WHEN I’M IDENTIFIED AS a fiction writer at parties, the question comes pretty quickly. “Did you go to school for it?” someone asks. Yes, I say. “Where?” they ask, because I don’t usually offer it.
I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I say.
Over the years, I’ve received two standard reactions when I say this. The first is a kind of incredulity: The person acts as if he or she has met a very rare creature. Some even challenge me, as if this is the sort of thing people lie about (and some probably do, though that makes me sad). Some ask if I mean the famous school for writers—and there are other writing programs in the state of Iowa, excellent ones, but I know they’re referring to the Workshop, and so I say yes, though instantly I feel as if I have been made an impostor, hiding in the clothes of a great man.
The second reaction is condescension, as if I have admitted to a terrible sin. To these people, I’m to be written off. Nothing I do could disprove what they now believe of me. All my successes will be chalked up to “connections”; all my failures will prove the dangers of overeducation. If they ever like a book of mine, they will say, “It’s okay as MFA fiction goes.”
I suppose this is just part of the price I pay for having been one of those people, the doubting kind, sure that it was all bullshit.
I GOT MY FIRST glimpse of Iowa City when I moved to San Francisco, after graduating from college. I told the friend I was driving with to take the Iowa City exit off I-80, and we pulled into a truck stop.
“I just want to look at it, in case I decide to go to school here,” I said. This seemed safe to say sarcastically, like saying I wanted to look at the White House because I was going to be president one day. I got out, pumped some gas into the car, looked around at the truck stop, and said to her, “It looks terrible. Let’s go.” And we laughed as we drove away.
Even then I felt a vague premonitory knock that would haunt me: Someday you’ll eat those words. But I pushed it away. It was impossible for me to go to Iowa. I would never go, I told myself, and they would never let me in.
At Wesleyan, the college I’d left behind, I’d studied fiction writing and the essay, and the three teachers I’d spoken to about my future offered strong opinions. Mary Robison warned of studying writing too much. “No one is doing anything like what you do,” she said. “You don’t want to mess that up by taking too many classes.” Kit Reed was dismissive: “Don’t waste your time. You just need to write, you don’t need the program. There’s nothing there you need. Just go write.”
Only Annie Dillard made the case for an MFA. “You want to put off the real world as long as possible,” she said. “You’ll write and read and be around other serious young writers.”
Two against one.
The real world I moved to was San Francisco during the AIDS crisis. My activist friends from college were all moving to the Bay Area, getting apartments together, going to rallies, protests, marches, direct actions, street theater. I saw the AIDS activism and queer politics movement emerging as a response to the fight of my generation, and I joined with the seriousness of a soldier. My friends and I were people who knew AIDS could kill us all, and we were fighting against those who believed it would kill only gay people. To this day, I can’t tell you if we were trying to remind them of our humanity or their own. My time there felt more like a preview of the end of the world.
I would stay two years.
I MOVED TO NEW York in the summer of 1991, for the love of a man who lived there. I had a job waiting for me, courtesy of A Different Light, the LGBT bookstore I’d worked at in the Castro. They had a New York store as well, and arranged me an employee transfer. My new bosses set me to work cataloging the contents of a warehouse in Queens that had belonged to a mail-order gay and lesbian bookstore that A Different Light had acquired at auction. After the chaos of San Francisco, New York wasn’t much quieter, but this job was: it was like going to sit in a padded room every day—a room padded with books.
If I went to San Francisco with something of the seriousness of a soldier, I left with a soldier’s bitterness. I had seen friends beaten by the police and hospitalized, or arrested and denied their AIDS medication under the pretext that they were taking illegal drugs. I had been profiled by the police, baselessly suspected of plotting against them. When one of the groups I belonged to had asked me to find out if my then boyfriend was a police plant, and this hastened the end of our relationship, though I don’t think he ever knew he was under suspicion—at least he never found out from me—I knew I wanted to leave.
After all that, it was nice to sit alone in a quiet room every day, surrounded by books. And there were thousands of them, books I knew alongside books I’d never heard of, spilling off the shelves and out of boxes. They ranged from pulp pornography paperbacks to Vita Sackville-West first editions to the works of the Violet Quill group. My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers—Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Christa Wolf—writers who were political as well as literary. Their work was in this room, as well as that of their predecessors and teachers: Muriel Rukeyser, for example, whom I discovered in that warehouse and whose poetry I still love. I hoped, like them, to find a way to fuse my work with my belief in the possibility of a better, more radicalized world.
Slowly I became aware that for me, a young gay writer who wanted to write, well, everything—poetry, fiction, essays—this time in the warehouse was an education I could never replicate. And that the catalog I was creating was a catalog of what kinds of gay writing had succeeded and failed—what the culture allowed and what it did not.
For every writer like Gore Vidal, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, or Susan Sontag, there were so many others no one knew. The fame of the well-known writers seemed to me a protection against the void, and thus, worthy of study. How had they managed to survive against whatever it was that had erased so many others? Two of my literary heroes, the artist David Wojnarowicz and the filmmaker Derek Jarman, were quite publicly dying of AIDS at the time, facing another, newer kind of erasure in the process, and I feared increasingly, from the work I’d been doing, that nothing was likely to save them except posterity. It was clear their impending deaths, the result of the epidemic, were in some way welcomed, if not wanted, by the government. AIDS was not God’s punishment, but the government inaction around it certainly was the government’s punishment—a kind of de facto death squad composed of the conservatives who were, incredibly, in charge of these public health decisions instead of the medical establishment, though the medical establishment had its own problems, in the form of for-profit health care. Those exposed, those in danger of exposure, all seemed likely to die because it was too expensive to save us.
Structural death: a preview of the approach conservatives would take for the next thirty years.
Back in San Francisco, a certain Beat poet used to come into the bookstore and move his books from the poetry section in the rear to the new-books table up front. After he left, we’d move them back. Sometimes I’d let them stay awhile; other times what I thought of as his pettiness angered me. But here in this warehouse, I understood him. Fame seemed like a terrible, even a stupid thing to want, but it also could protect you from vanishing forever, especially if you were a gay writer, already disadvantaged when it came to publication, much less posterity. Fame would push your book to the front table whether you were there or not.
The question was, as always, how do you become famous?
The best and only honorable way, to my mind, was to write things people wanted to read. I’d made some progress on that front since arriving in New York. An editor at a publishing house invited me to lunch, because he was interested in whether I had a novel, based on a travel feature I’d written for a magazine.
I was also interested in this question of whether I had a novel, and had shown up to that lunch cocky, with my hair in a blue James Dean pompadour, wearing a ripped black T-shirt and black jeans. My tweed-jacketed new friend smiled in the dark pub as he sipped his water, and we somehow got onto the topic of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which he had attended. Underneath my performance of San Francisco queer punk cockiness, I took mental notes as he told me stories about Michael Cunningham, one of the few male writers I admired. His story “White Angel,” which had appeared in The New Yorker, a part of his novel A Home at the End of the World, was the stark marker against which I measured my own ambitions. The dishy story I still treasure from this chat is how Cunningham would go running at Iowa and smoke Gauloises afterward by the track, and how this led the other students to call him “French Cigarette.”
“After we graduated, we all moved back to New York,” the editor said. This I especially stored away as important: all these writers from New York heading to the Midwest to study writing, and then returning afterward. I knew Cunningham had punctured what I thought of as the gay glass ceiling, all too visible to me there in that book warehouse. I began to wonder whether his going to Iowa was part of that—and if it was, if it would work for me also.
Such were the calculations of a young man who didn’t yet know that gay men had been publishing in The New Yorker before him. That it guaranteed nothing. That there was no guarantee except the one possible if you wrote it, and got it in front of at least one other person. Everything was possible then.
FOR YEARS I HAD mocked the idea of applying to MFA programs, but after that lunch, I became interested in a way I wasn’t prepared to admit. I still made snide remarks about how no one was going to force me to write to a formula. I still said I didn’t want to write fiction that said nothing about the world for knowing nothing about the world (unspoken: like all those MFA students), and so there I was, out in the world—wasn’t that better? I made a point of saying, whenever possible, that I refused to spend two years being made to imitate Raymond Carver.
This wisecrack about Carver was the supposedly damning critique of the biggest criminal of them all, Iowa. If it sounds familiar, that’s because the formula for making fun of MFA programs, and Iowa in particular, hasn’t changed much in the past twenty years. The fantasy of the haters is of a machine that strips away all originality, of people who enter looking like themselves and emerge like the writerly version of Barbie dolls, plastic and smooth and salable, an army of attractive American minimalists.
I was writing fiction without my MFA then and getting along fine without it, and I’d just written a story I was pretty sure was my best yet. I was also pretty sure it would never get published, for being a mix of too many strange things, some of them gay. I did not feel like a New York writer, despite being there and writing, and worse, I had to work a lot to afford New York. My bookstore salary was so low I sometimes had to choose between taking the subway and eating. A subway token cost as much as a bagel or a slice of cheese pizza, and so it was always a question of which would win. Some of my friends from college, whom I would see periodically, proceeded with a self-assurance that I didn’t feel into careers that seemed beyond my reach. I told myself I didn’t have the connections they had, to get jobs at The New Yorker, the Paris Review, Grand Street, the various publishing houses—and I didn’t realize that, if I knew them, it meant I had connections too. Wesleyan had been my entrée into this world, but it was a world they had entered eighteen years before, here in New York or somewhere nearby. I was from Maine, the state where they had all gone to camp together, but I had never been to that camp. “You’re not really from there, though, are you?” they used to ask, incredulous, as if I’d told them I cut a canoe out of the woods and rode it down the Connecticut River to college.
I was only subtly aware of getting an education in social class in those moments, which usually just felt like embarrassment that I had to hide. While I didn’t have their background, what I did have in these social settings were my looks, a sharp eye, a sharper tongue, and a penchant for making a spectacle of myself, which I would then use to observe people’s reactions, learning about them and me at the same time. I could do this and be amusing enough that most people didn’t mind. Also, the schools where all these people who knew each other went to had at least a few people like me around—which is to say, gay, political, and an activist.
When these connections I didn’t know I had led to an offer of a job as assistant editor at a start-up magazine called Out, I took it. The job was the best way for me to take my mind off of obsessing about whether I would get into an MFA program, because I had, by then, applied.
MY REASONS FOR APPLYING were not particularly noble. My boyfriend, the man I’d moved to New York for, had also applied. We’d met at a Queer Nation meeting in San Francisco and begun an intense correspondence that turned out to be our way of falling in love. He was a writer also, and I liked the thought of us as two young, talented gay writers going it alone together outside the system. But my talented boyfriend was working temp jobs he hated, and while he made more money than I did, he didn’t feel as talented as I thought he was, and he felt his education had gaps: he’d been a communications major, not an English major like me, and he wanted to know more about novels, poems, and stories. He’d never taken a writing class. He thought a program might help. And so, one night after I finished a shift at the bar beneath his apartment, where I worked to be able to afford to ride the train to my own apartment and still eat, I went upstairs to find him on his bed, covered in MFA brochures.
“What are these?” I asked. I felt betrayed but didn’t want to say so. I knew what they were.
He replied defensively—he’d heard me crap all over MFA programs—and our short conversation made me understand how differently we saw ourselves and each other. In his eyes, I had a future without an MFA degree, and he wasn’t sure he did.
I was afraid this was his way of saying he was leaving me, a sign of some secret dissatisfaction. In the end, I chose three schools to apply to, three schools he had also applied to, based on which schools had produced the most faculty appearing in the brochures—the schools whose students were hired the most after graduation. These were the University of Arizona, the University of Iowa, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
I applied as a cynic, submitting the story I was sure was my best, the one I was sure wouldn’t be published, sure they would reject me. “If they’re going to have me,” I said, “they need to know what kind of freak I am.” In the story, a young clairvoyant Korean adoptee helps the police find lost children and is the only actually psychic member of an ad hoc coven. He has penetrative sex with his high school boyfriend, who’s also in the coven, and is possessed by a ghost during an informal exorcism ritual. The plan was that a program devoted to the creation of minimalist realism would have to reject me and I could go on my way, my beliefs about everything confirmed. But that’s not what happened.
My first letter of acceptance, to UMass Amherst, came with an offer of a fellowship and a note from John Edgar Wideman. A day later, I got a phone call at work from a woman whose voice I didn’t recognize. “It’s Connie Brothers, from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” she said. “A letter is on the way, but I’m calling to offer you a place in the fall class and a fellowship.” She named a sum of money.
I was stunned.
“This is great,” I said, remembering to speak, and then blurted out, “UMass Amherst is offering the same amount.”
“Did you say anything yet?”
“No,” I said, appalled at my indiscretion.
“Give me a day,” she said, and hung up. I hadn’t intended to begin a negotiation—I wasn’t aware that negotiation was possible. I was only meaning to be literal: how could I decide between fellowships of equal amounts? I wanted to call back and apologize, but the next day she phoned and offered twice as much, and seemed entirely unconcerned.
“Thank you,” I said into the phone. “I’ll speak to you soon.” I hung up and announced the news, and my coworkers cheered and shook my hand.
BEFORE I GAVE NOTICE at Out, I spent a night walking the East Village, thinking about my decision. I ended up at Life Café, an East Village institution, where I splurged and ordered an almond-milk latte and a veggie burrito. I had some copy to edit, an asparagus recipe in fact. I was still not sure I would leave New York. If I moved to Iowa, I thought, I would vanish forever, unrecognizable to myself and others. And the amount of money in the fellowship, even after they’d doubled it—was that really enough to live on? I wasn’t rich here in New York, but if I stayed at the magazine, I knew I could get by. I could afford, for example, this meal I was having. I could make my way up the New York magazine-world ladder, a thought that instantly felt hollow.
At the next table, a conversation about the new Versace leather skirts broke out, if a conversation is people all saying the same thing to each other. They were so heavy, they kept saying. So heavy.
I wanted out, I knew then. I wanted cheap rent and a fellowship and people who were talking and thinking about fiction. A time would come again when I would kill to hear people talk about Versace again, but it was not then. Anything you did that was not your writing was not your writing, and New York provided a lot of opportunities to write, but also a lot of opportunities not to write, or to write the wrong things. There were things I wanted, like being a contributing editor instead of an assistant or managing editor, and you didn’t get there by working your way up. Contributing editors swoop down from above, made fabulous by the books they’ve finished, which they didn’t write while chasing after other people’s copy.
My boyfriend didn’t get accepted to Iowa, which disappointed us both greatly, but him more than me—it was his first-choice school. But he was offered a fellowship by the University of Arizona, which was my first choice, the school where one of my heroes, Joy Williams, taught, and where I’d really envisioned myself, until . . . they rejected me. We’d both been accepted to UMass Amherst, but my boyfriend’s offer was without aid. We drove up to Amherst as we thought about it and had lunch with John Edgar Wideman, who was, well, John Edgar Wideman: a profoundly intelligent, decent man, and a legend. But we knew, by the time we left, what we would do.
We had been long-distance before, and were prepared to be so again. We each chose our careers over being together, which seemed best for our relationship as well as for our futures. We packed up our little apartments and had a last dinner, where our friends sang “Green Acres” to us over a cake at Mary’s in the West Village, and we made our way onto I-80 West, to drop me off first.
THAT YEAR, I LIVED alone in an apartment that was once ROTC housing for married officers at the edge of town, up by the graveyard and the Hilltop Bar. This lent the whole project the air of a failed military mission. The floors were linoleum, and a couch, desk, and table were part of the deal.
The Iowa I found was a gentler place than the one my editor friend had described. Under Frank Conroy, the director when I arrived, the list in the student lounge ranking students from 1 to 50 had disappeared, and with it the fierce feuds the list’s posting engendered.
Conroy was said to reread the rejected stories first, because he believed that real genius is often rejected at first. This rumor endeared him to me when I eventually heard it, but in those days he was only the legend, sitting in his peculiar way—he could double-cross his legs—in a room full of the incoming class, giving the speech he always gave.
“Only a few of you will get to publish,” he said. “Maybe two or three.”
I remember looking around the room and thinking, I bet not. I had no way of knowing, of course, but I was right: of the twenty-five students in my class, over half have published a novel or collection of stories. But the talk was not meant to discourage us. If anything, it was a bravura dare, like a whack on the shoulder the Zen teacher gives to awaken a drowsy meditator.
I never studied with Conroy, but he taught me one lesson I still remember. I was featured in Interview magazine that year as an emerging poet, and I showed him the page, with my face huge and my poem tiny, almost hidden in my short hair. He smiled, congratulated me, and then said, “You succeed, you celebrate, you stop writing. You don’t succeed, you despair, you stop writing. Just keep writing. Don’t let your success or failure stop you. Just keep writing.”
BY NOW, I KNEW the Iowa City truck stop was not the town, and that the town was a pretty university town away from the highway, populated with Victorian houses that had been built from plans sent there from San Francisco, the result being that I would experience occasional uncanny moments, passing houses I knew first from that beloved place.
Not only did no one try to make me write like Ray Carver, no one tried to make me write like anyone. No one even tried to make me write. The only thing I really had to do was figure out whether my ideas were interesting to me, and then, in workshop, I discovered whether those ideas were interesting to other people. I was surprised to learn attendance was, mysteriously, not mandatory. It’s an occasionally controversial part of the Workshop. But the policy acknowledges a deeper truth: if you don’t want to be a writer, no one can make you one. If you need an attendance policy to get you through, then, go—don’t just skip class, go and don’t come back. Writing is too hard for someone to force you into it. You have to want to run for it.
That year, the Workshop accepted 25 students from a field of 727—now the Workshop regularly receives over 1,100 applications. In the fall of 2001, the numbers leaped upward—as did applications to MFA programs nationwide—and they’ve never really dropped. This fascinates me still, the idea that the September 11 attacks might have spurred people toward the institutional study of fiction.
The lore around your admission becomes irresistibly interesting once you get in, because it seems the odds are so shockingly against you. You either suspect you do not deserve to be there, or you suspect the others in your class do not deserve to be there. And whatever you think at first, it doesn’t matter; at some point the projection flips. You go from being suspicious of everyone else’s talent to suspicious of your own, or vice versa, until finally you get over it. Or don’t.
Soon I was walking around town with people I barely knew as if I’d known them forever. The conversations were long and passionate and exhausting, punctuated by strong coffee and the huge, strangely fluffy midwestern bagels. I was reading and writing, and doing a fair amount of drinking, for the alcohol was very cheap, and we were writers in the bars of Iowa City, bars that had been frequented by writers for decades. Something was happening to us all, and it felt as if we were all a part of it, even the ones who wouldn’t speak to each other. It was a little or a lot like a family.
My first professor for workshop was Deborah Eisenberg. She often dressed in head-to-toe black clothes, familiar from my previous life in New York City, and walked across campus in the impossibly high heels she favored, an ocean of flip-flop-wearing undergraduates around her. She was the kind of woman I had idolized in New York, and finding her here made me feel I’d made the right choice. She was at once a walking memory of the life I’d left behind and a vision of the life I wanted, and I fell head over heels in love with her. I volunteered to drive her home from workshop after the first class, eager to impress her in this puppy dog way I had, and when she asked when I’d started writing, I answered that I’d started late, in college. She laughed a little into the car door as I said this and then straightened up. “I didn’t start until my late thirties,” she said. “I consider that starting young.”
Driving her became a regular routine for us, one that thrilled me. I forgot my unhappiness about not getting into Arizona and dove into her mind as much as I could, at first through the short stories—her two (now four) collections. I took her seminar also, and read anything she suggested, from Elfriede Jelinek to James Baldwin to Mavis Gallant, and like all of her students, hung on her every word.
My first workshop with her was a revelation. I’d put up my application story—most of us did at some point in our first year, usually in the first term—still living with the idea that it was the best I had. She saw straight through it, into the way it was a mix of the autobiographical (I really had been in a coven in high school, with my high school boyfriend) and the fantastical (I did not ever help the police find lost children with clairvoyant dreams). I had tried, crudely, to make something out of a Dungeons & Dragons group I’d been in back in high school, but I hadn’t done the work of inventing a narrator who was whole and independent of me. Deborah drew lines around what was invented, and what was not, with a delicate pencil, and patiently explained to me how what we invent, we control, and how what we don’t, we don’t—and that it shows. That what we borrow from life tends to be the most problematic, and that the problem stems from the way we’ve already invented so much of what we think we know about ourselves, without admitting it.
She sometimes sat down at the beginning of class and would look out at us, smile, and say, “I don’t know how you do it. I could never stand it.” Unlike us, she had never attended an MFA program, and had ideas about radicalizing it, like making financial aid a random lottery instead of merit-based, or everyone getting the same amount. In our workshops, she listened carefully to each of us talk about the stories, and then, as a way of closing the discussion, delivered her very deliberate remarks, and it would be as if everyone had been arguing about how to turn the Christmas lights on, while she simply walked up to the problem bulb and fixed it and all the lights would go on. She also gave us some of the best advice I’ve ever heard about how to work with workshop advice. It was, approximately, as follows:
Listen to your classmates’ comments and try to listen to them in the round. Someone will insist if you just fix X on page 6, all will be better, and someone else will say no, it’s page 13 that needs your attention, and then you will change something on page 10, give it back to them, and they’ll all say, “It’s so much better, that’s exactly what I meant.” The problems are not where they think they are.
This taught me a valuable lesson. It is a rookie workshop mistake to go home and address everything your readers brought up directly, and if there is a problem inherent to workshop, it is that some people credulously do that. A reader experiencing what they called a pacing problem could be experiencing an information problem—lacking information that would make sense of the story for them about the character, the place, the situation—and problems with plot are almost always problems that begin in the choice of point of view. I learned to use a class’s comments as a way to sound the draft’s depths, and as a result had a much better experience of the workshop overall.
One common complaint about workshops is that the people who take them end up in some way alike, and that the class enforces this alikeness on one another’s writing in the workshop. But that was never what I experienced. Instead, I think of a great line from one of Deborah’s short stories: “You meet people in your family you’d never run into otherwise.” It’s true of families, and true of workshops also: you meet people there you’d never otherwise meet, much less show your work to, and you listen to them talk about your story or your novel. These are not your ideal readers per se, but they are ideal in that you can never choose your readers in life, and this is a good way to get used to it. Listening to their critiques forces you past the limits of your imagination, and for this reason, also past the limits of your sympathies, and in doing so it takes you past the limits of what you can reach for in your work on your own. Fiction writers’ work is limited by their sense of reality, and workshop after workshop blew that open for me, through the way these conversations exposed me to other people’s realities.
I will never forget the classmate who said to me in workshop, about one of my stories, “Why should I care about the lives of these bitchy queens?” It angered me, but I asked myself whether or not I had failed my characters if my story hadn’t made them matter to someone disinclined to like or listen to them—someone like him. A vow formed in my mind that day as I listened to him, which has lasted my whole career: I will make you care.
If his reaction sounds too harsh, well, the criticism you receive in your workshop is as nice as it is going to get in your writing career. I never tolerated abuse, racism, or homophobia in workshop back then, and I was in Connie Brothers’s office so often that first year, she offered to place the entire Workshop in sensitivity training. I turned this offer down. It seemed to me the more reactionary people in the program would make me the target, instead of their own racism or homophobia. I decided to focus on confronting what I found, as I found it, regularly.
I now think of an MFA as taking twenty years of wondering whether or not your work can reach people and spending two years finding out. It is not an escape from the real world, to my mind, but a confrontation with it, even if it also felt, in my case, like a fantasy in which it was my good fortune to study with Marilynne Robinson, James Alan McPherson, Margot Livesey, Elizabeth Benedict, and Denis Johnson, as well as Deborah Eisenberg. I had left a job, and a man who loved me, whom I loved, to be there. That’s as real as anything.
The man and I broke up finally in 1994, the year I finished at Iowa. He’d applied to the Workshop again during our first year apart, and when he was rejected a second time, it ate at him, and he resented me. When he canceled our plans to spend the summer together, saying, “You’re going to be the famous one, the one everyone remembers,” I tried to give him room for his disappointment, but it felt like he was punishing me. He’s since had a lot of success as a writer, so in that sense he was wrong. I think disappointment, and the desire to revenge oneself on that disappointment, can be an enormous motivator. Being rejected from an MFA program can push you as much as getting in can.
THE FIRST THING MY MFA meant to me, when I finished, was that I seemed to have become unfit for other work, though this proved to be an illusion.
I was fit for writing and for teaching. That I knew. I also knew the only teaching job I wanted was the sort you could get if you had published a book. As I was newly single, and as New York seemed like a good place to be single and gay and a young writer, I moved back, the words of that editor—After we graduated, we all moved back to New York—echoing as I did so.
That first summer, I went on interviews for jobs in publishing, but everyone who interviewed me, on seeing that I’d just come from Iowa, assured me I didn’t want to work there. “Writers shouldn’t hear the way publishers talk about them,” one publishing friend said by way of advice. “Also, the pay is crap.” I’ve since known several successful writers who had publishing careers, but it takes a canniness that I couldn’t fake, to go into publishing and act as if I had no interest in being an author.
I ended up being a waiter—first a cater-waiter, and then I waited tables at a midtown steakhouse. Deborah Eisenberg had been a waitress, I told myself when the possibility came up, and I remembered the story she often told of her time as a waitress, and I even let it be something of a guide. Joseph Papp, of New York’s Public Theater, approached her to commission a play and was surprised to find her reluctant to leave her job. She didn’t want to lose valuable shifts. He asked her what she made on those shifts, and that was partly how the price of the commission was set.
I could live that way, I told myself. And sure enough, a few months after taking my first waiting job, I set plates down between an editor and a newly hired editorial assistant and overheard the figure quoted as they discussed a promotion, almost half of my annual income. I was waiter rich, as we called it then, and I stayed at that job for four years while writing my first book.
During those years of waiting tables, I was not above bragging about having gone to Iowa in moments of insecurity, but I always reproached myself afterward. The white shirt, black bow tie, and apron came to feel like a cocoon for the novel, or the writer, or both. I wrote that novel on the subway, going back and forth to the restaurant, and sometimes I wrote it while at work—I still have a guest check with an outline that came to me while I waited for my section to be seated.
The year after that novel was published, I was invited to teach at Wesleyan. I congratulated myself on a completed plan on that first day of classes. I know some people condescend to me when I mention that I was once a waiter, but I will never regret it. Waiting tables was not just a good living, but also a good education in people. I saw things I never would have imagined, an education in life out past the limits of my own social class. Your imagination needs to be broken in, I think, to become anywhere near as weird as the world.
IT’S A STRANGE THING to teach at your alma mater. I have done it twice, at Wesleyan and at the University of Iowa. You learn that students and faculty are kinds of insiders at such places, but within realms that keep each hidden from the other. When you teach as an alum, then, gossip soon illuminates the old myths—the gossip that only the faculty has combines in your head with the gossip only the students had when you were a student, and your own students add to that.
At Iowa I learned to talk about Raymond Carver, because he so often comes up if I mention Iowa. He is part of the lore, but not, as everyone seems to imagine him, as the so-called high priest of minimalism. That is not—was not—him. He was not especially celebrated for his writing while he was a student at the Workshop, we learned as students there. And his famous minimalism grew out of his relationship with the editor Gordon Lish—a very New York sort of story, not at all a midwestern one. The extent to which Lish cut himself into Carver’s work is a source of jokes now, a punch line. I am more concerned with what I see as Carver’s real legacy, as a professor: Carver was known for being drunk much of the time, at least in the stories I’ve heard. His generation of writing professors—most of them literary writers given jobs because of their published work alone—resulted in the reputation that all writers are like this! That has followed all writers now in academia.
The boom in the MFA, whatever you might think of it, didn’t come about because young writers wanted to imitate Carver’s work, as is sometimes alleged. It came about because too many of them imitated Carver’s life, and administrators of writing programs began to demand some sort of proof that the writer hired to teach have the skill and the will to teach, to be a colleague, and to participate in the work of the department. You can sniff all you like that a book is the only credential that matters, but chances are you haven’t met a provost. In the aftermath of these unaccredited greats, the rest of us are now required to present our degrees.
With this, ironically, comes the complaint that even our sins are on the decline, that more and more we are too well behaved, domesticated creatures writing domesticated fiction, and the MFA is also blamed for this situation, created by, well, writers who don’t have MFAs.
It may be that you, like many, think writing fiction does not require study. And not only that: that it is not improved by study. That talent is preeminent, the only thing required to become a writer. I was told I was talented. I don’t know that it did much except make me lazy when I should have worked harder. I know many talented people who never became writers, perhaps because they got lazy when they were told they were talented. Telling writers this may even be a way to take them out of the game. I know untalented people who did become writers, and who write exceptionally well. You can have talent, but if you cannot endure, if you cannot learn to work, and learn to work against your own worst tendencies and prejudices, if you cannot take the criticism of strangers, or the uncertainty, then you will not become a writer. PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.
“I AM TAKING THIS PARADE down the middle of the road,” I wrote in a letter to a friend from San Francisco soon after arriving at Iowa. I had the sense of being given a place inside an American tradition, and I decided I would make the best of it. I would queer it.
A favorite photo from my time as a student in Iowa is of me at a Halloween party, dressed in short shorts, fishnets, a black motorcycle jacket, a yard-long blond wig on my head, applying lipstick in front of a bull’s-eye, studiously not looking at the camera, aware that it was on me. I was eventually crowned the Queen of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Prom, an event that saw me appear at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in that same wig, wearing a red leather coatdress slit up the sides, makeup, and heels. I remember the hush as I stepped into the bar area where the veterans sat, the saloon doors swinging, to go to the restroom, and the pause as I realized I had to decide which one to use.
I am still, I think, that prom queen, caught in the doorway.
Going to Iowa was one of the best things I ever did for my writing life. If the myth about the Workshop was that it tried to make us all the same, my experience was that it encouraged me to be a writer like no other before me. Whether I did that was up to me. I applied because I was afraid of losing something I lost anyway, and I went because I got in. I hoped to find some protection from oblivion, from my own shortcomings, from the culture’s relentless attack on the stories of people like me. I don’t know if I’ve found that, or if I ever will. I still fear those things. I still face them. And for now, I’m still here.