Salon.com > literary world

Invest in readers, not MFAs

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 20:53:00 +0000

Supply and demand -- those are concepts you'd expect a mogul to understand almost instinctively, so what to make of the recent donation by the Zell Family Foundation (set up by financier Sam Zell and his wife, Helen) of $50 million to the creative writing program at the University of Michigan? Helen Zell told the Associated Press, "The ability of fiction to develop creativity, to analyze the human psyche, help you understand people — it's critical. It's as important as vitamins or anything else. To me, it's the core of the intellectual health of human beings."

Of course, creative writing programs are not a bad thing, but their role in our current culture can make even those who work within them uneasy. The programs provide promising young writers with the opportunity to concentrate on their work in an (ideally) supportive community of writers. But the programs have difficulty imparting to their students a central truth of most authors' lives: Nobody cares about your work. When it comes to books, the supply is much larger than the demand.

Keith Gessen, Nathaniel Rich: I’m sorry I trashed your novels

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 01:00:00 +0000

I write. It is what I have always done, searching for what Robert Frost called "a momentary stay against confusion."

But I want more than just wisdom -- every writer does, outside the most hopeless of naïfs. Like most of my fellow scribes, I also yearn for fame, greatness and immortality, preferably in that order. Allow me to be immodest: I would like to write the best thing about Brooklyn since William Styron's "Sophie's Choice" and a campus novel to rival Donna Tartt's "The Secret History." I would also like to write a play and perhaps some poetry, if there is time.

Let me go further: If you do not want your own version of the above, if you are indeed a reasonable and/or responsible young man or woman, then literature is not for you. If you have a compelling personal story to tell, tell it to a therapist. An MBA will do you far more good than an MFA. Pursue writing only if you are pathologically unable to pursue anything else. Otherwise, consider advertising.

William Faulkner once said that the artist is "a creature driven by demons -- he usually doesn't know why they chose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why." The demons chose wisely in his case, yet you and I would be foolish to count on their discretion. I say that as someone who has tried and failed to publish a novel for a good decade, despite efforts that any dispassionate observer would consider impressive, if not outright troubling.

Pakistan: Not just India’s unhinged sister

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:50:00 +0000

You Think You Know Pakistan

When you think of Pakistan, acclaimed literary fiction is not your first thought. You’re thinking of the ubiquitous nation of 180 million that bleeds daily and leads sensationalist headlines declaring it the world’s “most dangerous place,” a title often accompanied by encouraging descriptions such as “terrorist haven,” “chaos,” “explosive,” “nightmare,” and “failed state.”

You know Pakistan as the moody, unhinged sister of India, which hennas itself with ghastly violence seeped in extremism and sectarianism.

You know a country whose complex, messy and challenging narrative is reduced to caricatures paraded on news shows as the bearded, anti-American Rage Boys, angry, obscurant Mullahs, disfigured burqa’d women, and President Zardari’s well-groomed mustache.

However, if you look beyond the increasingly grim and sordid headlines and peer deeper into history, you will discover a Pakistan of brilliant, artistic richness as heard in the Qawwalis mastered by the late, great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or the philosophical meditations of Urdu poets Iqbal and Faiz.