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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Stephen Dixon...


...a longtime Creative Writing professor at Johns Hopkins University, confirms much of what UD said in her Culte de Moi essay, which tries to hack back some of the Creative Writing kudzu that's strangling her students' education.

Excerpts from a City Paper interview with him.

'Dixon has been a tenured professor in the Hopkins Writing Seminars for 26 years. That's a long time, and a lot of manuscripts. It's also been a period of great change in the educational marketplace. When Dixon first received the Stegner Fellowship in 1964, there were three schools that offered paid fellowships for graduate writers: the University of Iowa, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford University. Now there are more than 150 graduate programs and 350 undergraduate creative writing majors in the United States.

Talk turned to some of his experiences, and his thoughts, after 26 years of teaching students.




[Interviewer:] Now you have a generation of writers who have grown up in writing schools.


SD: Just in writing programs, yes. It's a flat way to live, I think, not having experience. I cannot get any good fiction from teaching in a university. I have maybe two stories which take place in a university setting, and a couple of scenes in Frog, and that's it. It's just an uninteresting atmosphere. And what there is to write about has already been written about very well.


...When I give stories to undergrads, I'll ask who's read Tolstoy. Nobody's read Tolstoy. Or I mention James Joyce, when we read a story from Dubliners, maybe one or two have read a story in high school. When I first started out, kids were much more serious as readers, and I could actually have literary discussions with them, which I cannot do now. Even the ones who are the most avid writers are not avid readers. They just want to write. ...We grew up on Dostoevsky, Conrad, if there was ever a serious name, we read that writer. It also told us what not to write, because if the thing has been taken up already, and you have a history of having read it, you want to go on to something new. So a lot of students are sort of writing what's already been written.'




---james elias - for this link much thanks...---