15   •   The Voice: Ayana Mathis and Mass Culture

Harpo, the multiplatform billion-dollar entertainment production company, is a palindrome for Oprah. Although the company may not appear to bear the name of Oprah Winfrey—the most significant force behind the migration of literature into popular culture—its ethos and brand values mirror the identity of the former daytime talk show host who runs its operations. With each recommendation for her book club accounting for more than one million additional copies sold, “The Oprah Effect” (also known as the “Oprah bump”) creates instant bestsellers.1 In 2007, Business Week reported that, for driving book sales, “no one comes close to Oprah’s clout: Publishers estimate that her power to sell a book is anywhere from 20 to 100 times that of any other media personality.”² Her sway over a massive audience has given her a profound literary influence, as Ayana Mathis discovered one brilliant autumn afternoon in Paris in early October 2012, when her mobile phone rang.

It was a request for an interview, and it initially struck Mathis as an onerous task, especially on the first clear day of her vacation after a solid week of rain. Her agent, Ellen Levine, advised her to prepare for a call at two in the afternoon. Although the thirty-nine-year-old Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate from 2011 knew that an interview with O, The Oprah Magazine might expose her new novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, to a large number of readers, she asked if it could wait, especially if the editor only “needed a quote” that might take “fifteen minutes.”³ She had not considered that the popular magazine was the most successful startup ever in the industry, turning a $140 million profit in just the first two years of its existence.⁴ Her attention, instead, was fixed on sightseeing with her partner under the bright Parisian sky. But the magazine’s editor insisted. By two o’clock, Mathis had hurried back inside, but “the phone didn’t ring.” She opened her laptop and glanced at the time. At 2:12, the phone rang. “Can I speak to Ayana Mathis?” the voice inquired. “Yeah,” she blurted out, unable to mask her impatience. Then, in a calm measured tone, the voice replied, “This is Oprah Winfrey.”5

Mathis immediately took it as a ruse, flatly replying, “No, it isn’t.” The voice insisted, “No, no it is, it’s Oprah Winfrey.”⁶ The request for a short interview with an editor for O, The Oprah Magazine had been a setup to enable Winfrey to break the life-changing news herself. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie had been selected for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, Winfrey’s revamped multimedia reading group that launched in 2012, following the cancellation of The Oprah Winfrey Show along with its associated book discussion club after a fifteen-year run from 1996 to 2011. Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, which adopted as its first title Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, operates as a joint venture of the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) and O, The Oprah Magazine, leveraging social media platforms and producing special e-reader editions of its adopted texts. Through early 2013, Mathis was treated to a book launch unmatched by any faculty or graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one propelled by the twenty-first century’s most powerful amplifier of literary talent. But what remained to be seen was whether the packaging and branding of Mathis for mass consumption—which she found at times “overwhelming and destabilizing and bizarre”—would distort or somehow compromise the voice she had developed at the Workshop in 2009–2011.⁷ Also at issue was whether Winfrey’s endorsement would undermine the loyalty of Marilynne Robinson, her mentor, who was a notoriously sharp critic of commercial media.

Winfrey informed Mathis that she could not utter a word of her selection for two months, until December, at which time the press release and publicity strategy would be in place. Until then, Winfrey said, celebrate. That she did. She and her partner “decided to be splashy and absurd,” Mathis fondly remembered of the night she toasted the birth of her new career over champagne—“a bottle I couldn’t afford”—and oysters. They “stumbled home,” delirious in the moment, when the chaos of fame and fortune still stood at a safe distance in the future. Oprah had said she “could tell my nearest and dearest,” which included her mother, her partner, and her best friend and fellow MFA from the Workshop, Justin Torres.⁸

Voice Lessons

When Mathis’s close friend Torres first visited Iowa City in 2008, he had underestimated the xenophobia of the rural Midwest. A gay New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent who applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in his late twenties, Torres was not prepared for the lack of diversity in the program. The majority of the programs he applied to had accepted him. But Iowa, through the work of Director Lan Samantha Chang, pursued him most aggressively. On his campus visit, he experienced immediate culture shock. In particular, when he visited classes, he was stunned by what Matthew Salesses calls “the loss of voices of color to the white straight male default of the writing workshops.”9 These were still very much Paul Engle’s workshops, where competition and criticism prevailed over cooperation and collaboration. When minority students tried to defend their writing, Torres observed, these often turned into defenses of themselves and their own ethnic identities. During his visit, Torres’s “reservations and hesitations were mainly about the diversity of the program and the diversity of the town.” He explained, “I was coming from Brooklyn as a queer Puerto Rican, and I was nervous about what it would be like to come to Iowa City.” Much of his concern centered on the energy he would have to pour into surviving in this campus culture. “Sometimes it’s just exhausting going into a class of middle-class, straight, white people,” he confessed, an environment in which he felt “just automatically that ‘other.’ ”¹⁰ His discomfort was acute enough that he resolved to attend only under the condition that his best friend, Ayana Mathis, attend the program with him. In the absence of any support system he could find at Iowa, he would bring his own with him from New York.

Mathis—who had been dabbling in poetry, freelance journalism, copy editing, fact checking, public relations, and translation projects—found the opportunity irresistible. During her itinerant childhood, she moved frequently with her mother. Raised in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, Mathis lived in New Jersey and other locations following the estrangement of her mother from her father and the rest of the extended family. Unlike Torres, Mathis did not fear the prospect of living in an alien culture, especially one where she stood out as an ethnic other. Indeed, she had lived in Florence for two and a half years before moving south toward Siena to Barbarino Val d’Elsa, a small, picturesque, medieval walled city with a thousand residents in the hills of Tuscany. While in Southern Italy contemplating a magazine career as a travel writer, Mathis continued to write poetry and struggled to learn the language to maintain her position as a server at a cocktail bar. But after bringing the wrong drinks to exasperated patrons too many times—especially those not interested in translating their orders for a server whose Italian was “nonexistent”—she abandoned “this tragic waitressing job” and returned to the United States. She had attended NYU, Temple, and the New School but dropped out without a degree; freelance writing and fact checking for magazines, she had hoped, might lead to a more secure position as an editor.11

Once Mathis returned from Europe to New York, she began writing nonfiction, mainly autobiographical creative vignettes, representing her first real foray into prose, which laid the foundation for her fiction. She began crafting the narratives with the notion that she “would shape them into something like a memoir.”¹² That memoir took shape at a New York friend’s art studio in West Chelsea where Jackson Taylor, author of The Blue Orchard and associate director of the New School’s Graduate Writing Program, led an informal class. Arranged by word of mouth, this group consisted of Taylor insiders looking to develop their writing independent of a formalized program. Taylor found much in Mathis’s memoir to admire, and imbued her with the courage to persist in fulfilling its promise. The sessions were held in the studio of a woman named Ultra Violet, a former member of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Mickey Mouse figurines, artifacts, and dolls occupied every square inch of wall and counter space, making for a surreal environment. The ubiquity of reproduced pop culture in these surroundings paradoxically put the writers at a critical distance to mainstream consumerism and entertainment media. Mickey Mouse in so many forms was no longer Mickey Mouse, but an abstraction functioning like Warhol’s famous repetition of the Campbell’s Soup label and Marilyn Monroe’s image, all casting a critical eye on mass production and consumer culture.

Before the Workshop, Ultra Violet’s studio was Mathis’s workshop. Taylor, “an amazing teacher,” fostered eclecticism, tolerance, and diversity in an open environment that encouraged risk taking and creative experimentation. Mathis recalled “people working in different genres,” with a wide spectrum of verse, creative nonfiction, and fiction. The writers themselves, who included Torres, seemed an embodiment of “one of those ‘dreams of New York,’ ” a vibrant array of diverse tastes “with just completely different backgrounds—racially different, economically different, different professions—engaging in impassioned and interesting conversations about writing.” Free from the polarizing constraints of formal education in traditional MFA programs that pitted students in competition with one another for fellowships, grades, and even publications, the group thrived creatively in the “funny and bizarre, but kind of wonderful” setting of Ultra Violet’s Mickey Mouse–bedecked latter-day Warhol art studio.13

The “language-reliant poetry/prose hybrids” Mathis developed in Jackson’s studio constituted the writing sample she submitted for admission to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.¹⁴ Buoyed by Taylor’s and Torres’s encouragement, she resolved to fictionalize her memoir and send it with her application. Unlike the complete novels and short story collections—many published—among the samples of the more than one thousand applicants she was competing against for admission, her fictionalized memoir was a meager thirty-two pages, just two over the minimum requirement. Yet the admissions committee heard the voice of a young writer with a powerful future in the world of letters. The piece proved instrumental in her acceptance to the Workshop, along with Torres’s persistence in urging Chang to accept her.

From copy editing English translations of publicity materials for small businesses and wineries in Tuscany, Mathis found herself accepted to the most competitive creative writing program in the world. Admission to the Workshop has become widely recognized in popular culture as a life-changing event. The concluding episode of the third season of the HBO television series Girls, in March 2014, dramatized the euphoric experience of being accepted to Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The scene depicting the character Hannah Horvath clutching her acceptance letter could not overemphasize the triumph of the moment. A form rejection letter from the Workshop dated February 27, 2015, which went viral on the internet because of a verb tense error in the first sentence, illustrates the extraordinarily remote chances of being accepted; signed by Director Lan Samantha Chang, it informed the recipient, Julie Mannell, that “this year, one-thousand and twenty-six people applied for twenty-five spaces.”¹⁵ This staggering ratio distinguishes the Workshop as the world’s second most selective graduate program in any field, far more difficult to enter than the schools of law or medicine at Harvard and Stanford, and behind only the teaching arm of the Mayo Medical Clinic.¹⁶ Mathis’s promising writing samples, along with the strong endorsement of Taylor and Torres, combined to earn her admission to this elite program.

Once enrolled at the Workshop, Mathis and Torres both encountered tension. They had been working on their memoirs, which put them in the perplexing situation of offering themselves as subjects for the scrutiny of their straight, white, mostly male peers. Although the Chang era brought a sharp increase in opportunities for people of color like Mathis and Torres, the climate was not yet entirely accommodating. The exhaustion of attending classes as “other” set in for both of them. Mathis described one particular incident involving a workshop session for a story that later became part of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. “One of the characters” in the story “is referred to as having something like almond skin, something that would identify the character as black,” she explained. As her peers bore down on that detail, “there was a person in the workshop who said they had been reading happily up to that point, but then felt they were reading a story about race—which somehow invalidated what they’d been reading up to that point.” The author, the student argued, was gratuitously foregrounding race to cover for a lack of aesthetic merit. When Mathis pointed out that “things like that certainly happened,” Torres reported that such moments “make you want to pull your hair out.”17

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, which Mathis wrote entirely at Iowa against such untoward resistance, centers on Hattie Shepherd, a beautiful “high yellow” woman who moves from Georgia to Philadelphia in the early 1900s after her father was murdered by a group of white men. Hattie marries August, a dockworker who turns out to be a drinker, gambler, and womanizer. They have eleven children, nine of whom survive. Over time, Hattie’s once vibrant and hopeful spirit becomes embittered and worn down from the burden of losing two babies, raising nine more, and dealing with an undependable husband. At one point she takes her youngest daughter and runs away with a young lover, but then realizes he too is unfaithful, so she returns to her husband.

This narrative did not come without a struggle. Mathis divulged how she was crushed by her mentor Marilynne Robinson’s critique of her first attempt at writing a fictionalized memoir. Robinson chided her for creating characters that “aren’t sufficiently in the situations in which she placed them,” urging her to abandon the project and start over. Although she felt her fictionalized autobiographical vignettes expressed a deep part of her experience, she succumbed to the overwhelming pressure from both peers and mentor to adopt an altogether new narrative voice and locus of subjectivity through “the primacy of invented character.” She began to internalize the insistence that the voice of her fictionalized memoir “was stilted, and wrong, and ridiculous,” hurtful allegations that Robinson reinforced. The pressure to conform to the conventional standard of the workshop short story was squarely upon her, a predicament Sandra Cisneros had experienced during the Jack Leggett era of the 1970s. “Of course,” Mathis recalled of this baptism by fire, “I was completely devastated.”¹⁸

The final judgment on the narrative voice of Mathis’s autobiographical memoir carried disturbing racial implications. The logic of the class’s consensus on her work in effect condemned and rejected her racial identity, particularly as the voice of her well-traveled life. She remembered returning for Thanksgiving break in the fall of 2009 to her partner’s apartment feeling emotionally violated. She headed for the shower, weeping profusely. Submitting herself to such abuse for another month seemed impossible to endure. The crying lasted for a full day, leaving her partner helpless to find a way of consoling her. If the thirty-two-page fictionalized memoir was strong enough to gain her admission to the program, she thought, surely it could pass muster at a workshop session. By this point, Hattie Shepherd had yet to arrive in the story, and there was no clear sign “that she would, at all.” Stunned by how savagely and swiftly her writing was “beaten up” by her peers, she sunk into “a crisis.” Friends consoled her by attempting to normalize her experience as one shared by most new Workshop students. This expected hazing ritual, they assured her, was common. The crisis that followed, the rationalization went, “happens to a lot of people in their first semester at Iowa, especially after you get a little beaten up.” Thoughts of self-doubt plagued her: “What am I doing here? I am not really a writer! Oh my God!” The desperation was almost indescribable. “I am making it sound really light, but at the time” it was a weight she could not bear, a “huge crisis of faith.”19

After “twenty-four hours in tears,” Mathis poured a drink and pulled herself together. She remembered thinking, “Well, what are you going to do? You’re here. You have to do something. You can’t just spend the next two years weeping” and assuming the MFA would magically appear. The prevailing culture of the program drove her away from her creative instincts. “I do not consider myself a short story writer,” she said. But pressure to specialize in short story writing was overwhelming; mastering it was the only option for survival. “I’ll try to write some stories anyway,” she resolved. Before leaving the program, “I’d try.”²⁰

Her first foray into the short story involved a teenage mother whose infant died, precisely the scenario with which The Twelve Tribes of Hattie begins. That story “was a kind of strange hybrid of the first and last chapters” of the novel. Each of her subsequent stories built on the one before, so that they “became a prism through which” Hattie, the matriarch at the heart of the novel, “could be refracted.” Although each of her characters could be construed as a window into the Great Migration, her intent was not to write a historical novel. The title’s reference to the Twelve Tribes of Israel became “a metaphor of nation building and leaving a situation of bondage and coming to a situation of freedom,” which is finally disillusioning, a place that “is not what folks thought it would be.”21 Mathis’s turn to the short story drew on her Pentecostal background for biblical themes of mass exodus. The novel’s organizing theme depicts African Americans fleeing oppression in the South only to encounter different kinds of racism in the North. It draws on the Bible’s rendition of the Israelites’ emergence from the wilderness of Egypt only to encounter the Babylonians, theological patterns actively encouraged by Robinson.

New Inflections

The fingerprints of Marilynne Robinson are readily apparent on Mathis’s Iowa MFA thesis from 2011. Robinson made a career of fashioning narratives out of the complex interiority of preachers’ lives that form the subjects of her world-famous trilogy of novels, Gilead, Home, and Lila. The first of three stories Mathis submitted as her thesis explores the inner world of Six, a teenage preacher who heard his calling after a terrible accident left him physically and emotionally scarred for life. As depicted in her published novel, the accident occurred when his sisters, Cassie and Bell, were rolling their hair in curlers in their home in early 1940s Philadelphia. Ordering their brother about, they asked for more bobby pins, sending him to “tell mother we need the hot comb in twenty minutes.” He played along, assuming the role of their butler. Bell lit the hot water heater and opened the faucet valve. Water rushed “into the tub in a torrent,” billowing steam “hot enough to cook an egg.” When they requested a clean towel, he was “just about to stand for an exaggerated pretend bow when he lost his balance and fell into the tub.” His sisters screamed and pulled him from the tub, horrified as “he convulsed on the tile.” “Feeling as though his flesh was sliding off of his bones, he blacked out” the moment his mother Hattie entered the room.²²

After such Morrisonesque interludes from Six’s past, we return to the present setting of a revival tent in Alabama where the young preacher is about to deliver a sermon. Two years earlier he heard his calling, which “came over him like a fit; it hijacked him suddenly.” The story echoes the anxiety Mathis suffered during her own “crisis of faith” when she dreaded returning to the Workshop after the Thanksgiving holiday in 2009. Six’s crisis fittingly occurs in a public forum in which he is under pressure to produce inspiring wisdom for a congregation of judgmental listeners. He approaches the pulpit with absolutely nothing prepared, looking out at a sea of unsympathetic eyes. He hears mumbling, “He ain’t no bigger than a minute,” and his eyes flood with tears.23 But soon he finds his voice. Midway through the sermon a shout of “Amen!” rises from the crowd, unleashing a floodtide of spirit in the congregation. Suddenly “his anxiety was replaced with an ecstasy that spun like a ball of fire.”²⁴

Mathis self-reflexively inscribes her triumph over her own traumatic experiences as a first-year Workshop student into the self-conscious and terribly blocked adolescent preacher Six, who eventually finds his voice and uplifts the congregation. Her method shares a long literary history of self-reflexive fiction dating back to Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.²⁵ She came to the short story by way of memoir writing with Jackson Taylor. Now in the realm of fiction, she deftly debunks the notion of romantic inspiration as a reliable resource for creative inspiration, especially for generating moving lyricism on cue before a judgmental audience. Although Six had been “hijacked” by the Holy Spirit when he first heard his calling, he certainly has no means by which to consistently recreate that inspiration. He instead more pragmatically considers his audience’s expectations and selects his material for the sermon accordingly. Mathis would learn to summon her most powerful prose in precisely this manner, particularly under the guidance of Robinson.

In a “webisode” video interview on Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, Mathis dutifully recites the “three lessons” she learned from Robinson, all of which actively discourage self-reflexivity. The autobiographical impulse did not derive from Robinson, but was Mathis’s own, traceable to her earlier memoir writing, as well as her identification with James Baldwin. In him, she saw “a writer who looked like me” and seemed as though he “understood the singularities of my experience.” When she encountered his deeply autobiographical novel Go Tell It On the Mountain, “it was as though the two of us were huddled on the couch, just he and I, whispering our lives to one another.”²⁶ But Robinson advised her to resist the autobiographical impulse by delving into her characters’ inner lives. “Primacy of character” was of the utmost importance to Robinson, followed closely by “truth telling,” described as being as “truthful as you can be in your writing at all moments.” Particularly challenging was Robinson’s insistence on being able to articulate, on demand, “five reasons for any character doing anything.” When asked in workshop sessions why a particular character stumbled and fell down a flight of stairs, Mathis confessed, “the most I could ever come up with was three.”²⁷ The lesson remained unchallenged because of the authority figure at the head of the class. “It’s an impossible standard, one which I’m sure Marilynne meets but the rest of us mortals cannot,” Mathis told Winfrey, who smiled and turned to the camera with an earnest word of encouragement to the viewer: “Keep reading, see you soon, stay in touch online.”28

Mathis’s comment corroborates the sentiment of Thessaly Le Force and other students who have struggled to attain Robinson’s standards that govern her own practice. In the acknowledgments of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, Mathis praises Robinson for pushing her beyond her comfort zone, and for “the rigor of her standards, which urges me forward, even when I have reached my limit.”²⁹ Mathis regards the hardship suffered under Robinson as necessary to her success, sounding a note Mark McGurl has observed in the masochistic strain of Workshop culture dating from Flannery O’Connor.³⁰ For Mathis, subordinating her life to writing was a series of compromising trials that made adversity and hardship integral to the learning process. Learning with Robinson and her other Workshop instructors, she recalled, “made me want to be better, to do better, even when it was hard. . . . Especially when it was hard.”³¹ The creative writing instructor as martinet is now a pedagogical prototype that has spread well beyond Iowa. Many are convinced that badgering students is the only way to inspire growth. Some instructors such as Dan Barden in other programs have gone so far as to proclaim, “one of the things that makes me a good teacher, I’m convinced, is that I’m a bastard.”³² Creative writing professor Margaret Mullan has credited the harsh conditions of the sexist learning environment of her MFA training as a key factor in her success. Although “it was very much a guys’ program,” she insisted, “I kind of needed that. I needed to be kicked around a little bit.”³³

The Iowa experience for Mathis reflects a clear pattern in which she faced “impossible” standards only Robinson could meet, felt pushed beyond her limits, and was pressured to defend her creative choices. Mathis grew as a memoirist under entirely different, and indeed opposite, nonviolent circumstances among the cadre of literary artists in the Mickey Mouse–themed studio under the informal and supportive tutelage of Jackson Taylor. Indeed, she was poised in that setting to become a memoirist of the caliber of her friend Justin Torres.³⁴ His We the Animals was published by the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and received an Indies Choice Book Award under the category of Adult Debut along with nominations for several others. Torres never faced pressure to shift genres the way Mathis did when she adapted to short fiction against her natural understanding of herself as anything but a short story writer. Taylor’s scene—diverse, eclectic, and mutually supportive—was in her past by the time she arrived at Iowa. As Lan Samantha Chang has acknowledged, “there are huge cultural differences between Iowa City and New York a large number of students face when they arrive here.”35 Just as Sandra Cisneros in the previous generation adapted her poetry to conform to the short stories her Workshop instructors insisted she write, Mathis bent the natural shape of her creative spirit to fit the Workshop mold, particularly as dictated by Robinson. Her mentor drove her to write stories that she eventually turned into the novel, a process that left her in a state of “creative and physical exhaustion when I sent it off.”³⁶ The prestige and professional rewards for enduring that process, however, were extraordinary.

The Whiteness of Workshop

Behind the trying pedagogy Mathis endured at Iowa after leaving the accepting one in New York, the shibboleth of narrative voice—and the specter of Toni Morrison—loomed large. According to Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, the writing program cliché of “find your own voice” arose in the post-1960s culture that valued creativity as exhibited in the works of the acclaimed African-American novelist Toni Morrison. Earlier eras alternately centered on “write what you know,” emphasizing experience as displayed by Tom Wolfe, and “show, don’t tell,” which fixated on craft as embodied by Flannery O’Connor. McGurl’s schema here is helpful in defining the social and pedagogical context of Mathis’s graduate education, one characterized by a culture of uniformity that depended on these mantras as rallying points.³⁷ The novelist and critic Anis Shivani identifies “find your own voice” as currently the most conspicuous among the commonly believed and repeated sayings in MFA creative writing programs. Often it is used to tyrannize students into conforming to prevailing modes of expression. Such standardization conditions the social matrix of creative writing programs, he argues, so that they risk becoming havens for “talentless people afraid to independently carve out a broad career in letters as used to be the case.”³⁸

Unlike Torres, whose minimalist memoir was the result of repeated workshop sessions that negated much of his original drafts, Mathis was escorted out of the genre altogether. We the Animals epitomizes the minimalism McGurl defines as a distinguishing characteristic of Workshop writing in “an aestheticization of shame, a mode of self-retraction,” one that paradoxically functions as a “form of attention-getting.”³⁹ But once in the realm of fiction, her training steered her away from an aggregate voice, one that might don the pluralistic identity of the speaker of Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” for example. The Workshop’s formula was that “ ‘voice’ equals strictly private voice, not a universal voice.”40 Mathis appeased her workshop audience by withdrawing her voice from the narrative and placing it in her characters. McGurl describes this process whereby “the properly impersonal narrator must try, however quixotically, to relinquish her speaking role, distributing as much of it as possible to characters in the story and retreating to the back of the imaginary theater of fiction to pare her fingernails.”⁴¹

As an African-American woman writer, Mathis faced pressure to find her creative writing voice at a distance from her ethnicity, while also somehow replicating the achievement of Toni Morrison. Winfrey affirmed what Workshop members expected of Mathis from the moment she entered the program. “I can’t remember when I read anything that moved me in quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison,” Winfrey effused. This of course pleased Mathis, but it also set extremely high expectations. “It’s a great deal of pressure,” she admitted, careful to align herself with Morrison only insofar as she shares “coming out of a similar tradition of post-Civil Rights literature with black women as subject.”⁴² Comparisons to Morrison, she insists, should not reach beyond these shared categories of period, subject matter, gender, and race. In an op-ed she wrote for the New York Times after taking her position as a Workshop faculty member, Mathis was even more candid about the role of MFA programs in “inspiring inflated expectations—after all, the formalized study of writing isn’t an alchemical formula by which every student becomes Tolstoy, or even publishes a book.” She went further, observing the damaging effect of being held to such standards in the context of “the MFA’s workshop model” and “its intense scrutiny of new work [that] can be crippling for some writers.”⁴³ Much of that scrutiny, she found, centers on voice.

Shivani points out similar abuses of the concept of voice as a superficial “subterfuge, allowing one to judge individual effort without making any real attempt to penetrate the infinite densities of style.” It becomes a vapory attribute of writing that requires little justification on the part of the arbiter, something “anyone can critique. How does one critique voice anyway? What does one say, except utter inanities? Your voice is too sarcastic. Your voice is too hallucinatory. Your voice is too boozy.” But such distinctions are moot, as Shivani points out, since voice is “something beyond critique,” because “you either have it or you don’t.” At the Workshop, voice often masquerades as code for another style of writing that the instructor and workshop peers expect to see. “I don’t think you’ve found your voice yet” is the message to young authors like Mathis, rather than those who, like T. C. Boyle, ostensibly conform to the white male “reigning voice, the Michael Chabon [and] Jonathan Lethem off-kilter irony.” There is pressure to “get with the program, the Manhattan-Brooklyn affectedness or else.”44

Creative writing programs have been known to stifle the voices of ethnic writers and steer them toward conventional forms of expression. Junot Díaz reports an incident in which a young Latino writer was told by his workshop peers that the diction of his story was too elevated, that people in the barrio did not sound nearly so intelligent. To Díaz’s disbelief, the “fellow writer (white) went through his story and erased all the ‘big’ words because, said the peer, that’s not the way ‘Spanish’ people talk. This white peer, of course, had never lived in Latin America or Spain or in any US Latino community—he just knew.” Worse yet, the instructor “never corrected or even questioned” the peer for making these racially insensitive suggestions.⁴⁵ Siddhartha Deb reinforces Díaz’s position by observing how “the lack of diversity in MFA programs . . . seems to translate into the astonishingly narrow range of contemporary writing.”⁴⁶

Lan Samantha Chang bitterly recalled Frank Conroy advising her in no uncertain terms that if she did not want to be typecast, she should avoid writing stories with Chinese characters.⁴⁷ Anthony Swofford described the Workshop as “a very white place” when he attended from 1999 to 2001. “I’m sure that changed year-to-year, but my two years felt super Caucasian.” In addition, “there weren’t many economically disadvantaged students in 2001,” he told me.⁴⁸ This is precisely the institutionalization of conformity that Chang herself rebelled against by aggressively recruiting both Mathis and Torres. Mathis is careful to factor in class, gender, and sexual orientation in calling for “MFA programs to take special care to admit and nurture . . . writers of color, L.G.B.T. writers, working-class and poor writers,” so that diversity is a “mandate” and “not empty policy-speak.”⁴⁹ As the pedagogical equivalent of empty policy-speak, “find your own voice” can operate as a disingenuous mantra of diversity that really “serves conformism to reigning social platitudes,” so that “voice does not equal cultural difference,” according to Shivani.⁵⁰

Patronage

Ayana Mathis did not suddenly appear on the porch of Oprah Winfrey’s media empire as some sort of literary foundling. Instead, she depended on a series of vital connections provided by her Workshop mentor Marilynne Robinson. Mathis has acknowledged that Robinson’s “sort of encouragement and endorsement has meant everything,” especially “in career kinds of ways, which is certainly not to be overlooked.”51 Two years after its launch in 2002, the Trident Media Group merged with the powerful literary agent Ellen Levine. Levine had served as Robinson’s agent for decades, brokering the breakthrough deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2004 for Gilead, her Pulitzer Prize–winning second novel after a twenty-four-year hiatus from the genre. Robinson cemented her status as the most acclaimed living writer in the world with her next novel, Home, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2009. So by 2011, the year of her pupil’s graduation from the Workshop, Robinson’s endorsement carried authority in the literary world matched only by Winfrey’s in the popular realm. Levine therefore responded promptly when Robinson summoned her to represent her pupil.

Soon after its establishment in 1980, the Ellen Levine Literary Agency became one of the industry’s most powerful promoters. Levine’s clients have won virtually every conceivable literary accolade, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Booker Award. The most well known of her clients’ titles have been made into major motion pictures, such as The English Patient, Holes, The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction, Ride with the Devil, and Housekeeping, the adaptation of Robinson’s debut novel from 1980. Levine has a record of representing Iowa Writers’ Workshop faculty and graduates, such as Asali Solomon, for whom she landed a prestigious contract, also with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reluctant to accept first-time authors, Levine makes an exception for “Workshop grads” such as Solomon.⁵² If the Workshop offered graduates connections to the publishing industry through the special fellowships Engle was continually negotiating during its earliest days, that tradition continues through the representation of Ellen Levine and the Trident Agency.

No single author of Levine’s is more renowned than Robinson. Upon Robinson’s retirement from the Workshop in the spring of 2016, Lan Samantha Chang declared her “the most distinguished writer in the United States right now.”⁵³ With the backing of such a towering figure as Robinson, Mathis enjoyed a distinct advantage on the market as a first-time novelist. In an interview in 2013, Mathis mentioned that her agent, provided by a “well known author,” functioned as “the best advocate and guide I could ever have hoped for.”⁵⁴ On Robinson’s advice, Levine offered Mathis guidance and representation typically reserved for established luminaries like Michael Ondaatje, the author of The English Patient.

The contract proffered by Knopf placed the book in the hands of the most influential arbiters of taste in the critical community, whose lists Winfrey had been scouring in search of a second title for her online book club. Formerly a teen mother, Winfrey identified immediately with Hattie Shepherd, the opening chapter’s fifteen-year-old African American who names her newborn twins Philadelphia and Jubilee, much to the consternation of their father and grandmother. By chapter’s end, the twins perish of pneumonia despite Hattie’s efforts to save them. A moving scene depicts the young mother holding Philadelphia before her, the baby’s head lolling despondently. “ ‘Fight . . . Like this,’ she said and blew the air in and out of her own lungs, in solidarity with them, to show them it was possible.”55 The scene touched Winfrey, whose child also died in infancy.⁵⁶ Winfrey said, “beginning with Ayana’s description of Hattie’s desperate efforts to save her babies, Jubilee and Philadelphia, I was right with Hattie, in her house in Germantown, Philadelphia.” She immediately wanted “to know Hattie, understand her and be introduced to everyone in her life.”⁵⁷

Mathis understood that her deal with Knopf, arranged by Levine, arose thanks to a combination of talent and to some extent institutional privilege, as she discussed in an interview with National Public Radio in 2014. The Workshop MFA, especially with Robinson as her thesis supervisor, was hard won through dedication necessary to contend with rancorous workshops and an austere mentor. Realizing the advantages Iowa offered her, she now dedicates herself as a faculty member to making “writers of color able to take advantage of that kind of access.”⁵⁸

Given this ardent advocacy for student publication, one might expect Mathis to foreground the importance of navigating the literary market in her current approach to teaching creative writing as a faculty member at the Workshop. Yet the Workshop’s enduring anticommercial myth that sets literary culture at odds with mass culture is apparent in her claim during a video interview in 2013: “First novelists shouldn’t think about publication or their careers. It’s very dangerous to begin thinking, what will an editor like? What will people want to read?” she said, shifting her tone to a panicky whisper with her eyes wide in a sarcastic look of anxiety. Too much “tailoring of your writing in terms of the impact it has on one’s career can make the writing inauthentic,” she warned. The advice clearly suggests that she did not write Hattie with the intention of having it selected by Oprah for her new book club. “It’s important to keep that off the table as much as possible.”⁵⁹ Historian R. Jackson Wilson has likened the taboo of raising the question of capital with respect to literature as tantamount “to wondering who picked up the check after the last supper.”60

As her incredulous reception of Winfrey’s phone call shows, Oprah’s Book Club members collectively did not make up Mathis’s imagined audience. Instead, they consisted of her Workshop faculty and peers. In this sense, the Workshop’s insularity means “essential feedback mechanisms” from audiences in the broader industry “are blocked, and the programs” like Iowa’s “are indifferent to markets,” as Shivani and McGurl note. However, for every instance in which first-time novelists like Mathis achieve acclaim without any attempt to promote themselves in the literary market, one can identify a T. C. Boyle among students, or a Kurt Vonnegut among faculty, who were acutely aware of markets and audiences, and deeply tapped into fluctuations of mass market tastes. Poetry remains a different case altogether, as that side of the program “has explicitly stated its disinterest in broad readership.”⁶¹

The Workshop Author in Mass Culture

Without Torres’s encouragement, Mathis is not likely to have applied to Iowa. Without Torres flagging her file for Chang, she might not have been admitted. Without Robinson, she would not have had access to her literary agent Levine; without Levine, no Knopf; no Knopf, no Oprah. This chain of delicate connections might have broken at any point. But powered by the endorsement of probably the most acclaimed living writer in the world, and credentialed by the foremost creative writing program in existence, she seemed destined for a publisher of Knopf’s stature, if not a patron of Winfrey’s command over mass culture. Robinson and Winfrey together backed The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a rare instance of a “literary bestseller” in the publishing industry, and a feat of both popular and critical success that only Dickens was consistently able to achieve throughout his career. For all the pieces to fall into place so perfectly, it was “a kind of fluke,” a “miracle for me,” according to Mathis.⁶²

The selection of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 represents a milestone in Workshop history, like John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp being made into a film that established the program as a vehicle for ushering literary culture into popular culture. The successes of Mathis and Irving suggest the profit potential of an Iowa MFA. To many authors, however, such as Jonathan Franzen, commercial success is mutually exclusive to literary excellence. Franzen feared that his novel The Corrections would be tainted if Winfrey adopted it, so he refused to allow it to be a book club selection. In 2004, he said, “I feel like I’m solidly in the high-art literary tradition. She’s picked some good books, but she’s picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional [ones] that I cringe, myself, even when I think she’s really smart and she’s really fighting the good fight.”63

Interestingly, Mathis also does not approve of many of Winfrey’s titles, noting how “she picks a wide range, some that I like, some that I don’t like.” But where she differs from Franzen is in her capacity to see that by blending genre fiction with literary works, “Oprah’s Book Club breaks the barriers down . . . it breaks assumptions down, and that side of it is helpful.”⁶⁴ In particular, she saw the benefits of enriching the reading of those who “normally say they only like to read mysteries or thrillers” and “may be intimidated by this strange ‘literary fiction’ label.” With Winfrey’s endorsement, these readers are more likely “to pick up a book” like hers “and enjoy it without worrying about the label,” according to Mathis.⁶⁵ More than crossing boundaries, Winfrey’s book club selections change the climate of the industry decidedly away from popular genre fiction toward the more challenging material she typically recommends. Winfrey is less interested in making bestsellers out of genre fiction than she is in turning literary novels into bestsellers, in the process bringing previously detached aesthetes—literary artisans toiling in anonymity—onto the center stage of popular culture.⁶⁶

Franzen found no such progressive liberation from labels and mainstreaming of intellectual authors in the club, but instead saw it only as a tool of corporate media aligned with the malignant forces of capitalism. “I’m an independent writer and I didn’t want that corporate logo on my book,” he said, regarding it as a Faustian deal with commercial media’s obsessing over “consumer advertising and consumer purchasing.”⁶⁷ Franzen’s rejection of Winfrey situates him as the white male humanist condemning the black female producer of mass media in a misogynistic rejection of both female and mass culture. In his phobia over commercial media, he overlooked the benefits that accrue to women and the black community from the spread of works like Mathis’s. It is no small achievement—perhaps greater than the personal fame and wealth Mathis herself attained after her book’s selection—that an online discussion of her novel on Goodreads among African-American women turned squarely to gender discrimination within their community. As forum contributors began to blame Hattie for the problems encountered by her children, others objected. “It’s always easy to place more blame on the mother,” a reader named Kisha argued. “That’s the way society is set up, especially in the black community. We don’t force our men to take responsibility, instead we make excuses for their actions and persecute the woman.”68

The reach into the African-American community with a novel like Mathis’s would not have been possible through the marketing engine of Knopf alone. When her book was adopted it literally became a new product, inside and out. The Oprah’s Book Club logo appeared on the cover of all copies; a special digital version offered notes and a reading guide for clubbers to organize their discussions and meetings. Winfrey’s notes on her favorite passages also appear in the digital editions, for the Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook devices, available for purchase on the iBookstore and online e-book venders. A host of video clips featuring brief interviews with Mathis appear on the Oprah website. When news of the novel’s selection struck, Knopf swung into action, recalibrating the packaging of the literary commodity itself as well as the scope and scale of its production, print run, and distribution. “We obviously had to advance our on-sale date,” Knopf spokesman Paul Bogaards reported. “This is a book that everyone at Knopf is completely enamored of. As a result of Oprah’s endorsement we took our printing up to 125,000, from 50,000.” Much to the company’s delight, “All kinds of retail windows have opened.”⁶⁹

Reclaiming the airwaves from the National Football League and its predominantly male audience, Oprah devoted several hours worth of material to Mathis and her novel for a program titled “Super Soul Sunday.” In 2013, a special edition of “Oprah’s Soul Series” aired on Super Bowl Sunday, February 3, on Oprah’s Sirius XM radio station, her Facebook page, and Oprah.com. Mathis answered reader questions on the VYou social video platform, as 13 million members converged on the official Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 Goodreads forum. Still more splintered off into their own mobile networks for discussion of her book via GroupMe, in addition to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds (#OprahsBookClub). Print literary culture, and Knopf in particular, had never seen such a thorough multimedia campaign for a single novel. The greatest reach in all of this was of course the combined media of Winfrey’s television network OWN (the Oprah Winfrey Network, which was formerly the Discovery Health Channel), which attracts 85 million viewers, and O, The Oprah Magazine, read by 15 million per month.⁷⁰

The first ever title by a Workshop author endorsed by Winfrey, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is also the program’s first work to be embraced by ethnic women readers in the mass market. Workshop authors have in several cases courted broad female audiences through women’s fiction with romantic themes. Anthony Swofford, for example, courted that market with his novel, Exit A, but was unsuccessful. Access to these and other lucrative markets, Workshop students have been aware, occurs through the program’s internal system of privileges, dispensed from “certain übermasters” (Chang and Robinson in Mathis’s case). As seen in Cisneros’s comments on the system, many faculty “exercise disproportionate control over the distribution of rewards and honors” determining access to the most powerful publishers.71 Defiance of that system, as many have discovered, can result in dropping out. Alumnus Joe Haldeman recalled that although he was not “harmed by a workshop, obviously some people are. Sometimes they’re discouraged enough to quit writing.”⁷² To this end, “outright challenges to the authority of the masters,” who have typically been program directors and the most distinguished authors among the faculty, “must be rare indeed,” because the “system measures its success by the frequency of non-events” in this sense.⁷³ Mathis was precisely such a non-event. Her decision to meet rather than to challenge Robinson’s authority paid rich dividends by providing her access to her agent Levine and the lucrative market beyond.

The impact on sales of an endorsement from Winfrey is enormous. After receiving her blessing, A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle, sold 3,375,000 copies; James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces sold 2,695,000; Elie Wiesel’s Night, 2,021,000; and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, 1,385,000.⁷⁴ Now that Mathis has demonstrated that Workshop authors can reach this elite circle, the value of the Iowa MFA has risen. Winfrey’s media corporation virtually eliminates dependence on publishers as the determining factor of authors’ long-term prosperity.⁷⁵ For those fortunate enough to earn it, her endorsement takes away any concerns regarding publisher loyalty, such as those that consume authors like T. C. Boyle. “A first run of five hundred thousand copies, just like the record industry, may be great for a few authors,” Boyle says, but he wonders “if they’ll have sustained careers or not. Or are their expectations up too high after one success, which was orchestrated by the publisher? Will the publisher sustain you?” he asks. “Or you [publish] one or two books and you’re gone?” Far more powerful than any one publisher, Winfrey-owned media can single-handedly sustain an author, as the sales figures of her selections illustrate.⁷⁶

As the list of Winfrey’s choices makes clear—with titles ranging from Tolstoy and Faulkner to Morrison and McCarthy—trade and romance genre fiction are not the staples of this system as many frustrated male Workshop students from the 1970s assumed. The “genteel tradition” of literature, one alumnus groused, “is being shoved rudely aside by our commodity-driven world” in New York publishing, where “demographics, gender, ethnicity and above all, marketability are the yardsticks by which literary talent is measured and presented to the American public.” While Winfrey’s club members fit the profile of “women over forty” who constitute “the overwhelming majority of novel readers,” this does not mean they are all reading Danielle Steel, as evidenced by the challenging list of works they have devoured at Winfrey’s behest.77 Yet that stereotype of daytime drama TV viewers, precisely the time slot Winfrey’s talk show occupied through 2011, persists in its association with Oprah’s Book Club.

Although the number of voices like Franzen’s openly deriding literary culture’s movement into mass culture through Oprah’s Book Club have diminished in the decades following his clash with Winfrey, the stigma of such highly commercialized broad appeal persists. “Thanks to Oprah,” Hector Tobar of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “Mathis is now the beneficiary of the book world’s most precious and rare commodity: buzz.” Tobar claimed that readers anticipating her novel to be “a great work of narrative art are going to be disappointed.” For him, the wall between mass culture and literary culture—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—still exists. Reviews like his vehemently oppose crossovers like Mathis, the author of what he calls “a competently written melodrama that only intermittently achieves anything resembling literary excellence.”⁷⁸

Yet new evidence points to the increasingly challenging nature of the works selected by Winfrey, and more importantly, the mass audience’s eagerness to adopt them. While the club increased sales of its selected titles, in the twelve weeks following her nominations there were declines in sales for mystery and action-adventure novels, and also for romances. Because of the longer and more difficult nature of the book club selections, readers turned away from their usual lighter fare; weekly adult fiction book sales declined because readers were absorbed in month-long explorations of more challenging texts at a much deeper level, time extended also by the frequency of discussions both online and in person.⁷⁹ The club disrupts the consumer spending pattern of a steady diet of several Nora Roberts novels per week, for example, replacing it with immersion in a masterpiece like Anna Karenina. As for the therapeutic purpose of the reading promoted by the club, its medicine is hardly easy and coddling, but can prove quite caustic and disturbing, as seen in club selections such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.⁸⁰ Even Mathis herself underestimated Winfrey’s literary acumen during their first conversation. The media mogul read lines from Morrison’s Sula to illustrate similarities in tone and literary technique to passages in Mathis’s novel. “It’s clear that language really resonates with her, and that she’s a very literary, passionate reader,” Mathis gathered. She knew Winfrey had “read a lot of books,” but “was surprised by the literariness of her viewpoints.”81

Even if there was a grain of truth in Tobar’s claim that melodrama intermittently takes over Mathis’s narrative, her online presence as packaged by Harpo Productions appears to have a distinctly richer, more edifying purpose than that of the producers of Days of Our Lives, or sensual trade romances. If Mathis’s critical reception is any indication—in a highly unusual achievement for a debut novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie graced the cover of the New York Times Book Review in 2013—she has proven herself worthy of the sales generated by Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. The Oprah Effect is not just financial; it is also cultural. The club’s educational mission “floats above commercial interests.”⁸² This in turn builds courage in readers to expand their understandings of these texts toward self-help/realization, a form of bibliotherapy that has always coursed through the lives of the most elite and respected of readers. The corrective emotional response of deep engagement with literature is epitomized by “6 Things Ayana Mathis Knows for Sure About Sticking With It,” featured on Oprah.com. It mentions the poetry she read as consolation when “she was broke” and on the brink of homelessness, the way she sustained herself on inexpensive fare, and how she persisted in her efforts to find resources and cash—all foregrounding literature’s capacity “to startle us out of a deep-sleep of death into a more capacious sense of life,” as one avid reader said.⁸³

As is clear from “Why Get an MFA?” a piece Mathis wrote for the New York Times in 2015, she is acutely aware of the need to diversify Workshop culture. With The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, she represents the Workshop’s first step into the world of Harpo Productions. Her success demonstrates how the program can be allied with other commercial media powerhouses to awaken and mobilize new readerships. Her alliance with Winfrey offers a progressive twist—distinctly twenty-first century, radically diverse, and socially progressive—on Paul Engle’s aggressive corporate enterprising of the Workshop’s first era. With its peerless status, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop continues to define contemporary literature. The program’s privileged access to the publishing industry’s most powerful agents, publishers, and promoters can now advance literature as an agent of social progress at the height of the digital revolution. Before Mathis, no Workshop member had tapped into cross-platform resources for publicity on the scale of Winfrey’s media empire. Through such unprecedented reach, the Workshop is now poised to realize the full potential of Mathis’s credo that, in its most noble function, “literature is a triumph of radical empathy.”84