Month: October 2012

Hurricane Sandy

News

Photo credit: Associated Press

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
So… Hurricane Sandy happened. Are you safe? I hope that wherever you are living right now, it is safe and with heat/water/electricity.

As you doubtless know by now, the New York-New Jersey area — as well as other Eastern Seaboard states such as Virginia — got pummeled. The president has declared NY and NJ literal, legal disaster areas. (Photos of the devastation at CNN.)

If you want to help with the relief efforts, here are some places taking donations:

The American Red Cross (obviously). Particularly the Greater New York branch.  You can donate money through mail, telephoning with your credit card number, via their website or, more mysteriously, via texting “REDCROSS” to 90999.  The text automatically donates $10 to the organization’s Disaster Relief branch, which helps with relief efforts in general; this doesn’t specify if your $10 would go to Sandy relief efforts exclusively (or at all).  I imagine that right now, though, at least part of your donation would go to Sandy.  It’s my understanding that any texted donations will show up as charges on your phone bill.

The Red Cross does not accept donated goods (e.g. clothing, canned food, etc), as that would require diverting part of their workforce toward sorting, shipping, and distributing said goods.  It’s more efficient to donate money to the relief efforts; the Red Cross can buy needed items nearby the affected communities, assisting their local economy and saving precious time.

They do, of course, accept blood and platelet donations, and those are needed more than ever.

Food banks run by Feeding America is supplying basic meals in the aftermath and Direct Relief International is working to give people healthcare in the 16 states affected by the storm,  especially individuals’ access to pharmacy services.  Given that the MTA in New York continues to be shuttered and that transportation remains an issue in several other states, this is not something to dismiss.

CNN has further information on ways to help.

Race and Reading: On NPR’s “100 Best YA Novels”

Lit

Recently, NPR Books compiled a list of the  “100 Best Young Adult Novels.”   Audience members were invited to nominate and then vote for the “best” examples of young adult literature. The response was overwhelming: NPR received nominations from 75,500 listeners. If this project is any indication, the general public is passionate and opinionated about young adult books. As a writer and an advocate of literacy, I find this heartening.

However, the list itself has discouraging implications. The audience selected only two books –– out of one hundred –– that feature protagonists of color. The NPR Ombudsman blog has already addressed the methodology of the poll and the role of its panelists; I think the list speaks less to the incompetence of NPR than to the invisibility of certain stories, and perhaps the inherent danger in declaring “bests.” Blame notwithstanding, touting the best books as ones almost exclusively about white people perpetuates white privilege and marginalizes a multitude of stories. And what about other facets of identity –– class, sexuality, gender –– that teens are coming to terms with? One thing that surprised me about discussion of the list is that it essentially stopped at race.

I believe that YA literature is crucial. It’s not just important that kids read books. It’s not just important that kids read good books. Kids need characters and stories that they can identify with –– books that reflect their own varied experiences and struggles. By extension, they need characters and stories that challenge them as well, provoke them to consider their place in the world and engage with narratives they might not encounter in their own lives.

Adolescence is a great time to read –– as a teenager, reading is fun and free of pretension. Books sustained me in middle and high school. They were an escape, certainly, and they were entertainment. But beyond that, they allowed me to conceive of the world beyond my tiny corner of it in a vivid and beautiful way (I grew up in a small, somewhat isolated and chronically rainy town in Alaska).

By reading voraciously, I was exposed to lives along myriad racial, cultural and socioeconomic lines outside my own experience. While this list features some excellent books, its heterogeneity confuses and saddens me. My broad inference is that overwhelmingly, teenagers are either deprived of stories about themselves or deprived of stories about the world. At a time when most of us are utterly absorbed in ourselves and yet at the same time developing a social consciousness, we benefit from stories of both.

What Makes a Writer

Essay

Last month there was another article in Poets & Writers about whether or not creative writing can be taught. In it, Gregory Spatz told the story of a student who came in writing cliché material, worked hard in his MFA program, and ended up publishing a book of short stories…so voila, the answer is yes, creative writing can be taught!

It makes sense that this kind of article would show up in the annual MFA issue, along with program rankings and short articles about various new programs. There’s always an article like this somewhere; we can’t seem to stop asking whether good writing is the result of talent or hard work. Gregory Spatz does argue that writing can be taught, but he also ended his article with a list of four character traits that helped this student to be successful: “dedication, desire, drive, and discipline.” Desire and drive are the same thing; dedication and discipline are pretty much the same thing, so in the end, according to Spatz, there are two main factors deciding whether or not you can write: you have to want it, and you have to work hard.

People buy the MFA issue and read those articles because they want to know if a studio master’s degree in writing is the right choice for them; if it will be worth the time and money and result in better writing. There’s the ongoing debate, which has its moments of eruption on the internet, about whether getting an MFA actually improves your writing, or turns it into boring, cliché literary fiction, or whether you need an MFA to get fellowships and publications, and really, the only answer to either of these questions is, it depends on you. The best answer I’ve heard to the question of what an MFA does for you is that it speeds up the process. If you want to be a writer, and you’re working hard at reading and writing, and you’re getting honest feedback and revising, you might improve. But if you’re doing all that in an environment where you are given time to write, and you write a lot, and the feedback you get is from professors and students who know what they’re talking about, you might improve faster. So, is that the place where you want to spend your time and get your feedback?

I get tired of that debate about what kind of fiction MFA programs “produce”. Teachers and programs don’t produce writers. Writers produce writing, and if you’re complaining that most of the writing by MFA graduates is mediocre, well, I have news for you: most writing is mediocre! While we should be skeptical of the institutionalization of art, the idea of the individual genius writing on his own is equally dangerous. Someone has to decide what counts as genius, and geniuses have generally had gifts of money and time that allowed them to hone their creative gifts, which is to say that those deemed genius are usually privileged. What I like about MFA programs is the possibility for diversity; the idea that anyone can be accepted for his/her potential as a writer and then given funding to read and write.

People also get upset because having MFA programs for writers creates a system in which some writers can be seen as more legitimate than others. The same debates still rage for visual artists and musicians. Maybe, for some editors and programs, seeing that someone has a degree makes a difference, but I would say the most important factor in any decision is always the writing. I see flat, uncertain writing from MFA graduates all of the time; I  also see compelling, original writing from people who don’t list MFA programs in their cover letters. And the opposite is true for each. I agree with Spatz that writing is not pure talent or pure teaching; it’s some combination of characteristics in the writer’s personality that work to help him/her learn. I’d also like to expand that list just a bit, beyond desire and discipline, because I think there’s more to it than wanting to write and working hard.

Imagination. When people speak of talent in creative writers, they may talk about a finely honed sentence or line of a poem, but I think the root of it is always the writer’s imagination. Imagination is a part of the unconscious that we all have access to, and maybe some people have more access to it, or they tap into it more. To demonstrate imagination in writing requires risk taking; it requires thinking differently from other people and presenting bold ideas that very well may fail. It’s key to good creative writing because it is the creativity, that raw talent that shines through. I know that teachers can teach reading, writing, and revision strategies, and I know that hard work can produce better writing, but creativity comes from within.

Humility. You have two ears and one mouth; use them accordingly. Humility is important for accepting feedback and revising, for checking the ego while writing, and for receiving numerous rejections from magazines and publishers. Humility is the place from which dedication comes. Humble writers read more than they write and learn from the books they read. They continue writing because they are not yet satisfied. Humility means being wary of praise and self-congratulations, and it means being willing to ditch failed work and start fresh. Being open to growth and improvement as a writer often means pushing the ego out of the way. That said, you need to be just foolhardy enough to attempt risky projects in the face of failure.

Obsession. You have to be obsessed. I mean, you have to be batshit crazy about sitting alone at your desk for hours and just making things up, and then revising those things over and over. Desire and drive are much too mild to cover this one. Obsession means needing it even when it doesn’t make you happy, and refusing to stop even if you’ve crossed the threshold of humility and gone straight to despair, which, like arrogance, can be a trap. But, short of clinical depression, your obsession should be able to drag you out of that discouraged place and get you to start over, simply because you have to. This is also where perfectionism and dedication come in, because the willingness to work comes from an obsession with making the work better.

These are the things that cannot be taught. Like Spatz, I want to argue that creative writing can be taught like any other subject, but I always end up arguing that it is something in the personality; it is some particular combination of qualities that make people pursue writing. Because, in the view of the rest of the rational, logical world, writing is crazy. It’s nuts to spend hours making up stories that, in all likelihood, very few people will ever read. It’s nuts to go into any kind of debt for a master’s degree that, in all likelihood, will not result in a related career. It’s a fool’s errand. So, to do it and do it well, maybe you just have to be that particular brand of fool.

The Male Privilege Plot: Jeffrey Eugenides Broke My Fragile Woman Heart

Essay, Lit, Politics

Jeffrey Eugenides is a wonderful writer.  I loved, and love, Middlesex.  But the recent interview he gave with Salon, specifically the bits about gender in the literary world, surprised and disappointed me.  It’s not his ignorance of the issue so much that bothers me; it’s his denial of it, the dismissive tone of his response, the unwillingness to engage in an analysis of his privilege beyond an offhand “You know, it’s possible.”  Yes, I know it’s possible.  VIDA knows it’s possible.  It’s more than possible.  How could the person who wrote Middlesex –– a novel about the permeability, and the cultural centralization of, sex and gender –– not believe in gender bias?

Eugenides argued that Zadie Smith is as well-respected and reviewed as Jonathan Franzen and the Great (White) Male Writers of his ilk.  I agree with him on that point… but that’s Zadie Smith.  One author.  Marie Curie discovered radium, but one wouldn’t look back on scientific history and claim that women were (or are) as respected or prominent in the field as male scientists.  I could list a handful more women writers held in high literary esteem (Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Alice Walker) but the list would run out far, far sooner than the list of male authors regarded in the same light.

There’s a difference between the work that Franzen produces and that which Jodi Picoult produces, he said.  I agree with him there, too.  Picoult produces beach reads; Franzen produces heavy tomes about”the way we live now” (as Time famously hailed Freedom).   Personally, I don’t enjoy either writer’s work, but there is a clear difference in their sentence, character, and plot construction.  Franzen wins reviews; Picoult wins the “average” consumer.  But Jodi Picoult, in the notorious tweet that launched Franzenfreude 2010, said nothing about Jodi Picoult.  Nor did she say anything about the type of book that Jodi Picoult writes (nor the audience that reads them: typically cast as middle-aged, middle-class, and female, invariably mothers, belonging to a book club full of other mothers).   Picoult was talking about the difference in general between the way men and women are received in the literary world. To misunderstand this as Picoult “bellyaching” about her own work’s designation of low culture versus Jonathan Franzen’s as high culture seems intentionally simplistic and irresponsible.  It shrinks and delegitimizes Picoult’s point by ignoring her point.

Men write about divorce and it’s hailed as The Way We Live Now.  Women write about divorce and it’s hailed as Women’s Fiction.  Because why would someone who isn’t a woman want to read about them?  “[I]t usually has nothing to do with their gender,” Eugenides said, “it’s just the marketplace.”  But that’s exactly my point.  The marketplace itself skews toward the historically most common reader demographic: white men.  Work by writers of color is often expected to concern itself with their race or ethnicity, and when it does, it’s often marginalized –– if not by way of bookstore organization (e.g. “African-American Literature”), by way of cover art (Sociological Images has a good breakdown on this regarding work by writers of Asian descent).  These stories are othered.  We want to highlight the work, the idea goes, but we don’t see it as normative and don’t anticipate the author to receive a widespread American audience.

There are always exceptions –– Jhumpa Lahiri, for one –– but in my experience as a consumer that seems to be the case.  We didn’t even read multicultural authors when I was in public school, now that I think about it.  We read Harper Lee to learn about racism in the American South and Pearl S. Buck to learn about China.  Of course, I can’t speak to everyone’s experience, only my own.

Women writers may not have a designated area of the bookstore, but their work is still discriminated against and marginalized in the way it is marketed.  (Let alone how often it is reviewed, or even published.)  Meg Wolitzer’s article in the New York Times, referenced by Eugenides in the interview, rings true and valid.  Perhaps he should read it again.