In my junior year, I studied with Grace Paley. The fact that I even met Grace Paley, much less sat in her classroom for an entire year, is a wonder to me even now. There was no better short story writer, and very possibly no better person, though she would smack me on the head with a newspaper were she around to hear me say such a thing. (Interested in being a better writer? Go buy yourself a copy of The Collected Stories by Grace Paley.) The lesson that Grace taught was a complicated one, and I will admit I had been out of her class for a couple of years before I fully understood all she had given me. I was used to Allan, who was as diligent a teacher as he was a writer. He was where he said he would be at the appointed minute, our manuscripts meticulously commented on in his trademark brown ink. He gave assignments and picked readings that spoke directly to our needs. But when we went to Grace’s classroom there was often a cancellation notice taped to the door—Grace has gone to Chile to protest human rights violations, or something of that nature. Or I would be sitting outside her office, waiting for our scheduled conference, but the door stayed closed. I could hear someone in there, and frequently that someone was crying. After half an hour or so, Grace would pop her head out, telling me very kindly that I should go. “She’s having troubles,” she would say of that unseen person who had arrived before me. If I held up my poor little short story, a reminder of why I was there, she would smile and nod. “You’ll be fine.”
Oh, Grace, with her raveling sweaters and thick socks, her gray hair flying in every direction, the dulcet tones of Brooklyn in her voice, she was a masterpiece of human life. There was the time she came to class and said she couldn’t return our stories because she had been robbed the night before. A burglar had broken into her apartment and tied her to the kitchen chair. She then proceeded to talk to him about his hard life for more than an hour. In the end he took her camera and her bag full of our homework. I’m sure I was not alone in thinking how lucky that guy was to have gotten so much of Grace’s undivided attention. Another time, she came to class and herded us all into a school van, then she drove us to Times Square. We were to march with the assembling throngs to the Marine recruitment office chanting USA, CIA, out of Grenada! It was crowded and cold and after we were sent off down Forty-second Street with our signs we never did find Grace or the van again. I once heard her read her story “The Loudest Voice” in a small room at Sarah Lawrence where we all sat on pillows. Somewhere in the middle of the reading she stopped, said her tooth was bothering her, reached into her mouth, pulled out a back molar, and kept on going.
Like most of my classmates, I was young and filled with a degree of self-interest that could rightly be called selfishness. Nothing was more important than the stories we wrote, the Sturm und Drang of our college lives. Grace wanted us to be better people than we were, and she knew that the chances of our becoming real writers depended on it. Instead of telling us what to do, she showed us. Human rights violations were more important than fiction. Giving your full attention to a person who is suffering was bigger than marking up a story, bigger than writing a story. Grace turned out a slender but vital body of work during her life. She kept her editors waiting longer than her students. She taught me that writing must not be compartmentalized. You don’t step out of the stream of your life to do your work. Work was the life, and who you were as a mother, teacher, friend, citizen, activist, and artist was all the same person. People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say. I would not begin to know how to teach another person how to have character, which was what Grace Paley did.
The last time I saw Grace was at a luncheon at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was being treated for breast cancer. Her hearing was bad and she didn’t answer my questions about how she was doing. She gave me a hug instead. “You wouldn’t believe all the nice people I’ve met at chemotherapy,” she told me.
My last fiction teacher in college was Russell Banks, and the lesson I got from him came in a single conversation that changed everything I did from that day on. He told me I was a good writer, that I would never get any substantial criticism from the other students in the class because my stories were polished and well put together. But then he told me I was shallow, that I skated along on the surface, being clever. He said if I wanted to be a better writer, I was the only person who could push myself to do it. It was up to me to challenge myself, to be vigilant about finding the places in my own work where I was just getting by. “You have to ask yourself,” he said to me, “if you want to write great literature or great television.”
I remember leaving his office and stepping out into the full blooming springtime. I was dizzy. I felt as if he had just taken my head off and reattached it at a slightly different angle, and as disquieting as the sensation was, I knew that my head would be better now. The world I was walking in was a different place than the one I had been in an hour before. I was going to do a better job. There are in life a few miraculous moments when the right person is there to tell you what you need to hear and you are still open enough, impressionable enough, to take it in. When I thought about the writer I had wanted to be when I was a child, the one who was noble and hungry and lived for art, that person was not shallow. I would go back to my better, deeper self.
I’ve run into Russell many times over the years and I’ve told him how he changed my life. He says he has no memory of the conversation, a fact which does not trouble me in the least. I too have given a lot of advice I’ve forgotten about over the years. I can only hope it was half as good as Russell’s.
While I give due credit to Sarah Lawrence for having hired the right people and for fostering a philosophy of education in which a young writer could thrive, I also realize that there was a large component of luck involved. It’s a wonderful thing to find a great teacher, but we also have to find him or her at a time in life when we’re able to listen to and trust and implement the lessons we are given. The same is true of the books we read. I think that what influences us in literature comes less from what we love and more from what we happen to pick up in moments when we are especially open. For this reason I’ve always been grateful (and somewhat amazed) that I read The Magic Mountain in my high school English class. That novel’s basic plot—a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society in confinement—became the story line for just about everything I’ve ever written. (Then again, that was also the plot of The Poseidon Adventure, a cheesy 1970s disaster flick I had seen several years earlier that also had an impact on me.) I was greatly affected by Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift, which I read when I was fourteen or fifteen, not long after it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. I read it because a copy was lying around the house after both my mother and stepfather had finished it. I’m certain it was much too adult for me then, but I can still bring up more of the imagery and emotion from that novel than anything I’ve read in a long time. It was because of Humboldt that I went on to read the stories of Delmore Schwartz, and fell in love with In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Even as a teenager I knew a brilliant title when I saw it.
Based on my own experience, I believe the brain is as soft and malleable as bread dough when we’re young. I am grateful for every class trip to the symphony I went on and curse any night I was allowed to watch The Brady Bunch, because all of it stuck. Conversely, I am now capable of forgetting entire novels that I’ve read, and I’ve been influenced not at all by books I passionately love and would kill to be influenced by. Think about this before you let your child have an iPad.
If the gifts I received as an undergraduate were of fairy-tale dimensions, that was not the case for me at the esteemed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I arrived at the age of twenty-one. I never had a class in graduate school that approached what I had had in college, but I chalk it up to the luck of the draw. (Luck, come to fin
d out, works in both directions.) Had I been in Iowa two years later, or two years earlier, or had I merely signed up for a different roster of classes, I would have had an entirely different experience. (The same, of course, would have been true at Sarah Lawrence.) The ability to write and the ability to teach are not the same, and while I’ve known plenty of people who could do both, there are also plenty of people who can do only one or the other, and plenty who do both who should be doing neither. That’s why picking an M.F.A. program is tricky. It may give you the opportunity to study with your hero, but your hero may prove a disappointment in the classroom. The best way to judge a program is to look at the person directing it. I once taught briefly at the University of California at Irvine, a small program that was run at the time by the wonderful writer Geoffrey Wolff. He controlled everything magnificently. He did a meticulous job choosing both the faculty and the students, oversaw a financial aid program that didn’t pit students against one another, and in general set a tone that was congenial and supportive. All M.F.A. programs rely on visiting faculty and most of them change from year to year (if not semester to semester), so don’t go by the prestige of a name or by someone else’s experience five years ago. It’s always a work in progress.
The answer to how important a Master of Fine Arts degree is to becoming a fiction writer is, of course, not at all. The history of world literature is weighted heavily on the side of writers who put their masterpieces together without the benefit of two years of graduate school. Still, M.F.A. programs have been part of the mix, at least in this country, for a long time now, and many writers attend them. Even though it was an imperfect experience for me, it was not without benefit: spending two years devoting myself to writing was indisputably a good thing, as was meeting the other students who had come for the same reasons I had. We all had such good intentions, and most of us were eventually distracted from them. I remember complaining one night on the phone to my mother that we spent too much of our time worrying about love and money. “Think of it as research,” she said. “That’s what everybody writes about.”
Iowa was where I learned how to tune my ear to the usefulness and uselessness of other people’s opinions. An essential element of being a writer is learning whom to listen to and whom to ignore where your work is concerned. Every workshop was an explosion of judgment. A third of the class would love a story, a third would rip it to shreds, and a third would sit there staring off into space, no doubt wondering what they were going to have for dinner. Sometimes an entire class would say that something wasn’t working, and they’d be wrong. I had to trust myself and keep doing whatever I was doing. Other times one lone dissenter would point out a problem and the rest of the class would disagree, but that person was right. Had I given equal weight to everyone who had something to say, every story would have turned into a terrible game of Twister (left hand, yellow; right foot, blue; nose on red; so forth and so on). On the other hand, had I listened to no one, or only to the people who liked me, the workshop would have been a waste of time.
One misconception about workshops is that you learn the most about how to be a better writer on the day your story is discussed—not true. People are nervous, sometimes deathly so, when their story is being dissected, and there’s always a great deal of ego involved. But it’s when someone else has their turn at bat that you actually get to see what’s going on; the view is always clearer without all those emotional defenses in the way. This is where M.F.A. programs are most valuable: you can learn more, and more quickly, from other people’s missteps than you can their successes. If we could learn everything we needed to know about writing fiction by seeing it masterfully executed, we could just stay in bed and read Chekhov. But when you see someone putting in five pages of unnecessary descriptive detail in a twenty-page story, or not bothering to engage the reader’s interest until the seventh page, or writing dialogue that reads like a government wiretap transcription from a particularly boring conversation between a couple of fourteen-year-old girls, then you learn and learn fast. You may not always grasp what you need to do in order to make your own work better, but if you pay attention you’ll figure out what you need to avoid. It doesn’t take long to identify who the best critics in the class are, and those people become the ones you seek out. Making friends with other writers you respect is reason enough to go to graduate school. You’re not always going to have teachers, but if you’re lucky, you’ll always have a couple of tough, loving, forthright peers who have something to teach you.
The best thing I got out of my time at Iowa was that I learned how to teach. In my first year, my financial aid package entailed teaching an undergraduate Introduction to Literature class. Then, in my second year, I taught undergraduate fiction writing. The degree to which I was unqualified for this work is appalling. I was twenty-one years old and had never given teaching a thought. For the literature class, the teaching assistants were told to cover two novels (any two novels, any of them), two plays (one Shakespeare and one contemporary), some short stories, and a section on poetry. We were given two days of group instruction, a class schedule, a room number, and that was it. We were on our own. It was terrifying, and I learned more from that experience than all the writing and reading I had done in my life to date. Being the one to stand in front of the class and talk about a book for fifty minutes made me read at a whole new level. I was forced to think through every idea I had about a story, to support all of those ideas with examples from the text, and articulate my thoughts in a cogent manner. In short, I started to study how writers did what they did with a great deal more diligence because I had to explain it to someone else. I’ve often wished there had been a way for me to teach before being a student—I was so much better at studying now.
Education aside, my most emphatic piece of advice regarding whether or not to attend an M.F.A. program has to do with money: no one should go into debt to study creative writing. It’s simply not worth it. Do not think of it as an investment in yourself that you’ll be able to recoup later on. This is not medical school. There are many more M.F.A. programs turning out many more writers than the market can possibly bear; the law of averages dictates that a great percentage of graduates are never going to make anywhere close to a living practicing their craft. Every M.F.A. program has some level of financial aid that is based on how talented you are deemed to be, which is another way of saying how badly that program wants you. If you get into an M.F.A. program without an offer of financial aid, sit out a year and then reapply. Who accepts you, and how much money they give you, is a capricious business, subject to who happens to be serving on the admissions panel (which is often composed of students in the early rounds). I applied to four M.F.A. programs and I got into one—the one that was supposedly the most competitive—and I received financial aid in the form of a teaching assistance, a small income I supplemented with a great deal of babysitting. Would I have gone to Iowa without financial aid? Probably, but only because I wouldn’t have known any better. At the time I had no idea what I was buying. I will admit to being a profoundly practical person, especially where money is concerned; but unless you are independently wealthy, I urge you to listen to this. If you plan to roll the dice, thinking, Well, surely I’ll get a big book contract at the end of two years that will cover the loan I’ve taken out, the chances are excellent it’s not going to happen.
And while we’re on the subject of writing programs, let me touch on summer programs as well. They can be a lot of fun, as long as you’re honest with yourself about what your goals are: if you want to make friends with other people who want to be writers, have a vacation with an opportunity to learn something, and have the chance to listen for a week or two to the wisdom of a writer you respect—and you can do it all within your budget—then summer programs are great. But if you think you’ll find an agent who will take on your novel, or that the writer you love will love you in return and will mentor you beyond the parameters of the summer schedule, forget it. I stopped
teaching in summer programs a long time ago because I felt uncomfortable with the promises that were being sold. Those programs can be a life-saving connection for people who are toiling away by themselves month after month with no one to share work with. Like an M.F.A. program writ in miniature, it’s the chance to find friends and reliable critics among classmates. I imagine that every now and then a book is picked up by a prestigious New York agent and sold to a prestigious New York publisher, but it is statistically akin to finding a four-leaf clover. On the banks of the Dead Sea. In July.
After finishing the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I got a job as the writer-in-residence at a small college in Pennsylvania. Two days before my second school year was set to begin, I left my husband, left the job, and very quickly left the state. I moved back to Tennessee and in with my mother. Having burned my last employers so badly, there was pretty much no chance of my finding another teaching job, so I wound up getting a job as a waitress. I was twenty-five years old. It wasn’t the best time in my life, but at least I wasn’t mailing in a percentage of my tip money to pay down student loans for my M.F.A.
Up until that point there had never been any reason to doubt that my life was going to work out exactly according to script. I had thought I was a writer when I was a student, but would I still be a writer now that I was also a waitress? It was a test of love: How long would I stick around once things were no longer going my way? (Illustrative anecdote: Many years later, I was in London interviewing Ralph Fiennes for GQ. While we were at lunch the waiter approached to tell Fiennes how much he admired his work. “I’m an actor, too,” the waiter said as he held out a piece of paper for an autograph. Later I asked Fiennes how long he would have been willing to be a waiter who struggled to be an actor. Things had gone well for him pretty much right off the bat, but let’s say for the sake of argument that they hadn’t and he had to pick up dirty plates and sweep up the crushed saltines of children. How much resilience had there been in his dream, and how far would he have slogged on without any signs of success? The actor shook his head. “I couldn’t have done it,” he said.)