How I spent my winter vacation: A post-AWP* post

I went to Washington, and it was good. It was overwhelming, too, despite the fact that I’d been warned that the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference can feel that way, and that I thought I’d prepared for dealing with it. Still, so many writers, so many sessions, so many booths at the bookfair, so many hobnobbers glancing this way and that in the lobby of the hotel, looking for anyone who might be someone, while they clutched their glasses of scotch.

I went to what seemed like a bizillion panels at AWP, and that was even after I made a list of all of the sessions I wanted to make it to, and then crossed out about half of them. I ate a lot of burritos at the Chipotle outlet conveniently located just outside the Marriott that hosted the conference. I heard Jhumpa Lahiri read a lovely personal essay that described how she became a writer.  I listened to Joyce Carol Oates read from her new memoir about her husband’s untimely death and, despite the subject matter, manage to tell funny stories about her cat. I giggled uncomfortably when Junot Diaz told us how white we were (“there’s Boston white, and then there’s AWP white”) and I laughed at his profanity-laden responses to audience questions, was impressed by the completeness of what he described as work in progress. Was just impressed, really.

I ate poorly and erratically (did I mention the late-night burritos?), drank beers, and slept not nearly enough. The school from which I earned my MFA hosted a reception one night, and I was surprised to see my thesis advisor there, along with another professor whose memoir workshop I enjoyed. It was great to talk with them again – it has been, amazingly, five years. I talked with a few classmates who are having some success with their writing, and met a few writers whose work I’ll be keeping an eye out for. I heard advice from panelists whose books I’ve added to my to-read list. It was all very motivating and yes, I think I’ll say it again, overwhelming.

Perhaps the best thing about attending the conference was not the conference itself, but rather the uninterrupted time away from home and family to think about writing. Specifically, my writing. The cross-country flights alone were amazingly productive without a two-year-old in tow (surprise, surprise).  On the way home from D.C., I spent about three hours plotting out what I now see is more of a novel, not linked stories**  — and then promptly banged out half of a completely unrelated short story which has been lurking in the back of my mind for years.

And so, what’s changed since I went to AWP? Not much, probably, but I have a sense of purpose and motivation that I had been out of touch with before the trip. I have a pile of lit mags on my nightstand that I picked up at the bookfair. I don’t want to see a burrito for a while. I have a few new friends on Twitter and a reading list a mile long. Time to get back to it.

____

*I’ve noticed an increase of “post- ” phrases of late. Is it just me? It seems that anything can be era-defining these days. There’s post-James Frey, of course, and I read the phrase “post-Eat, Pray, Love” in a panel description at AWP. Hell, I’m going to go ahead and jump on the post-post bandwagon.
**More on this later. I attended a fabulous session on linked stories that helped me see things more clearly. The subject of my next post.

six degrees of separation

Speaking of reading, I’ve been immersed in two books over the past couple of weeks that I wanted to mention here. Both have ties to my MFA alma mater Emerson College. I’ll admit, I might not have been aware of them had I not been keeping an eye out for mentions of Emerson, and that’s why I wanted to bring them up here — they are worth noting.

The first, Day for Night, is by Frederick Reiken. I had Reiken for a lit class on short stories and it was one of the best classes I took in my MFA days, largely because he geared the class toward writers, and thus when we read a short story we spent a lot of time considering how it was written and consequently the class was as much a craft class as a lit class. Reiken has some terrific and very understandable theories about craft (you may have seen some of his essays in The Writers Chronicle). Anyway, Reiken’s command of craft is evident in his latest novel. It’s a kind of wild ride, this novel, with a “six degrees of separation” kind of premise that brings the reader from Florida to Utah to San Francisco to Israel and traverses time and, maybe, reality. There’s a bit of the fantastical here, and yet there’s also some historical reality — The Holocaust — that keeps Day for Night grounded. At first I wanted to classify this one as a collection of linked stories, but about a third of the way through the book it became clear that this is very much a novel, albeit with many different narrators. They are all telling the same story, in a way, though with varying degrees of knowledge of the big picture. Each offers a piece of the puzzle and Reiken is able to bring what seems like many disparate stories together in a way that I found pretty satisfying.

The second book is a collection of short stories by a recent Emerson grad … wow, wow, Laura van den Berg‘s first book, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us is fantastic. I’m a little late to the party –this collection has been lauded all over the place since it came out in late 2009. The book was a 2009 holiday selection for the Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” Program, shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award, and long-listed for The Story Prize. There’s a quiet sorrow in all of these stories, which have in common themes of loss and loneliness, despite their disparate geographic settings. (Van den Berg deftly writes about the Congo, Boston, Madagascar, and New York City, among other locales.) There’s a strangeness here to that contributes to the desolation (a Bigfoot impersonator, a store that sells Balinese masks, a search for the Loch Ness monster, a little brother who has found a tunnel to the other side of the world…) but doesn’t ever feel forced or, well, strange. Such is van den Berg’s talent.

I am eagerly awaiting her next book.

Writing links for May

It’s the end of May already. The end of May means the end of spring — the season — and the end of that metaphorical spring, youth. It’s time for summer, and for growing up, and for journeys … [insert needle dragging across record noise here]

Yeah. So I was writing up this post full of yummy May writing links yesterday and somehow it got all depressing and maudlin. This is not to say all of the links I want to share this month are depressing or maudlin. I’m not sure what happened — one minute I was happily writing up a list of links, the next I was using phrases like “that metaphorical spring, youth.”  Perhaps more caffeine (or sleep) was in order.

In any case, I’d like to start off this month’s links post with a preemptive strike against depressing topics. What better way to accomplish that than with Brontë Sisters Power Dolls?

Ahem. Ok. On to meatier clicking:

Is this the part where I tell you what I learned? San Francisco MFAer Margaret LaFleur wraps up her coursework and considers what it all means:

It’s the end and it’s the beginning and someone once told me that in any great story the ending should circle back and lead, somehow, back to the first sentence.

Some things to consider when tackling a case of writer’s block.

Over at The Millions, a beautiful essay, Elegy for a Stillborn Story:

One moment, I thought I had the story by its shoulders, but I was simply holding a shapeless protuberance of ice.  Other times I wrested it up with frostbitten fingers only to find it had changed.   It was born, or stillborn; I couldn’t tell the difference.  I mourned in the midst of celebration.  I buried it and dug it back out.  It was always ending and beginning.

Finally, Bay Area author Michelle Richmond considers what’s ahead for the Alabama beaches of her childhood in this lovely blog post, a kind of elegy of its own:

A whole way of life stands eerily close to extinction. If I sound alarmist it’s because I am very alarmed. What’s happening in the Gulf right now would make a great premise for some dire futuristic film–were it not for the fact that the film is real, and we’re all caught inside it, and everybody knows we’re in trouble but no one really knows what to do about it. My five-year-old son has been very concerned of late with the idea that perhaps we are not entirely real. “What if we’re just a book and someone’s reading us?” he asks again and again.

It’s easier, I suppose, to think of some things as not being real. Perhaps that’s why I like writing. (I love the idea that we’re a book and someone’s “reading us.”) I wish, as no doubt many people do, that the oil spill in the Gulf was some kind of fictional eco-thriller, but alas. If you feel helpless to do something about it, as I have for the past weeks, here’s a list of things you can do. There are a number of worthy organizations working in the Gulf to clean up the wildlife and shoreline, and they could really use your support.

Word count woes

After two days of whacking at a 12-page essay with what feels like the editing sophistication of a machete,  I’m done. I’ve given up. I’ve run into a problem. It’s not a new one for me, but it’s frustrating all the same. I’ve got a pile of essays that I’d like to publish, and they are all too long.

Most of these essays came into existence while I was working on my MFA in nonfiction writing. My advisor, whose nonfiction workshops I took quite a few of, insisted that we turn in pieces in the 16-20-page range. He had found, he said, that requiring that length resulted in better, more complex pieces of writing. And, conveniently for the nonfiction book workshop I took with him, that length is a nice one for a chapter of a book.

It’s a bit ironic, this problem I’m having. Before I entered the MFA program, I tended to write five-page essays. They seemed monumental. I thought they were complete and complex. After two years in an MFA program, two years of being required to write longer, I realized that my earlier pieces were not complete, nor did they contain many of the characteristics of what I was learning were “good” essays: The dialogue, character and setting development that you might find in a work of fiction. My essays did not relate my experiences to a wider theme or experience, which I’d also learned was a must in a good personal essay. When I finished my MFA coursework, one of the things I could point to definitively as something I’d learned and valued in the MFA program was “learning to write longer.”

The types of essays I tend to write fall into the categories of travel, humor, and women’s interest (sometimes a combo of all three). These are not categories that tend to be popular with literary magazines, which do, often, accept longer essays. I have spent a lot of time researching publications that  accept travel and humor writing of the type that I do, and that’s where I’m running up against the word count limits: Generally, 800-1,200 words is what’s acceptable. This blog post is already 400 words. The travel memoir I wrote for my MFA thesis consists of chapters of abut 5,000 words. Yesterday, I tried to cut and rework a 3,500-word piece to about 1,000 words. I was unsuccessful. As a former newspaper editor, I know that there are often sentences, words, and even whole graphs that can be cut out — it is sometimes amazing how much of a piece is expendable. But when you start to loose the essence and meaning of a piece, you’ve gone too far.

And so, do I try to excerpt some of my essays – essentially rewriting them in shorter forms? I’d love to ignore the word counts and compile the essays into a book, but what agent/publisher would be interested in a book of essays in which none of the individual essays has been published yet? Do I just forget the essays, let them pile up in the back of my hard drive and concentrate on writing new, shorter pieces instead?

It’s funny, this morning I read this piece on Brevity’s blog (Brevity itself accepts nonfiction of 750 words or fewer. It’s an excellent mag all the same.) on how few places accept short essays. We writers are all looking for something that eludes us, it seems.

On feedback

Before heading off to school to study creative writing, I had been a member of two different writing groups. The first consisted of a number of my journalist colleagues who had novels and screenplays stashed in the backs of their desk drawers. A few significant others and friends joined the group, until it became an unwieldy size for any real critiquing to take place, and I think it proved to be more social than anything else. Plus, I felt strange showing my creative writing to people I worked with — it felt too personal to share with professional colleagues, even if those colleagues were my friends.

The second writing group was more of a success. We were a group of about six women, writing and sharing short stories. I think all of us had been through a writing workshop or two — one woman had an MFA — so we had more discipline and the skills for reading and critiquing others’ work. All of us worked at media outlets, but not all of us worked together. We met for a year or so, and I think I can say all of us looked forward to our meetings, which were held monthly. We talked and gossiped, but we also seriously discussed each other’s work. The feedback was helpful. It was, alas, one of those strange confluences of lives overlapping that formed the group, and when our lives diverged, the group fell apart. Two of us left to begin MFA programs; another woman moved back to the East Coast. Those who remained in San Francisco lost momentum.

I miss that writer’s group. It’s taken me three and a half years of recovery from MFA workshops to be able to get to this point. I knew, when I completed my MFA program, that I needed other writers. That was, strange as it sounds, something that I learned in my program. Writing is a solitary practice, and yet…there’s only so far you can go on your own. You can revise and revise, but at some point another set of eyes can help see what you can’t. It helps if that other set of eyes is familiar with narrative, is a critical reader of the type of writing that you do, and is honest, but not brutally so. (I don’t, for example, turn to my husband for a response to whatever I’m working on. He’s very honest, and I love him for his views on many things, but he’s a businessperson and lacks the vocabulary and expertise to critique my writing. His responses are often “I liked that one,” or “that was depressing.”)

All writers need go-to readers, whether it’s a writing group, or just a friend who is willing to read all of your stuff and has the expertise to provide the appropriate commentary. I’ve reached a point in a number of pieces of writing where I can’t progress without some feedback. Does this piece of memoir ring true? Is it a problem that this character uses broken English? Does this scene seem believable? I think I’m ready to look for a writer’s group again, though the task is a daunting one. I tried it last February and failed. I answered a well-worded ad on Craigslist that made the group sound like a perfect fit. I went twice, and it was not, for various reasons.  It’s hard to find a group of writers who are working at the same level, are at similar points in their publication histories, and who can read and comment on each other’s work in a way that works for everyone involved. Personalities have to click, but the writing and the goals for the writing have to as well.

The top 50 MFA programs…

The November/December issue of Poets & Writers includes the magazine’s 2010 rankings of the top 50 MFA programs. There’s a longish article accompanying the list, which mostly details the methodology used for creating the rankings, and the ways in which this list differs from the last ranking of MFA programs done by U.S. News and World Report, in the late 90s. The print issue apparently includes some other data that’s not available in the online chart, as well as a longer article.

Whether or not you put a lot of value in school rankings lists, there’s some good information here about each school’s funding and selectivity. Not sure if there are any big surprises, in terms of schools appearing in the top 20 that may not have been there before. I haven’t seen the print version yet, but from looking at the online list, I can say I’d love to see more information about nonfiction programs included in this list.

on freelancing writing with an MFA

There’s a very informative post up on Lisa Romeo‘s blog about freelance writing and the MFA. She interviewed a number of editors, agents, and writers on whether having an MFA might help (or hurt) your freelance career.

The answer seems to be (surprise?) that it makes very little difference. As a freelancer who holds an MFA, I’d have to agree.

I attribute any success I’ve had freelancing, both before and after doing an MFA, to the following:

•Previous work experience. Hands down, I learned a lot about writing for magazines and newspapers by …um, working for magazines and newspapers. I think working for a publication at any level is extremely helpful in developing a sense for what’s appropriate to pitch to a particular publication, learning what editors want and don’t want, and, I hate to say it, but learning from other freelancers’ mistakes, which, as an employee of a publication, you often get a chance to witness. (My MFA program had courses in magazine writing that covered pitching different publications, etc. but I know that’s an anomaly. Most MFAs do not cover that kind of practical information. Journalism programs, however, do.)

•Persistence. True for any writing endeavor, really. There’s a lot of competition out there, and editors are busy people. If one publication isn’t interested, you have to keep trying other possibilities.

•Contacts. It’s all about who you know, and not being shy about asking people you know whether they have opportunities for you. Yes, you may gain contacts through an MFA program, but it’s not something you can count on going in. I find working reporters, freelancers, and editors to be much more widely connected than my professors were, and much more helpful in terms of potential assignments that can help pay the bills. (On the other hand, MFA professors tend to have agents and editors, so … it depends what you are after.)

I would not say my MFA was good for my freelance career, other than the fact that I honed my writing skills in general. I don’t usually mention my MFA when dealing with more journalistic publications. Literary magazines, yes, sure, I mention it. A newspaper, no. I probably wouldn’t bring it up. What matters to editors is that you can write, that you turn in your copy in pristine condition and that you turn it in on time.

If my goal was to become a successful freelancer, I probably wouldn’t have attended my MFA program. I could argue that doing the MFA actually hurt my (freelance) career, because I took a two-year pause from working regularly. I try not to think about such things too much. In all honesty though, I chose to do an MFA because I wanted to spend the time working on my writing, and I wanted the experience of writing longer, not because I had a particular professional goal in mind. Journalism is often all about short and sweet, and I could never get beyond a certain page length in my own writing as a result. Writing something book-length in my MFA program was a great experience. And that was worth it to me, despite the costs.

Teaching and the MFA

It says something that one of the most popular posts on this blog is What Are You Going To Do With An MFA? Namely, that there are a lot of people out there who are looking for answers to that question… So in need of answers are they that they google the question, which lands (at least some of them) here on a regular basis.

It should be said that I don’t have the answers, I was only musing about my possibilities and letting off some steam about the incessant questions I was getting about my future. And here I am, a year and a half later, still musing. (And still getting questions about my future.)

Earning an MFA was a great experience, but for me (and I think for a lot of others), finishing the degree brought about an instant personal conflict that had been held off, with the help of student loans, for two or three years. The conflict comes down to this:

I have to make a living.
I want to keep writing and get published.

As most MFA grads know, it can be difficult to balance those two needs, because of lack of time (due to working full-time), or lack of creative energy (due to the demands of working full-time), or both.

Since earning my MFA I’ve tried freelance writing and I’ve tried a full-time reporting job. The full-time gig, while it paid better than the freelance, filled me with panic over my lack of time to write. I felt all that creativity I had rediscovered during my MFA program slipping away, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to end up back where I’d begun before I started the program in the first place. So I quit. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about what do next.

I’m still taking the patchwork approach that I thought I might a year and a half ago. A little freelance writing here, a little freelance editing there. And now, I’ve begun looking into teaching.

I did not teach during my MFA program, for a variety of mostly logistical reasons, and now I feel ill-prepared to do so. There’s this idea that teaching writing is the prescribed career path for MFAs, but a lot of MFA students don’t have the opportunity to gain this experience during the course of their programs. Without decent, or enough, publication credits and no experience it can be tough to swing a job teaching writing at the college level. Most job ads ask for several years of teaching experience… but how to get this experience?

-Author Michelle Richmond has a helpful post about her experience landing teaching jobs and suggestions for getting your foot in the door.

There are a few other resources I’ve found on the web for MFA grads looking into teaching, but not as many as I would have thought.

-Practicing Writing lists some post-MFA job-hunting resources here.

-This article on the MFA weblog lays it all out, no punches pulled. Sigh. It also suggests, for a slightly more hopeful outlook regarding teaching in academia, going on to earn a Ph.D.

I’m iffy about the continuing-with-school options. On the one hand, usually more school = more debt. And that’s the last thing MFA grads need. On the other … maybe it helps, I don’t know. There are also shorter post-MFA teaching certificate programs out there (for example), which again, seem like a good way to acquire more debt … Do they work? Do they help when looking for teaching jobs? Are they worth it? I’d be curious to know.

I am, in fact, looking into taking a couple of classes locally in order to gain some experience/preparation for teaching, but also to potentially get my foot in the door at the school where those classes are offered. It seems like this path is all about persistence and connections, just like most others that MFA grads walk.

Grad school? What grad school?

One of my friends from grad school just moved here from Boston. Last night we went out for drinks…I had not seen her for nearly a year. We each caught up on what the other was up to, people we both knew from school and … then we both said something to the effect of “Did grad school actually happen?”

Neither of us feels like it did. Of course, we’ve come away knowing people we didn’t know before, but in terms of actually attending classes for two years… it all feels very, very far away, kind of like a dream. Weird.

Also weird: The fact that many, many of the people we studied with went right back to what they were doing before grad school, me included. I’m not sure what this says about our school, or getting a masters in writing/publishing, or about us as people, but it’s interesting that just as I was always telling those curious friends and relatives who asked, it turned out to be true … My MFA was a pause, a chance to do something for me that I’d always wanted to do. Now, looking back on it, “pause” seems less the correct word than “blip.” My MFA was a blip. Blink, it’s over. Time to get back to work.

some good news about an old thing

I found out today that an essay of mine will be published. In an actual literary magazine.

(yay!)

This is obviously very good news, and I was so excited after I found out that I had a lot of trouble getting anything done all afternoon at work.

It’s strange…the essay is an old piece, written pre-MFA program. I think I wrote the first version in 2000, or 2001. I can’t even remember, it was so long ago. I re-vamped it a couple of times in the years that followed. I actually used it to apply to MFA programs four years ago. But for some reason I never considered sending it out until a few months ago.

Because I am a spastic over-analyzer of everything, having an essay published that I wrote before getting an MFA when I can’t for the life of me get something I wrote during my MFA program published has not gone unnoticed by me. But I am trying not to think about that, and what it might mean.

What is important to point out, however, is that it doesn’t hurt to send out old stuff. Even if it seems …well, old. Or tired, because you’ve read it so many times, or it’s just different from how you write now.

a different kind of commute

Recent discussions with friends about commuting reminded me of an essay I wrote in grad school, about living in San Francisco. The essay as a whole did not go over very well with my classmates or my professor, and when I reread it I understand better some of the reasons why. But whatever its flaws it included a description of the best commute I ever had (when I first moved to San Francisco), which I thought I’d post here.

Most mornings I walked to work, purposefully leaving early because the city on spring mornings was something that had to be absorbed before ducking into a climate-controlled office. When describing the brightness of the buildings against clarity of the blue sky or the soft outlines of the verdant hills across the Bay, it is hard to resist using words that have no concrete meaning: spectacular, glorious, beautiful. And yet every morning I whispered these words to myself.

I did not walk straight to work. Instead, like a distracted school girl, I wove my way up and over Nob Hill, across still-sleepy Chinatown and through parks and playgrounds. My path on a map might have looked like a maze, like the wanderings of a scavenging cat. I chose to climb the steepest streets; hills at such an angle that stairs had been carved into the sidewalks, that cars had to be parked perpendicular to the curb. At the top I blinked at the view of the Victorian-style apartment buildings — all bevel and trim and bay windows — spread before me, tumbling, it seemed, into the sparkling blue of the water. Here was Greece, or Italy, or some impossibly foreign city in which I could not quite place myself. And yet I was there.

Some days I climbed to the crest of California Street and looked down on the tops of skyscrapers. In a trick of geology and architecture, the tallest portion of the city lay below me, and I watched the famous cable car descend into that promise in the pastel of early morning light.

It seems like I did not write that essay so long ago, but already it’s been two years. When I re-read it, I can see how my writing has changed since then. It’s so hard to quantify what I learned in grad school; how my writing was altered by the experience. People are always asking me that, and there’s no simple answer. Some days I feel lost in my writing and I think that I learned nothing; some days I am grateful to have had the chance to spend so much time practicing writing, and that my writing is better for it. Rarely can I identify particular differences. I tend to tell people that I learned to write longer in grad school, and that seems to satisfy them.

I know that if I wrote this essay again the writing would be different now: the sentences more varied, less sculpted, rawer. I tended to over-edit my work (and it is a tendency I have to resist still), and I couldn’t for a long time break out of certain rhythms in my writing. I think — I hope — that this has changed.

Who is this Nell Freudenberger, anyway?

What is more comforting than a lobster? One long line segment, the length of the brush, fanning slightly at the bottom. Three or four hook strokes, on the diagonal (three for a small lobster, four for a big one). With a wet brush, three dashes, nearly but not quite joined at the base, like an inverted bouquet. A dot of pure ink for the eye. Then with a clean brush — rinsed, dried, and separated, so that a few long bristles stand apart from the rest — four firm lobster legs. Then the magic.

I remember the first time I watched my teacher, Wang Laoshi, pull a hair from his own head, dip it in tincture (three parts ink, one part water) and draw it lightly across the page. At once there was a lobster and the ground the lobster stood upon; suddenly the lobster seemed to cast a shadow, though there was nothing to indicate rock or seabed beneath him. I cannot explain, except to say that a lobster without antennae is a specimen, dependent on his dead, stalked eyes; with the antennae, he is a creature of motion… (The Dissident, p. 147.)

So I picked up this novel, The Dissident, by Nell Freudenberger, at the library last week. I was struck by the author photo in on the jacket. Nell looked very young (and attractive, in a young Audrey Hepburn sort of way). Just above this black and white photo was a quote from the New York Times Book Review: “Young writers as ambitious — and as good — as Nell Freudenberger give us a reason for hope.” At this, I admit, I rolled my eyes. And, I admit, I *may* have checked the book out partly because of that quote….because I assumed I would be disappointed with the book and find myself annoyed by young Nell’s success in spite of it all. I wanted to be annoyed.

Well, I’ve been reading The Dissident for a few days now, and I’m not disappointed. Or annoyed. And it appears I’m a little bit late to the “I want to hate Nell Freudenberger but can’t” club. When I googled her, I discovered this excellent article in Salon, by the (also young) novelist Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep) about wanting to dislike Freudenberger, and the competitive jealousy young writers are prone to:

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that four factors could lead to one young writer’s becoming the object of other young writers’ loathing. Let’s say these factors are that the writer in question is thought to be attractive, thought not to have paid her dues, known to have gone to Harvard (horrors!), and believed to be without talent. The bad news for Freudenberger is that she represents the overlap of all these factors, thereby becoming emblematic to other 20-something aspiring literati of all that’s unfair and demoralizing about publishing.

I learned that Freudenberger debuted — debuted! — at age 26 in the New Yorker, which caused a big stir among young writers and writer-wanna-bes. Then she got a lucrative book contract…after turning down an even more lucrative one. People didn’t think she could write a whole book, but she did — and her first short story collection, Lucky Girls, was well-received. And The Dissident is a much more mature and complex first novel than I was expecting. The passage above struck me…such an exact and tactile representation of just one, small aspect of the painting process. If The Dissident has a weakness it is that it’s perhaps more “popular novel” than “literary fiction” — it’s breezy and easy to read. Whatever, I’ve been completely sucked in.

Let’s face it: the “four factors” Sittenfeld lists are the typical grudges of youngish writers trying desperately to be published. I’m not saying that it’s healthy or nice to send bitter thoughts to the Jonathan Safran Foers and Nicole Krausses and Nell Freudenbergers of the literary world. But visit any MFA program and you’ll hear these bitter refrains: Of course she went to Stanford (or Harvard or where ever)…of course she just happened to be an EA at the New Yorker and “got discovered.”  Oh, and she’s attractive. Great.

Yeah, I’m a little jealous. But I’m also impressed. These young writers are doing the work of writing, despite how easy it all looks from the outside. And they’re doing it in a fishbowl, with the pressure of big contracts, the expectations of everyone, and doubters and naysayers hurling their barbs. Writing a book is hard. Writing it knowing many, many people want you to fail must be even harder. The rest of us, who didn’t go to Harvard and didn’t get discovered at the New Yorker, have only our own expectations to meet. Which is why when we fail (or at least, don’t measurably succeed), it’s tempting to want to fling our frustrations at the success of writers like Freudenberger.