The Writing Industrial Complex: From The One-day Seminar to the Iowa Writers Workshop

Part 8 of 12

The aspiring writer today is caught in a tug-of-war between art and commerce, idealism, and harsh economic inequalities. There are only a few writers who can sustain themselves, much less a family, with their writing alone. Most of them write for Hollywood because movie and television writers are considered employees rather than freelancers and so they have a functional union and earn a salary. Even then, it’s likely most of them have a spouse who is also bringing in an income. The number of novelists supporting a family on their own is laughably smaller. Once, for a brief period of time, perhaps when dinner for two followed by a movie would set you back about $1.00 (circa 1920), a so-called “midlist” writer of novels with a regular, but not fast, output of non-serialized books could support a family, if just barely, but that’s impossible now when the average advance against royalties for a first novel has been between five thousand and ten thousand dollars (NOT adjusting for inflation) for more than half a century. In 1970 five to ten thousand dollars may have felt like a lot of money^[1]; today it’s a month’s salary for someone making sixty thousand to one hundred and twenty thousand a year. Also, the majority of books published never make back that five to ten thousand dollar advance, so there are no quarterly royalty payments for those writers.

The lack of money in writing books means writers have to make a living some other way. There are some, mostly women but also a few men, who rely on high-earning spouses to support them while they write. It’s kind of an individualized, modern version of the feudal patronage system, but writers almost never talk about that situation, especially if they are supported by a high earning spouse. A number of writers work as editors, but those jobs are underpaid, plus their numbers are shrinking as the major houses consolidate and trim staff. There are the lucky few who land those much coveted and viciously clung to full-time teaching positions at universities, small colleges, or well-regarded junior colleges (that is if they don’t get trapped in adjunct hell). Most writers, however, get day jobs that have little or nothing to do with their writing lives^[2] and squeeze their writing time into the gaps between working, sleeping, and all that unpaid regenerative labor needed to keep themselves fed, clothed, and alive—not to mention maintaining anything like a personal or family life (that is, if they even have a family).

For the writers outside of academia or who lack home-based patronage, some get awarded grants and writer-in-residence appointments. Some teach private writing workshops out of their homes or local bookstores. Some bounce between guest teaching gigs at retreats and conferences and occasionally teach at those non-academic institutions like the Gotham Writer’s Workshop, Grub Street, The Loft Literary Center, The Center for Fiction, or Catapult. Still others supplement their day-job income by reducing the writing practice to a step-by-step formula they then try to sell to anyone willing to pay them for the lesson.

It seems strange that the dominant way writers have to secure access to basic human needs like food, shelter, and medicine (all so they can keep writing) is centered around some form of instruction. When I was an undergrad, there was an active debate over whether creative writing could, or even should, be taught at all, not to mention what it even meant to “teach” creative writing. However, as the cost of living has gotten higher and wages have stagnated, we have, essentially, dropped that argument and created a two tiered “Writing Industrial Complex” in response to the economic pressures of late-stage extraction capitalism.

This Writing Industrial Complex provides not only an economic lifeline for writers who might, instead, be subsumed into the Sarlacc-like void of the American corporate world, it also provides countless pathways for aspiring writers to learn some version of the basic craft of writing. From one-day seminars to magazines and how-to books, and from writing retreats to non-degree and degree granting creative writing programs, would-be writers can immerse themselves in any number of lessons, tips, tricks, hacks, and advice for writing whatever type of story they wish to write, for whatever audience they can imagine, and for any conceivable reason.

Tier One: You Can Be a Bestseller, or Writing as Content Creation

During one draft of this chapter, I did a quick Google search of the phrase “How to write a novel” and retrieved 8.6 million results. Some tutorials were led by well-known writers like Margaret Atwood (through Masterclass.com), some were led by hacks like Jerry Jenkins, the premier purveyor of premillennial dispensationalist apocalypse fiction, through his own website (jerryjenkins.com) where he recommends everything from novel writing software and mechanical keyboards^[3] to his own coaching services and writing courses. Most of the results I found were by unknown writers who were writing short and punchy un-paid content for websites and blogs, or they were writers attempting to make a living by selling their particular method for cranking out endless variations of the same story to energetic novices with dreams of superstar bestsellerdom.

Now, I firmly believe the creation of art and literature should never be off limits to anyone who wants to try. So, if a side-hustle teaching the mechanics of writing, especially in the cut-throat environment of late-stage extraction capitalism, can keep a person financially solvent and armed with enough free time to write, then that side-hustle, too, shouldn’t be off limits. I only wish these non-academic for-profit writing instructors, like Jerry Jenkins, wouldn’t scam people and claim to teach them the skills needed to be the “next big thing” when all they’re doing is exploiting naive daydreamers.^[4] Jenkins’s success as a writer has nothing to do with executable literary skills, and certainly nothing to do with talent, and so he has nothing, really, to teach but a formula that, for the majority of people who take his course, will not result in the kind of success he achieved by accident.

There is a quote, supposedly from Ernest Hemingway, and somewhat apocryphal (I couldn’t find the source) that goes “If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.” Jenkins, and his late writing partner Tim LaHaye, became popular for their premillennialdispensationalism and Christian Nationalist dogma. So, you can be fairly certain his instruction also includes selecting an ideology to push, which, of course, lands him squarely in the realm of those bad writers creating Dogmatic Literature.

Now, the positive thing any commercial, or public artistic instruction can do, at least when done honestly, is create a deeper appreciation of truly exceptional work. The most well-known example of this “appreciation by doing” approach is Bob Ross. My SWAG^[5] statistics assume more people have seen an episode of The Joy of Painting than have taken a creative writing class.

Bob Ross presented painting in an accessible way for the beginner, the amateur, and the hobbyist to discover and appreciate painting by giving them basic skills to do simple paintings with minimal tools. Ross knew his students would never match painters like Caravaggio, Cézanne, or Monet, and that’s fine. His show was a meditation, a path to appreciation, and not a class for aspiring professional artists. To that end, Ross provided a formula, which anyone could follow, and, by following it, create a finished painting (it might even look pretty). Ross made millions selling the practice of painting as appreciation, and he is well loved for it, even by those who never attempted to paint along with him. Ross never made any claims that he could teach someone to be a master, or that they could become famous following his techniques. The visual art world is rarified enough that anyone attempting to sell a class called “How to Become a Famous Painter” would be laughed at. Famous, living, painters are nearly non-existent anymore, but writers . . . well there’s the New York Times Bestseller list and often what appears on that list is generic enough to make people think anyone can write and publish something. Of course, the truth is anyone can—especially with enough discipline, practice, and access to a self-publishing platform. A writer with nothing but the ability to solidly execute a template can, in fact, become quite popular and even wealthy because, as with any created thing, once the process for making something becomes easily repeatable, it can be reproduced faster, and at scale.

To stick with our painting analogy a bit longer, consider the paint-by-numbers kit, which would be a step below Bob Ross. These kits come with pre-portioned and numbered paints, a set of brushes, and a canvas with the predetermined image outlined on it and with each section of the outline bearing a number that corresponds to a certain paint. The painter’s skill is then expended on faithfully matching the paint to the number and cleanly applying the paint. Some will do this better than others, and still others will successfully improvise within that strict framework, or overcome errors in the design, and put their own spin on the finished painting. This nearly instructor-less type of approach is what we get when a detailed step-by-step guide is paired with an established genre formula. It’s often what the one-day seminars and online step-by-step guides that claim to show you how to write a novel amount to.

There are twenty-step models, fifteen-step models, twelve-step models, eleven-step models, ten-step models, and so on. I looked at story drafting models from ReedsyBlog.com, Jerryjenkins.com, masterclass.com, novel-software.com, thewritepractice.com, curtisbrowncreative.co.uk, and nybookeditors.com (some of those are so fly-by-night they might not exist anymore). Only the last two started their steps to writing a novel with telling the would-be writer to begin with the actual, disciplined practice of writing. Nearly all the others start with the directive to “get a great idea” and then go straight to researching and outlining. I would like to give those lists and their authors the benefit of the doubt and say they must assume anyone looking to write a novel would already be writing on a regular basis, but I doubt that’s the case. Most of those how-to lists also include suggestions on how to set up a writing space and start a routine—but not until after you’ve got that great idea and done all your research.

It seems obvious that how we teach writing seems to fall into similar delineations as the types of literature I described earlier. Stories written by those who learned via “write-by-numbers” instruction seem to ignore social subtext^[6], or treat it in a heavy-handed, didactic way that is quite off-putting. They fall victim to the lure of ease, and because of that fall into being the kind of bad writers who turn literature into nihilistic games or ideological propaganda. The metalinguistic material in write-by-number stories is treated as a priori knowledge, and the work ignores or vilifies any experience or evidence that would disrupt the Rube Goldberg construction of the entertaining story, or contradict the pre-determined, dogmatic moral architecture the writer is operating under. The further away from the write-by-numbers approach a writer gets, the more likely they are to build stories that provide a more accurate simulation of a posteriori knowledge, but it would be delusional to think there is writing that isn’t influenced by some sort of formulaic instruction, especially when the Writing Industrial Complex is driven by the need for exponential growth and the push to merge the remaining Big 5 publishers into two or three mega publishers.

Writing instruction exists on a spectrum (and here I’m going to mix my metaphors). On one end we have the write-by-numbers model with all the tools clearly defined and the pre-work (in the form of approved genre tropes) done for the assembler so that all they have to do is snap the pieces together to make the story they want (and this gets even easier with the addition of AI.). On the other end, we have the artist’s formula, which is akin to improvisational jazz where the artist has practiced the basics so thoroughly that all they need is a loose framework, usually an agreed upon chord progression or theme, to create something new.

It’s still, however, a learned formula.

So, whether a writer uses the write-by-numbers plan, or a more improvisational method, they are all operating under some level of formula. The former plan will produce, at its best, a potentially exciting, but rather generic tale, especially if constructed within a defined and easy to market genre (epic sci-fi, paranormal romance, mystery, etc.). The later will produce, at its best, something that might approach a true work of art; however, I think if we look close enough, we’ll find the current “Literary” genre is almost as rigidly formulaic as anything belonging to the subliterary genres. So, even though we call these works of fiction literary it feels like they are becoming as generic as the endless variations of the Paranormal Vampire romances and Adult Baby Diaper Lover porn flooding Amazon’s self-publishing platforms.

I suspect there’s nothing we can do to change the write-by-numbers system where content platforms are recruiting would-be writers to join their sites and, essentially, asking them to be free content generators to feed the artificial intelligence algorithms and surveillance and data extraction capitalism that’s taken hold online. In that environment, a writer needs a formula, especially if their goal is to make as much money as possible before A.I. takes over. But we can, I think, do something about our second tier in the Writing Industrial Complex.

Tier 2: The MFA, or It’s All About Who Your Champion Is.

Although both the how-to seminar and the MFA program propose to improve the writer’s skills, or at least their productivity, the idea of aesthetics is rarely addressed in the former and sometimes used as a leveler in the latter. At least the non-academic how-to courses and seminars are up front that they are pushing an established, clear, and easy to follow formula (even if their promise of success is a lie). It’s usually right there in the marketing materials with the writer’s credentials: Bestselling writer will teach you how to write a bestseller! The MFA program, however, purports to create artists (it’s also there in the name, Master of Fine Arts), and art, due to its personal nature, tends to resist being made into a commodity. However, economic forces are diligently trying to commodifying MFA programs and focusing, inadvertently, on the MFA graduates ROI^[7]. If they are focusing on that, even unintentionally or subconsciously, then it suggests a standardization of some variety has taken place. Once a standardized mode of instruction takes hold, what’s produced also becomes standardized and, in a way, generic. That means the instruction has become formulaic, and formulaic instruction breeds formulaic writing.

We’re approaching nearly a century of college creative writing programs^[8], which are now the most common apprenticeship system for would-be writers of so-called “serious” literature. Most writers produced by these programs have tremendous technical skill, but it doesn’t seem that many are writing exceptionally daring, or risky work. It sometimes seems that we’re all simply assembling stories from the same set of used parts, viewing them through a relatively uniform, mediocre aesthetic, and calling ourselves geniuses when we become noticed for generating something that is, essentially, a charming echo of something we’ve all read before. It’s as if we have, out of spite for his apparent bootstrap-ish, masculine bravado, decided to ignore Ernest Hemingway’s remarks from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech when he wrote “How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.” Now, instead of admiring that courage, we see it as something like self-defeating insanity—in effect wondering why anyone would try something no one has ever tried before if it means being unpublished and, most importantly, unpaid.

What makes this drift to mediocrity troubling is that writing programs are where most of the editors come from. In the past, I’ve often joked with friends about an “Iowa Conspiracy” and have laid out a mostly joke-based bullshit strewn “theory” that the Iowa Writers Workshop is controlling American letters. The truth, however, is that it isn’t a conspiracy at all, but a subconscious and widespread bias toward a certain workshop derived aesthetic. The creative writing program is, ostensibly, attempting to create artists and, as a byproduct, it ends up creating editors who then acquire books, often written by their former classmates. So, no matter how well intentioned the writing program is, a group manufactured aesthetic, which amounts to a stealth formula, generally takes hold, and that is what I mean when I talk about the “Iowa Conspiracy.”

Now it could just as easily be the “Stanford Conspiracy” or the “University of Texas Conspiracy” or the “Wichita State Conspiracy.” Just swap in the name of any college that has a long standing, respected creative writing program. I’m only calling out Iowa because it is the oldest and has the longest list of well-known and (supposedly) important writers and editors who were instructors or alumni—alumni who then went on to found, and teach at, other writing programs. Iowa, in other words, established a formula that most other programs use (the Iowa Workshop Model), and that formula, as vague and variable as it is across those other programs, still generates surprisingly consistent results.

If asked, any creative writing student—especially MFA candidates—will tell you there is no conscious effort in any program to press the adoption of a specific aesthetic, which is mostly true; however, a class or group aesthetic of some type will develop regardless. It’ll be broad to include the variations between the strongest writers and loudest critics in the class, and it’ll shift from time to time, and no one will be able to clearly articulate it, but it will be there. I saw it happen in my own MFA program at a university that prided itself on non-competition, formal risk, and cross-pollination (actively borrowing, breaking, and mutating forms from across genres).^[9] Unintentionally, the strongest writers and most frequent commenters (usually the instructor, but also a particularly strong or opinionated student) in any given workshop tend to drive the class’s expectations for what makes a well written story. That classroom dynamic eventually shapes each student’s aesthetic tastes, especially if their sense or understanding of an aesthetic is weak to begin with. Then there are the well-connected teachers who often single out certain pupils they feel are exceptional and recommend them to agents and editors, thus launching the career of a protege whom other students will try to emulate.

Think about it this way: before MFA programs, and before the rise of How-to instruction, writers embarked on solo apprenticeships, often self-directed, and always eclectic (writing and reading in multiple genres, including journalism). Their education often came from one-on-one interaction with one, or, if they were lucky, two older established writers. If an established writer wasn’t in close proximity, then instruction came from one or two close friends who were also writers. Formal, structured creative writing workshops didn’t exist. The academic field of Narratology didn’t exist.^[10] Even “genre” in the way we think of it now as a marketing classification tool, didn’t exist. Apprentice writers therefore learned by constantly writing and rewriting instead of by critique and analysis. Additionally, a single mentor might have only a handful apprentices in his or her lifetime, which meant that a writer’s reach across the landscape of literature was limited in scope, even if it was significant in impact.

Once the creative writing programs started, the workshop and the group critique became the method for learning to write, and mentors, now professors of creative writing, might have ten to fifteen different apprentices for each class, each academic term over a career that might span several decades. Most of those students are subsumed back into a normal life, a small number of those students might become agents, editors, publishers, critics, and, of course, professors of creative writing and literature, and an even smaller number become published writers. It’s easy to see then how massively influential one way of thinking about how to write well and what makes a good story can spread to become a dominant aesthetic without any conscious conspiracy being involved.^[11] In fact, it might be more accurate to refer to it as the “Iowa Virus” to account for its spread and mutation across the landscape.

There is some awareness that this uniformity exists in the literary world, but an aesthetic of the mediocre doesn’t need a manifesto. It just needs to go unchallenged, and the best way to do that is distraction—especially if the distraction has some merit.

In the last few years, several groups have pointed out the white, upper middle class male bias in publishing (see the annual Vida Count on women in the literary arts), and literary agents and publishing houses have made efforts to scout for and hire BIPOC and LGBTQ people to acquire texts. Despite their drive to publish books by writers from those communities, the editors have still, largely, been trained and influenced by the same old mainstream institutions with the same old subconsciously group-generated aesthetic. Interestingly, in some cases, publishers have gone outside the publishing world and hired celebrities to lead imprints, but with marginal success (and in some cases no books at all out of the deal).

So, while more writers from marginalized backgrounds, and more BIPOC and LGBTQ characters and books are appearing on the shelves, their stories still seem to conform to the same old aesthetic generated in Iowa-inspired workshops at the same old prestigious colleges that have always fed the New York publishing industry. All of those institutions are, even if peppered now with minority instructors and students, aesthetically palatable to a still predominantly white, upper middle-class college educated reader. This is why I argue that the outsized influence of Iowa, and its descendants, has led to a certain standardized, stagnated, and homogenized view of what is “publishable.” We may be making space for certain representatives of previously marginalized and ignored communities to have their books published (a net positive that I do not wish to change), but we’re only elevating those BIPOC and LGBTQ writers whose mode of expression, how they build and tell their stories, conforms to and is palatable to the arbiters of the same old aesthetic built by mostly white students and instructors in the hot-house environments of creative writing programs run by universities that are economically pressured to conform by their mostly white upper middle class donors and alumni who fear a loss of prestige in a quickly diversifying culture.

So, while we do desperately need wider racial, ethnic, and cultural representation in what is published, focusing on that alone is a distraction from the still homogenized aesthetic those previously marginalized writers are being forced into so they can get past the gatekeepers.

What this is coming to mean, not just for previously marginalized writers but for all writers, is that a writer’s bio, especially in the “literary” sphere, is part of the overall formula required of the work (the identity trap I mentioned before). If a young writer can’t get into the right school, can’t scare up the right recommendation letters to win the right fellowship, or can’t win a scholarship to that expensive writer’s conference or retreat—much less spare the time to attend—then all they have is luck, which we all know is unevenly distributed. Then, if a writer does get lucky and breaks through, they have to continue to produce work that hews to what people assume a writer of that background would write.

As writers, what we choose to write about certainly can’t be trained out of us, but the way that what we write is constructed and presented can be influenced—especially so when it is subtle and unconscious. If someone, no matter how famous and influential, walks into a class and lays down a dogmatic set of rules for determining “good writing” then I’m sure there would be a bit of a rebellion (there’ll certainly be a rebellion against my generalized “rules” in this tractate), but when someone says I don’t think this passage is working, then provides a rational and clear explanation for why, and a few classmates agree, a young writer is more likely to alter what they’re doing rather than search out a way to perfect the thing they were trying to do. Furthermore, young writers will do it believing they’re learning instead of unlearning and conforming. We should never assume that by dint of being “literary” we are immune to the social and psychological pressures humans are prone to respond to, especially in the highly charged and compressed environment of a creative writing workshop.

I think it might be better if someone did come along and lay down some rigid rules just to see if it might force us to analyze our aesthetic and properly defend it, especially now that we’re engaged in this tug-of-war between idealism and economic reality.

Art Vs. Commerce: A Personal Story.

I am ambivalent about the Writing Industrial Complex. Artistically, the way I view the craft, and how I think about my work and structure it, has benefited from instruction at all stages of my writing life. Professionally and economically, I’ve been shut out almost entirely. I didn’t make the right connections in graduate school. Then, I’ve made my home in Kansas, which is not known for having a literary community of any prestige, and whatever community once existed outside of academia was officially euthanized when former governor Sam Brownback privatized state arts funding. That move meant the individual grant for writers, which had been shrinking for years before his tenure, was finally dissolved completely.

My first lifeline from the Writing Industrial Complex came when a thoughtful high school girlfriend gave me a copy of Writers Digest for Christmas one year. If not for that serendipitous gift, my knowledge of fiction writing would have been limited to my own paltry, naive efforts and the occasional unguided creative writing assignment from my English teachers whenever they got tired of explaining grammar to kids who’d already made up their minds to work for the aircraft companies or join the military. If I hadn’t discovered K-State’s English department offered a creative writing track, I may have floundered in college. Four years after finishing there, I went to Naropa University (and its once spectacular four-week Summer Writing Program) for an MFA in writing and poetics. I took classes with Dodie Bellamy, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Keith Abbott, Kristin Iverson, Alexs D. Pate, Will Christopher Baer, Fielding Dawson, Junior Burke, Brian Evenson, Laura Mullen, and Jack Collom among others. On top of their direct tutelage, there were all the other writers who showed up to read, lecture, and talk to us such as Michael Ondaatje, Amiri Baraka, Robin Blaser, Eileen Myles, Hettie Jones, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, Laird Hunt, Andrei Codrescu, and many others. A lot of knowledge was crammed into a two-year program but, sadly, all my interactions with those writers has not translated into a growing shelf of books with my name on the spines because I didn’t make the leap from mere student to someone’s protege—and that connection is what MFA programs are reallydesigned to produce. Instead, I focused on the one strength Professor Steve Heller told me I had back in 1994 when I took my last workshop at K-State.

Before admitting me to my final workshop, Heller sat me down and laid out what he thought I needed to do if I really wanted to be a writer; mainly I needed to develop a practice (I resisted that for another three years after graduating). My one strength, he said, was that whenever my classmates told me something in my story wasn’t working, I rejected the revisions they had suggested and instead doubled down on whatever it was I was doing as if to say Now, do you see what I’m trying to do? That, he said, would serve me well if I wanted to pursue writing. What he didn’t tell me was that stubbornly pursuing my own artistic vision—my own aesthetic—would sometimes put me at odds with the reality of the Writing Industrial Complex.

I write slowly, but steadily. It’s a habit developed out of economic need. I never landed the teaching job I wanted, nor did I marry and have a spouse with an income that could fill the gaps when my own income fell short, or who earned enough to let me focus on writing. I couldn’t get a job in publishing because, fresh out of college, I didn’t have a wealthy family that could pay for me to live in New York while I worked an underpaid or unpaid internship^[12] with a New York publisher. So, I’ve continued to live in Kansas rather than try to relocate someplace more amenable to a literary life because the cost of living here is low, and I can survive—if only barely—on whatever poorly paid job I’ve been able to find. In the last fifteen years, I’ve wandered into a corporate job that pays well, at least by Kansas standards. Living alone and relying only on the income I can generate means my writing time is confined to a two-hour window before work between Monday and Friday (more on the weekends). My time after work and on weekends is divided between unpaid regenerative labor (all the house cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, and cooking), maintaining friendships, reading, and revising what I’ve written.

If I were content writing within a formula, if I could be satisfied with fitting each story I wanted to tell into the same structure, I might be able to slip into a life that looks more like the writer’s life as most people understand it. But to me, form and content are inseparable. One story might demand a linear structure with plain language, another might require an episodic structure with more abstract, poetic language, and yet another might need something cyclical and detached with prose that slides between tight micro-focused observances and wide, philosophical vignettes. To write one story and fit it into the structure of one of the others would destroy it, and that type of approach puts me at odds with the commercial, economic, and commodified elements of the Writing Industrial Complex.

So, because most writers can’t support themselves without becoming either a fast-producing generalist who needs to rely on successfully repeated formulas, or a state sponsored university instructor (limited opportunity there) or landing a high-earning spouse who’ll free them from labor^[13], the opportunity for those obligated to earn their own money in the so-called free market as writers is non-existent. Our society has essentially restricted who can afford the time to write novels to those who come from comfortable socio-economic backgrounds and are conditioned to conform to the commodity driven expectations of the market.

And nothing encourages conformity more than undeserved privilege and the threat of economic destitution.

Works cited.

·      Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Ernest Hemingway. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1986.

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^[1] In fact, the median family income in 1970 was just under $10K per year. US Census Bureau. “Income in 1970 of Families and Persons in the United States.” Census.gov, October 8, 2021. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1971/demo/p60-80.html.

^[2] This is where I landed, putting in forty hours a week managing and editing operating procedures and other documents for Koch Industries.

^[3] I have such a visceral distaste of Jenkins that when I saw he was pushing the Qwerkywriter keyboard on his site as a “productivity tool,” I had a momentary urge to throw mine out, but I reminded myself that keyboard preference doesn’t have anything to do with how well one writes or, more importantly, how productive a writer is. Also, they’re $300.

^[4] This may also be true of MFA programs, but at least those completing MFA programs use that degree in other ways.

^[5] Scientific Wild-Ass Guess

^[6] Karahasan’s “metalinguistic material” or the tenor of the giant metaphor that is fiction to begin with.

^[7] Return on Investment.

^[8] The Iowa Writers Workshop was founded in 1936.

^[9] Sadly, it seems the program at Naropa has become just as rigid and generic as all the others.

^[10] Narratology came into being in the mid to late 1960s.

^[11] My new hypothesis about why I have had a hard time finding an agent is that there are simply no agents who went through the Naropa University MFA program.

^[12] The unpaid internship was still quite common in 1995.

^[13] A situation mostly limited to women writers because in our patriarchal society women are objects and trophies, while men are wallets.