Shelnutt, Eve. "Notes from a Cell: Creative Writing Programs in Isolation." Creative Writing in America. Joseph Moxley, Ed.

Well, I couldn't fit the entire citation in the title, but I know I have it in an earlier blog.

I disagree with a great many things Eve Shelnutt says in this chapter, although perhaps I can see where she's coming from. Shelnutt claims that creative writing programs are separated from academe, that "for teachers of creative writing and M.F.A. students in writing, the intellectual life has, I believe, never been so disconnected from our niche in the university" (3). Her beliefs for this stem from her argument that critics of undergraduate and graduate writing programs across the country would "no doubt answer that they never expected 'real' writers to emerge from the cocoon of academe, much less intellectuals from among those writers."

Well, for those of us who have graduated from undergraduate and graduate programs in creative writing, and also speaking as a teacher of creative writing, I can say that, if I were to speak of the professors I know, and being one myself, she can count my vote out. I see real writers emerge, publish, become teachers themselves to encourage other writers follow the same path. I don't see us as a bunch of dumbasses -- I've got three degrees, and I'm working on my fourth and fifth, if you want to put it into an academic context. For me, this is just a bunch of Ph.D. snobbery, the kind that want to look down at the MFA as a terminal degree, probably because they've never been through a program themselves (or if they did, or teach at one, I wonder what their level of commitment is).

Some of Shelnutt's argument is at the heart of what I find so snobbish about academia -- that the publishing industry is at the heart of what we strive for (of course, academics don't have "publish, don't perish" as one of their mottos, now do they?) or that because we might consider writing commercial fiction, that surely writing for a mass audience isn't up to snuff of those articles we might find in the academic journals. Yet, I don't think either of my master's-levle programs pushed me to publish -- although both recognize that writers do like to feel acknowledged by being accepted by the publishing industry, and the programs celebrate us when we do publish. I think the same is tru for Ph.D. students -- we're pushed to publish all the time, just not for a mass audience, both for each other.

A bit more snobbery occurs when Shelnutt admits that she strives to have her students "aspire to the quality of work producedby Naipaul, Gordimer, Coetzee, and Jhabvala, even if I believe that most students will not become writers" (7). Well, probably not, if she's not asking them to find their own voices, but to imitate those that have achieved "literary" success, if not commercial. Again, this smacks of the lines that "educated" people like to draw to make themselves feel better; it's as though if someone without a formal education could dare to understand and appreciate a book, or even be entertained by it, then surely it isn't worth reading.

I do agree with Shelnutt that MA and MFA in creative writing programs can suffer from identity crises, especially if they're housed in traditional English departments with long-standing literature and composition components that don't quite know what the requirements of a creative writing degree should be -- so they shove their courses into the mix and hope that the poor, poor creative writing student has gotten at leasat a somewhat-sufficient education, now that they've been served by taking classes from their own sequences as well. however, I would argue that creative writers are eventually the best served of the bunch; we've had a taste of the entire English department education, and begin to understand how literature, composition, and creative writing and merge and intersect to create one body of learing. Shelnutt disagrees, saying we can't possibly comprehend it all and literature professors complain that we bring down the quality of their programs. But I feel that's all preconceived snobbery. Perhaps that the reason why creative writing students might keep to themselves.