You Are Not the Only One Writing About Moldavian Zookeepers: George Saunders and Deb Olin Unferth Discuss the State of the Creative Writing Degree.

The idea behind Dialogues is to engage the literarily-inclined in critical conversations regarding the writing world and/or the writing life. For this premiere article, I asked my former fiction writing professor, Deb Olin Unferth, and her former professor, George Saunders, to have a discussion with me regarding how they approach the act of teaching others to use language as a means for making Art.

This, of course, is not the same as asking how one teaches others to “write a book” or “write a story”—both of which could be addressed by the mere explication of how writers have managed to construct such things and could be communicated by teaching concrete concepts of structure, paint-by-numbers plot building, character articulation, pacing, and so on. There are technical elements of craft that can absolutely be “taught” and do then serve to better reify (and, perhaps, therefore justify) the teaching of writing, but what I’ve asked about is that space of encouragement and instruction that is less tangible—the type of teaching that evades being quantifiable.

As anti-MFA arguments continue to appear, it remains baffling to me that these arguments rarely go beyond painting the MFA as some sort of static, unified experience that often works to mold an otherwise fine writer into a Carver-copying (or Barthelme or Pynchon or Saunders copying) robot. Another argument that crops up with annoying regularity is that the MFA discourages writers from engaging in a more complex understanding of the literary and intellectual histories that contextualize their craft in favor of mole-like focus on their own thoughts, feelings, stylistics—thus condemning them to a lifetime of boring, masturbatory pieces of writing that are unalterably severed from any sort of continuance of true literary tradition.

Each time I hear such flaccid, generalizing arguments, I’m struck by the fact that so many are willing to frame academic institutions as purely all-dominant mechanistic structures that produce and control in strikingly similar ways, rather than acknowledge that all MFA programs consist of people who are capable of making specific and individual choices; such as, the choice not to defer one’s singularity to a mob-like mentality or the choice to go ahead and take advantage of the resources most Universities offer like (gasp!) libraries, academic databases, literature and theory courses, despite whether or not one is being told to do so. As far as I know, no MFA programs actively seek to rob students of their agency to do more than is expected of them.

What some argue is a fault of the MFA seems really to be a problem with how some students manage their insecurities and vulnerabilities, both of which may blossom easily when one pursues the making and sharing of Art in the public space of the classroom. Often we avoid the painful disequilibrium that necessarily comes with trying to make or do something that is new, genuine, difficult, relevant by adhering to the simplest of expectations and the most knowable structures, patterns. This tendency to seek comfort and sameness is found wherever challenges are presented and complex questions are asked and the writing workshop can certainly be one of those places, but this is a human problem that flourishes within and without the halls of academia. Keeping this and the knowledge that the teaching of writing will not be soon abandoned in mind, it seems to me that a more productive conversation to have about the MFA system might be one that speaks to the subtle and singular possibilities for growth and advancement that can occur when a student enters into a dialogue with a great teacher. With these thoughts and with many questions, I turned to two of our most celebrated writers and professors of writing. George Saunders is the author of several works of fiction including, Pastoralia and In Persuasion Nation, and nonfiction, most recently, The Braindead Megaphone. Saunders received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. He teaches at Syracuse University. Deb Olin Unferth is the author of a short story collection, Minor Robberies, and a novel, Vacation. Her memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, is forthcoming February 2011 from Henry Holt. She teaches at Wesleyan University.

-Chloé Cooper Jones

The Faster Times: Deb and George: How do you encourage your students to use their discomfort or disequilibrium toward the production of good writing? How do you encourage students to do more than what is expected of them? To break them from the malaise of imitation and toward a truer speaking self?

George Saunders: Well, let me start off with a sort of 15-point rambling mini-manifesto about creative writing programs in general.

(1) Saying that “creative writing programs are bad” is like saying, “college football teams are bad” or “book clubs are bad” or “emergency rooms are bad.” All it takes is one good example to disprove the generality.

(2) Most critiques I read re: Creative Writing programs or writing in the academy are kicking entities that don’t actually (in my experience) exist. The trope about CW students not reading, or being encouraged to be sort of ahistorical and New Agey—I don’t see that. I really don’t. And I travel to a lot of MFA programs. Everywhere I go, people are reading, and reading deeply, and not just in contemporary fiction either. And people seem to realize they are part of a tradition, and had better know that tradition if they hope to further it. Likewise, the trope about “producing writers who all write alike.” That trope is so well-known that it is a cliché, such a cliché that I don’t know a single CW teacher who is not aware of it and on the watch for it. (It could be argued that any time you get 10-40 people together and have a core group of teachers, some homogenization is going to happen, but, in a sense, isn’t that what culture is? The establishment of a standard and then a resulting attempt to mimic that standard, followed by a passionate revolt against that stupid repressive reactionary standard, which is then replaced by a lovely innovative pure new standard, etc., etc.?) (It’s also possible that the perception of homogeneity is a function of the fact that, as CW programs expand outwards so that every town has 15 of them, more average writers are being let in (see #11, below) and so what we are really seeing is a bunch of average writers doing what average writers are supposed to do, which is write average. It might also be possible that, in any generation, there are only about two writers who are really great anyway, and it takes time to sort that out, and meanwhile the books keep flying off the presses.)

(3) As in all things, we have to look at particulars. When someone says “creative writing programs are bad,” I’d think we’d want to ask: “Which one?” And: “When?”

(4) I would feel weird if my students were going into mad debt to study with me. At Syracuse, we give 100 percent remitted tuition and about 15K a year, which a person can (sort of, approximately) live on in Syracuse. In any event, nobody’s leaving here with, you know, 80K in student loans. So this changes the dynamic dramatically. I feel good about teaching here, I feel like it’s honest. If we can help someone along their personal trajectory, great. If not, well, the person is only three years older than he/she was. It’s not so high-stress, which creates a more pro-art atmosphere. And I think we’re pretty honest about our limitations, and our role, and the need for them to take charge of their own artistic development, and resist the potentially infantilizing effects of “being accepted” and being back in school and all of that – that is, the tendency to surrender agency to the program.

(5) One of the things I try to do is to constantly be lobbing out thoughts on the potential dangers of the thing we are doing, i.e., the perils of the workshop model. There are many. But if you admit them and call them out on the table, I think they lose a lot of their power. So, I try, pretty often, to say: How are we doing here? Is there something in the way we’re looking at these stories that might be forbidding certain possibilities? Are we actually taking crap here? Being reductive? And to ask: what, of all this stuff I’m saying, might actually be helping you? What’s just obnoxious? What do you want more of, what do you want less of? I think this is important, in the same way that you’d want your doctor to have a proper level of skepticism about the scientific method.

(6) The numbers are important. We admit six students a year in fiction, and have basically 3 fiction people teaching here, with one floating semester-long line a year for a guest writer. So that’s a pretty good ratio and it means that we absolutely know our students. We know them personally and we care about them and so this presents an incredible range of so-called “teaching moments.” Say I’ve had X in three classes, and have had a number of good & intimate conferences with X, about the work but also maybe about the sort of personal dynamics behind the work, and I know something about X’s process, and about what X has and hasn’t read/liked, and I also know what X hates about his/her work, where he/she blocks up….that’s valuable information. And if you’re paying attention you can sometimes find out-of-the-classroom moments to do little tweaks, little pushes, little confusions that might help a dam break or whatever. But this can only happen — or happens more often — when you have a manageable number of students.

(7) There are, alas, a lot of problems with aspects of the creative writing program idea but my contention is that as long as a person (and the program itself) is mindful of these things, they can become one of the very things the workshop is talking about. For example: let’s say we’re talking about the 20th century American short story collection. We might, in talking about Flannery O’Connor, find ourselves wondering if the standard workshop mode of discussion is too rational to really explain the glories of her work. That is, does the “normal” workshop approach really come to terms with the level of extra-rationality in her work and, if not, how might we change that, or at least stay alert to that possibility? This all seems to me to be fair game.

(8) It’s important, I think, to see the whole MFA thing as a pretty freaky but short-term immersion. You are not going to be doing this workshop crap forever. You are doing it to get a little baptism by fire, purge yourself of certain habits (of sloth; of under-revision; of the sin of thinking you’ve made a thing clear when you haven’t) and then you are going to run away from the whole approach like your pants are on fire, and not look back, but return to that sacred land where your writing is private and you don’t have to defend or explain it one bit. If you need that immersion and think it would help, go for it. If not, not. And don’t apply just because you think it’s the thing to do or is a “good career move” or everyone else in your school is doing it. Apply when you really feel you need…something: shelter or focus or good readers or just some time out of the capitalist shit-storm.

(9) If someone wants to go to a CW program, then goes to a CW program and it sucks, they probably won’t die from it. And they might at least feel: well, I took my chance.

(10) It’s important to remember that a CW program is neither necessary nor sufficient. That is: you don’t have to go through one to write a beautiful book, and going through one will not assure that you will write a beautiful book. And: no teacher in any CW program that I know of has ever claimed the contrary of the two statements above (i.e. that going through a CW program is necessary or sufficient).

(11) There are probably too many CW programs. I say this because, if we accept that talent-in-writing is basically going to resemble the classic bell curve – with a very few really amazing writers at the far end and some real stinkers at the near end, and a bunch of pretty good/average writers in the big bump in the middle, then it is a little weird if the twin vertical lines demarcating the area we will label “Accepted to Grad School” get so widely placed that they include, you know, the whole middle section, i.e., any good/average writer can get in. This is the same as saying, I suppose, that there are tons more writers in grad school than there will ever be spaces on the bookshelf for, etc., etc., or teaching jobs, or whatever.

(12) There is something gross about a culture telling a bunch of people who are never going to be artists that they maybe are, even if only by implication. So on the one hand, this might argue for, you know, shutting down a few programs. But who’s going to do that? And why would we? Or, you know, why would “they?” Most of them are making money. And, from the young artist’s point-of-view: “Hey, give me a chance! I’m not one of the average ones! I’m not! This is all I’ve ever wanted to do!” Which seems fair enough.

(13) It’s important to remember that the ability of a teacher to know “who’s got it” is pretty wobbly. Especially when you are working with young writers, who can grow exponentially in just a few months. This means, therefore, that acceptance/rejection is not all that meaningful. Well, I mean, obviously it’s meaningful to the person being accepted or rejected. But let’s say it’s not 100 percent diagnostic. There are definitely going to be people who get rejected and go on to write wonderful books. Every year, at every school. So this puts a certain onus on the young (applying) writer: don’t think acceptance/rejection is (necessarily) a deal-breaker or deal-maker. It’s not. (And as a corollary, I’d say it’s very important for the teacher of writing to have a little internal mantra that goes: “Well, I could be wrong. How should I know? I’ve been wrong before.” One thing I don’t like is when a writing teacher plays seer. You know: “I’ve seen a lot of young writers come down the pike, and you, Ferdinand, have got IT. Mel doesn’t. Mel thinks he does, but Mel — oh, poor Mel. Shoot, here he comes.”

(14) We all love the idea of, you know, Tolstoy and Chekhov and Gorky exchanging manuscripts and passionate letters of critique and so on (or Ginsberg/Kerouac or Hemingway/Fitzgerald, whoever) and so maybe the goal would be for ones’ CW community to look something like that: just a bunch of artists, living simply and honestly, cutting out the crap, trying to construct a happy little Petri dish, forming intense friendships that center around, but are not limited to, art, and that continue on through the rest of one’s life.

(15) I was once doing some screenwriting with a kind of famous producer and expressed some hesitation about writing a scene the way he was suggesting.

“I just think it might be a little cheesy if it was, you know, filmed wrong,” I said.

“Ah,” he said. “Here’s an idea: how about we don’t film it wrong?”

The same applies for CW programs. If they suck when we do it wrong, let’s try to not do it wrong.

Deb Olin Unferth: I’ve noticed that one impression people seem to have of creative writing as a course study in general is that it is an easy or fluff track. In fact, creative writing is rigorous, at least the way my professors taught it and the way I try to teach it. And contrary to that “you can’t teach writing” cliché, my experience is that a good deal of it can be taught and demonstrated and practiced in the classroom, much the way one takes drawing classes to learn drawing technique, even if only to reject these techniques or rebel against them later. Writing is a craft and, at the same time, it’s an art, so in addition to the skills that can be taught, there is the exciting and liberating element of self-expression—of resistance, of growth, of searching—which, under the hand of craft, is every bit as much an exacting endeavor as other disciplines. I’d put the creative writing classes I’ve taken and taught up against any humanities class any day for rigor, intellectual engagement, knowledge-transmission, and encouragement of critical and creative thinking. So there!

About the point that MFA programs make writers into Carver-or-[insert-other-writer’s-name]-copycats: It’s just silly to think that an MFA program is more likely to produce a copycat than a writer working in seclusion. That’s more a danger for the solitary writer, who doesn’t have three or four teachers a semester, dozens of student colleagues, and select visiting writers bombarding her with different books, approaches, traditions, and ideas—even taking into account that there might be some trends among the students. And, sure, there are plenty of writers who don’t find their way out of self-based work that isn’t original and that isn’t aware of itself as part of a tradition—but that’s in or out of a program. It’s up to the student writer to get a hold of herself, to witness, respond, and visualize. If someone wants to be a copycat, she’ll be a copycat. It’s hard to get beyond imitation, after all. It takes vision and courage and focus. It takes being willing to look like a fool. It takes waiting for the revelations.

In my experience, the creative writing professor teaches this second lesson (after craft, that is) by taking the students’ work seriously and, perhaps most importantly, by role-modeling. George was the best role model I could have hoped for. It was by looking at him that I began to form a picture in my mind of what a writer could be that was workable for me.

A final point here: I think it’s easy to stand outside of or at the edge of a community and call it dull. That is, I think it’s easy for people not involved in an active, engaged MFA program to look at it from afar and see monotony and repetition. This is because we see dullness everywhere—all landscapes, all communities. You can look at any space, at any group of people, and see dreariness, self-absorption, the long trod to death. Or you can look at the same space and people and see longing, hope, heroism, and disappointment that will break your heart. If you squint just right at an MFA program, you see both. You see the lifeless side—maybe the student who isn’t finding her voice or the teacher who is just “going through the motions”—and the side that shines and beats. To generalize that a program is all one or the other is unrealistic. As committed professors and students, we try to locate and re-shine the dull side and shore up the shiny side.

GS: Amen to all of that, Deb. I mean, except the part about me being a role model. Oh, sure, I gave you your start in gambling, but I don’t consider that “role modeling,” really. Likewise with that good old “opium den” we had in the department. And I’m sure you would have figured out how to pull off a “pyramid scheme” perfectly well without my “role modeling.”

TFT: Deb, you say that George was a good role model and you were a good role model for me as well, but more than that, you pushed me when I was being lazy or bratty. I was forced to rise to a higher standard that was only achievable through the acknowledgment and then articulation of my singular perspective, style, voice. Do you, George and Deb, feel that it is important to push your students when you sense they aren’t challenging themselves? If so, how do you ideally accomplish that? How does a writing teacher get his or her students to write in a way that is wholly theirs? Wholly unique?

DOU: To get to your question, Chloé , I’ll say something about George’s point (11). I think you’re absolutely right, George, that not all the writers in grad school are going to become famous writers, that’s for sure! And maybe there are too many MFA programs (and Ph.D. programs, and undergrad majors and minors and concentrations in creative writing, and low-res), but maybe not? I think there hasn’t been a lot of discussion (that I’ve seen) about what else creative writing prepares you for. If you have an MFA in visual art, you could bring those skills to many different tables—you could be a designer of books, clothes, rooms, furniture, websites. The art student learns the skills to use a visual language and then is commanded to make something fully her own: a painting, an odd-looking pile of rocks that represents oppression, or whatnot.

An MFA in creative writing is the same—the student is learning a language that isn’t like the other languages being taught in the university, it’s not academic, not mathematic. It can be of use not only to write good books and to write other cool things (speeches, copy on websites, movies, songs), but also the ambition is to learn how to form a vision that is fully one’s own. And connected to your question, Chloé, I think the language of creative writing—once the skills have been learned and any bullshit cleared away—is simply one’s own voice, and that’s it. And, of course, all the debris and booty and backstory that come with it.

I guess as a teacher I just try to be the truest self that I can be in the classroom and hope that my struggle to do so will be apparent and that students will try to model it.

GS: Yes, and it is about responding honestly to those places where the student’s real talent is already manifesting.

And one thing that probably should be said is that, at the acceptance rate we maintain, the students are already extraordinary when they arrive. Which, of course, changes the nature of the teaching. It’s more a form of judo, in a sense: they already have great energy and a pretty good sense of where their power lies, and so the teacher’s job might just be to, as the student goes rushing past, give a slight torque in one direction or another. The student supplies the energy and velocity and all of that. So really the first order of business is: do no harm. And a lot of this work is quasi-psychological, in the sense that the seeds of the improvement or talent-refinement are already, of course, present in the student. So it can be permission-giving type of stuff, or just talking through a certain conceptual blockage that is keeping that refinement temporarily away from the table.

And a lot of this kind of work starts (at least for me) at the level of line-editing: noting certain tics or avoidances and flagging these as places where good things could happen, etc., etc.

It would be very hard, I think, to “teach” someone who wasn’t very talented to write. Impossible, probably. And I find that a lot of narratives about MFA programs seem to proceed from that model—that we are lifting someone inert off a mat or something. Which is never, in my experience, the case…

Pushing or challenging students isn’t usually a problem at Syracuse, to be honest. Everyone works hard. But sometimes a person might have, for example, certain conceptual ideas (about what kind of writer they are, what kind of stories they want to write) that aren’t really helping them—and that might mean my job is to help the writer break up that iceberg. And there are cases where people are sort of cruising happily along, maybe on the general buzz of being in an MFA program, and then my job is to remind them that there are, you know, 10,000,000 MFA programs across the country, and so just being one of the best writers in our program is not the same as pushing themselves into their truly iconic space. Or, to put it another way: if he/she is, say, the only writer in our program who specializes in comic fiction about Moldavian zookeepers, to remind he/she that this might not be enough, since, in those 10,000,000 other programs, there will no doubt be a bunch of other good writers specializing in comic novels about Moldavian zookeepers.

Above all I think the job is to listen generously to what they say and think, and really honor their written work with my attention, and then trust that this level of understanding will, at the right moment, let me say or do something that will have a positive impact. That’s the hope anyway. And that’s easy, because the young writers we’ve been getting are, if I could use this word without sounding like a codger: dear.