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Sunday, May 29, 2005
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HARRUMPH II [For HARRUMPH I, scroll down.] " Really and Truly Fed Up To the Editor: Maybe I was just in a bad mood, but I slammed down my coffee cup in exasperation while reading Nell Freudenberger's otherwise smart review of Stewart O'Nan's new novel, "The Good Wife" (May 8). Or maybe it wasn't me; maybe it was that Freudenberger's passing remark about how O'Nan "does a lot of the things they teach you not to do in M.F.A. programs" (for which, it should go without saying, she greatly admires him) was the proverbial itty-bitty piece of perfectly harmless straw, and this camel's back had finally had it. Just to set the record straight, for all the readers of the Book Review who have not attended an M.F.A. program in creative writing — who are not, in fact, writers themselves but passionate readers (but who have heard this sort of nonsense so often they found themselves nodding thoughtfully: Yes! That's right! A good writer would never do what he's told to do by — shudder — an M.F.A. program!); just to let the young writers who read the Book Review (and who might themselves be thinking about attending an M.F.A. program someday) know: no M.F.A. program worth its salt would ever "teach" a writer not to use the second person, not to write in present tense, not to tell a story sequentially. I don't know where Freudenberger got her M.F.A. (and I'm betting she has one; most writers do these days, for better or for worse — if for no other reason than that these programs provide a community of writers and other artists, and many of them give their students two or three years of full financial support while letting them write nearly full time and giving them the opportunity to take classes, free, in any subject that happens to interest them anywhere in the university, thus going the old move-to- Paris routine one, or two, better), but I can say with absolute certainty that neither I nor any of my colleagues at Ohio State University, all of whom are themselves not only fine writers but thoughtful, dedicated teachers, has ever told a student "not to do" anything. And to tell you the truth, although it was 20 years ago that I was an M.F.A. student myself at Iowa, I don't remember ever being told not to do, or not to try, anything there, either. I'd call up all my friends who teach at other programs right now and ask them if they have ever told a student writer such a thing — or if they were ever told such a thing when they were students — but I'm too busy today reading my students' M.F.A. theses (which in most cases will become their first books), not one of which has anything in common with any other, except that they were all printed out in 12-point type on white paper. MICHELLE HERMAN Columbus, Ohio " |