For a long time now, Dialogue has subdivided the prose in each issue into  Articles and Essays, Personal Voices,  and Fiction.  These divisions are  strained by current submissions.

The division between Articles and Essays always seemed pretty nebulous to me–”Articles” is, I think, meant to signify academicishness, while “Essays” are, presumably, thinky but not necessarily heavily footnoted.  But since most academics younger than 40 (50?) don’t feel the need to scrupulously avoid the first person or affect the semblance of “objectivity” that once characterized scholarly writing, and since  postmodern theoretical frameworks in many disciplines actually encourage the self-conscious articulation of one’s subject position, a good deal of academic writing seems less formal and more “Essay”istic than in decades past.  Still, since these two categories have been lumped together for a long time, it’s easy to just leave them that way, without too much fretting about what’s an article and what’s an essay.

The distinctions between “Personal Voices” and “Fiction” are blurred by the newish category (is it a genre yet, or still?) of “creative nonfiction.”  There is, of course, a whole (sub)genre of writing devoted to the exploration of what creative nonfiction is, but this is the sort of thing that even someone who managed to tolerate an entire graduate seminar on the definition of postmodernism (and its discontents), can hardly wade through for more than a few dozen pages without starting to mutter things like “ivory tower”, “navel gazing”, “job security for English majors”  under her breath.  If pressed for a shorthand definition, I would say that “creative nonfiction” organizes itself around a narrative sequence, where a personal essay grows out of the exploration of an idea or a theme.  [I know that's not a terribly satisfying definition, and I hope it will lead to plenty of  interesting quibbling in the comments].

So far, I’ve lumped one creative non-fiction piece in with the fiction, and put one into Personal Voices, which used to mean “Personal Essays.”   But the Table of Contents is not really the problem, of course–such practical issues of categorization are easily managed.  What troubles me is that I think Creative Nonfiction may eventually edge out Personal Essays altogether, and Mormons will join the rest of the world in creating slightly detached, ironic memoirs, heartbreaking works of staggering genius, and non-fiction that is so “creative” as to create epic scandals on Oprah.

This, it seems to me, would be a terrible loss.  My sentiment may be merely the midlife nostalgia of  someone whose early intellectual life was nurtured by Eugene England, Laurel Ulrich, Marden Clark, Louise Plummer, Elouise Bell and other mid-20th-century Mormons who found the personal essay form apt for the function of exploring the tangled intersections of their own thoughts with Mormon theology and culture, and, in essaying those heights and depths, laid down a thin golden thread for me to follow home after venturing into my own wildernesses.  Certainly Mormon artists and thinkers have used other genres to accomplish some of the same work–there were the novelists of the 1940s, historians and biographers whose narratives of the Mormon past took on the contours of a founding epic (or myth, if the word can be tolerated), poets and hymnodists who made both art and theology, folklorists and storytellers, and always autobiographers and journal-keepers.  One could argue, in fact, that the sine qua non of modern Mormonism, Joseph Smith’s account of the First Vision, was itself a work of creative non-fiction, and that the proliferation of that genre is thus wholly appropriate and ought to be welcomed as quintessentially Mormon.

And still, I want to argue that we need the Mormon personal essay, for another couple of decades, at least.  It is an important mode of resistance against the tropes of post-post-modernism:  irony,  satire, parody,  snark.  We like our memoirs biting–David Sedaris vivisecting his family for our amusement, Augusten Burroughs mining addiction and ruin for dark comedy, Elizabeth Wurtzel and Marya Hornbacher making depression and eating disorders into lurid spectacle.  Always, the narrative “I” is disconnected–the story is always in the past tense.  Wherever these authors were then, they are not now–now they are on book tours (which will later be cynically described and illustrated with sketches of amusingly pathetic audience members), allowing readers a faux-intimacy with a literary version of their past selves.  Sincerity has somehow come to be seen as antithetical to the “authenticity”  of such rehearsals.  And Mormonism could lend itself perfectly to the wry, sardonic-but-affectionate tone of the memoir/sketch/vaguely parodic short story.  What could be better, funnier, more authentic then poking a little fun at your own religious convictions and practice?  How better to show that Mormons are not weird, that we are good Americans, that we get the jokes in Big Love, too, and ought to be allowed to hang out with the cool kids now?  Maybe we could even get Ira Glass to do one story where the Mormon character is not a bigot or a rube!

But we are weird.  We believe (or wish we could) in angels, gold plates, prophets in bad suits and conservative ties, sending our children to faraway places to do that most unhip thing of all–proselyting!  We spend three hours (!) every week talking didactically [I would say sermonizing, except that "sermon" implies a liveliness and polish we eschew in favor of unskilled sincerity] about our doctrine, debating the significance of grammatical errors in holy writ, exhorting each other to repentance, enduring “special musical numbers”  [seriously, how could you possibly parody something that unironically calls itself "special"?], organizing do-good-y projects of all sorts, testifying in tearful, clumsy words and acts of pure grace.  We are earnest.

And so is the personal essay–it’s not properly “authentic”, because the author deigns to invite the reader into the creative thicket with her.  The invitation only works when it is sincere, when the author cares about the reader, recognizes that author-ity is always a gift, whether by the laying on of hands or of eyes and reading glasses.  Creative nonfiction can be “truth…independent in that sphere where [the author] has placed it.”  If a memoir falls in the forest, it makes a noise whether or not anyone hears it–its narrative is still “true.”  Not so the essay–it is meaningful only in community, where two or three (well, at least two–a writer and a reader) are gathered.   It is tentative, pensive, incomplete, partial; it believes in and relies on that which is yet to be revealed. [Like blog posts by certain writers, it may overuse the em-dash, the semi-colon, and the parenthetical aside].  It works only when it is earnest, unabashed, when the writer is willing not only to confess her indiscretions, but to abandon discretion and announce her convictions as well as questioning them.  Belief and hope are terribly out of fashion just now, and look to be so for a few years yet, and that is why Mormon literature needs a literary form that allows us to “believe all things, …hope all things,”  to “seek after” things that are true and lovely, not from the artist’s garret or the therapist’s couch or the book tour lectern, not in the safety of the ironic past tense, but in the earnest, present willingness to subjugate narrative authority for the sake of communal pursuit of ideas.

Call For Papers
The Association for Mormon Letters announces that our Annual Meeting will be held on Saturday, February 27th on the campus of Utah Valley University. The theme of the Meeting is “One Eternal Round: Mormon Literature Past, Present, and Future.” We welcome submissions on any topic relating to Mormon literature, film, or drama. Please submit a short (2 to 3 paragraph) abstract of your paper proposal to Boyd Petersen, boyd.petersen@uvu.edu or to Eric Samuelsen, eric_samuelsen@byu.edu, on or before February 1, 2010.

AML Blog
The AML’s new blog, Dawning of a Brighter Day, has just launched. Permabloggers include Gideon Burton, Margaret Blair Young, Rachel Nunes, Chris Bigelow and more. It should be a great new place for conversations about Mormon literature.

Tenth Annual Mormon Studies Conference

Outmigration

and the

Mormon Quest for Education

November 5^th – 6^th, 2009

Library Lecture Hall

Utah Valley University

In 2009, the PEW Forum’s “Portrait of Mormons in the U.S.” determined that Mormons are “significantly more likely than the population overall” to seek a college education. Since Joseph Smith created the School of the Prophets in Kirtland, Ohio, the Church has called members to “seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”

In the twentieth century, a significant force in Mormon outmigration from Utah was the quest for opportunities in higher education. As Latter-day Saints enrolled in universities such as the University of Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, NYU, and George Washington University, they helped to reshape Mormon culture in these communities. Their professional pursuits in business, law, politics, and academia also contributed to the changing perceptions of Mormons by outsiders.

This two-day conference will reflect on the experience of these migrants as they sought to develop themselves and advance the cause of Mormonism through their studies at prestigious colleges and universities. A variety of outmigrants, their biographers, and Mormon studies scholars will join together to discuss this phenomenon and its connection to broader questions in the Mormon quest for education.       Pertinent questions for discussion include: How has Mormon society been affected and reshaped by outmigration? In what ways have these migrants contributed to social institutions in the United States? What challenges are present as Mormons pursue secular education while maintaining their status as a “peculiar people”?

The conference is a joint effort between UVU’s Religious Studies Program and Marian and Wesley Johnson, whose research included over six hundred interviews in twenty-one cities across the county.

Thursday, November 5

UVU Library Lecture Hall

Opening Remarks

Brian Birch, UVU

8:30 – 9:45

Wesley Johnson

Marian Johnson

(Outmigration Project)

10:00 – 11:15 a.m.

Keynote Address

Greta  Peterson

Chase Peterson

11:30 – 12:45 p.m.

TBA

1:00 – 2:15 p.m.

Armand Mauss

2:30 – 3:45

Michael Quinn (J. Reuben Clark)

Robert Fletcher (Harvey Fletcher)

Friday, November 6

UVU Library Lecture Hall

Welcome

Boyd J. Petersen, UVU

9:00 – 9:50 a.m.

Ned Hill

Jack Wheatley

10:00 – 10:50 a.m.

Keynote Address

Jan Shipps

11:00 – 11:50 a.m.

Mark Cannon

12:00 – 12:50 p.m.

Brownbag Panel Discussion

Secular Knowledge and Religious Faith

1:00 – 1:50 p.m.

John Carmack

(Perpetual Education Fund)

2:00 – 2:50 p.m.

Boyd Petersen

(Hugh Nibley)

From the October 6, 2009 New York Times (by way of the AML-list):

In an ingenious spin on the co-author strategy, Stephenie Meyer, who wrote the Twilight novels, said that her vampire hero appeared in a dream and then dictated the first book as fast as she could type. He did not demand a percentage of the advance. This does sound like a great strategy, and I understand that millions of American women currently have a dream of having that dream.

I am one of those American women. Oh, not for the reason I think the Times writer implied. I wouldn’t let a man for whom the destruction of the human female was his most primitive instinct near my computer, much less me. But I do dream of getting in on that “it-writes-itself” genre…especially since it seems to be paying now.

Heck, I give my writing away. I work my butt off trying to make my fiction good enough for someone to publish for free. Rephrase. Actually, I’ve worked my butt on, seeing as its grown rather large as I build my career as an unpaid artiste. So yeah, I want to write my dreams by dictation, make a boat load of money, and have a home gym and a personal trainer. And a maid. I’d even get a dog if I had someone to clean up after it. And a golf cart. I’ve always wanted to pick my kids up from school in a golf cart.  Way cool. Oh, and maybe I’d buy an electric can opener. No, an electric knife for Thanksgiving dinner. I don’t want to seem worldly.

What about the rest of you? What would you buy if you made millions off your dreams?

I am making my way through the Carter-touted Story Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee and have met some challenging ideas. I’d thought I’d run one up the flagpole.

Early in the book, McKee discusses his take on the decline of the storytelling craft. He faults what I’ll call the assembly line manufacture of stories. But he concludes this section like this:

The final cause for the decline of story runs very deep. Values, the positive/negative charges of life, are at the soul of our art. The writer shapes story around a perception of what’s worth living for, what’s worth dying for, what’s foolish to pursue, the meaning of justice, truth–the essential values. In decades past, writer and society more or less agreed on these questions, but more and more ours has become an age of moral and ethical cynicism, relativism, and subjectivism–a great confusion of values….

This erosion of values has brought with it a corresponding erosion of story. Unlike writers in the past, we can assume nothing. First we must dig deeply into life to uncover new insights, new refinements of value and meaning, then create a story vehicle that expresses our interpretation to an increasingly agnostic world. (17)

There is much to digest here. I’ve read the passage a billion times, trying to process it, to decide whether or not I stand with him. I think he is equating values with truth, and truth with morality and ethics. So when he mentions  the “erosion of values,” he could just as easily have written “erosion of morals.” Maybe that’s a leap since he speaks of “what’s foolish to pursue” as a value. Still, he seems to set up “moral and ethical cynicism, relativism, and subjectivism” as the opposite of value, so I’m sticking to my interpretation of value as, at least in part, morality. This fits nicely with my Mormon worldview, so I accepted his position.

In fact, the idea that people with morals, or moral people, are best suited to craft stories that attain a level of greatness excited me. I thought, Hallelujah! What good news for Mormon writers!

But then reality hit: The most devout, or morality-based, of Mormon stories tend to be far from the mark of great literature, a term I admit limps. Oh, I know that some Mormon lit is deep and meaningful, but much is not, particularly if it can wear the label “faith-promoting.” And don’t we think of faith-promoting stories and their writers as being especially morally steeped? I can’t speak for anyone except myself, but to me, these kinds of Deseret Bookish tales are superficial because they will surely reach a moral conclusion that is not only predictable,  but is “authorized.” I know from the outset what the moral boundaries of such a story will be.

Interestingly, McKee doesn’t mention anything about boundaries in his discussion of values, morals, or ethics. In fact, he says writers must “dig deeper,” which, to my mind, suggests moving beyond established boundaries. Yet to most Mormons, morality is defined by its boundaries.

Somewhere along the line, it dawned on me that I was interchanging the concept of morality with the idea of religious. Suddenly I lost confidence that religious writers are, by default, moral writers. Certainly our faith-promoting stories are bursting with Standards, spelled with a capital S, but are these Standards the same as values, ethics, and morals?

I’m left asking why today’s best literature is not being created by religious people. Shouldn’t the very cultures that most vociferously defend choosing the right, or doing what Jesus would, be the best at developing ideas that explore moral and ethical controversies?

Of course I acknowledge that many of the greatest writers of the 20th century had strong religious ties. But that is McKee’s point. Great stories used to be written by moral people, but, he argues, the morality and values behind these stories is no longer lauded on a large scale. This brings me back to the question: Have religious people–including Mormons–stopped (or never been) the McKee kind of moral?

One of my dearest LDS friends has cautioned me not to read the kinds of things I read, worrying that the books and journals she questions might challenge my testimony. She, like many others, only ingests reading material she feels is church-approved, or definitively ‘right,” and therefore safe. To her, if anything Joseph Smith taught or did proved  to be not “true,” then her entire religion–her life–falls into the chum bucket. Her primary investment is not discovering truth, but sustaining truth as she already has it.

Can that be a moral way to live?

Can a person with such a strong, overarching need to protect his/her core identity “dig deeply into life to uncover new insights, new refinements of value and meaning”? Can he/she “then create a story vehicle that expresse[s his/her] interpretation to an increasingly agnostic world”?

Here my brain spins, so I ask your opinion. Can a person’s faith conviction prevent him/her from becoming deeply, truly moral? If so, is this lack of morality preventing our writers from crafting masterpieces? I tend to think so.

The other day, I unexpectedly had an hour of free time  (I know, it never happens to me either. I wish I knew what stars had aligned so I could do it again).  Of course I headed to Barnes and Noble.  I spent some time greeting old friends on the shelves, and then settled down with a hot chocolate from the cafe and a comfy chair to read my books.

I picked up two books that caught my eye:  Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, and On Writing Well, by William Zinsser.  I had heard of the first, and had been meaing to read it.  I hadn’t a clue about the second, but I figured any book with the words “30 Anniversay Edition” printed on the front must have staying power, and deserved a look.

I devoured Zinsser’s book in an afternoon.  I felt like he was giving me the secrets of writing, and I reveled in it.  I skipped some parts that were specific to journalism, but I paid close attention to the parts about the principles of writing.  I was struck by his discussion of clutter.

Zinsser says people always try too hard to make their sentences sound like something an educated person would write.  Most people use too many words, and most people can’t get away with it. I always knew that adverbs and adjectives were not the friend my 8th grade English teacher told me they were, but Zinsser took it beyond that.  He talked about putting brackets around his students’ clutter in papers.  Phrases like “I might add”, “It is interesting to note” “Due to the fact”  ”With the possible exception” all got cut.  ”Virtually” and “literally” are also some of his least favorite adverbs, because they are repetitive.   His description of clutter in a sentence and “journal-ese” stayed with me as I turned to Miss Hurston’s  novel.

Zora Neale Hurston does not use clutter in her writing.  Her writing is breathtaking.  Just FYI.

I was so caught up in the spirit of the novel that I actually read the afterward, something I almost never do.    Here is a sentence that appears in the 2nd paragraph:

“Virtually ignored after the early fifties, even by the Black Arts movement in the sixties, an otherwise noisy and intense spell of black image – and myth-making that rescued so many black writers from remaindered oblivion, Hurston embodied a more or less harmonious but nevertheless problematic unity of opposites.”

With Zinsser’s lessons still fresh in my mind, I laughed out loud, and read the sentence to my husband.

“Wow, that’s some serious overblown writing.  This guy is trying way too hard to sound smart.  Who IS this blow hard, anyway?”

I checked the Table of Contents.

“Have you ever heard of Henry Louis Gates, Jr?” I asked DH.

“Um, yeah.  He’s one of the nation’s leading scholars on race relations.  He teaches at Harvard.”

A bell rang in my head.

“Was he the guy who was arrested for trying to get into his own house?”

“Yes, that’s him.”

So, I guess he is pretty smart.

But I am still left scratching my head.  This guy breaks the rules for writing well, and I don’t think he does it for the sake of style.  And the result is exactly what Zinsser describes in his book—the reader loses interest because there is too much to wade through.    I’m not saying that the sentence I quoted isn’t worth decoding, or that Gates doesn’t have some insightful things to tell me about Hurston’s exceptional novel.  I’m saying that the clutter in his language bogged me down.

But who am I to argue with a scholar of his merit?

It leaves me wondering what good writing is.  I was behind Zinsser all the way, and a book like Their Eyes were Watching God is an example of something that can only be described as good writing.  But then there is all the stuff in between that sometimes seems a little harder to categorize.  I’ll admit to reading an essay that has won some award or another, and think, “Why is this considered good?”  And I don’t mean that I’m dismissing it as a piece of junk, it’s that sometimes I just can’t see it.    And I want to see it, because if I could, I know that would make me a better writer.

But I’d like to think that sometimes, it just isn’t there.

What does good writing look like to you?

I’ve had a very grumpy weekend. My husband was on call, which never does much for my mood, and I’m feeling the crunch of all the things that need to be done before school starts next week (but not the accompanying motivation to actually hit the mall and Target and Office Max). Most of all, I’ve been peevish because I know that a great party has been going on practically in my backyard, yet I’m on the other side of town, refereeing fights and going to piano recitals and folding laundry.

When we lived in Missouri and Minnesota and Texas, we’d get information about the Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium in the mail, and I’d sigh and say, “If we ever move to Utah, I’m there.” So we moved, and I came. But you probably didn’t see me (not that you were looking). Because instead of listening to speakers, attending dinners, devotionals and sing-a-longs, meeting old friends in the hallway, and singing karaoke late into the night, I got babysitters only for the two panel discussions on which I was participating, then rushed home to do the mom thing. I got enough of a glimpse of how much fun everyone else was having (through their blog posts and tweets and facebook status updates) that I’ve felt very jealous all weekend.

So next year, my husband and I have a plan. We’re going to sign up for the symposium, book a hotel downtown, find someone to keep the kids for the weekend, and tell everyone we’re going someplace sexy, like maybe Vegas or San Diego. No one will have to know that we’re only five miles away– close enough to rush home to change that exceedingly poopy diaper or drive the kids to soccer practice. Instead, we’ll be tourists in our hometown. I can’t wait.

Since I didn’t make it to much, rub it in. Tell me about all the great stuff I missed.

3 boxes Dialogue

1 box JMH, BYU Studies

1 box Mormon women’s history

What about you?  What’s on your shelves?  Do the relative proportions of things reflect your personality and interests?  I find, for instance, that grad school themes are drastically overrepresented compared to what I really do all day.  On the other hand, there are also not-so-subtle hints about what it is I should be doing all day in the boxes of music.  What have you discovered packing up your library (or unpacking it, like Walter Benjamin)?

Well summer’s about halfway over. How’s the reading coming?

I ask because as I prepare for my family’s vacation to Yellowstone I’m interested in some reading recommendations. I’m up for just about anything—heavy or fluffy, creepy or funny—just as long as it’s good. I’ll kick it off with my list:

—Mudbound by Hillary Jordan. A literary novel that’s also an incredibly fast and satisfying read. Although the story of racial tension and prejudice on a Mississippi Delta farm in the late 1940s can be harrowing—and yes, a touch predictable—the writing is lovely and the characters richly drawn.

—Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stout. If you haven’t read this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction, you should. Stout writes with charity, which is the highest compliment I can pay any writer. Plus, Olive is a character you won’t soon forget.

—The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. This one’s a beach book for sure. A quintessential thriller, full of plot twists and mysteries to be solved, Dragon Tattoo will keep you guessing. I found the beginning of the novel a little long to slog through, but once the story got going it really took off. Plus, the novel’s translated from the Swedish, so it has that touch of international cache that John Grisham’s latest title lacks (but of course you don’t care about cache, right?).

—For all of you non-fiction readers: A Failure of Capitalism by Richard A. Posner. True confession: I haven’t read the whole thing (yet) since I bought it for my husband for Father’s Day, but what I have read is lucid and interesting and makes the complexities of our current economic crisis relatively easy to understand for those (like me) without much background in economics. Not the cheeriest of summer books, to be sure, but if you approach your summer reading with a sense of purpose rather than a sense of escape, then here you go.

—And finally, for those of you planning to enter next year’s Irreantum fiction contest: Story by Robert McKee. Our own Stephen Carter has recommended this title a number of times and I finally broke down and read it. Great stuff. Much of my summer has been spent reading the entries to the Irreantum fiction and creative nonfiction contests (over 100 entries in all), and while I have come across some gems—if you entered, yes, it was probably you—the majority of entrants could definitely use some story structure intervention. McKee’s book gets at the heart of story structure in a practical, accessible, memorable way. For all the writing books I’ve read and pieces of fiction I’ve studied and written and edited and graded, McKee helped me see the act of story creation in a whole new way.

Now I want to hear about the books you think I should be reading. Yellowstone is right around the corner. Hopefully I can get my nose out of a book long enough to see some buffalo.

My first response to the article was “Can Creative Writing Be Taught” exhaustion. As a person with an MFA who also teaches creative writing, not only does the whole argument make me a little weary—this again??—but I’ll admit to a bit of defensiveness, too. The legitimacy of my undergrad major in English Lit was never called into question, and my decision to try and teach a bunch of squirmy, distracted, hormonal fifteen-year-olds how to read, understand, and talk intelligently about the symbolism in The Lord of the Files was deemed an appropriate enough use of my time.

Little did I know that choosing an academic system that purports to teach folks about reading (or literary devices, or rhetoric, or expository writing) was an entirely laudable choice, if low-paying. But choosing an academic system that purports to teach others about creative writing? Waste of time! Ridiculous! A fool’s errand! Or (worst of all) downright dangerous! Didn’t I know that I was contributing to the very downfall of American letters, homogenizing the voice of the masses?

Okay, so I’m engaging in a bit of hyperbole (and if you were listening in the 10th Grade English class I used to teach, you know what that word means). And I do understand why creative writing, with an emphasis on the “creative,” is a much trickier subject to teach than, say, English grammar. As a product of the creative writing system, I agree that much of what makes a writer great–insight, inspiration, and yes, creativity itself–can’t really be “taught.” But I also know that my own MFA experience DID teach me many, many valuable things: basic elements of craft; how to read like a writer; how to revise effectively; how to give (and take) editorial feedback. These are all academically sound outcomes, in my opinion—outcomes born of a heckofa lot of hard academic work.

Which is why the initially snarky feel of Menard’s essay bugged me. His first sentence establishes a kind of roll-your-eyes, get-a-load-of-these-guys tone:

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem.

First off, I suppose he’s describing the traditional “workshop” setting here, but many (most?) creative writing courses and programs don’t rely on the workshop alone. I know mine didn’t. Mine involved reading—lots of reading, both good literature and dense texts on theory and craft—as well as instruction by qualified professors, writing critical papers, and a truckload of creative writing (obviously?). Workshopping was a part of the experience, yes, but to reduce a creative writing degree program to Menard’s dismissive initial sentence is pretty misleading.

But, yes, workshopping is one important aspect of an MFA, and it can be hit or miss. In some classes (both courses I’ve participated and in courses I’ve taught) the intellectual energy in a workshop is downright electric. It seems to me the point of getting an education in a room full of other people, rather than sitting alone in front of a computer, is to participate in that energy. There’s no better classroom experience than when your instructor and fellow classmates are engaged and smart and thoughtful, and you get the opportunity to learn as both a giver and receiver of critical feedback. Workshops offer students the chance to experience this in ways that lecture-based classrooms can’t approach.

Some workshops I’ve participated in have flopped, of course. Often, the teacher’s not very good, or you can be unlucky and land in a class where the participants are bored or disconnected or downright misanthropic, tearing apart your text with a scarcely-contained glee. But can’t all academic programs be described as hit or miss? The courses required to obtain my secondary education certification, for example, were probably 90% miss . . . ah, the torture that was “Theory and Methods of Secondary Education”!!

But enough of my defensiveness. Menard does make some good points in the article, especially when dealing directly with McGurl’s book, which sounds like an interesting read. For example:

[McGurl points out that ] university creative-writing programs don’t isolate writers from the world. On the contrary, university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit—the world of mass higher education and the white-collar workplace. Sticking writers in a garret would isolate them. Putting them in the ivory tower puts them in touch with real life.

A provocative statement and, in my experience, true. Which makes me wonder what the outcome will be when Brigham Young University starts putting a bunch of would-be writers in the quintessential Mormon Ivory Tower.

Yes, beginning this fall, BYU will be offering an MFA in creative writing. I think a BYU MFA bodes well for the future of Mormon letters, but then again we’ve established that I’m biased. Now I want to know what you think.

How do you feel about a creative writing programs in general? The new MFA in creative writing at BYU in particular? What kind of influence will it have on the next generation of Mormon writing? Positive, negative, or will its presence cause nary a ripple?