...is f*ing amazing. Thankfully, Jonathan Franzen's story of class and family in a gentrifying neighborhood is still available to all who click.
Many a brilliant insight in Louis Menand's essay on whether creative writing can be taught.
David Grossman's essay on Bruno Schulz is excellent but requires registration. I particularly wanted to excerpt an interesting metaphor he thinks up, in which he invokes the life cycle of salmon to better understand Jewish experience.
Tia Obreht's short story is just plain excellent.
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Wow, that article was the highlight of my day. I love how in-depth it went. As an MFA holder I will say this, though. Creative writing can be taught. Just like business can be taught.
But can you guarantee that everyone who comes out of your program will make a living as a writer or even as an entrepreneur?
No. Like any grad program, the success of the grad depends on the grad not the program.
There were a lot of talented people in my writing program who chose not to do the work once the deadlines were taken away. And I would say whether you succeed or fail as a anything has more to do with your values and work ethic than whatever program you graduated from.
That all said, I'm usually not a big fan of writers that haven't been through some kind of instruction. Twilight was nearly unreadable for me, b/c the writer was so untrained. And I'm stunned by the numbers of people who refuse to submit to training.
I wouldn't try to fix your sink without getting a plumbing certificate, why would you insist on submitting your shitty novel to agents and publishing houses without any formal training whatsoever? I only say this from experience. I wrote a book in high school, having never taken a college-level writing class and tried to get it published. My failure in this regard led me to seek out further training, and now I feel bad that I wasted all of those people's time with my poorly prepared submission.
It's a little like that DIY article you posted a while back. You can try to do things yourself w/o any training, but you ofter end up wasting more time and spending more money than you would have if you had just gone about things properly in the first place.
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