2026 Creative Writing MFA Applicants Forum

[Ogwick]

4 hours ago, SocialKonstruct said:

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/tuition-debt-and-graduate-creative-writing-programs

"Creative Writing (MFA/BA): Often viewed as a "cost center" or having lower ROI, with two-year tuition potentially reaching $63,000, while graduates may face low-paying jobs or debt. However, some funded programs provide stipends, indicating they are supported by university, not just student tuition."

Thanks for that link to the article in higher ed - that was well written and researched and asked all the right questions. 

Everyone in the creative industry, from film, writing or dance, has its legacy founded in the great boom of television dollars in the 1950’s/60’s.  
 

Suddenly large American soap , car and processed food companies had a “new tech media app” to funnel huge amounts of dollars into producing TV and movies for ONE REASON - to sell shit on commercials. Remember - this is an era when nothing was “rerunned” - everything had to be new each week to show on TV.
 

Once the need for 32 live eps a season went away in the 21st Century, so did the advertising dollars funding all these writers, camera operators, directors, dancers, etc. - the production of pilots (new shows) alone was a huge industry paying a lot of people a lot of money and those shows never made it on air. 
 

Bottom line - all of us under-estimate the seismic shift that is occurring right now before our eyes. 
 

For those that are “rejected” I would say take it as a sign to directly publish immediately and screw waiting for two years of more bullshit before the world hears your voice. 
 

Screw the academics - write without them!

Edited February 15 by Ogwick

[bioluminescent sloth]

15 hours ago, eunereun said:

also waiting on jhu. ive accepted my fate. but also, kinda holding out on hope for some reason

I'm also waiting on jhu, but my hope is dwindling. I would loveee to even make it on their waitlist! 

[Ogwick]

1 hour ago, SocialKonstruct said:

Perhaps but this is definitely not the case since the current government seized power in 2025... definitely the emphasis is on business and non-humanities endeavors in the academic field... the US government is pretty much wanting to focus on AI-driven rapacious fields... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/20/universities-humanities-programs

The opposite has been going quite substantially with the dismantling of anything which doesn't satisfy the agenda of the current dictatorship/mandarin during the past year.

To provide an example, I walked into the ASE office at USC this past week and they had fired all of their staff of around 15, only to rehire 3 people back at a lower position. Even engineering folks were not saved either. So far, the business school has thrived (along with other tech related fields) and grown during the same time frame. So I don't see how literary expertise based on this envisioned schema is going to be satisfying what the administration/landed gentry is going to want over the next few years to fuel their ultimate agenda.

The main reason I want to go back to a PhD/MFA creative writing program is 90% political. For me, protesting what's going on today in the streets is pretty futile and I honestly see that writing novels and poetry is the only way to document the atrocities happening in the US as well as abroad and resisting the clutches of late stage capitalism.

I find this a fascinating thread and discussion. 
 

The best works of literature have always been written in this mindset! Starting with Dante giving a middle finger to the Catholic Church in his Divine Comedy.  
 

Writing and the creative arts (should be) a way to express a thought or an idea into a population because you want your thoughts, your voice, to transcend the limitations of your agency in life.  
 

Unfortunately a post WW2 “academic machine” was set up in the 20th century when school administrators realized they could keep increasing tuition, and offer majors on any subject they wanted (ie who cared about ROI - it’s the knowledge itself that is the value, etc) and the government would bank loans to any amount the school would charge. 
 

Obviously this is unsustainable and this era / this decade is the period when that academic machine falls apart, and the Creative Arts is no longer a “career decision” but purely a creative, political or artistic in itself exercise.  
 

Not good. Not bad. Just reality. 

Edited February 15 by Ogwick

[TPike]

Hi guys, love the discussion going on! I’ve been trying to think of things other than acceptances or rejections. But I somehow found my way back to the spreadsheet. I’m waiting for George Mason, and it looks like they notify poetry applicants by now. Very nervous.

[bioluminescent sloth]

Is it a good sign that I'd much rather be writing a poem than this statement of purpose? It's my 11th and final one, but I have a half-written poem in my notebook just a few feet away...

I'm wondering if any of y'all can relate hahaha

[SocialKonstruct]

33 minutes ago, Ogwick said:

I find this a fascinating thread and discussion. 
 

The best works of literature have always been written in this mindset! Starting with Dante giving a middle finger to the Catholic Church in his Divine Comedy.  
 

Writing and the creative arts (should be) a way to express a thought or an idea into a population because you want your thoughts, your voice, to transcend the limitations of your agency in life.  
 

Unfortunately a post WW2 “academic machine” was set up in the 20th century when school administrators realized they could keep increasing tuition, and offer majors on any subject they wanted (ie who cared about ROI - it’s the knowledge itself that is the value, etc) and the government would bank loans to any amount the school would charge. 
 

Obviously this is unsustainable and this era / this decade is the period when that academic machine falls apart, and the Creative Arts is no longer a “career decision” but purely a creative, political or artistic in itself exercise.  
 

Not good. Not bad. Just reality. 

This is partially correct methinks. I really do think that we need to have a more cynical view of the American creative writing factory system that churns out literary authors by the yard. One can blame the flattening of literary styles during the late 1970's and early 1980's to many trends: neoliberal capitalism, Reaganomics, a growing conservatism amongst the liberal elites, and the dominance of the Iowa Writers' Workshop graduates/Cold War mentality in other MFA programs... a tragedy to diverse voices which were key to the ascendancy of American writing from the 1950's until early 1980's.

Mark McGurl does such a good job delineating these academic trends in his masterly works: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674062092 and https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Less-Novel-Age-Amazon/dp/183976385X. In fact, I would argue in a pretty controversial way that Amazon and self-publishing have had more impact on literary writing during the past 20 years than even the MFA programs.

Even though I have been writing for about 40 years now (and a lot of the folks in this thread are going to be mostly in 20's and 30's who wouldn't be contextualizing MFA applications in the same manner that I would), I definitely can attest that I am very interested in going to do a Ph.D. or MFA in creative writing for professionalization purposes (not workshopping really because I want to avoid all influences from the flattened styles that dominate literary magazines today particuarly in the US. Thankgodfor Irish and British literary magazines which I dig a lotatthispoint :p)...

So I wouldn't be dismissing Ph.D. and MFA programs at this point completely in this summary case. You still need a MFA (or Ph.D.) and a publication (or a contracted publication) in order to teach at the university level for writing and that is my hope for the trajectory of my writing life at this point as I near my life of a half-century this fall. But for being a writer for the sake of art, definitely I see a lot of MFA programs (which proliferated so much after I got my English lit BA degree in 1997) mostly banking on making profitable authors, not writers whose works will be a testament to innovation or long-lasting provocations.

[bioluminescent sloth]

3 minutes ago, SocialKonstruct said:

This is partially correct methinks. I really do think that we need to have a more cynical view of the American creative writing factory system that churns out literary authors by the yard. One can blame the flattening of literary styles during the late 1970's and early 1980's to many trends: neoliberal capitalism, Reaganomics, a growing conservatism amongst the liberal elites, and the dominance of the Iowa Writers' Workshop graduates/Cold War mentality in other MFA programs... a tragedy to diverse voices which were key to the ascendancy of American writing from the 1950's until early 1980's.

Mark McGurl does such a good job delineating these academic trends in his masterly works: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674062092 and https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Less-Novel-Age-Amazon/dp/183976385X. In fact, I would argue in a pretty controversial way that Amazon and self-publishing have had more impact on literary writing during the past 20 years than even the MFA programs.

Even though I have been writing for about 40 years now (and a lot of the folks in this thread are going to be mostly in 20's and 30's who wouldn't be contextualizing MFA applications in the same manner that I would), I definitely can attest that I am very interested in going to do a Ph.D. or MFA in creative writing for professionalization purposes (not workshopping really because I want to avoid all influences from the flattened styles that dominate literary magazines today particuarly in the US. Thankgodfor Irish and British literary magazines which I dig a lotatthispoint :p)...

So I wouldn't be dismissing Ph.D. and MFA programs at this point completely in this summary case. You still need a MFA (or Ph.D.) and a publication (or a contracted publication) in order to teach at the university level for writing and that is my hope for the trajectory of my writing life at this point as I near my life of a half-century this fall. But for being a writer for the sake of art, definitely I see a lot of MFA programs (which proliferated so much after I got my English lit BA degree in 1997) mostly banking on making profitable authors, not writers whose works will be a testament to innovation or long-lasting provocations.

This strikes me as a very pessimistic take! And dismissive of the many writers published in today's literary magazines. What makes a style "flattened" in your opinion? The phrase "avoid all influences" also sounds a bit concerning to me, but maybe I've misunderstood. 

[Ogwick]

12 minutes ago, bioluminescent sloth said:

This strikes me as a very pessimistic take! And dismissive of the many writers published in today's literary magazines. What makes a style "flattened" in your opinion? The phrase "avoid all influences" also sounds a bit concerning to me, but maybe I've misunderstood. 

What is considered a pessimistic opinion to the young is considered an accepted fact to the gray haired. 
 

Socialkonstruct and I are of similar ages and ‘real world’ experiences to see how the games of life are played. 
 

One of the reasons I can get along so well with the anti-capitalists (even though I am a self described one myself) is that I completely agree with most of the fundamental theories.  
 

My attitude is more of a “infiltrate and change from within” vs outside opposition like socialkonstruct is taking. 
 

A different life mode - but one I can understand and see a consistent philosophy at work (even if I disagree with the action steps from the facts)

Edited February 15 by Ogwick

[SocialKonstruct]

8 minutes ago, bioluminescent sloth said:

This strikes me as a very pessimistic take! And dismissive of the many writers published in today's literary magazines. What makes a style "flattened" in your opinion? The phrase "avoid all influences" also sounds a bit concerning to me, but maybe I've misunderstood. 

Yep I am definitely very pessimistic, more so than Melville.

 

To quote:

In the spirit of that historical perspective, here’s a sample of how Menand interprets McGurl’s approach:

“The Program Era” is an impressive and imaginative book. It does three things unusually well. First it interprets works of fiction as what philosophers of language call illocutionary acts. The meaning of one of Raymond Carver’s stories is not only what the story says; it’s also the way the story says it. The form of a Carver short story—ostentatiously brief, emotionally hyper-defended—expresses something. McGurl thinks that the style represents the “aestheticization of shame, a mode of self retraction.” Literary minimalism like Carver’s—McGurl calls it “lower-middle-class modernism”—is a means of reducing the risk of embarrassing oneself, and is one way that students from working-class backgrounds, like Carver…deal with the highbrow world of the academy.

Rather ingeniously, McGurl reads the wok of Carver’s exact contemporary Joy Carol Oates as an expression of the same class-based self-consciousness…Oates is a prolific practitioner of what McGurl calls “maximalist” fiction: it has been said that, at one point in her career, she wrote forty pages of fiction every day, or about a quarter of what would constitute an entire book for Carver. But McGurl thinks that maximalism, too, is “a way of shielding oneself with words.” The two styles are methods of self-protection and, at the same time, forms of self-assertion: the minimalist writers puts his craft on display, the maximalist his facility.

 

I just feel that everything today is dominated by self-promulgation,  influencer culture, and autofiction during the past decade. I really also like this article: https://jacobin.com/2026/02/new-masses-proletarian-literature-wright-gold which points the direction of where I see my writing practice is heading towards.

[2O2AMFA]

2 hours ago, SocialKonstruct said:

Perhaps but this is definitely not the case since the current government seized power in 2025... definitely the emphasis is on business and non-humanities endeavors in the academic field... the US government is pretty much wanting to focus on AI-driven rapacious fields... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/20/universities-humanities-programs

The opposite has been going quite substantially with the dismantling of anything which doesn't satisfy the agenda of the current dictatorship/mandarin during the past year.

To provide an example, I walked into the ASE office at USC this past week and they had fired all of their staff of around 15, only to rehire 3 people back at a lower position. Even engineering folks were not saved either. So far, the business school has thrived (along with other tech related fields) and grown during the same time frame. So I don't see how literary expertise based on this envisioned schema is going to be satisfying what the administration/landed gentry is going to want over the next few years to fuel their ultimate agenda.

The main reason I want to go back to a PhD/MFA creative writing program is 90% political. For me, protesting what's going on today in the streets is pretty futile and I honestly see that writing novels and poetry is the only way to document the atrocities happening in the US as well as abroad and resisting the clutches of late stage capitalism.

People will understand that AI will replace workers in physical science first as it is the most black-or-white subject and non-theoritical/non-computational natural science the next. Social science follows, and Humanity should be the last. The current irrational decision is based on a misconception of new industrial revolution. 

Restrictions on illegal immigration and cost-cutting on wasted resources are reasonable, but the execution has gone to extremity, which has always been inevitable when the political policy shifts. However, the rationale is to admit the overdone and reverse the course to a neutral zone. The current administration may not comply with this practice. 

I hope you will enroll in a program you desire as you will add much value to it based on your shared thoughts here.

I wished my son to do this and I only supported him, but he is not interested in creative writing despite being an excellent writer often drawing thousands "likes" for his political and social online posts as he brags to me. 

Without wasting my writing talents and life experience, I resumed doing this myself five years ago. I will keep writing and publishing. 

Postscript: If it is the late stage of Capitalism, is Socialism coming? 

 

[TheeMightyQuinn]

1 hour ago, bioluminescent sloth said:

Is it a good sign that I'd much rather be writing a poem than this statement of purpose? It's my 11th and final one, but I have a half-written poem in my notebook just a few feet away...

I'm wondering if any of y'all can relate hahaha

Do the poem first. Time better spent. 😊

[Hank Moody]

4 hours ago, SocialKonstruct said:

The Program Era” is an impressive and imaginative book

It has some legitimate crituqe for sure but it definitely also seems like an overblown emotional response to his personal experience that might not reflect how things currently are.

I think Tony Tulathimutte had sensible things to say about the whole debate: https://www.salon.com/2014/03/06/stop_blaming_iowa_mfa_vs_nyc_is_a_phony_debate/

[traceykibres]

I hope I get into one or more of the schools I've yet to hear from. But I think I've realized that I only really really want to go to one of them. Which is too bad, because it is the school on my list that is admitting the fewest people this year. Still, it's kind of a relief. I do feel like I wasted money on the other applications now, and I regret that. I also feel like next application year is going to be way less stressful and way less work.

I also feel less attached to getting an MFA in general. Knowing that I would only be like 1000% jazzed at one particular acceptance makes me feel like, well, how bad do I want the degree itself? 

I'm feeling refocused, like I can start planning my next few years without feeling in flux (for this particular reason, anyway). 

[SocialKonstruct]

53 minutes ago, Hank Moody said:

It has some legitimate crituqe for sure but it definitely also seems like an overblown emotional response to his personal experience that might not reflect how things currently are.

I think Tony Tulathimutte had sensible things to say about the whole debate: https://www.salon.com/2014/03/06/stop_blaming_iowa_mfa_vs_nyc_is_a_phony_debate/

Eh, perhaps but honestly I would subscribe more to this: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-iowa-flattened-literature

Eric Bennett is definitely a super reliable source. And Mark McGurl definitely has way more weight as a literary and cultural critic than Tony Tulathimutte who tends to be more a clickbait provocateur in many ways.

Plus I definitely as a communist leaning writer see Paul Engle's legacy as super detrimental. Bennett is dead on when he states "Much of the answer lies in the remarkable career of Paul Engle, the workshop’s second director, a do-it-yourself Cold Warrior whose accomplishments remain mostly covered in archival dust. For two decades after World War II, Iowa prospered on donations from conservative businessmen persuaded by Engle that the program fortified democratic values at home and abroad: It fought Communism. The workshop thrived on checks from places like the Rockefeller Foundation, which gave Iowa $40,000 between 1953 and 1956—good money at the time. As the years went by, it also attracted support from the Asia Foundation (another channel for CIA money) and the State Department.

As for the hype, it followed the money and attracted more of it. The publishing moguls Henry Luce and Gardner Cowles Jr. conceived of themselves as fighting a battle of ideas, as they contrasted the American way of life with the gray Soviet nightmare on the pages of their newspapers and glossy magazines. Luce published Time and Life, Cowles published Look and several Midwestern newspapers, and both loved to feature Iowa: its embodiment of literary individualism, its celebration of self-expression, its cornfields.

Knowing he could count on such publicity, Engle staged spectacles in Iowa City for audiences far beyond Iowa City. He read memorial sonnets for the Iowa war dead at a dedication ceremony for the new student union. He convened a celebration of Baudelaire with an eye toward the non-Communist left in Paris. He organized a festival of the sciences and arts. Life and Time and Look transformed these events into impressive press clippings, and the clippings, via Engle’s tireless hands, arrived in the mailboxes of possible donors.

In 1954, Engle became the editor of the O. Henry Prize collection, and so it became his task to select the year’s best short stories and introduce them to a mass readership. Lo and behold, writers affiliated with Iowa began to be featured with great prominence in the collection. Engle marveled at this, the impartial fruits of his judging, in fund-raising pitches.

The Iowa Workshop, then, attained national eminence by capitalizing on the fears and hopes of the Cold War. But the creative-writing programs founded in Iowa’s image did not, in this respect, resemble it. No other program would be so celebrated on the glossy pages of Look and Life. No other program would receive an initial burst of underwriting from Maytag and U.S. Steel and Quaker Oats and Reader’s Digest. No other program would attract such interest from the Asia Foundation, the State Department, and the CIA. And the anticlimax of the creative-writing enterprise must derive at least in part from this difference.

There, in the paragraphs above, is blood squeezed from the stone of a dissertation. If, in 2006, as a no-longer-quite-plausibly aspiring novelist beached on the shores of academe, you’re struggling against the bleakness of the dissertation as a genre, you’ll do your best to work the CIA into yours. You’ll want to write a heroic dissertation—or at least a novelistic one. You’ll read books about soft diplomacy during the Cold War, learn about the Farfield Foundation, and search for its name, on an abject hunch, in the 40 boxes of the Papers of Paul Engle at the Special Collections Library at the University of Iowa. You’ll exhaust those archives and also the ones at Palo Alto (where Wallace Stegner founded the Stanford program) and Tarrytown (home of the Rockefeller archives), tracing the relationship between creative writing and the Cold War. But even as you do, you’ll wonder about your motives.

Because you yourself attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop before deciding to enter a Ph.D. program. At Iowa, you were disappointed by the reduced form of intellectual engagement you found there and the narrow definition of what counted as “literary.” The workshop was like a muffin tin you poured the batter of your dreams into. You entered with something undefined and tantalizingly protean and left with muffins. You really believe this. But you can also see yourself clearly enough: unpublished, ambitious, obscure, ponderous. In short, the kind of person who writes a dissertation.

Were you right to be frustrated by the ethos of Iowa City, or are you merely a frustrated novelist? Were there objective grounds for your sense of creative stultification, or did the workshop simply not love you enough? Was the whole idea of your dissertation a guerrilla raid on the kind of recognition you couldn’t attain by legitimate means? And did the CIA really have much to do with it?

At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop between 1998 and 2000, I had the option of writing fiction in one of four ways.

First, I could carve, polish, compress, and simplify; banish myself from my writing as T.S. Eliot advised and strive to enter the gray, crystalline tradition of modernist fiction as it runs from Flaubert through early Joyce and Hemingway to Raymond Carver (alumnus) and Alice Munro. Marilynne Robinson (teacher) did this in her 1980 novel Housekeeping. Denis Johnson (alumnus) played devil to Robinson’s angel in Jesus’ Son. Frank Conroy (director, 1987-2005) had this style down cold—and it is cold. Conroy must have sought it in applications, longing with some kind of spiritual masochism to shiver again and again at the iciness of early Joyce. Such lapidary simplicity becomes psychedelic if you polish it enough. Justin Tussing (class ahead of me) mastered it in his prismatic novel, The Best People in the World. I myself, feeling the influence, revised sentences into pea gravel.

Second, and also much approved, I could work in a warmer vein—the genuinely and winningly loquacious. Ethan Canin (my favorite teacher) set the example here, writing charismatically chatty prose that, like the man himself, exhibited the gross health of the fortunate and tenderhearted. Your influences, if you tended this way, were F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, or anybody else whose sentences unwind with glowing ease. Cheever loomed as an undisputed great. Curtis Sittenfeld, in the class below mine, displayed this style and charm and unassuming grace in Prep and American Wife. Marilynne Robinson’s recent novels, Gilead and Home, turn toward this manner from the adamantine beauty of Housekeeping.

Third, you could write what’s often called “magical realism.” Joy Williams (alumna, teacher) and Stuart Dybek (alumnus, teacher) helped to shape a strain of fable-making passed down to my classmates from Kafka and Bruno Schulz and Calvino or their Latin American heirs. Sarah Shun-lien Bynum was writing Madeleine Is Sleeping; Sarah Braunstein was developing the sensibility she’d weave into The Sweet Relief of Missing Children; Paul Harding was laying the groundwork for the enchanting weirdness of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers.

These first three categories were the acceptable ones. But Category 4 involved writing things that in the eyes of the workshop appeared weird and unsuccessful—that fell outside the community of norms, that tried too hard. The prevailing term for ambitious pieces that didn’t fit was “postmodernism.” The term was a kind of smackdown. Submitting a “postmodern” story was like belching in class.

But what is a postmodern story? In those years, Robinson was already in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction, as were Jayne Anne Phillips (alumna) and Bobbie Ann Mason, model citizens of the M.F.A. nation. Joy Williams and Stuart Dybek were certainly not Victorians nor modernists nor best sellers. What was it that you weren’t supposed to do?

At the time I considered Freud and Rabelais my favorite novelists. Later I understood that I was being annoying. But I thought then, and still think now, that the three-headed Iowa canon frustrated as much as satisfied a hunger for literature that got you thinking. Iowa fiction, published and unpublished, got you feeling—it got you seeing and tasting and touching and smelling and hearing. It was like going to an arboretum with a child. You want exactly that from life, and also more.

People at Iowa love to love Prairie Lights, the local independent bookstore. In Prairie Lights I found myself overwhelmed by the literature of the senses and the literature of the quirky sensing voice. I wanted heavy books from a bunch of different disciplines: on hermeneutics, on monetary policy, on string theory, on psychoanalysis, on the Gospels, on the strange war between analytic and Continental philosophers, on sexual pathology. I was 23. I knew I wanted to write a novel of ideas, a novel of systems, but one also with characters, and also heart—a novel comprising everything, not just how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt (but that, too). James Wood did not yet loom over everything, but I wanted to make James Wood barf. At Prairie Lights, I would have felt much better buying the work of Nathan Englander (alum) if it had been next to that of Friedrich Engels. I felt there how I feel in bars that serve only wine and beer.

This aversion to novels and stories of full-throttle experience, erudition, and cognition—the unspoken proscription against attempting to write them—was the narrowness I sensed and hated. The question I wanted to answer, as I faced down my dissertation, was whether this aversion was an accidental feature of Iowa during my time, or if it reflected something more."

As a writer who has been working for over 40 years since I wrote a novel from age 7-10 (now gone thank goodness), I definitely have shifted from an imitator of Hemingway and Carver when I was in elementary school to focused on a non-American and more British/Commonwealth method of literary writing today... Plus I really am glad to work on novel of ideas and themes that do not flinch away from the easy answer or resolved narrative structure. And that involved me having to rewrite a lot of the materials I have been working on 30 plus years into the mold I use today (two styles, one which is super complex and the other a lot more straightforward and playfully postmodern).

5 hours ago, 2O2AMFA said:

People will understand that AI will replace workers in physical science first as it is the most black-or-white subject and non-theoritical/non-computational natural science the next. Social science follows, and Humanity should be the last. The current irrational decision is based on a misconception of new industrial revolution. 

Restrictions on illegal immigration and cost-cutting on wasted resources are reasonable, but the execution has gone to extremity, which has always been inevitable when the political policy shifts. However, the rationale is to admit the overdone and reverse the course to a neutral zone. The current administration may not comply with this practice. 

I hope you will enroll in a program you desire as you will add much value to it based on your shared thoughts here.

I wished my son to do this and I only supported him, but he is not interested in creative writing despite being an excellent writer often drawing thousands "likes" for his political and social online posts as he brags to me. 

Without wasting my writing talents and life experience, I resumed doing this myself five years ago. I will keep writing and publishing. 

Postscript: If it is the late stage of Capitalism, is Socialism coming? 

 

To answer sort of the last question, I think we will be lucky if the world survives in a decade at this rate. I am definitely not putting any stock in our communal survival by any means.

So in sum as an idealist I lean towards this: https://www.amazon.com/Ministry-Future-Kim-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0316300136

and as a pretty brutal realist: https://www.amazon.com/Submission-Novel-Michel-Houellebecq/dp/0374271577

Oh, and I should mention that you all should definitely read this: https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/workshops-empire hilariously published by the University of Iowa Press (nodding irony here).

[actualair]

1 hour ago, SocialKonstruct said:

Eh, perhaps but honestly I would subscribe more to this: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-iowa-flattened-literature

Eric Bennett is definitely a super reliable source. And Mark McGurl definitely has way more weight as a literary and cultural critic than Tony Tulathimutte who tends to be more a clickbait provocateur in many ways.

Plus I definitely as a communist leaning writer see Paul Engle's legacy as super detrimental. Bennett is dead on when he states "Much of the answer lies in the remarkable career of Paul Engle, the workshop’s second director, a do-it-yourself Cold Warrior whose accomplishments remain mostly covered in archival dust. For two decades after World War II, Iowa prospered on donations from conservative businessmen persuaded by Engle that the program fortified democratic values at home and abroad: It fought Communism. The workshop thrived on checks from places like the Rockefeller Foundation, which gave Iowa $40,000 between 1953 and 1956—good money at the time. As the years went by, it also attracted support from the Asia Foundation (another channel for CIA money) and the State Department.

As for the hype, it followed the money and attracted more of it. The publishing moguls Henry Luce and Gardner Cowles Jr. conceived of themselves as fighting a battle of ideas, as they contrasted the American way of life with the gray Soviet nightmare on the pages of their newspapers and glossy magazines. Luce published Time and Life, Cowles published Look and several Midwestern newspapers, and both loved to feature Iowa: its embodiment of literary individualism, its celebration of self-expression, its cornfields.

Knowing he could count on such publicity, Engle staged spectacles in Iowa City for audiences far beyond Iowa City. He read memorial sonnets for the Iowa war dead at a dedication ceremony for the new student union. He convened a celebration of Baudelaire with an eye toward the non-Communist left in Paris. He organized a festival of the sciences and arts. Life and Time and Look transformed these events into impressive press clippings, and the clippings, via Engle’s tireless hands, arrived in the mailboxes of possible donors.

In 1954, Engle became the editor of the O. Henry Prize collection, and so it became his task to select the year’s best short stories and introduce them to a mass readership. Lo and behold, writers affiliated with Iowa began to be featured with great prominence in the collection. Engle marveled at this, the impartial fruits of his judging, in fund-raising pitches.

The Iowa Workshop, then, attained national eminence by capitalizing on the fears and hopes of the Cold War. But the creative-writing programs founded in Iowa’s image did not, in this respect, resemble it. No other program would be so celebrated on the glossy pages of Look and Life. No other program would receive an initial burst of underwriting from Maytag and U.S. Steel and Quaker Oats and Reader’s Digest. No other program would attract such interest from the Asia Foundation, the State Department, and the CIA. And the anticlimax of the creative-writing enterprise must derive at least in part from this difference.

There, in the paragraphs above, is blood squeezed from the stone of a dissertation. If, in 2006, as a no-longer-quite-plausibly aspiring novelist beached on the shores of academe, you’re struggling against the bleakness of the dissertation as a genre, you’ll do your best to work the CIA into yours. You’ll want to write a heroic dissertation—or at least a novelistic one. You’ll read books about soft diplomacy during the Cold War, learn about the Farfield Foundation, and search for its name, on an abject hunch, in the 40 boxes of the Papers of Paul Engle at the Special Collections Library at the University of Iowa. You’ll exhaust those archives and also the ones at Palo Alto (where Wallace Stegner founded the Stanford program) and Tarrytown (home of the Rockefeller archives), tracing the relationship between creative writing and the Cold War. But even as you do, you’ll wonder about your motives.

Because you yourself attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop before deciding to enter a Ph.D. program. At Iowa, you were disappointed by the reduced form of intellectual engagement you found there and the narrow definition of what counted as “literary.” The workshop was like a muffin tin you poured the batter of your dreams into. You entered with something undefined and tantalizingly protean and left with muffins. You really believe this. But you can also see yourself clearly enough: unpublished, ambitious, obscure, ponderous. In short, the kind of person who writes a dissertation.

Were you right to be frustrated by the ethos of Iowa City, or are you merely a frustrated novelist? Were there objective grounds for your sense of creative stultification, or did the workshop simply not love you enough? Was the whole idea of your dissertation a guerrilla raid on the kind of recognition you couldn’t attain by legitimate means? And did the CIA really have much to do with it?

At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop between 1998 and 2000, I had the option of writing fiction in one of four ways.

First, I could carve, polish, compress, and simplify; banish myself from my writing as T.S. Eliot advised and strive to enter the gray, crystalline tradition of modernist fiction as it runs from Flaubert through early Joyce and Hemingway to Raymond Carver (alumnus) and Alice Munro. Marilynne Robinson (teacher) did this in her 1980 novel Housekeeping. Denis Johnson (alumnus) played devil to Robinson’s angel in Jesus’ Son. Frank Conroy (director, 1987-2005) had this style down cold—and it is cold. Conroy must have sought it in applications, longing with some kind of spiritual masochism to shiver again and again at the iciness of early Joyce. Such lapidary simplicity becomes psychedelic if you polish it enough. Justin Tussing (class ahead of me) mastered it in his prismatic novel, The Best People in the World. I myself, feeling the influence, revised sentences into pea gravel.

Second, and also much approved, I could work in a warmer vein—the genuinely and winningly loquacious. Ethan Canin (my favorite teacher) set the example here, writing charismatically chatty prose that, like the man himself, exhibited the gross health of the fortunate and tenderhearted. Your influences, if you tended this way, were F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, or anybody else whose sentences unwind with glowing ease. Cheever loomed as an undisputed great. Curtis Sittenfeld, in the class below mine, displayed this style and charm and unassuming grace in Prep and American Wife. Marilynne Robinson’s recent novels, Gilead and Home, turn toward this manner from the adamantine beauty of Housekeeping.

Third, you could write what’s often called “magical realism.” Joy Williams (alumna, teacher) and Stuart Dybek (alumnus, teacher) helped to shape a strain of fable-making passed down to my classmates from Kafka and Bruno Schulz and Calvino or their Latin American heirs. Sarah Shun-lien Bynum was writing Madeleine Is Sleeping; Sarah Braunstein was developing the sensibility she’d weave into The Sweet Relief of Missing Children; Paul Harding was laying the groundwork for the enchanting weirdness of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers.

These first three categories were the acceptable ones. But Category 4 involved writing things that in the eyes of the workshop appeared weird and unsuccessful—that fell outside the community of norms, that tried too hard. The prevailing term for ambitious pieces that didn’t fit was “postmodernism.” The term was a kind of smackdown. Submitting a “postmodern” story was like belching in class.

But what is a postmodern story? In those years, Robinson was already in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction, as were Jayne Anne Phillips (alumna) and Bobbie Ann Mason, model citizens of the M.F.A. nation. Joy Williams and Stuart Dybek were certainly not Victorians nor modernists nor best sellers. What was it that you weren’t supposed to do?

At the time I considered Freud and Rabelais my favorite novelists. Later I understood that I was being annoying. But I thought then, and still think now, that the three-headed Iowa canon frustrated as much as satisfied a hunger for literature that got you thinking. Iowa fiction, published and unpublished, got you feeling—it got you seeing and tasting and touching and smelling and hearing. It was like going to an arboretum with a child. You want exactly that from life, and also more.

People at Iowa love to love Prairie Lights, the local independent bookstore. In Prairie Lights I found myself overwhelmed by the literature of the senses and the literature of the quirky sensing voice. I wanted heavy books from a bunch of different disciplines: on hermeneutics, on monetary policy, on string theory, on psychoanalysis, on the Gospels, on the strange war between analytic and Continental philosophers, on sexual pathology. I was 23. I knew I wanted to write a novel of ideas, a novel of systems, but one also with characters, and also heart—a novel comprising everything, not just how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt (but that, too). James Wood did not yet loom over everything, but I wanted to make James Wood barf. At Prairie Lights, I would have felt much better buying the work of Nathan Englander (alum) if it had been next to that of Friedrich Engels. I felt there how I feel in bars that serve only wine and beer.

This aversion to novels and stories of full-throttle experience, erudition, and cognition—the unspoken proscription against attempting to write them—was the narrowness I sensed and hated. The question I wanted to answer, as I faced down my dissertation, was whether this aversion was an accidental feature of Iowa during my time, or if it reflected something more."

As a writer who has been working for over 40 years since I wrote a novel from age 7-10 (now gone thank goodness), I definitely have shifted from an imitator of Hemingway and Carver when I was in elementary school to focused on a non-American and more British/Commonwealth method of literary writing today... Plus I really am glad to work on novel of ideas and themes that do not flinch away from the easy answer or resolved narrative structure. And that involved me having to rewrite a lot of the materials I have been working on 30 plus years into the mold I use today (two styles, one which is super complex and the other a lot more straightforward and playfully postmodern).

To answer sort of the last question, I think we will be lucky if the world survives in a decade at this rate. I am definitely not putting any stock in our communal survival by any means.

So in sum as an idealist I lean towards this: https://www.amazon.com/Ministry-Future-Kim-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0316300136

and as a pretty brutal realist: https://www.amazon.com/Submission-Novel-Michel-Houellebecq/dp/0374271577

Oh, and I should mention that you all should definitely read this: https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/workshops-empire hilariously published by the University of Iowa Press (nodding irony here).

Sounds like you didn’t apply to iowa 

[SocialKonstruct]

17 minutes ago, actualair said:

Sounds like you didn’t apply to iowa 

That's a definite no. Going to stick to being here in either Utah or LA.

[dyedviolet]

1 hour ago, SocialKonstruct said:

To answer sort of the last question, I think we will be lucky if the world survives in a decade at this rate. I am definitely not putting any stock in our communal survival by any means.

You might be fine with dying at 60, but I have to insist on how wrong you are if for no other reason than my own interest in living past 35. At your age, you likely remember people talking about the hole in the ozone layer, or the impending extinction of the blue whale. I have to assume at least a passing familiarity with Captian Planet and its projections that the world would be over around the year...Oh, now! And yet here we are, with different topics being the hot-button ecological disasters. This is because people with higher levels of optimism than you in the benthic zone put in the work to reverse the damage. The hole in the ozone layer has shrunk since it was first discovered. The blue whale is still in our oceans. And if your conception of humanity-ending climate disaster is a singular event after passing a point of no return, then you lack entirely too much information to be making ten-year predictions. Climate change and environmental destruction are a myriad of intertwined systems, not a linear dial of "healthy" to "irreparably damaged." 

7 hours ago, 2O2AMFA said:

People will understand that AI will replace workers in physical science first as it is the most black-or-white subject and non-theoritical/non-computational natural science the next. Social science follows, and Humanity should be the last. The current irrational decision is based on a misconception of new industrial revolution. 

This is also not true. If you listen to anyone familiar with the inner workings of generative AI and/or LLMs, you'd know how utterly incapable they are of producing novel work. None of these models have cognition, none of them think, and none of them have anything resembling a capacity to understand something. They are not going to be able to look at the current state of science and propose a theory to further our knowledge of anything. When a machine makes a mistake, it makes it so fast that it can't be caught until it's too late; Fail Safe (1964) was fairly prescient on this front. We are in no way looking at a future where computers are autonomously synthesizing new medicines. AI as it is now has very limited use cases where it is genuinely beneficial, and all of those cases have it as a computational tool assisting a human's work. Furthermore, the AI economic bubble is predicted to burst as soon as this year, and with the ongoing shortage of computer parts, there will likely be a very steep decline in its use immediately following that burst.

8 hours ago, SocialKonstruct said:

Even though I have been writing for about 40 years now ... I definitely can attest that I am very interested in going to do a Ph.D. or MFA in creative writing for professionalization purposes (not workshopping really because I want to avoid all influences from the flattened styles that dominate literary magazines today particuarly in the US. Thankgodfor Irish and British literary magazines which I dig a lotatthispoint :p)...

With the formalities out of the way, I can finally begin addressing something that is relevant to the main topic of this thread. I can respect your pragmatic approach to the potential benefits of acquiring a formal writing degree, but I have to point out how pretentious and rude you sound dismissing out of hand any potential value your future cohort may have for your writing. I hold a minor in creative writing (A minuscule achievement compared to your four degrees), so my understanding is that best practice for a workshop is to meet a piece where it's at, and to be very careful not to give prescriptive notes to the writer being critiqued. Are you so easily influenced that mere suggestion would drive you to a writing style you loathe? Do you turn your nose up at the idea of critiquing the writing of your strawmen, all while denying that you could potentially steer them towards something you find more palatable? Is it so hard to conceive of a world where your classmates' work and notes are... Gasp! Worth your time?! I have to hazard a guess that being so dismissive of the writing of people you haven't even met yet is not a quality that makes one a good writing professor. 

Moving past your misanthropic tendencies towards modern literary writers, let's examine the opinions you've shared on fiction itself. 

8 hours ago, SocialKonstruct said:

I really do think that we need to have a more cynical view of the American creative writing factory system that churns out literary authors by the yard. One can blame the flattening of literary styles during the late 1970's and early 1980's to many trends: neoliberal capitalism, Reaganomics, a growing conservatism amongst the liberal elites, and the dominance of the Iowa Writers' Workshop graduates/Cold War mentality in other MFA programs... a tragedy to diverse voices which were key to the ascendancy of American writing from the 1950's until early 1980's.

Mark McGurl does such a good job delineating these academic trends in his masterly works: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674062092 and https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Less-Novel-Age-Amazon/dp/183976385X. In fact, I would argue in a pretty controversial way that Amazon and self-publishing have had more impact on literary writing during the past 20 years than even the MFA programs.

2 hours ago, SocialKonstruct said:

As a writer who has been working for over 40 years since I wrote a novel from age 7-10 (now gone thank goodness), I definitely have shifted from an imitator of Hemingway and Carver when I was in elementary school to focused on a non-American and more British/Commonwealth method of literary writing today... Plus I really am glad to work on novel of ideas and themes that do not flinch away from the easy answer or resolved narrative structure. And that involved me having to rewrite a lot of the materials I have been working on 30 plus years into the mold I use today (two styles, one which is super complex and the other a lot more straightforward and playfully postmodern).

So, as you might expect from someone bemoaning the creatively bankrupt state of literary fiction, SocialKonstruct is a self-avowed fan and writer of... literary fiction? Surely you understand that with Amazon's mass-distribution and the decade-plus of ebooks being commonly favored, the writing coming from the United States and from Britain has been partially flattened into an anglophone literary style? If you wish to argue that they are different, I counter with the inevitable meshing of the two. The cross-pollination of British and American slang is already well underway, along with certain grammatical forms such as "I was sat there," in place of "I was sitting there." In a global world, there can only be so much difference in the literature of two countries that share a language. I suspect Australia will be joining this amalgamation in the near future.

Of course, since your most recent data point on stylistic trajectories is from forty years ago, it's entirely possible that your conception of British literary fiction is simply outdated. Again, I have to respect a pursuit towards earlier styles of writing—I recently finished The Count of Monte Cristo and thoroughly enjoyed both the complexity of the narrative and the long-winded, flowery writing style of the 19th century. It simply seems disingenuous to me to so vehemently deride an entire swath of the literary landscape without being able to identify a work you dislike from the past 20 years, or without leaning heavily upon the work of a single critic. Similarly, while you state your willingness to argue for self-publishing's and Amazon's effects on literary writing, you fail to provide any claims for that statement beyond a link to McGurl's work. I understand you have used recent works as touchpoints to describe your personal worldview:

3 hours ago, SocialKonstruct said:

So in sum as an idealist I lean towards this: https://www.amazon.com/Ministry-Future-Kim-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0316300136

and as a pretty brutal realist: https://www.amazon.com/Submission-Novel-Michel-Houellebecq/dp/0374271577

—But a cursory glance through their author pages reveals that both Kim Stanley Robinson and Michel Houellebecq have books published from more than twenty years ago (predating 2005). Legacy careers such as theirs do not make much of an argument for any stance on what has or has not affected the recent history of fiction. It is not very easy to believe that you have personal experience with those shifts in publishing, and have not simply latched onto the opinions in McGurl's book. It is, however, the duty of the young to be on the pulse of the ever-changing present, and to share that knowledge with the... less young, so I will be happy to share a few recommendations that may help broaden your literary palate and break you out of your current mold. I will warn you that, unlike your strict adherence to literary fiction, I primarily read genre fiction, so there will likely be a mismatch of taste.

The Blue Clerk, by Dionne Brand (2018): A prose poetry collection focused on interrogating the validity of Brand's own work, alternating through her own perspective and a fictionalized version of her thoughts framed as a dialogue between the characters of the poet and the titular clerk. 

House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski (2001): I bend my own rules regarding publishing date, but this book has had a resurgence of popularity because of the 2023 videogame myhouse.wad. House of Leaves is notorious for how it plays with structure; the abundant footnotes, the multiple appendices, and the disruptions of how the text is formatted on the page. The form is uniquely suited to a story about severe disruptions of physical space and multiple layers of doubt over what is or is not real; it is also why the book has been a mainstay in game design classes.

Ranked Competitive Breast Growth/Estro Junkies (2025-): A collaborative project between online satirist Beth Leigh-Ann and transfeminist theorist Talia Bhatt, RCBG is a serialized webnovel that looks as the severe social dysfunctions that can arise within a community when necessary transitional care is only accessible through demanding, often contradictory performances. It's a very modern, somewhat commercial style of writing that unflinchingly tackles one of the most controversial, complex issues of today.

Hatoful Boyfriend, by Hato Moa (2014): "This is a video game!" you may say. You would be correct; it is a game in the Visual Novel genre. "This is a game about dating PIGEONS!" You would be right again. It is also a speculative piece about a society post-mass-extinction event where a new intelligent species has largely replaced humans. It is a multi-layered tragedy where there is no narrative thread that allows every character to have a happy ending. It is a deeply interwoven melodrama, setting up the character arcs of eight different characters to all be resolved in one climax in a way a more traditional, linear narrative could not achieve. It is the most resounding proof I have found that the absurdity of a concept has no bearing on the quality of story that can be contained within; that, in fact, a more absurd set-up can allow one to suspend more disbelief and therefor become more deeply invested in the serious narrative to come.

I cannot say I have much vitriol left after extolling the virtues of one of my favorite pieces of fiction. For now, I rest my case.

 

 

[SocialKonstruct]

12 minutes ago, dyedviolet said:

You might be fine with dying at 60, but I have to insist on how wrong you are if for no other reason than my own interest in living past 35. At your age, you likely remember people talking about the hole in the ozone layer, or the impending extinction of the blue whale. I have to assume at least a passing familiarity with Captian Planet and its projections that the world would be over around the year...Oh, now! And yet here we are, with different topics being the hot-button ecological disasters. This is because people with higher levels of optimism than you in the benthic zone put in the work to reverse the damage. The hole in the ozone layer has shrunk since it was first discovered. The blue whale is still in our oceans. And if your conception of humanity-ending climate disaster is a singular event after passing a point of no return, then you lack entirely too much information to be making ten-year predictions. Climate change and environmental destruction are a myriad of intertwined systems, not a linear dial of "healthy" to "irreparably damaged." 

This is also not true. If you listen to anyone familiar with the inner workings of generative AI and/or LLMs, you'd know how utterly incapable they are of producing novel work. None of these models have cognition, none of them think, and none of them have anything resembling a capacity to understand something. They are not going to be able to look at the current state of science and propose a theory to further our knowledge of anything. When a machine makes a mistake, it makes it so fast that it can't be caught until it's too late; Fail Safe (1964) was fairly prescient on this front. We are in no way looking at a future where computers are autonomously synthesizing new medicines. AI as it is now has very limited use cases where it is genuinely beneficial, and all of those cases have it as a computational tool assisting a human's work. Furthermore, the AI economic bubble is predicted to burst as soon as this year, and with the ongoing shortage of computer parts, there will likely be a very steep decline in its use immediately following that burst.

With the formalities out of the way, I can finally begin addressing something that is relevant to the main topic of this thread. I can respect your pragmatic approach to the potential benefits of acquiring a formal writing degree, but I have to point out how pretentious and rude you sound dismissing out of hand any potential value your future cohort may have for your writing. I hold a minor in creative writing (A minuscule achievement compared to your four degrees), so my understanding is that best practice for a workshop is to meet a piece where it's at, and to be very careful not to give prescriptive notes to the writer being critiqued. Are you so easily influenced that mere suggestion would drive you to a writing style you loathe? Do you turn your nose up at the idea of critiquing the writing of your strawmen, all while denying that you could potentially steer them towards something you find more palatable? Is it so hard to conceive of a world where your classmates' work and notes are... Gasp! Worth your time?! I have to hazard a guess that being so dismissive of the writing of people you haven't even met yet is not a quality that makes one a good writing professor. 

Moving past your misanthropic tendencies towards modern literary writers, let's examine the opinions you've shared on fiction itself. 

So, as you might expect from someone bemoaning the creatively bankrupt state of literary fiction, SocialKonstruct is a self-avowed fan and writer of... literary fiction? Surely you understand that with Amazon's mass-distribution and the decade-plus of ebooks being commonly favored, the writing coming from the United States and from Britain has been partially flattened into an anglophone literary style? If you wish to argue that they are different, I counter with the inevitable meshing of the two. The cross-pollination of British and American slang is already well underway, along with certain grammatical forms such as "I was sat there," in place of "I was sitting there." In a global world, there can only be so much difference in the literature of two countries that share a language. I suspect Australia will be joining this amalgamation in the near future.

Of course, since your most recent data point on stylistic trajectories is from forty years ago, it's entirely possible that your conception of British literary fiction is simply outdated. Again, I have to respect a pursuit towards earlier styles of writing—I recently finished The Count of Monte Cristo and thoroughly enjoyed both the complexity of the narrative and the long-winded, flowery writing style of the 19th century. It simply seems disingenuous to me to so vehemently deride an entire swath of the literary landscape without being able to identify a work you dislike from the past 20 years, or without leaning heavily upon the work of a single critic. Similarly, while you state your willingness to argue for self-publishing's and Amazon's effects on literary writing, you fail to provide any claims for that statement beyond a link to McGurl's work. I understand you have used recent works as touchpoints to describe your personal worldview:

—But a cursory glance through their author pages reveals that both Kim Stanley Robinson and Michel Houellebecq have books published from more than twenty years ago (predating 2005). Legacy careers such as theirs do not make much of an argument for any stance on what has or has not affected the recent history of fiction. It is not very easy to believe that you have personal experience with those shifts in publishing, and have not simply latched onto the opinions in McGurl's book. It is, however, the duty of the young to be on the pulse of the ever-changing present, and to share that knowledge with the... less young, so I will be happy to share a few recommendations that may help broaden your literary palate and break you out of your current mold. I will warn you that, unlike your strict adherence to literary fiction, I primarily read genre fiction, so there will likely be a mismatch of taste.

The Blue Clerk, by Dionne Brand (2018): A prose poetry collection focused on interrogating the validity of Brand's own work, alternating through her own perspective and a fictionalized version of her thoughts framed as a dialogue between the characters of the poet and the titular clerk. 

House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski (2001): I bend my own rules regarding publishing date, but this book has had a resurgence of popularity because of the 2023 videogame myhouse.wad. House of Leaves is notorious for how it plays with structure; the abundant footnotes, the multiple appendices, and the disruptions of how the text is formatted on the page. The form is uniquely suited to a story about severe disruptions of physical space and multiple layers of doubt over what is or is not real; it is also why the book has been a mainstay in game design classes.

Ranked Competitive Breast Growth/Estro Junkies (2025-): A collaborative project between online satirist Beth Leigh-Ann and transfeminist theorist Talia Bhatt, RCBG is a serialized webnovel that looks as the severe social dysfunctions that can arise within a community when necessary transitional care is only accessible through demanding, often contradictory performances. It's a very modern, somewhat commercial style of writing that unflinchingly tackles one of the most controversial, complex issues of today.

Hatoful Boyfriend, by Hato Moa (2014): "This is a video game!" you may say. You would be correct; it is a game in the Visual Novel genre. "This is a game about dating PIGEONS!" You would be right again. It is also a speculative piece about a society post-mass-extinction event where a new intelligent species has largely replaced humans. It is a multi-layered tragedy where there is no narrative thread that allows every character to have a happy ending. It is a deeply interwoven melodrama, setting up the character arcs of eight different characters to all be resolved in one climax in a way a more traditional, linear narrative could not achieve. It is the most resounding proof I have found that the absurdity of a concept has no bearing on the quality of story that can be contained within; that, in fact, a more absurd set-up can allow one to suspend more disbelief and therefor become more deeply invested in the serious narrative to come.

I cannot say I have much vitriol left after extolling the virtues of one of my favorite pieces of fiction. For now, I rest my case.

 

 

Astonishingly, I do read some genre fiction myself. If you peruse my Goodreads, you can see that I have perused Jasmine Mas and even a romance novel by Lauren Kung Jessen most recently. So no, I really do enjoy genre fiction and in fact, as a post-postmodernist, I definitely can say that having my own work behave as a meta-commentary on genre fiction in relation to literary fiction is quite interesting.

However, your argument isn't going to make me any less of a pessimist. And definitely I am not dismissive completely of the younger generation. in fact, Zoe Dubno's masterwork Happiness and Love is a definite must-read of this year (I got to message her privately just recently). Unfortunately, the a lot of the younger writers in the United States are getting much more homogenized at this stage of the literary trajectory with little to varying experimentation.

[dyedviolet]

12 minutes ago, SocialKonstruct said:

Astonishingly, I do read some genre fiction myself.

Well, my apologies for not scouring your profile for every detail available. I do appreciate knowing that you read more broadly than I first assumed. I agree that recent American publishing has had a greater volume of formulaic fiction coming out (largely owing to the advertisement norms on BookTok), but I think beyond that point we will have to come to a civil disagreement.

[dontwanttodothis]

5 hours ago, SocialKonstruct said:

Eh, perhaps but honestly I would subscribe more to this: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-iowa-flattened-literature

Eric Bennett is definitely a super reliable source. And Mark McGurl definitely has way more weight as a literary and cultural critic than Tony Tulathimutte who tends to be more a clickbait provocateur in many ways.

Plus I definitely as a communist leaning writer see Paul Engle's legacy as super detrimental. Bennett is dead on when he states "Much of the answer lies in the remarkable career of Paul Engle, the workshop’s second director, a do-it-yourself Cold Warrior whose accomplishments remain mostly covered in archival dust. For two decades after World War II, Iowa prospered on donations from conservative businessmen persuaded by Engle that the program fortified democratic values at home and abroad: It fought Communism. The workshop thrived on checks from places like the Rockefeller Foundation, which gave Iowa $40,000 between 1953 and 1956—good money at the time. As the years went by, it also attracted support from the Asia Foundation (another channel for CIA money) and the State Department.

As for the hype, it followed the money and attracted more of it. The publishing moguls Henry Luce and Gardner Cowles Jr. conceived of themselves as fighting a battle of ideas, as they contrasted the American way of life with the gray Soviet nightmare on the pages of their newspapers and glossy magazines. Luce published Time and Life, Cowles published Look and several Midwestern newspapers, and both loved to feature Iowa: its embodiment of literary individualism, its celebration of self-expression, its cornfields.

Knowing he could count on such publicity, Engle staged spectacles in Iowa City for audiences far beyond Iowa City. He read memorial sonnets for the Iowa war dead at a dedication ceremony for the new student union. He convened a celebration of Baudelaire with an eye toward the non-Communist left in Paris. He organized a festival of the sciences and arts. Life and Time and Look transformed these events into impressive press clippings, and the clippings, via Engle’s tireless hands, arrived in the mailboxes of possible donors.

In 1954, Engle became the editor of the O. Henry Prize collection, and so it became his task to select the year’s best short stories and introduce them to a mass readership. Lo and behold, writers affiliated with Iowa began to be featured with great prominence in the collection. Engle marveled at this, the impartial fruits of his judging, in fund-raising pitches.

The Iowa Workshop, then, attained national eminence by capitalizing on the fears and hopes of the Cold War. But the creative-writing programs founded in Iowa’s image did not, in this respect, resemble it. No other program would be so celebrated on the glossy pages of Look and Life. No other program would receive an initial burst of underwriting from Maytag and U.S. Steel and Quaker Oats and Reader’s Digest. No other program would attract such interest from the Asia Foundation, the State Department, and the CIA. And the anticlimax of the creative-writing enterprise must derive at least in part from this difference.

There, in the paragraphs above, is blood squeezed from the stone of a dissertation. If, in 2006, as a no-longer-quite-plausibly aspiring novelist beached on the shores of academe, you’re struggling against the bleakness of the dissertation as a genre, you’ll do your best to work the CIA into yours. You’ll want to write a heroic dissertation—or at least a novelistic one. You’ll read books about soft diplomacy during the Cold War, learn about the Farfield Foundation, and search for its name, on an abject hunch, in the 40 boxes of the Papers of Paul Engle at the Special Collections Library at the University of Iowa. You’ll exhaust those archives and also the ones at Palo Alto (where Wallace Stegner founded the Stanford program) and Tarrytown (home of the Rockefeller archives), tracing the relationship between creative writing and the Cold War. But even as you do, you’ll wonder about your motives.

Because you yourself attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop before deciding to enter a Ph.D. program. At Iowa, you were disappointed by the reduced form of intellectual engagement you found there and the narrow definition of what counted as “literary.” The workshop was like a muffin tin you poured the batter of your dreams into. You entered with something undefined and tantalizingly protean and left with muffins. You really believe this. But you can also see yourself clearly enough: unpublished, ambitious, obscure, ponderous. In short, the kind of person who writes a dissertation.

Were you right to be frustrated by the ethos of Iowa City, or are you merely a frustrated novelist? Were there objective grounds for your sense of creative stultification, or did the workshop simply not love you enough? Was the whole idea of your dissertation a guerrilla raid on the kind of recognition you couldn’t attain by legitimate means? And did the CIA really have much to do with it?

At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop between 1998 and 2000, I had the option of writing fiction in one of four ways.

First, I could carve, polish, compress, and simplify; banish myself from my writing as T.S. Eliot advised and strive to enter the gray, crystalline tradition of modernist fiction as it runs from Flaubert through early Joyce and Hemingway to Raymond Carver (alumnus) and Alice Munro. Marilynne Robinson (teacher) did this in her 1980 novel Housekeeping. Denis Johnson (alumnus) played devil to Robinson’s angel in Jesus’ Son. Frank Conroy (director, 1987-2005) had this style down cold—and it is cold. Conroy must have sought it in applications, longing with some kind of spiritual masochism to shiver again and again at the iciness of early Joyce. Such lapidary simplicity becomes psychedelic if you polish it enough. Justin Tussing (class ahead of me) mastered it in his prismatic novel, The Best People in the World. I myself, feeling the influence, revised sentences into pea gravel.

Second, and also much approved, I could work in a warmer vein—the genuinely and winningly loquacious. Ethan Canin (my favorite teacher) set the example here, writing charismatically chatty prose that, like the man himself, exhibited the gross health of the fortunate and tenderhearted. Your influences, if you tended this way, were F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, or anybody else whose sentences unwind with glowing ease. Cheever loomed as an undisputed great. Curtis Sittenfeld, in the class below mine, displayed this style and charm and unassuming grace in Prep and American Wife. Marilynne Robinson’s recent novels, Gilead and Home, turn toward this manner from the adamantine beauty of Housekeeping.

Third, you could write what’s often called “magical realism.” Joy Williams (alumna, teacher) and Stuart Dybek (alumnus, teacher) helped to shape a strain of fable-making passed down to my classmates from Kafka and Bruno Schulz and Calvino or their Latin American heirs. Sarah Shun-lien Bynum was writing Madeleine Is Sleeping; Sarah Braunstein was developing the sensibility she’d weave into The Sweet Relief of Missing Children; Paul Harding was laying the groundwork for the enchanting weirdness of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers.

These first three categories were the acceptable ones. But Category 4 involved writing things that in the eyes of the workshop appeared weird and unsuccessful—that fell outside the community of norms, that tried too hard. The prevailing term for ambitious pieces that didn’t fit was “postmodernism.” The term was a kind of smackdown. Submitting a “postmodern” story was like belching in class.

But what is a postmodern story? In those years, Robinson was already in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction, as were Jayne Anne Phillips (alumna) and Bobbie Ann Mason, model citizens of the M.F.A. nation. Joy Williams and Stuart Dybek were certainly not Victorians nor modernists nor best sellers. What was it that you weren’t supposed to do?

At the time I considered Freud and Rabelais my favorite novelists. Later I understood that I was being annoying. But I thought then, and still think now, that the three-headed Iowa canon frustrated as much as satisfied a hunger for literature that got you thinking. Iowa fiction, published and unpublished, got you feeling—it got you seeing and tasting and touching and smelling and hearing. It was like going to an arboretum with a child. You want exactly that from life, and also more.

People at Iowa love to love Prairie Lights, the local independent bookstore. In Prairie Lights I found myself overwhelmed by the literature of the senses and the literature of the quirky sensing voice. I wanted heavy books from a bunch of different disciplines: on hermeneutics, on monetary policy, on string theory, on psychoanalysis, on the Gospels, on the strange war between analytic and Continental philosophers, on sexual pathology. I was 23. I knew I wanted to write a novel of ideas, a novel of systems, but one also with characters, and also heart—a novel comprising everything, not just how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt (but that, too). James Wood did not yet loom over everything, but I wanted to make James Wood barf. At Prairie Lights, I would have felt much better buying the work of Nathan Englander (alum) if it had been next to that of Friedrich Engels. I felt there how I feel in bars that serve only wine and beer.

This aversion to novels and stories of full-throttle experience, erudition, and cognition—the unspoken proscription against attempting to write them—was the narrowness I sensed and hated. The question I wanted to answer, as I faced down my dissertation, was whether this aversion was an accidental feature of Iowa during my time, or if it reflected something more."

As a writer who has been working for over 40 years since I wrote a novel from age 7-10 (now gone thank goodness), I definitely have shifted from an imitator of Hemingway and Carver when I was in elementary school to focused on a non-American and more British/Commonwealth method of literary writing today... Plus I really am glad to work on novel of ideas and themes that do not flinch away from the easy answer or resolved narrative structure. And that involved me having to rewrite a lot of the materials I have been working on 30 plus years into the mold I use today (two styles, one which is super complex and the other a lot more straightforward and playfully postmodern).

To answer sort of the last question, I think we will be lucky if the world survives in a decade at this rate. I am definitely not putting any stock in our communal survival by any means.

So in sum as an idealist I lean towards this: https://www.amazon.com/Ministry-Future-Kim-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0316300136

and as a pretty brutal realist: https://www.amazon.com/Submission-Novel-Michel-Houellebecq/dp/0374271577

Oh, and I should mention that you all should definitely read this: https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/workshops-empire hilariously published by the University of Iowa Press (nodding irony here).

I love McGurl's work and enjoyed this essay from Bennett. However, I feel compelled to say you might be surprised if you ever visited Iowa City (lol) and talked to recent grads, profs, and students.

Despite the experience of walking into Prairie Lights and looking at the tables of bestsellers in the front... the millennial/zillennial/zoomer set of the last 10-15 years seem intensely aware of the school's history, and the larger historicization of the workshop model and of academic creative writing in the States.

In fact, in my experience a healthy % of students admitted into the 'major' MFA programs nowadays tend to write in some sort of avant-garde tradition. You'll find their names with equal measure in rags like Protean, The Baffler, n+1, Jacket2, Fence, and endless smaller leftist zines etc. etc. as you would the traditional outlets. 

Further, and not to necessarily 'defend' Iowa, but you can find plenty of famous grads who wrote/write against its prevailing aesthetic. Here's a small and random grab-bag of great writers across the decades: alice notley, joshua clover, james tate, cathy park hong, john edgar wideman, michael lally, joyelle mcsweeney...

[commandercowboy]

Perhaps related to the current conversation… does anyone ever get discouraged around MFA stuff because keeping the company of (some) other writers, uh, bothers them? I’m sure I’m not the only one, but I feel like I definitely don’t fit in in the sort of high-brow, high-pretension, high-pessimism -verse. Don’t get me wrong, I love academia and highly theoretical conversations, but I’d hate losing the inherent fun in my work. Writing is my number one passion and I love reading other people’s writing. And I want to teach. That’s why I want my MFA, at least. Being around other writers makes me feel bad sometimes. 

[3hourmovie]

33 minutes ago, commandercowboy said:

Perhaps related to the current conversation… does anyone ever get discouraged around MFA stuff because keeping the company of (some) other writers, uh, bothers them? I’m sure I’m not the only one, but I feel like I definitely don’t fit in in the sort of high-brow, high-pretension, high-pessimism -verse. Don’t get me wrong, I love academia and highly theoretical conversations, but I’d hate losing the inherent fun in my work. Writing is my number one passion and I love reading other people’s writing. And I want to teach. That’s why I want my MFA, at least. Being around other writers makes me feel bad sometimes. 

current MFA student here + someone who has read applications before—admission committees read SOPs for red flags & one of the most common ones is a disdain for other writers of contemporary fiction. it’s actually quite easy to tell when someone is going to be annoying/a bummer in a workshop where they are expected to engage in other writers’ work with thought, care, and generosity. no matter how “good” someone’s sample is (although, the more problematic the SOP, the worse the writing tends to be….), they are not making their way into a program if the committee can sense that kind of energy. obviously, some people can slip through the cracks; not all terrors reveal themselves in the SOP, but this would not be my main concern at all if i were in your position. honestly, i think the greater problem afflicting MFA programs isn’t the pretentious wannabe-iconoclasts but rather people who grew up on AO3 and YA and haven’t really progressed their reading habits beyond that. 

[SocialKonstruct]

13 minutes ago, 3hourmovie said:

current MFA student here + someone who has read applications before—admission committees read SOPs for red flags & one of the most common ones is a disdain for other writers of contemporary fiction. it’s actually quite easy to tell when someone is going to be annoying/a bummer in a workshop where they are expected to engage in other writers’ work with thought, care, and generosity. no matter how “good” someone’s sample is (although, the more problematic the SOP, the worse the writing tends to be….), they are not making their way into a program if the committee can sense that kind of energy. obviously, some people can slip through the cracks; not all terrors reveal themselves in the SOP, but this would not be my main concern at all if i were in your position. honestly, i think the greater problem afflicting MFA programs isn’t the pretentious wannabe-iconoclasts but rather people who grew up on AO3 and YA and haven’t really progressed their reading habits beyond that. 

Interestingly enough, a recent NYT article addresses this very fact. https://archive.ph/D9z6y

[runlolarun]

Wow, I saw a Cornell poetry acceptance on the draft. I didn't think any schools would reach out on President's Day!

[meanwhile]

just got the official reject from Ole Miss. was expecting it, but still stings. 

hoping that everyone here is taking deep breaths and doing kind things for themselves every day as these results come out  

i know we are, in effect, competitors,  but i am truly rooting for everyone and wishing you well!