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ellenkushner"Who reads this shit?"
OK, in the actual joke it's "Who wrote it?" - but that's not my punchline for this post. See, it's like this:
On Saturday we went to a new play at Vital about the loving relationship of two adult sisters, one of whom gets cancer, and the other has to decide whether or not to pursue her mid-life dream of being a Writer, which involves taking a grueling grad school degree from a Bigshot Writer. She works hard, even beating out the hipster guy who wins prizes for stories that essentially come down to "Will my protagonist get laid?" (which, having now read a ton of submissions to various places, I am here to tell you is what a shocking percentage are about. Yawn. But that's another post....) . . . and her reward, her big marker of success, is that her mentor recommends her stuff to a prestigious literary Little Magazine. Which, after many edits & revisions, publishes her story. I suspect only the dying sister reads it. Though possibly she dies first.
The next day, Guy Kay (an old pal from our mutual Struggling Writer days) sends me this from Harper's (read it and laugh so hard you'll snork. I particularly like "This sentence is short, not because it is brief—which it is—but because it has few words.") Very cheering. But.
So here's the thing: What made me - and most people I know - want to be writers is that we loved to read. We read a lot. We wanted to write the kinds of books we loved to read.
Schools are full of grad students whose highest goal seems to be getting published in small literary magazines with minute circulations. But have they actually read those magazines themselves first? Did they love reading them?
I'm probably being an idiot here, but I've already written the post, and it seems a waste of time to delete it now. Also, it gives me a chance to offer you the link to the Colson Whitehead piece.
OK, in the actual joke it's "Who wrote it?" - but that's not my punchline for this post. See, it's like this:
On Saturday we went to a new play at Vital about the loving relationship of two adult sisters, one of whom gets cancer, and the other has to decide whether or not to pursue her mid-life dream of being a Writer, which involves taking a grueling grad school degree from a Bigshot Writer. She works hard, even beating out the hipster guy who wins prizes for stories that essentially come down to "Will my protagonist get laid?" (which, having now read a ton of submissions to various places, I am here to tell you is what a shocking percentage are about. Yawn. But that's another post....) . . . and her reward, her big marker of success, is that her mentor recommends her stuff to a prestigious literary Little Magazine. Which, after many edits & revisions, publishes her story. I suspect only the dying sister reads it. Though possibly she dies first.
The next day, Guy Kay (an old pal from our mutual Struggling Writer days) sends me this from Harper's (read it and laugh so hard you'll snork. I particularly like "This sentence is short, not because it is brief—which it is—but because it has few words.") Very cheering. But.
So here's the thing: What made me - and most people I know - want to be writers is that we loved to read. We read a lot. We wanted to write the kinds of books we loved to read.
Schools are full of grad students whose highest goal seems to be getting published in small literary magazines with minute circulations. But have they actually read those magazines themselves first? Did they love reading them?
I'm probably being an idiot here, but I've already written the post, and it seems a waste of time to delete it now. Also, it gives me a chance to offer you the link to the Colson Whitehead piece.
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Date: 2009-01-27 05:08 am (UTC)Ha, well, yes, I've been trying to write my personal statement and come up with a way of saying, "I'm going to want to write genre and historical fiction, I'm going to be really frustrated if you say I can't write genre and historical fiction, I really hope you can see that genre and historical fiction is valuable and doesn't need to be formulaic despite all the people who would prefer to just dismiss it." Some way that's, you know, tactful.
Anyone good you can recommend?
Erm, well. *shuffles feet* Keep in mind that I meant it when I said I was five years out of date sometimes.
A couple of people I wonder if I'm not cheating by reccing, because they've landed on my LJ flist after I found their work: Adrienne J. Odasso (poetry and fiction) and Lucy Knisley (graphic novels). I think they're both up-and-coming in their own corners of the literary world, and they deserve to be because I think they're working to expand those corners.
On the side of well-established Lit Fic people, whose stuff I seek out despite being a genre girl at heart, I love Aimee Bender a lot. Been to see her read three times now (easier when I lived in LA) and I keep buying her books for people at holidays.
T.C. Boyle is frequently awesome. And one of my favorite writers is Susan Straight, who was also my favorite undergraduate prof.
I also have a whole collection of people whose work in fandom I admire like mad, though I'm somewhat embarrassed to say I'm not sure how you feel about fanfic and transformative works, so. (Though I see you've got Naomi Novik friended.) Just, I'm rather amused to find fandom tropes turning up elsewhere: sometimes to amazing effect, like Samantha Henderson's Five Ways Jane Austen Never Died, from the "Five Times" story form, and sometimes...not so successfully. :/
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Date: 2009-01-28 10:54 pm (UTC)When I was reading Clarion submissions, we had more than one applicant who was in a competitive MFA program but wanted to spend 6 weeks in an environment that was more receptive to genre. I hope you don't feel similarly straitened.
I'm a big enthusiast for fanfic - don't read much, but what I've seen can be truly impressive. Writing is writing. Bless you for trying to make a bridge! I'm all about crossing boundaries.