You Are Not the Only One Writing about Moldavian Zookeepers

In the Faster Times there's a dialogue between George Saunders and Deb Olin Unferth about the state of the creative writing degree.

From the article...

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

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

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

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

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