A book review from Louis Menand turns into a pretty evenhanded look at the age old question: Can writing be taught?
I stopped writing poetry after I graduated, and I never published a poem—which places me with the majority of people who have taken a creative-writing class. But I’m sure that the experience of being caught up in this small and fragile enterprise, contemporary poetry, among other people who were caught up in it, too, affected choices I made in life long after I left college. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Tags: Louis Menand, MFAs
an interesting piece. the ending totally took me by surprise, especially given the beginning, which seemed like he was gearing up to spit some real vitriol
an interesting piece. the ending totally took me by surprise, especially given the beginning, which seemed like he was gearing up to spit some real vitriol
A very good piece. An MFA program would do some young writers a lot of good. Like it might turn one from ‘a little shit’ into ‘something that would begin to resemble a man.’
A very good piece. An MFA program would do some young writers a lot of good. Like it might turn one from ‘a little shit’ into ‘something that would begin to resemble a man.’
As Michael Chabon wrote:
“But when I showed up at Irvine to start my first year as the youngest member of the MFA fiction workshop, I was not ready for what I found there: a room full of grown ups, more than half of them women. Some of these women were married, one of them had a grown child of her own. Without taking themselves half as seriously as I did, they were all twice as serious about what they were doing. They were better read, more disciplined, more widely traveled, and far less impressed with me than I was.
“The people in the workshop, but especially the women, and especially the women who were in the full middle of their lives, knew—they could testify to—just how rare and marvelous such a gift truly was. They had left real jobs, made real sacrifices, to come to Irvine. They had mortgages and health problems, troubled marriages, debts and obligations. And so I was obliged, or at least I felt that I was, to rise to the standard they set: in their writing, for the treatment of human emotion and relationships; in their lives for seizing this chance to learn and share and get immersed in the work; and in the workshop itself, women and men, for undertaking that collective work with respect, with charity, with tolerance, and above all—most frightening to me at the time—with no patience for the pretense and callowness and trite anti-social pose of some little shit. I think that’s the only cure, in the end, for the little shit: regular exposure to the healing rays of healthy disillusion, and in particular the hard-earned skepticism of grown women. Call it the Yoko Ono effect.”
There are a lot of little shits running around calling themselves writers who need the Yoko Ono effect.
As Michael Chabon wrote:
“But when I showed up at Irvine to start my first year as the youngest member of the MFA fiction workshop, I was not ready for what I found there: a room full of grown ups, more than half of them women. Some of these women were married, one of them had a grown child of her own. Without taking themselves half as seriously as I did, they were all twice as serious about what they were doing. They were better read, more disciplined, more widely traveled, and far less impressed with me than I was.
“The people in the workshop, but especially the women, and especially the women who were in the full middle of their lives, knew—they could testify to—just how rare and marvelous such a gift truly was. They had left real jobs, made real sacrifices, to come to Irvine. They had mortgages and health problems, troubled marriages, debts and obligations. And so I was obliged, or at least I felt that I was, to rise to the standard they set: in their writing, for the treatment of human emotion and relationships; in their lives for seizing this chance to learn and share and get immersed in the work; and in the workshop itself, women and men, for undertaking that collective work with respect, with charity, with tolerance, and above all—most frightening to me at the time—with no patience for the pretense and callowness and trite anti-social pose of some little shit. I think that’s the only cure, in the end, for the little shit: regular exposure to the healing rays of healthy disillusion, and in particular the hard-earned skepticism of grown women. Call it the Yoko Ono effect.”
There are a lot of little shits running around calling themselves writers who need the Yoko Ono effect.
who be these “little shits,” in your opinion?
who be these “little shits,” in your opinion?
http://swoonrocket.blogspot.com/2009/04/notes-for-talk-on-mfa-from-last.html
http://swoonrocket.blogspot.com/2009/04/notes-for-talk-on-mfa-from-last.html