So Now You’re a Writer

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You’ve read Bukowski’s “So You Want to be a Writer?” and in spite of it all, though your stillness is in fact a kind of madness, it nonetheless “doesn’t come bursting out of you.”  Not the way it comes bursting out of Bukowski.

“How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliche?” by Lorrie Moore says it in a voice a lot like the way you wish your voice could be, a voice you want so badly to steal. You like how she talks about failure. Failure is more your speed.

Still, you have no clue how to be a great writer. But you do finally know how to be a writer, and it has nothing to do with saying you’re a writer, planning to write, dreaming about one day being a writer, outlining projects, telling your bartender the plot of a project you’ve outlined, hanging out in coffee shops and bookstores, reading poems and essays about the fact that you want to be a writer, or getting a subscription to The New York Times so you can read poems and essays about the fact that you want to be a writer.

Of course you’ve always been eager to learn the craft, embrace your art and celebrate literature. But you’ve found these tactics impotent without the single vestige that, despite your many failings, has allowed you to meekly proclaim yourself a writer:

Writing.

Benefits of the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing

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The following list is a quick outline of why you should consider the low-residency option for your master of fine arts in creative writing. This is not meant to be an exhaustive argument for or against the MFACW. Instead, consider these points, one student’s reasons why the degree has not been a bad decision.

  1. Community—the low res MFA allows students the opportunity to form connections with other writers. Students meet other amateurs and learn from professionals.
  2. Solitude—the time away from the program gives freedom to students to explore the solitude necessary to produce writing.
  3. Time—the convenience of meeting twice a year for ten days at a time allows parents and the already-employed to study writing without leaving the family or the job, as the case may be. Even for singles and those without children, the option of meeting every six months or so may be attractive.
  4. Travel—for those with jobs or kids, the chance to get away for ten days may seem like a vacation rather than work.
  5. Audience—though the cliché is for writers to find a voice, perhaps the most important reason to consider the low res MFA is the chance to find an audience. Students work with a mentor who reads their writing, and they workshop with classmates, perhaps five or six others in a group. The feedback from these readers is invaluable and worth the cost.
  6. Mentor—one of the most valuable components is the one-on-one interaction with an established writer. After the workshops during the ten day residency, the student submits up to 100 pages or more to the mentor over the course of four months. The mentor provides detailed feedback and annotations. This is, perhaps, an extension of the chance to find an audience.

A colleague of mine says, “MFA, schmem-FA.” He questions the degree, like others, and feels that creativity cannot be taught. He is right, of course, but certain moves and strategies can be taught. More than that, writers can learn to write better in an MFA program by sharing with an audience who can help teach the writer to become a better reader of his/her own work. The low res option may not be best for all, but for many, the benefits are substantial.

Waccamaw and the Wheel

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Waccamaw Journal is a favorite online literary site edited by Dan Albergotti and Joe Oestreich, supported by Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina. Waccamaw takes its name from the Waccamaw River, which wanders through Conway on its way to the sea. Albergotti has a collection of poems called The Boatloads that you must read if you haven’t already, and Oestreich’s memoir, Hitless Wonder,  published earlier this year, chronicles the plight of Oestreich’s band, Watershed, and is a great read. Albergotti and Oestreich have a current feature called “Nine More Gates” which highlights an essay by University of Tampa MFA faculty poet Erica Dawson called “John Donne is My Pusherman.” In it she claims, “Writing is a gateway drug.” Like Dawson’s essay, the eight others featured on the site consider the topic of “poetry and gateways.”

Another creative feature of Waccamaw Journal is Jason Ockert’s Waccamaw Interview Wheel. Here’s what Ockert says about the concept of the interview wheel:

In an effort to reinvent the traditional author interview, I invited ten of today’s best fiction writers to participate in an experiment. After randomly selecting names, I encouraged each author to both ask and answer questions posed by their peers. There were no stipulations…

Ockert recently won a short story collection contest by Dzanc, who will publish the collection of fiction in 2013; it will be called Neighbors of Nothing. Ockert has also published a highly recommended, surreal collection of fiction called Rabbit Punches.

For those looking for fine fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, Waccamaw Journal offers plenty. Albergotti, Oestreich, and Ockert have created a repository of literature that is sure to please.

The Future of the Publishing Industry

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In Nate Silver’s recent best selling book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t, the Great Predictor begins with a history lesson.He begins with a brief history of what he considers the information age. The lesson does not begin with the personal computer or the internet, but with perhaps the first info-tech invention:

Signal and NoiseThe pursuit of knowledge seemed inherently futile, if not altogether vain. If today we feel a sense of impermanence because things are changing so rapidly, impermanence was a far more literal for the generations before us. There was “nothing new under the sun,” as the beautiful Bible verses in Ecclesiastes put it — not so much because everything had been discovered but because everything would be forgotten.

The printing press changed that, and did so permanently and profoundly. Almost overnight, the cost of producing a book decreased by about three hundred times, so a book that might have cost $20,000 in today’s dollars instead cost $70… The number of books being produced grew exponentially, increasing by about thirty times in the first century after the printing press was invented.

In the recent MFA residency period, a good portion of breath went to the discussing of and pondering about publishing and its future. Some of the guest lecturers of previous residency periods suggested the publishing industry is dying, that Amazon, with its selling books at a loss and pricing out all local book sellers, was mere years away from soldering shut the vault of diversity that had been the publishing industry. Others bemoaned the written word would become purely digital, that no physical scrap would survive.

Allow me to posit an alternative. Allow me to suggest we learn from the ebbing past, we ask History what becomes of outdated technology. Because History says progress does not mean deletion.

A Simple, Powerful Story

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This handsome young man:

Francis Alexander's Charles Dickens in 1842

…Wrote this undying story, and it was published 159 years and 1 day ago. What has made this story such an enduring treasure of western society? Why has it birthed no less than infinity adaptations to film, theater, radio, and graphic novel?