On his book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
Cover Interview of September 07, 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.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
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.