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.).
