MFA in a Box
By John Rember
4.5/5
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About this ebook
Winner of Hoffer, Nautilus and Midwest Book Awards as one of the best new books on creative writing.
"The essential truths about excellent writing." The Judges of the Hoffer Awards
MFA in a Box is a different kind of book on creative writing -- and, more broadly, on the creative process. Part craft talk, part philosophical tome, part memoir, MFA in a Box is not so much a book about how to write as it is about why to write. In chapters that explore the relationships between the writer and love, grief, place, family, race, violence, and other topics, author and creative writing professor John Rember (Sudden Death Over Time, Traplines, Cheerleaders from Gomorrah) helps writers dive deep into their own writing. He tells them how they can breathe down there and how they can get back.
"A big part of writing involves grappling with the terrors and discouragements that come when you have writing skills but can't project yourself or your work into the future," says Rember. "My hope is that MFA in a Box will help writers balance the despair of writing with the joy of writing. It's a book designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor--but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor keeps it from being laugh-out-loud funny."
Praise for MFA in a Box
"Beyond Burroway. This is the book for the serious student of writing." Jo-Ann Mapson, author, and co-creator of the University of Alaska Low-Residency MFA Program
"This is more than an advice book with a catchy title. What makes it different than the many, many books about writing on the market today is the way Rember engages his readers in some of the issues every writer faces--writing about place, about family, about grief--not as problems to be overcome but as issues to be understood." Jeff Baker, Book Editor, The Oregonian
"Witty, audacious, and wise, MFA in a Box is a unique and valuable book that addresses the subject--and the life experience--of Creative Writing from both a practical perspective and in a manner so highly personable you'll read it like a memoir--and want to meet the author. Rember has the storyteller's magic. You'll be enthralled. And walk away a more astute and vibrant writer." Robin Metz, author of Unbidden Angel, winner of the Rainer Maria Rilke International Poetry Award, Director of the Knox College Creative Writing Program
"Rember cleverly makes the reader dig into her own unconscious wisdom to recognize the true jewel at the center of a story. This book is not filled with rules and dogma to guide the writing process. Instead, an understanding of our relationship to our place on earth, acknowledging that our civilization is built on violence, and 'how the big moments in life require a witness,' impel us to infuse our stories with truth." Judges of the Hoffer Awards
"MFA in a Box should be on every writer's bookshelf, right next to On Writing by Stephen King and other great books on the art and craft of creative writing." Randy Richardson, President, Chicago Writers Association
"For writers and teachers searching for rejuvenation in their work and affirmation of it, this book is a sacred read." Renee D'Aoust, author of Body of a Dancer
John Rember
John Rember is a fourth-generation Idahoan. Recurring themes in his writing include the meaning of place, the impact of tourism on the West, and the weirdness of everyday life.His book MFA in a Box: A Why to Write Book (Dream of Things: 2011) was recognized by the Nautilus Awards, Hoffer Awards and Midwest Book Awards as one of the best new books on creative writing. His memoir Traplines: Coming Home to Sawtooth Valley (Vintage: 2004) was named Idaho Book of the Year by the Idaho Library Association. He is also author of Cheerleaders from Gomorrah: Tales from the Lycra Archipelago (Confluence: 1994), and Coyote in the Mountains (Limberlost: 1989). His most recent book is Sudden Death, Over Time: Stories (Wordcraft of Oregon: 2012).John has also published numerous articles and columns in magazines and newspapers, including Travel & Leisure, Wildlife Conservation, and The Huffington Post. He has been a professor of writing for many years, most recently as a core faculty member of the Pacific University MFA program (Forest Grove, Oregon). He is Writer at Large at The College of Idaho.John lives in the Sawtooth Valley of central Idaho.
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MFA in a Box - John Rember
Also by John Rember
Traplines: Coming Home to Sawtooth Valley
Cheerleaders from Gomorrah: Tales from the Lycra Archipelago
Coyote in the Mountains
MFA in a Box
A Why to Write Book
John Rember
Dream of Things
Downers Grove Illinois USA
Copyright © 2010 John Rember
Published by Dream of Things
Downers Grove, Illinois USA
dreamofthings.com
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, except for brief quotations in critical articles and reviews, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Rember, John.
MFA in a box: a why to write book / John Rember.
The Permissions Acknowledgements on page 253 constitute a continuation of the copyright page.
Dream of Things provides discounts to educators, book clubs, writers groups, and others. Contact customerservice@dreamofthings.com or call 847-321-1390.
Cover design: Megan Kearney, Cartwheel Design Studio Book design: Susan Veach
First Dream of Things Edition
For Julie,
who wears many hats in our marriage,
some of them gold.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Writing Violence
Chapter 2: The Writer as Outsider
Chapter 3: Writing Shadows
Chapter 4: Writing Family
Chapter 5: Writing Place
Chapter 6: The Writer as Witness
Chapter 7: Writing Image
Chapter 8: Writing Depth
Chapter 9: Writing Mom
Chapter 10: Writing Grief
Epilogue: Writing Travel
Bibliography
Permissions Acknowledgments
Index
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the students of the MFA program at Pacific University Oregon for being the initial audience for these meditations. Their intelligence, wisdom, feedback, and friendship have shaped this book.
I am grateful to my friend and publisher Mike O’Mary for his encouragement and for his willingness to see this project through to completion. I couldn’t and wouldn’t have done it without him.
Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to the generous teachers and colleagues who showed me how good and conscious and humane the life of a writer can be. I’m still trying to live up to their examples.
Introduction
MFA IN A BOX is not a How to Write Book. It’s a Why to Write Book.
If you want a How to Write Book, two good ones are William Zinssner’s On Writing Well and Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town. In my decades of teaching writing, I’ve consistently assigned those two books to my students. Another book I always assign is Diana Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference, because new writers make apostrophe mistakes. Editors view apostrophe mistakes the way they might view a worm dropping out of the nose of a corpse, and as far as they’re concerned, the corpse belongs to the writer whose flawed manuscript they’re reading.
This book is full of references to other writers and their works, and you may recognize the worm and the nose above as an allusion to Gilgamesh, one of the oldest stories in the world. It’s a story about death and grief, and I consider death and grief so important to writers that I’ve devoted a chapter of this book to a meditation on Gilgamesh as a twenty-first century story.
If you read every work that I allude to in these pages, you’ll have the foundation for a decent, if quirky, education in the humanities. You’ll also be familiar with the struggles of brilliant minds to make meaning in a universe that can seem devoid of meaning. If you’re struggling to make meaning out of your own experience, this book will help.
ALL OF THE CHAPTERS in this book had their origins in problems that either stopped my writing cold or that would have stopped it if I’d thought about them.
Here’s an example: at one point in my teaching career I told my writing students, You can’t avoid nihilism, you have to go through it.
My glib words sounded good to me and may have sounded good to my students, but they wouldn’t have sounded good to people who had studied Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, philosophers who had actually grappled with the problem. The old Schopenhauer joke goes that Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, and two thousand years later Schopenhauer discovered that the examined life isn’t worth living either.
Actually, the phrase Schopenhauer joke is a joke.
So one of my chapters discusses what I meant by going through nihilism,
and the soul-destroying things that can happen to you if you try. As far as I know, none of my students actually did try to go through nihilism, which is a good thing.
These days, my less-than-glib caution to writers is that almost no one who dives into a belief in nothing makes it through to believing in something. Furthermore, if you write the truth about the world we live in, you’re going to be facing more voids than just the blank screen in front of you. Now I tell my students, Try not to write out of a totally naïve place. But don’t write out of a place where you’re so street smart that you don’t believe in anything, because you’ll quit writing or you’ll kill yourself.
Too dark? Nothing in this book will be as dark as that place in the middle of a story where you’re convinced that you’re writing a bridge to nowhere, and that the idea of writing as an identity and occupation was a bad one in the first place.
Every writer faces that dark place, and a lot of them succumb to it. A good many people who invest years of their lives and tens of thousands of dollars in an MFA degree never write again, simply because they cannot follow a story into its own depths, or they fear that if they do, they’ll never get back to daylight.
A big part of this Why to Write Book involves grappling with and defeating the terrors and discouragements that come when you have writing skills but can’t project yourself or your work into the future. This book will give you solace in those dark nights of the soul, and it will give evidence that the sun eventually breaks the darkest horizon.
THIS BOOK tries to show and not tell. Whatever that means.
Somewhere far away and long ago, probably in the ancient city of Uruk, when Gilgamesh was its king, the first fiction workshop was held. When the workshop’s first story was written on slabs of clay and passed around the group, fourteen of the fifteen people who read it inscribed the Uruk equivalent of Show Don’t Tell in its margins.
If everyone agreed on the meaning of Show Don’t Tell, there would be no reason for MFA programs. The great novels that people hold in their hearts would translate directly to the page, and then fly back off the page into the hearts of happy readers everywhere. That doesn’t happen. One problem is that Show Don’t Tell doesn’t refer to what happens on the page. It refers to what happens in your reader’s head when he or she looks at the page.
I don’t claim that you’ll know the ultimate meaning of Show Don’t Tell by my last chapter, but you’ll know more about what it means than you know now.
Parts of this book are a writer’s memoir, parts of it are tales from my misspent youth, and parts of it are knowledge that I received from generous teachers. You will be relieved to know that I don’t pretend that your path to writing will be the same as my path to writing.
Almost everything in this book will require that you translate it into your own terms. After all, I’m an old white guy writing in the middle of Idaho. Chances are that you’re not one of those. So read with an eye toward changing my metaphors and images into equivalent metaphors and images from your own life. Above all, let my stories spark your own.
I HOPE that when you finish this book you’ll be able to balance the deep despair of writing with the deeper joy of writing. I hope you’ll find the courage to put truth into words. I hope you’ll find reasons for being kind and intelligent in the presence of your readers and characters. I hope you’ll understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor, but nothing about a life-and-death endeavor keeps it from being laugh-out-loud funny.
I hope you’ll finish this book with more reasons to write than not to write.
Finally, this book is in no way intended to replace a real MFA. If it were, I’d be charging a lot more for it. But if you have decided to become a serious and literary writer, it will give you glimpses of the terrain ahead, and an idea of the talent and will and good luck that you’ll need to negotiate that terrain, and even some routes around the rough spots.
If you are an MFA student, this book will help you get more for your tuition money.
Regardless of who you are, it will give you reason to sit in that chair and to face the screen that has nothing on it. Yet.
John Rember
Sawtooth Valley, Idaho
1
Writing Violence
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
—Philip K. Dick
IT’S SIX HUNDRED MILES from my home in central Idaho to Forest Grove, Oregon. I’ve traveled those miles many times going to and from the June residencies of the Pacific University Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing program.
Six hundred miles means ten hours in the car, and you’d think that would be time enough to come up with the answers to every question about writing. But it doesn’t work that way. Instead, you come up with more questions.
For example, as I’ve driven by the fences and concrete walls of the Oregon State Prison in Pendleton, I’ve wondered about the author and murderer Jack Henry Abbott, who wrote the prison memoir In The Belly of the Beast.
Abbott’s memoir attracted the attention of the novelist Norman Mailer, who orchestrated a successful effort to have Abbott paroled in 1981.
Abbott’s parole was less successful. Six weeks into it, he stabbed a waiter to death for denying him access to a restroom. The stabbing prompted an ironic mea culpa from Norman Mailer, who said, in effect, that writers are shocked — shocked! — when the violence of their imaginations turns out to have a real world counterpart.
Abbott went back to prison for fifteen to life. It turned out to be life. He committed suicide in prison in 2002 after his second book didn’t sell anywhere near as well as his first. He used a shoelace and a bedsheet to hang himself, which indicates determination, a certain amount of ingenuity, and an unwillingness to write a third book. He left a note, which may or may not have explored any of these things.
Norman Mailer was accused of romanticizing Jack Henry Abbott by portraying him as a talented artist caught up in the gears of an inhuman system.
In another side note to this story, Jack Henry Abbott’s sanity wasn’t questioned by the authorities until he killed himself. Then they called him crazy, indicating that suicide is the ultimate insanity defense.
A RELATIVELY BENIGN QUESTION that you ask when you drive through Pendleton at sixty-five miles per hour: how does someone like Jack Henry Abbott take the mindless violence of his life and make meaningful narrative out of it? A less benign question: what violence exists in the rest of us who are trying to write narrative, even if we’ve never been convicted of anything more serious than a parking violation? Less benign yet: how many stories are there behind the walls of the Pendleton prison, stories that will never get told because the people inside are so damaged that they cannot make meaning at all?
These questions imply that an ability to make meaning is good, the criminal mind of Jack Henry Abbott notwithstanding. When I juxtapose stories and meaning, I’m implying that stories are good, and that if we’re not too damaged, we can form a narrative arc with a beginning, middle, and end, and we can tell it to other people, and their worlds will contain more meaning — if they’re not too damaged to catch it.
But one more question, a question from the deep and the dark: what if most people, who aren’t violent criminals, who live ordinary lives in a civilized culture, who pay their bills and go to their jobs and contribute to United Way — what if the mundane is a form of violence that has damaged these people so much that they can no longer tell stories?
If Jack Henry Abbott escaped nothing else, he escaped the mundane. And he was able to articulate the damage done to him over a lifetime of incarceration. In his letters to Norman Mailer, written at age thirty-seven, he noted that since the age of twelve, he had been free only nine and a half months. More than a decade of his imprisonment had been served in solitary confinement. But because his letters demonstrated that Abbott was sane and perceptive — that he could make sense after seeing and doing and having done to him what would render most of us mad — Mailer argued for his release.
Even after he had killed somebody for denying him the restroom, Abbott had his defenders. At the murder trial, where actor Susan Sarandon and writer Jerzy Kosinski appeared as character witnesses, Abbott told his victim’s grieving widow that her husband’s life wasn’t worth a dime.
After Abbott’s conviction, the widow said she was glad that he wouldn’t be able to kill again.
Abbott’s capacity for violence was his first defense against his world, but it wasn’t his only defense. If you read In the Belly of the Beast, you understand that a culture that is supposed to protect human beings destroys some of them. Some people get caught in the gears, which is bad, but as they do they develop a sense of irony, which is good. Abbott wouldn’t have become a writer without his sense of irony.
I don’t think you can be sane without irony. I don’t believe you can make meaning without irony. I don’t think you can combat the violence of the mundane without irony. Without irony, your characters will be mute victims of circumstance, and over time, you’ll be a mute victim of circumstance, too, not a writer at all.
Of course, in the long run, we’re all mute victims of circumstance.
A PARTIAL LIST of the ironies attendant to the story of Jack Henry Abbott:
In spite of the efforts of the prison authorities, Abbott did kill again.
Susan Sarandon, who seems to be an otherwise benign person — somebody you’d like to hang out with, especially if you play baseball — named her son Jack Henry Robbins after Jack Henry Abbott.
Jerzy Kosinski, whose novels contain a level of psychological and physical violence beyond the tolerance of a lot of readers, committed suicide in 1991 with barbiturates. His suicide note said he was putting himself to sleep for longer than usual. It was shorter and probably less articulate than the note Abbott left, which the prison authorities still refuse to release. They’re waiting for a call from their agent.
Abbott’s victim, a young man named Richard Adan, was an aspiring writer who had just had a play accepted for production.
Norman Mailer knew more about non-fictional violence than he let on. He had stabbed his wife at a party in 1960, almost killing her. Mailer died in 2007, not a suicide, even though he had received the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his last book, The Castle in the Forest.
Abbott’s second book, My Return, expressed little remorse for any of his crimes and was used as justification to deny him parole at a 2001 hearing. So be careful what you put in your memoirs.
Finally, if I’m correct to assume that telling stories is something that human beings will do if they’re not too damaged, then there are lots of people out there way more damaged than Jack Henry Abbott, Jerzy Kosinski, and Norman Mailer.
SO YOU FIND YOURSELF on I-84 in Pendleton, Oregon, on your way to an MFA residency and you get caught up in the story of Jack Henry Abbott. You also gain some insight into the problem of staying in the Now if you’re a writer. The Now is a prison in Pendleton where thousands of lives have been freeze-framed behind razor wire. The Now is the population of prisoner’s spouses and children in Pendleton’s cheap apartments. It’s the abandoned buildings downtown and the recession-emptied campus of Blue Mountain Community College. It’s the sputtering hum of your car in the 105-degree heat, the whine of its air-conditioner, the flashing lights of the Umatilla Tribe’s Wildhorse Resort and Casino, and the steep grade of Cabbage Hill outside of town, where now and then a pickup driver with a trailer full of cattle won’t downshift soon enough, and his brakes fail.
The Now is a violent place, and if you use pretty philosophical questions to insulate yourself from its violence, you’re not going to see the Now at all. The Now will simply be a place you travel through while remembering the ironies surrounding a good writer who was a bad person and checking your memory once you get to a motel with Wi-Fi.
But before you start assuming that the Now is the fifteen minutes on either side of what your watch is telling you, consider this: if you are a writer, the most important characteristic of the Now is that it contains the past. Start telling a story and if you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself writing backstory. Start writing backstory and you’ll find that you’re not going back far enough. If you’re a writer of place, you find the Now expanding to include the Pleistocene and beyond, because your characters seldom transcend the landscape. The Now is a tar pit at La Brea, and it’s always giving up the perfectly preserved bones of what has fallen into it.
Jack Henry Abbott’s isn’t the only ghostly voice you hear on the trip from Sawtooth Valley to Forest Grove. Let’s go back to central Idaho and start over, and see where we took a turn toward the dark, to get so ironic and so violent so soon.
WE LEAVE HOME in a June snowstorm. Snowstorms happen in Sawtooth Valley even when it’s 105 in the desert west of Pendleton. Clouds fold over the Sawtooth Mountains, and streamers of snow come trailing down the canyons. Rocks roll down the road-cuts onto the highway, and deer and elk begin to move through the mists.
I drive slowly during June snowstorms, because sometimes people in giant SUVs will move into your lane to avoid rocks or cow elk or fawns, even when they see you coming.
Thirty-five miles from Stanley, where the road meets the South Fork of the Payette, the river that comes out of the north end of the Sawtooths, the past becomes the present. I am hit with a memory from the summer of 1965: my family is constructing new trail along the headwaters of that river, in a remote part of the Sawtooth Wilderness, twenty-four miles from the nearest road.
I’m fourteen. I’m living in a tent and most days I’m looking at the ass end of a harnessed workhorse, guiding a one-sided plow, peeling virgin hillside out and down to make a path for hikers and horsemen. And yet I’m not far from civilization. B-52 bombers fly over, dropping glittering chaff that makes spindrifts in the sunlight and hangs in the trees like tinsel.
That’s forty-five years ago, is what I’m thinking as I wake from memory, twenty miles later. We’re near the town of Lowman, once a mining and timber town, now a retirement community.
Not everything has changed. Some of the B-52s that dropped aluminum chaff on us are still flying. But some of their original pilots have died of old age. I’ve gotten a bit older myself.
In Lowman, we drive by fenced-off mounds decorated with radioactive warning signs. Underneath them lie great piles of uranium tailings. Before the topsoil was brought in and the fences were put up, people in Lowman used the tailings for backfill around their foundations and as surfacing for their driveways, and I remind myself to invest in a Geiger counter if I ever decide to buy a house in Lowman.
Downriver, after fifteen miles of whitewater, we pass a dam site that the Army Corps of Engineers evaluated during the 1950s, when they examined every stream in the country for hydroelectric potential. Their excavations are visible on the other side of the river, tunnels just a few feet above the water, where they drilled deep into the rock