That title sounds like it could be an AWP panel, right? “This panel will examine ways in which today’s MFA program can prepare student writers for a world in which they have no viable future. Emphasis on practical measures administrators can take to capitalize on the growing market of confused and desperate young people.”
I teach (in part) in a creative-writing program, and I must say I’m feeling increasingly uneasy about that, at least for grad students. For one thing, there’s no future in the academy for new faculty, except as part of a pauperized, “flexible” labor force. And even to get that far, you’ll have to undergo the usual humiliations required to get published. But in addition to the institutional issues, there’s the question of what we think we’re teaching people to do. I daresay most of us might rethink our writing if we had a terminal diagnosis. But in the old days, they withheld that information from the patient. I think maybe we’re doing that to our students. Or we’re all still in the denial phase of grieving for the world we grew up in, with publishing houses and career paths and literacy, and stuff. In the era of climate breakdown, in the twilight of the Holocene, all that is starting to seem a bit unreal, and worrying about them, rather complacent or even self-deluding – like choosing the musical program for the RMS Titanic for the evening of April 15, 1912. But supposing that MFA/CW programs survive into the 2040s. What will they look like? Will the workshop be viable, even logistically? Will people still be interested in literary history – and if so, what aspects? The answer, of course, will be closely tied to the fate of colleges and universities – public ones, especially. Indeed, given the ascendency of neoliberalism + climate breakdown, it seems likely that the number of postsecondary institutions will decline precipitously, leaving only a few elite institutions for the ultra-rich (i.e., pre-Civil-War stuff). It may be that workshops survive, but not as a part of college curriculum, but in refugee camps, community support groups, or subcultural enclaves of various sorts – perhaps taking place in the abandoned buildings on college campuses. That is, they may be very de-professionalized. What can you do? You can write stuff that matters. You can write stuff that gets read. But nobody wants to hear the truth if it’s scary and bad. The left and the center are just as fact-averse as the right wing, if the facts don’t confirm what they already want to hear (hence Jay Inslee, the single-issue “climate-change candidate,” just dropped out of the presidential race). Writers are no different. Some are writing climate-fiction – or “ecopoetry” that addresses climate change at one or two removes – but we’re not really registering the seriousness of the situation. It’s going to diminish, dilute, and maybe destroy the degree programs that many of us work within, the degrees we grant, and the postsecondary institutions that grant them. And sooner or later, it’s going to affect everything all of us write about: relationships, politics, mores, everyday life, war, ethnicity, gender, class – and o yeah, nature.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |