(Editor's Note: I know I said I was taking a hiatus from the blog to work on an old novel. I have, and it's going well. It's fun to write again. I've been through it carefully once and have a list of 114 items to go back and fix. I simply wanted to write this post. I'll go away again.)
I can’t believe I haven’t written about this before. I graduated from Auburn in June, 1974, and started my MFA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in late August, 1974. I was 20. That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. As the incoming MFA student with the highest undergraduate GPA, I had been appointed editor of The Greensboro Review. It came with an assistantship pitiful enough to match the pathetic tuition back in those days.
I was in charge of selecting some of the submissions that would become acceptances to the Review, and I was utterly incompetent. I have saved the old issues, but I’m afraid to look at them. Fortunately, taste in literature, especially submissions to a little magazine, is subjective. It’s been 47 years, and I haven’t been sued.
A year or so later, I was looking for some document or another in someone’s office. I really don’t remember the details. I came upon the notes that the faculty had written regarding the applications to the MFA program. Knowing I was wrong and absolutely not caring, I skimmed through them till I came to the notes on mine.
The first, by Lloyd Kropp, who later got fired and moved on to Southern Illinois, was true, which was that I was too young and needed to get more experience. The next, Tom Kirby-Smith, a poet and the director of the program when I was there, wrote something I don’t recall and which was mildly encouraging but not conclusive, I suspect. Then Fred Chappell, the light of the fiction program and one of the kindest men I’ve ever known (known only to the cognoscenti, he’s the author of numerous novels, several books of poems, winner of the Yale Younger Poets award, wrote—and I recall this word for word—“Yeah, pretty good stuff.” I suspect that it was on this one sentence that I was admitted.
Talk about not understanding where I was: I was in awe of these people. There were a couple of southerners, but there was also a guy from Cornell and a girl from Mt. Holyoke, whom I later dated. Almost nobody became a successful author of literary fiction, which was our goal.
MFA programs are frauds. I had no business being there. And I didn’t learn much from the faculty, maybe a little from the Mt. Holyoke girl. It was just two years to write and write and write. I killed tens of trees. I don’t recall any of Fred’s comments on my work, except on a touch football scene I wrote: “I don’t get why this is so important to them.”
Fred read my next to last novel, which is the one I’ve taken up again, 20 years after I wrote it. Which means that Fred offered to read it 26 years after I graduated, which is pretty remarkable. He had good comments, better than the guy at the University of Delaware whom I paid to read it. At the end, Fred wrote, “You have a lot of courage”—or something to that effect. Which I took to mean that I had a lot of nerve continuing to write after nearly three decades of failure.
Oh. Maybe I was relying too much on people’s non-existent love of touch football.
We had class on Monday nights for three hours. Once Fred came in and said, “I’m too drunk to have class. Let’s go to Ham’s,” the beer and sandwich place a walkable distance from campus. That night he drank and drank and drank, and went around the table and doled out evaluations: “You stink”; “You should just go home if you’re going to keep doing this;” “You’re trying to be Virginia Woolf’s tenth draft on your first” (oh, that was me); and on and on. We sat, chastised, and drank our beer. It was like porn for self-doubting, insecure writers: he told us what we already knew about ourselves.
I owe Fred for one moment no matter what. The format was that we’d sit in a big room purple with cigarette smoke and over the three hours Fred would read three stories by three of the students. He was a good reader, not emphasizing or dramatizing anything. Then he’d call on us in a way that he choreographed to get the comments he wanted. The tall blond kid from Minnesota was always great on bad details. Mary went way beneath what seemed to be going on. I had a feel for pacing. Fam had an ear for bad dialog.
Finally my last story of my second year was up: “Katherine in Transit”. It later appeared in The Greensboro Review. It was, like all of my stories, long. It took me a while to realize that I was a novelist and not a short story writer. I was also a starting pitcher. They are like novelists. Short story writers and poets are like relievers. You either get this or you don’t, and my back is killing me, so you’re on your own.
At the end, the students’ comments on my story were awful: too long; too slow; don’t know what’s going on; I don’t get this character, etc. Sometimes the comments were revenge for making us sit through the reading.
When they were done, Fred gazed steadily at everyone and said, “I wouldn’t change a word of it.”
I nearly cried in gratitude. My peers were right, too long, too slow, etc. He had to be lying to protect me, which was a sweet thing to do. Fred spun this tale of how it was all of those things for a purpose, that it all led up to Katherine, otherwise a completely indecisive and mild person, suddenly realizing that she had no choice but to act on her own and get going.
OK, I’ll buy that. I only wish I’d been thinking that when I wrote it.
Otherwise, MFA programs are about sex. Before classes even started, Mary seduced a guy named Ed from Idaho, and essentially processed him, and he left. We never met old Ed. A couple of people were married already, and eventually their marriages broke up. We even had groupies: A guy named Steve had a girlfriend named Polly, who was a townie. She even came to class, which was relaxed and informal. Polly asked my girlfriend Lynne if I were gay and if she were dating the gay guy who lived across the hall from me.
OK, it wasn’t as wild as law school, but writers are often pretty depressed and therefore not up to much except drinking.
Oh, there was the time that Lynne and Keith were kissing in the car, and Keith’s wife Martha and I walked by and somehow didn’t see them. And then Martha came to my place but I was so insecure and doubtful that I didn’t bed her as I suspect she had intended.
What else is there to recommend an MFA program? At UNC-G, when I was there, all of the MFA programs belonged to UNC-G—writing, theatre, music, dance, visual arts. Theoretically we could interact and there’d be a creative synergy but yeah, no. Now, every state school in NC has an MFA. Wait till the Republicans learn about that!! Actually, the Republicans in NC hate Chapel Hill. Jesse Helms said we should build a fence around it to keep the socialists locked in.
The best legends out of my MFA program are probably apocryphal. Guy Lillian, a science fiction writer, got so broke that he bought some three-for-a dollar chicken pot pies, would cook one, and leave it out on the kitchen table to take a bite when he really had to. A couple of naked lesbians dove into a vat of spaghetti out in the quad. Lloyd was supposed drive to the airport and pick up Joseph Heller, author most famously of Catch-22, forgot, then at the party later said, “Oh, you’re THAT Joseph Heller.” On and on.
Look, considering that I was barely into my twenties, it wasn’t the worst use of my time. I could have been doing something romantic like working on a tramp steamer, whatever that is. Except for knots, I probably learned more from the MFA program.
Actually, I learned ONLY this: When you’re writing a story in the past tense, you have to use the past perfect to denote a flashback. How long do you have to use the onerous “had had” type of construction and can you ever switch back to just past tense?
Yes, do 50 words in past perfect, then move to past tense, and at the beginning of the next paragraph when you’re going back to the present action of the story, start in past tense with a transition like “Now” or “Today” or some such. Very useful! I’m always doing that stuff.
It was so long ago now that I can’t imagine that it happened: twenty of us aspiring fiction writers in a large conference room with heavy curtains blocking any light, the air noxious with cigarette smoke, Fred hunched over and saying genius things, the rest of being whatever we were—I was deluded, thinking I was a writer.
Really, they shouldn’t have done that to me. Lloyd was right, and they should have listened.
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