On his book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
Cover Interview of September 06, 2009
In a nutshell
As recently as the 1930s there were no creative writing programs, and now there are hundreds. My book The Program Era is a literary history of postwar America that puts this remarkable fact at its center, asking what it means that most serious writers in the U.S. now teach creative writing, and are themselves graduates of writing programs.
This would be an important story if only for the magnitude of the transformation of literary institutions it suggests. But what gives it an extra edge is our widespread discomfort with the very idea of institutionalizing art. Shouldn’t writers be out having adventures at sea, or living in a garret in Paris? Won’t the teaching of creative writing in a workshop setting make everyone sound alike?
No one has worried more about these questions than creative writers, who have had to balance their sense of themselves as artist-outsiders with their desire for a more steady paycheck than writing alone can now provide. No wonder, then, that the stressful relation between creativity and the institution came to define so many postwar literary careers, and bubbles beneath so many postwar literary works.
My goal in telling this history is neither simply to condemn nor to celebrate the rise of creative writing, but to use it as a way to dig deeper into our understanding of art and institutions alike.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
In a nutshell
As recently as the 1930s there were no creative writing programs, and now there are hundreds. My book The Program Era is a literary history of postwar America that puts this remarkable fact at its center, asking what it means that most serious writers in the U.S. now teach creative writing, and are themselves graduates of writing programs.
This would be an important story if only for the magnitude of the transformation of literary institutions it suggests. But what gives it an extra edge is our widespread discomfort with the very idea of institutionalizing art. Shouldn’t writers be out having adventures at sea, or living in a garret in Paris? Won’t the teaching of creative writing in a workshop setting make everyone sound alike?
No one has worried more about these questions than creative writers, who have had to balance their sense of themselves as artist-outsiders with their desire for a more steady paycheck than writing alone can now provide. No wonder, then, that the stressful relation between creativity and the institution came to define so many postwar literary careers, and bubbles beneath so many postwar literary works.
My goal in telling this history is neither simply to condemn nor to celebrate the rise of creative writing, but to use it as a way to dig deeper into our understanding of art and institutions alike.