This past week has brought an extensive conversation on MFA programs and the rankings thereof, with thoughtful, wise contributions from many (including Jake Adam York here on the KR blog). I too attended an MFA program and I appreciate the in-depth examination of the institution, and how much MFA students, graduates, and professors, both those who support and who disagree with the rankings, aim to look out for future generations of readers & writers.
The conversation about MFA programs has reached a crescendo this week, but it can never said to be at a murmur. At any moment the literary blogosphere seems saturated with those three initials, whether with in-depth reflections on styles here or there or the institution of the workshop, or endless slings about the “workshop story” and the MFA machine, which according to many is churning out identical prepackaged writers and is even as we speak Ruining Literature.
This week I also finished reading Joy Williams’ amazing and urgent Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals (full MFA disclosure: this book was given to me by my thesis adviser). And I thought about the ten-year anniversary of September 11, and how absolutely the war on terror, as well as the Supreme Court’s decision that Gore would not be our president, shoved environmental issues out of mainstream politics and discourse. And I thought anew something that I often think during the MFA conversations: that it’s important to examine our relationship, as writers, as individuals, to institutions, including academic institutions. But not just academic institutions. You will get an MFA, or not, for two or three years of your life, but you will eat, dress yourself, commute, generate waste, purchase products, and live somewhere for just about every day. So we readers, writers, and bloggers should be sure to talk about those institutions, too.
At age 16 I read Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet, and not knowing what else to do with the passion and anxiety it inspired in me, became a vegetarian, which I have been since. This past year I became a vegan. I usually would hesitate before coming right out and saying that publicly, because sometimes announcing your veganism is perceived as aggressive, a call to arms, inspires people to start nervously making wheat-grass jokes or trying defensively to defeat your wan vegan logic. But Williams’ essay “The Animal People,” in which she takes on the destructive stereotypes of animal-rights activists, has inspired me to be louder, to remember that “the animal people are calling for a moral attitude toward a great and mysterious mute nation.” It can seem utterly pointless to try to vote with one’s dollars in today’s food economy, in a country where on an average day, as Williams notes, “130,000 cattle, 7,000 calves, 360,000 pigs, and 24 million chickens are killed,” and whose agricultural policies time and again put their money on corporations, GMOs, and environmental exploitation rather than the sustainable small farm. In the face of this it’s hard to see how any one person’s decision not to purchase hot dogs or to buy local and organic is going to make much of a difference. Similarly, whether vegetarian, vegan, or not, we all probably make such basic efforts as recycling, buying better light bulbs, and keeping the thermostat at a modest temperature–but of course these efforts are dwarfed by disasters such as the BP oil spill and indeed every time a new coal plant springs up somewhere.
But these efforts aren’t nothing, either, and their combination of urgency and futility–the need to do something, even with so little hope–seems to me related to the urgency and futility of writing. Williams directs me toward this line of thinking, ending her collection with an essay on “Why I Write”:
The writer writes to serve–hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve–not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.
“Hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve”–yes. Please read Joy Williams’ beautiful, rousing book. And maybe also the Nation‘s newest issue on global food politics (which features a piece by Moore Lappe). And chew on this tidbit from Christian Caryl’s article on drones in last week’s New York Review of Books, which gives a sense of the brave new world the war on terror is building for us:
… the researchers now working on military robots seem especially eager to ransack the biological world for elegant solutions to the design problems that have to be overcome. There is a snake-shaped robot that can rear itself up in the grass when it wants to scan its surroundings. Tiny surveillance robots scuttle up walls like bugs, and robot flyers flap their wings. The Navy is testing submersibles that swim like fish. Researchers in the UK have developed a robot whose sensors mimic rat whiskers–since so far no engineer has managed to come up with a sensor system that is better at navigating in total darkness.
No doubt such things have already happened in literature, and I bow here to its science-fiction soothsayers. I don’t want to live in the world where the animals are gone and the animal-mimicking military robots endure. Literature is bigger and older and wilder than any of us, and if anything ruins it, it won’t be an MFA program or two. It will be the loss of the world that’s even bigger and older and wilder than literature: a world that is in fact–even as we speak–in danger of being destroyed. Which needs all the talking-about it can get.