The Editor RavesFor those of us who have been in and out of writing programs for years—which is to say, that breed of student and teacher that tends to haunt the halls of creative-writing programs—it may be difficult to remember the trauma of letting strangers read your short stories for the first time. That’s only one reason why the work in TwoTwoOne is remarkable—because it represents a display of the kind of courage that writers have no choice but to have (or to develop or to fake, depending upon their constitutions).
The reward for such courage, of course, at least potentially, is the pleasure of seeing one’s work in print; and, in my opinion, it’s a reward that ought to come around in life a lot more often than it does.
But there’s another, less ego-driven reason for putting one’s work "out there," as the saying goes, and that is the hope that it will be read, grasped, appreciated; that it will provoke a reaction, make a point, advance an argument; that it will be seen. In other words—and at the risk of overstating the obvious—a factor that motivates creative writing perhaps more strongly than any other is the desire to communicate; to find one’s way into a community (a related term); to demonstrate what one has in common, which is the Latin root of both words.
Most of us who write hope—secretly or not, in vain or not—to be brought into the fold. We want to commune with others who enjoy words, who are creative, who value a good story well told, who think that facility with language is a valuable skill and that it ought to earn us a living. We want to feel like writers, whatever that means to us.
Such desires, unfortunately, are precisely the ones that creative-writing programs may be least capable of addressing.
For one thing, one of the main goals of writing programs is to propound and to export the Myth of the Writer, a significant feature of which is the idea of the writer as loner, the writer in cultural isolation, the writer as rugged individualist. Creativity, we learn (but certainly not just in writing programs), happens in moments of almost spiritual contemplation; it requires the recondite, even magical processing of experience "recollected" in repose (and seclusion). Writing, in other words, is the opposite of a community event.
Well, what about that? One of the things I like about the stories in TwoTwoOne, about half of which were written by my own students, is that they are the result of hard, work—grunt work, even—meaning multiple drafts and problem-solving and grappling with the technology of revision. More than that, they show writers not in the thrall of "art" or capital-L Literature (though art and literature may be the result) but rather people dedicated to solving the Rubik’s Cube that presents itself every time a writer begins a new short story. And that puzzle has (at least) two dimensions.
First comes the mechanical one: As soon as she’s written two lines, the short-story writer realizes she’s boxed "reality" in, and the possibilities of the narration simultaneously shift and narrow. If you set your story in Antarctica, you can’t have citrus trees growing outside the window (unless you’re Thomas Pynchon). If your main character is six years old, she can’t discourse on Nietzsche (ditto).
Or, maybe you can do anything you want. So let me back up and say that what I like about these stories is the way their authors have engaged with the second (and more important) dimension of the puzzle I mentioned, which is a recognition of the fact that the writer who actually writes (as opposed to the one who only thinks about writing) necessarily places herself, through writing, in relation to the world—puts himself, if you will, in the way of reality itself. (And by mentioning "reality" I don’t intend to conjure up discussions of the limitations of linear time or the "metaphor" of the physical body or the Heisenberg Principle. By "reality," I mean: the fact that violence happens, that the ones we love don’t always love us back, that people suffer and die, that not everybody gets the same breaks in life, that human interrelationship is so frequently contingent and fraught.)
The stories in TwoTwoOne were not made by people who thought their task as writers was merely to set beautiful words in rows or to depict worlds full of shiny, happy people (to cadge a line from Michael Stipe). Nor were they written by individuals who saw themselves as fundamentally isolated, by their attraction to the writerly arts, from their times, from world-pain, from the day-to-day culture (high-, low-, or middlebrow), from other people.
Instead, the stories collected here deal, in one way or another, with the management of (or the monumental failure to manage) one’s connections with others—family, friends, children, lovers, even strangers. What the stories show is the writers’ struggle with (and, not infrequently, distress over) the "real" world— their concerns, in other words, are the antipode of those of the "isolated" artist.
Let me put it even more bluntly: What I see in these stories is the work of students who haven’t yet been through the mill of writing programs and, as a result, still have the temerity to be writing about something. The quality of their writing—their styles, so to speak—will only get better with time and practice. With any luck, of course, that’s true of all of us. What I worry about is this: If they continue in a writing program (at the University of New Mexico or anywhere else), will they also be taught to devalue their desire to write about something that matters?
Michigan Technological University’s Marilyn M. Cooper, in a 1997 lecture on the ethics of teaching writing, notes that the positions students take in their work—what she calls "the clear communicative intent of the writing"—are not merely "intellectual" arguments to be supported or countered. Rather, "they are positions that have effects on others [and] that writers can acknowledge and do something to change."
Cooper goes on to describe the confusion of writing teachers who, "feeling that, rather than drawing out through discussion the complex consequences of such positions, it is necessary for them to enforce an ethical code if they are to ‘empower’ students to be agents for social change...." And she counsels that "teachers must ... allow their students to make decisions about their writing and to take responsibility for the effects of those decisions if they are to help them be (not become) responsible writers and responsible citizens in the classroom."
Well, no one wants to be found guilty of "enforcing an ethical code" these days—or of daring to try to build that Frankenstein’s monster, a "responsible" writer—all of which has become a convenient excuse for not teaching writing students (and especially creative-writing students) that writing has consequences, that it reflects positionalities beyond the story, that it matters.
Cooper, of course, is focused primarily on the teaching of what English departments like to call "composition"—that is, so-called "nonfiction"—but her points could not be better suited to the teaching of fiction writing. The fact that we tend not to think of "creative" writing in these same terms—indeed, that we rebel against the idea that creative writing has consequences and embodies intentions outside the "text"—is, in and of itself, revelatory.
The writers whose work appears in TwoTwoOne —call them student writers or apprentice writers, if you want; anything but "beginning" writers, for most of them have been putting words onto paper for years—have all been through the first course—English 221—in a sequence that can, if one wants to take it this far, culminate in a professional, graduate degree in creative writing. Their presence in that "opening" class—and the presence of their hundred or so peers who take the same course each year at UNM—begs some important questions.
For example: Is a workshop like English 221 (and a similar course is available in virtually every four-year college in America) meant to begin the early development of professional creative writers or is it supposed to be "for fun" (assuming the two are mutually exclusive)? In other words, should it be an introduction to the profession of writing or is its purpose to allow students to express themselves "artistically"? Or put it still another way: pretend the department is Geology and not English. Do we look at students in entry-level workshops as future petrologists or geophysicists or do we see them as weekend rock hounds in search of a compatible "survey" course to fulfill a general-education requirement?
It’s hardly an idle question. And yet most programs never contend with it. "Beginning" creative-writing courses are popular and they fill up; that’s good for the FTE. But by not facing the question—if I may be permitted to expand the analogy—creative-writing programs encourage weekend hobbyists to believe they’re going to be able to earn a living as geologists.
Maybe there’s a simple, if limited solution to one aspect of the problem: Divide entry-level writing courses into two "concentrations," one for the student who wants the writing equivalent of a pottery class and one for the student trying to suss out the professional-writing landscape.
But even to do that little would require writing programs to make the philosophical leap of considering creative writing a professional discipline and to view what goes on in creative-writing programs as career training. It would require a straightforward (and mostly discouraging) assessment of publishing opportunities. It would mean blunt honesty about the tiny handful of teaching positions that are actually available to degreed creative writers and about the fact that most creative writers leave writing programs utterly unqualified to compete in the academic (not to mention the "free world") job market. More than that, it would mean that the administrators and faculty of writing programs would have to come clean about their role in creating and perpetuating exactly these realities. But don’t count on it: These days, that kind of truth-speaking is not, as the old song says, what’s blowing in the wind.
It’s a truism—not to say a cliché—that writers are lonely people. What’s perhaps more accurate is that people who feel the need and the desire to turn their experiences (their opinions, their positions) into fiction are like the person madly waving her hand in the vast sea of a lecture hall, hoping to get the professor’s attention. Maybe the hand-waver has something useful to say; maybe she’s showing off; maybe all she’s got in mind is a dumb question; maybe she knows something the professor has never even thought of.
And that’s why hundreds of thousands of manuscripts are sent around to publishers every year in America—each one a raised hand, each one a request to be heard. Indeed, if writers stopped sending out manuscripts, the U.S. Postal Service would probably go out of business.
That said, it’s worth noting that the contributors to TwoTwoOne were chosen by no one but themselves. There was no competition; there was no one to beat. Any English 221 student who submitted a story to TwoTwoOne got accepted, on the theory that self-selection—when everything else is said and done—is what makes writers.
The contributors worked with the editor to prepare their manuscripts for publication—they put their stories into electronic format for submission; they dealt with queries (sometimes several rounds of them) and fielded editing suggestions; they wrote bios; and they waited impatiently for the slow machinery of the publisher (me, in this case) to churn their words into print. In short, they did everything that "real" writers do in anticipation of publication. All of which makes them, to my mind, real writers.
In TwoTwoOne you’ve got insanity, rape, murders, psychopathic kidnappers of children, obsessed lovers, drug addiction, the deaths of loved ones, suicidal teenagers—and, sidereally, even a couple of happy endings. In other words, all the stuff of contemporary fiction.
This ‘zine wasn’t expensive or difficult to produce. It would certainly have benefited from institutional support, but it got along fine without. TwoTwoOne is the kind of opportunity for publication and visibility that apprentice writers ought to demand, all the time, out of the programs that take their tuition money—or, on those occasions when demanding doesn’t work, ought to create for themselves, the way we did.
Toni Cade Bambara says that "the purpose of a writer is to make revolution irresistible." I’m with her. But I would add that (one) purpose of that revolution better be to make writers less invisible, less marginal. And that’s because, to paraphrase Emma Goldman, why would anyone want to be part of any revolution that didn’t include writing?
Wendell Ricketts