JM’s talk last night was awesome. He talked about the writing industry when he started out in the late 60’s, an how near the end of his MFA (or MA?) he was getting calls from the likes of Stanford encouraging him to come teach. Not because he had published or was known for his brilliance at the time, rather, because that’s how many jobs in the industry there were, relative to the ratio of people with advanced degrees. It wasn’t hard to for a writer to find good work.
That totally floors me—I can’t imagine getting phone calls right now, as I near finishing my MFA, from any school, much less a top notch one, recruiting me to work in their program. It’s sad. I think of the biomedical engineers at my job who work really hard and are really smart who get recruited and offered big salaries with signing bonuses, and I think: I’m smart. I work hard. I’m earning an advanced degree. What I have to offer contributes something significant and necessary to the world. But today, writers with MFAs have a 1 in 200 chance of getting a full-time teaching job (confession: I got that stat on someone’s blog). Furthermore: teaching isn’t writing. The chances of me being a professional poet who makes enough to live on after graduation: pretty much 1 in 9 quadrillion.
Obviously, the job prospects aren’t fueling my drive to do all this. This isn’t a shock. (To all the whiners who say “MFAs are useless! They don’t get you jobs!”: Duh.) Jim talked about whether or not writing poetry is “work.” He said if you call writing poetry work, you’re automatically a failure (unless you’re one of the very few who makes a living on selling the writing). Therefore, we may not want to call it work. Not in the career sense anyway.
If I don’t exercise my drive to create works of art, and to use writing to do my job to send a voice into the world, I can’t really do the other things in my life well. So writing is a sort of work. It’s a calling, a drive and sometimes feels like a curse. But having this calling feels much more like an honor than a curse most of the time.
For those of us who want to contribute to the domain (as in, not people who write in a paint-by-numbers hobbyist way), not really being able to call creative writing “work” without looking like a failure (because we don’t support ourselves on it) is detrimental. In our society, people identify one another by monetary value. The more money you make at doing something, usually the more valid it is, and its acceptable to squash people in the process. I’m thinking of big-wig CEOs, here, who make a shitload by doing unethical things like firing the less-powerful. It’s like a grown-up, much more harmful version of musical chairs. What do little kids do when you’re down to having the 1 chair left in musical chairs? They grab the other kid and throw them out of the way to get it, that’s what.
When you go to a party, people say “So what do you do?” imply “…for a job” not “…that creatively fulfills your soul” or “…to contribute to the world.” The latter question, “What do you do to contribute to the world?” could be answered with the name of a job—many of us have jobs that suit us well, tell something about our identity, and that we love. But it doesn’t have to be a job. This question opens up the possible answers to other values a person might have and things they might pursue. For some people how they earn a living is not what they mainly identify themselves as. So: Am I a writer if it doesn’t pay for anything?
I suppose it all comes down to values. I could blah blah blah about how fulfilling my drive to write makes me feel rich, an that’s what really matters, but we all know that’s a bunch of crap. There’s a paradigm shift that would need to happen to really value writers again. I suppose if it took 35 years for our society to go from one extreme—with universities recruiting fresh MFA grads—to the other extreme of people saying screw-the-MFA because it will do nothing for their career—that it could possibly evolve again in my lifetime.
It’s the politics of all this that gets me down. I’m starting to send stuff out and get some things accepted, and there is a whooooollllle world of drama attached to who is publishing what where, and who is going to make it and who isn’t, with all kinds of jealousy-filled fit-throwers and sabatogers and barnacles that drag down the ones who progress and all kinds of resentment-caked-pity-parties for those who don’t. Lots of people want to grab the other kids and throw them across the room to get one of the last chairs before the music stops.
This is all poison to our industry. We’re letting money and the fucked-up values of our culture turn writers against each other when really, we’re all on the same team, here. What needs to happen is for all of us to do our work respectably, to support it buy buying and reading it. We need to let go of the musical-chairs mentality that says “There’s only room for a couple of us at the top, and I’ll kick you out of the way to get a chair up there if I have to.” It’s self-sabotage. It creates festering wounds in our domain. I, for one, am not going to participate in that. If I can avoid it.
That totally floors me—I can’t imagine getting phone calls right now, as I near finishing my MFA, from any school, much less a top notch one, recruiting me to work in their program. It’s sad. I think of the biomedical engineers at my job who work really hard and are really smart who get recruited and offered big salaries with signing bonuses, and I think: I’m smart. I work hard. I’m earning an advanced degree. What I have to offer contributes something significant and necessary to the world. But today, writers with MFAs have a 1 in 200 chance of getting a full-time teaching job (confession: I got that stat on someone’s blog). Furthermore: teaching isn’t writing. The chances of me being a professional poet who makes enough to live on after graduation: pretty much 1 in 9 quadrillion.
Obviously, the job prospects aren’t fueling my drive to do all this. This isn’t a shock. (To all the whiners who say “MFAs are useless! They don’t get you jobs!”: Duh.) Jim talked about whether or not writing poetry is “work.” He said if you call writing poetry work, you’re automatically a failure (unless you’re one of the very few who makes a living on selling the writing). Therefore, we may not want to call it work. Not in the career sense anyway.
If I don’t exercise my drive to create works of art, and to use writing to do my job to send a voice into the world, I can’t really do the other things in my life well. So writing is a sort of work. It’s a calling, a drive and sometimes feels like a curse. But having this calling feels much more like an honor than a curse most of the time.
For those of us who want to contribute to the domain (as in, not people who write in a paint-by-numbers hobbyist way), not really being able to call creative writing “work” without looking like a failure (because we don’t support ourselves on it) is detrimental. In our society, people identify one another by monetary value. The more money you make at doing something, usually the more valid it is, and its acceptable to squash people in the process. I’m thinking of big-wig CEOs, here, who make a shitload by doing unethical things like firing the less-powerful. It’s like a grown-up, much more harmful version of musical chairs. What do little kids do when you’re down to having the 1 chair left in musical chairs? They grab the other kid and throw them out of the way to get it, that’s what.
When you go to a party, people say “So what do you do?” imply “…for a job” not “…that creatively fulfills your soul” or “…to contribute to the world.” The latter question, “What do you do to contribute to the world?” could be answered with the name of a job—many of us have jobs that suit us well, tell something about our identity, and that we love. But it doesn’t have to be a job. This question opens up the possible answers to other values a person might have and things they might pursue. For some people how they earn a living is not what they mainly identify themselves as. So: Am I a writer if it doesn’t pay for anything?
I suppose it all comes down to values. I could blah blah blah about how fulfilling my drive to write makes me feel rich, an that’s what really matters, but we all know that’s a bunch of crap. There’s a paradigm shift that would need to happen to really value writers again. I suppose if it took 35 years for our society to go from one extreme—with universities recruiting fresh MFA grads—to the other extreme of people saying screw-the-MFA because it will do nothing for their career—that it could possibly evolve again in my lifetime.
It’s the politics of all this that gets me down. I’m starting to send stuff out and get some things accepted, and there is a whooooollllle world of drama attached to who is publishing what where, and who is going to make it and who isn’t, with all kinds of jealousy-filled fit-throwers and sabatogers and barnacles that drag down the ones who progress and all kinds of resentment-caked-pity-parties for those who don’t. Lots of people want to grab the other kids and throw them across the room to get one of the last chairs before the music stops.
This is all poison to our industry. We’re letting money and the fucked-up values of our culture turn writers against each other when really, we’re all on the same team, here. What needs to happen is for all of us to do our work respectably, to support it buy buying and reading it. We need to let go of the musical-chairs mentality that says “There’s only room for a couple of us at the top, and I’ll kick you out of the way to get a chair up there if I have to.” It’s self-sabotage. It creates festering wounds in our domain. I, for one, am not going to participate in that. If I can avoid it.
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