. I know this kind of teacher who is sort of coasting on their fame and doing a half-assed job but the tone of the latter half of this post is just the kind of thing that makes teachers lose their shit. It is a little ironic, isn’t it, that this post is titled The Writerly Ego?

  17. John Domini

      About the Hijuelos response, my sympathies, but then any good writer has to fight the cold-shouldered, the tin-eared.

      About Hospital, her letter clearly isn’t a hoax — that’s not the point of the note in Huffington — and it turns my stomach. Worse, she masks her preening & snobbery as “encouragement” for her benighted out-of-towners. More despicably still, she implies any worthy writing must come, somehow, out of Manhattan. That’s just plain wrong. Any list of the literature that’s mattered over the last centurey, here in America, will include only a small percentage of and from New York.

  18. smart dumbguy

      classic Dukie, “here’s an analysis of this terrible piece of writi… wait, now i have an opportunity to talk about myself and Duke! blah blah blah…”

  19. smart dumbguy

      it could just as easily be titled “My Duke Undergrad Entitlement Complex”

      /hijuelos sounds like a perfect match, really

  20. Blake Butler

      I believe the majority of you are missing the point: it’s not about the grade, or the self, really.

  21. Mike Meginnis

      There’s some truth in this, but what gets me is the “writer of my experience” thing. Why does he need to do that? I think it’s revealing, and not flattering.

  22. KTLincoln

      Hey Roxane, no, I definitely appreciate your response. But would you have responded with an e-mail like this? My point is, the tenor of Hijuelos and Hospital match up pretty damn well. Why are they teaching? To cut a paycheck? And if they’re not doing their job—which, in this case, Hijuelos isn’t, he’s literally not doing the job he’s supposed to—we should hold them to that. Would you have ever sent an e-mail this flat-footed and insulting to someone who was asking for your help, essentially?

  23. Roxane

      I understand the point perfectly but come on! First of all, Mambo Kings was a fucking great book and to see it disrespected in such a manner kind of appalls me. No one is beyond reproach but shouldn’t there be a little respect? As I said in my previous comment, I get what Hijuelous pulled and I don’t condone his behavior but the entitlement in this post is hard for me to stomach. Maybe it’s because I teach at the undergrad level but I see this attitude where there’s no need to respect accomplishment all the time and I think it’s as big a problem as apathetic or egotistical faculty members.

  24. jereme

      this week on days of our lives…

  25. Matthew Simmons

      Sorta like to see the letter the author wrote to the professor, honestly.

  26. Roxane

      It’s very revealing. I just don’t think two wrongs make a right.

  27. KTLincoln

      Also, I’d be the first to admit that I have an ego. Trying to put my writing in the public sphere at all is completely indicative of that. But it’s like Justin’s post the other day: do we kneel down and worship all other writers at the expense of ourselves, or do we try and treat each other as equals? I e-mailed Hijuelos back after this and apologized for any misunderstanding and asked again, if he had any feedback on my writing and he told me to “take care.” And that was that.

  28. Roxane

      Hi Kevin. No I would not have responded with that kind of an attitude but I’m also not at the end of my career. I would like to think I won’t become an asshole but I do see how faculty get to that place where they don’t give a shit. Now, you show his e-mail but you don’t show yours so I don’t know if there was something about your tone that set him off or what. I don’t condone his email to you. It’s a jack ass move but so was posting his email without posting yours.

  29. Kyle Minor

      I think it’s generally uncool to post private emails publicly without asking permission of the person who wrote them.

  30. Karl

      good points, but hey, hijuelos is not at the end of his career. in this instance he may not have been the most inspired teacher, but he just had a new novel come out this Summer. i have it but haven’t yet read it.

  31. Mike Meginnis

      I think though that we’re at risk of demanding perfect behavior, which is impossible, but also common at HTMLGiant, in a weird way — lots of purity contests. I suspect our post’s author’s e-mail, which he doesn’t provide us, showed some of the attitude I dislike in my students too. But students have attitude. This is the province of students. And professors have attitudes too, and that’s okay. But the interesting thing, and the disturbing thing, is the underlying impulse, the need this writer and other writers show to build themselves up at cost to others, when esteem is, theoretically, unlimited, and free.

  32. Roxane

      I should have said, I’m at the beginning of my career (5 years of teaching) whereas I’m sure Hijuelos has probably been teaching for 3 or 4 times that. I won’t bore you with the details but I recently did a study about how faculty approach student writing and one of the ways I analyzed the data was by years in the profession. The longer faculty teach, the less faith they have in student writing so that’s the lens through which I read Hijuelos’s inappropriate email.

  33. Karl

      thank you for big upping mambo kings . . . i think much of this whole animus fling comes from ktlincoln not even finishing what was a fucking great book and so, in a weird way, disrespecting the hiljuelous first

  34. Matthew Simmons

      Clarify that, though. It’s an edit of a private email. (Reviewed this. I may be wrong. Kevin, is this the entire response?)

      Given to us as a response to a characterization of the author’s email.

      And I know Blake thinks I’m missing the point by focusing on this. It’s a post about the easily bruised egos of writers. Sure.

      Seems to me the author is the one with the huge, purple ego bruise, though. If this piece had more mirror and less window, I think I would’ve liked it more. Because it IS about self. Nothing but.

  35. KTLincoln

      Alexis—I do agree that posting the e-mail publicly was ethically questionable. I spent a lot of time debating whether to do so or not. But in the end, I thought that there was more to learn for people by looking at why he responded as he did than there was a negative cost to anyone involved from me putting it online.

  36. Cathy

      hey I don’t think it’s tacky to ask about an A-. What’s wrong about caring about your grades and being responsible for your education?

  37. KTLincoln

      God forbid the Pulitzer Prize winner has to critique his students’ work? I don’t get it. It’s not like he’s on staff out of charity. He’s being paid to do a job.

  38. Roxane

      One has nothing to do with the other. You insult his book and it seems like you do so in a petty way because you’re angry about the lack of critique. That’s what you should address, isn’t it? That’s what you have the problem with so defaming his book is… unnecessary.

  39. KTLincoln

      Matthew, yeah, that was his entire response. And I agree with you that this is a pretty solipsistic essay, maybe comparing my solipsism to theirs: if I’m going to criticize these two for their behavior, then I’m happy to open myself up to criticism as well.

  40. KTLincoln

      That’s fair.

  41. Karl

      KTL, if you couldn’t stand Mambo Kings, or even finish it, why did you bother to take his class? Ah, because he won a prize, you explain. think about that for a moment. if you were so dazzled by the prize, and value it so highly, should you be surprised at the prize-winner’s alleged hubris?
      And you got an A- out of this circle of shit.

  42. KTLincoln

      Roxane, Karl, you guys both have really good points, I appreciate it. I’m learning too, I guess. I think I’m trying to get at the vulnerable role of the student vs. the institutionalized prize winner here, and maybe I fell into that trap a little too much, but I was really hoping that all this discussion wouldn’t be about Hijuelos and me. Still, I asked for it, in many ways.

  43. Roxane

      I hear you Kevin, and I do understand what you’re getting at, about students who aren’t being adequately taught and nurtured by famous, or accomplished teachers, or any teachers at all. That’s actually a really important conversation, one I would love to have, and it is an issue that should be discussed way more than it is. The problem i that if you didn’t want this discussion to be about you and Hijuelous, you would not have named names or posted the email. You should have said something like “a teacher of mine” and paraphrased his response to you and framed the discussion around the real issue at hand.

  44. Lincoln Michel

      Thanks for the shout-out, fellow writer dude with Lincoln in his name.

      Having attended Columbia (although before Hospital taught), I can assure you most of us thought that letter was as absurd as everyone else. The mere idea of writing a letter to your former (? or does she still teach at both places?) students bragging about how much better your new program and students are is mind-bogglingly tone deaf.

      Her weirdest claim was that most students already have a book deal before they graduate. Columbia does indeed produce a lot of successful writers, but come on…most students haven’t even attempted to send to agents much less signed a book deal prior to graduating.

      That said, I’m not sure what your problem was with her statement that students take literature classes as often as workshops? Columbia’s program actually does require students to take far more craft and literature classes than most MFA programs.

      As to the letter debate, I think you are absolutely justified in being pissed that your teacher didn’t give you any commentary on your work. Isn’t that basically his only job? I agree that emailing about your A- grade and posting a private email are probably bad ideas though.

  45. alexisorgera

      I think we’re being a little hard on Kevin here. So what if we like the book? The point is that this prof. didn’t have time for a student, however annoying or self-important this student came across. I had a student email me at the beginning of this school year to tell me that I needed to control the tenor of my classroom b/c she didn’t like a critique she got. We set a meeting and sat down to talk about it. I heard her, she heard me. Teaching needs to be compassionate. Take your ego out of it, and it can be.

  46. alexisorgera

      Perhaps next time it could remain anonymous (as someone else mentioned) so you get your point across without 1. publicly defaming someone whose side of the story we don’t really know and 2. subjecting yourself to all sorts of (justifiable) criticism.

  47. deadgod

      I hope the Hospital email is a hoax – with Hospital and the USC people in as the pimpetrators. A creative-writing-on-the-internet baffle – hardy har har.

      But that’d probably be too beautiful to be truthy.

  48. Elsleepinggringo

      where can i obtain said stationary?

  49. Ryan P

      I don’t understand all the hurt that goes around in the MFA/creative writing community. Is this something common to any artistic pursuit within academia? Why all the ripping on each other?

      I wouldn’t listen to anyone who’d throw the “I don’t know who told you you were a young Nabokov” quip. To me that indicates that Mr. Professor-Man has settled for less within his writing practice, and is no interested in realizing his potential as best he can. Now he wants someone else to wallow in it with him. Last I checked Vladimir was just another human: two eyes, two ears, one brain, shat twice daily, etc. He was no alien life-form. Young Nabokov was not a “young Nabokov.”

  50. Mybutt

      Plenty of unsuccessful people are horrible teachers, too. Trust me, I’ve worked with many. Honestly, Hijuelos doesn’t sound that bad. Distant, definitely, but not actively assholish.

      I don’t see how this is about Pulitzer winners or the effect of success on the ego. I think the real issue here is that some people are dicks, regardless of position or level of success (although there’s probably a higher dick-percentage in academia, especially in the humanities, and especially especially in creative fields).

  51. Mybutt

      Also, do you realize how many vague “family emergency” type excuses a professor gets per semester? A TON. Not saying that your reason for absence wasn’t legitimate, but I think most profs become pretty callous about that sort of thing. And after having to deal with whatever make-up or catch-up you required, I can see how Hijuelos was less than enthusiastic about dealing with your concerns about a minus.

  52. Charlie F

      One reason why Hospital may have written such a letter—her students may just have been self-involved whiners who didn’t even bother trying to improve, much like the OP.

  53. Sean

      You people must be fucking kidding. There is nothing wrong with the email. The Nabokov thing was a bit cheeky, but get real. He was respecting you and telling you what he honestly felt. Who cares who is a student or who is a prize winner, blah, blah…

      You asked him a question he gave you a considered, honest answer. You think a person in his position has read a few drafts? Yes. And what he said was revise/revise/revise, and respect how hard it is to write a good sentence, story, packet, etc. We don’t even get your email to him in this post!! Want to include that?

      I’d let this email go and start writing. Writing is writing. He’s saying stop emailing over grades and write another packet. Now.

      Simone de Beauvoir burnt her first two novels is what he is saying.

      etc

  54. Trey

      it’s easy (and possibly correct) to criticize you now since you posted the e-mail and his name, Kevin, but I will say that had it remained anonymous I would have burned with curiosity. Not that knowing does me any good. But I appreciate it simply because I’m an ass and I like to know other people’s business.

  55. sm

      As an undergrad, I had two writing teachers who more or less phoned it in and who were clearly not interested in helping their students (one of these teachers actually apologized to me, ten years later! It seems professors have lives that turn upside down too…who knew…but more on that later). So I empathize with that aspect of this post. But as a writing teacher now, this post feels so so familiar. I’m truly sorry that you had family issues and I have no doubt you’re being honest about them. But if I had a dime for every family issue in my scant three years of college teaching, I would be able to buy a plane ticket to Paris. It seems like every undergrad of traditional age has some big but vague emergency every week that keeps them from doing work. I have no doubt that most of these emergencies are mostly true. But jesus christ there are a majillion of them. And if you’ve taught as long as Hijuelos, you’ve probably heard about a majillion to the infinity power number of family emergencies. It’s not that teachers aren’t empathetic. It’s just that this gets tiresome. Sometimes, in our less generous moments, it becomes difficult to believe them at all. Sometimes it feels like undergrads are looking not to do the work anyway. When I observe my older non-trad students, who have kids and spouses if they are lucky and are often working one or two other jobs AND still making it to class and turning in work, I wonder about my younger undergrads. There’s something about having a job, being out in the world, that makes you realize that the world doesn’t stop for you when life gets sucky. I’ve had my share of family emergencies in the last three years, unfortunately. But still, I’ve never missed teaching a class, or taught unprepared. Anyway, again, my intention is not to chide the original poster, with whom I do empathize, but to point out that maybe Hijuelos’s attitude is more complicated than “Hey I won a Pulitzer so suck it kid.”

  56. Catherine Lacey

      Do you think Hijuelos knows how to set up a Google Alert or has an assistant who knows how? Oscar Hijuelos Oscar Hijuelos Oscar Hijuelos Oscar Hijuelos Oscar Hijuelos

  57. keedee

      I don’t want to defend the Hospital email (I think she wrote the email to deflate egos elsewhere because she’s flailing in NY) but carpooling is more affordable and environmentally friendly and the “joke” (made by a colleague, not her) was about living in “Upstate Manhattan” not “Upper Manhattan”.

      The difference between Hijuelos’ email and Hospital’s is that her students leaked it to Gawker anonymously. You’re trying to exploit the inescapable Program Era Era on the internet this week.

  58. Sean

      Has anyone mentioned you can write without schooling?

  59. Trey

      What?!

  60. RyanPard

      I don’t. If he didn’t want his words on record he should have taken the time to meet with his student.

  61. keedee

      Let it breathe more.

  62. RyanPard

      I don’t understand all the hurt that goes around in the MFA/creative writing community. Is this something common to any artistic pursuit within academia? Why all the ripping on each other?

      I wouldn’t listen to anyone who’d throw the “I don’t know who told you you were a young Nabokov” quip. To me that indicates that Mr. Professor-Man has settled for less within his writing practice, and is no interested in realizing his potential as best he can. Now he wants someone else to wallow in it with him. Last I checked Vladimir was just another human: two eyes, two ears, one brain, shat twice daily, etc. He was no alien life-form. Young Nabokov was not a “young Nabokov.”

  63. Ryan Call

      one thing that college instructors will always do is joke about the number of dead grandparents and family emergencies that seem to affect their students each semester. i know because ive joked about it before. it goes with the job a little. but i dont think instructors should let those numbers color how they handle such emergencies/situations. when i taught and interacted with students, i always tried to, regardless of history, approach each student’s situation specifically and compassionately. i found that doing so gave everyone time to work through the difficulty, figure thigns out. when i think of those students who did struggle or who did have emergencies, i dont mind the trouble nor do i mind that maybe a few other students took advantage of my ways because it was worth it to help the others, maybe? i considered that part of my job as an instructor, to try to work with students to find a solution. likewise, many of my younger students were also dividing time between classes, work, caring for family, etc; all of their responsibilities were part of the world. so i dont think of it as stopping the world for their troubles, because i dont think the world stops when things get sucky. the world changes. your world changes. as someone who was a part of their world, i too was affected, and had to learn how to act as a fellow human. i made mistakes, i complained sometimes too, but i do miss teaching, and i miss interacting with people in that way. i write all this just to share how i approached these situations, not to say that your (sm) methods/attitudes are wrong. i know that there were things about how i taught that were probably not as good as they could be.

  64. KTLincoln

      This is a good point

  65. deadgod

      Shakespeare had an MFA (ok – in Creative Swordplay). Sophocles had an MFA and a Ph. D. (in Postanachronism).

      You don’t know what you’re talking about, Sean.

  66. KTLincoln

      I really appreciate all the comments/feedback here (including—especially?—the negative). Thanks errrybody.

  67. sm

      No, I totally agree with your methods and try to stick to them as closely as possible. Mostly, most days, let’s say 93% of the time, my teacher mind thinks, “No judgment, let’s just work through this to find a solution,” as you say. My selfish, imperfect human mind sometimes jacks me though when it’s late and I’m a whiskey in and halfway through a harrowing semester. I mostly put it out there because this is stuff that many teachers (at least the ones I’ve known) sometimes think but can’t/won’t/shouldn’t say, and though we try to repress them, once in awhile those things roil below student/teacher relation problems.

  68. Craig

      But how will I know what grade I got at the end?

  69. Niina

      Often people take courses with the most famous professors at their schools, walk away with little to no feedback. It is assumed that the reward for the course is just the chance to say they “studied with” so-and-so — a lame exchange but one that happens nonetheless. One of my professors (the famous kind) did not even require us to turn anything in during the course I took with him. The best classes I took during my MFA were with writers who weren’t as well-known as the school’s heavy hitters. They were more interested and more interesting and provided more useful feedback.

      Prof. Hospital’s email, on the other hand, is… um… something else.

  70. Niina

      Uff, I promptly left out an “and”. Cute!

  71. Joel W Coggins

      Intelligent, “successful” writers are not necessarily successful teachers… a damn shame.

  72. broadcast

      I totally agree, this problem is systemic. I have just finished undergrad in Melbourne, Australia and received only minor feedback over five years of studying. I too felt the need to ask, regardless of my grades.

  73. MM

      best advice given during the earning of my doctorate (albeit in microbiology; still, we too have a harpy scene [er… rather, minotaur… too much testosterone], like in literature, and business, and… is anything immune?):

      “stay nice as long as possible”.

      It’s like riding my bicycle in the busy street; when one must ceaselessly parry against a prominent stream of complainers, there seems to be a magnetism to ire. I often wonder, too, if it’s inevitable, as we get older and our pelts become stiffer.

  74. Oscar Hijuelos

      safeway shoppers, september 15th through october 15th is National Hispanic Heratage Month. This month we are honoring cuban-american Oscar Hijuelos, who became the first hispanic to win the pulitzer prize in fiction for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs Of Love later adapted into a major motion picture starring Antonio Banderas.

      what an awesome month.

  75. Andrewworthington
  76. Rob

      Kevin. Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. Don’t you know that you are never going to finish your book if you keep wasting your time writing things like this about successful people you think are mean or thoughtless? Write your book! You’re good! Oscar Hijuelos gave you an A-!

  77. smatchimo

      As a student in South Carolina (high school and now at CofC, not USC), I’m gonna say that that email was not anything new. Half of the teachers I’ve had in college, and more than half in high school, were wackos with delusions of grandeur. Most of them had already been up to the big cities, gotten chewed up and spat back down into good ole SC. I’m just glad that one more is gone, and maybe we can get a teacher who wants to teach for the sake of teaching, not as a way of finding recognition or as a steady (-ish) paycheck.