I don’t mean to rehash the whole “is-the-MFA-degree-in-creative-writing-useless” issue, but I do want to suggest some solutions to one of the commonly cited arguments against getting an MFA. [Full Disclosure: I'm getting my MFA at Columbia University.]

I’ve often heard that MFA programs produce cookie-cutter writers. Because students are all taught by the same professors, reading the same assigned readings (most often, from the mainstream canon of literature), and critiquing each others work within a closed loop, they end up all sounding like one another and like the influences that are hoisted upon them within the courses.

Like I said, I don’t intend to rehash this debate. Instead, I want to propose some solutions I’ve come up with.

If, in fact, people come out of MFA programs sounding like “MFA-ey writers,” with cautious language, similar influences, and a lack of risk and experimentation, here are some ideas of how to diversify your influences while in an MFA program and avoid robotic writing:

Read translated literature. Read works in English by authors from other cultures, countries, languages, and periods of time. Bring in some of that foreign-ness into your English. Push the boundaries of what English is expected to be able to do. Or hell, if you have the skills, just read non-English works in their original language! Certainly the majority of people around you aren’t doing this in most traditional MFA programs.

Translate literature yourself, if you have sufficient language skills. In the process, you’re forced to become super acquainted with another author (do one you admire) and you’ll end up soaking up some of their literary influences, ones that stand outside of the English stuff everyone else is reading.

Read things that might not be categorized, necessarily, as literary. What about the works of oral history by Studs Terkel and Svetlana Alexievich? In reading those transcriptions of monologues by people who survived the Great Depression and the Chernobyl disaster, I learned a lot about dialogue, tone, being sparse, and forcing myself to cut out the unnecessary fat of my paragraphs.

Maintain ties with writers, editors, and friends who are good readers of your work outside of the MFA program. Have people outside your program read your work. Go to readings of people who aren’t your classmates. SheWrites is a great online community for women writers, for example.

Get a part-time job (or dreaded internship) that exposes you to worlds beyond the classroom. Try journalism. Try teaching. Be a grant writer. Work as the editor for a literary journal. Obviously easier said than done, especially in this (transitional) job market.

Take classes or workshops in other genres! Be friends with writers across genres! This is a big one, I think. Who says you can only write in one form? Challenge yourself to try out other forms, and even if that’s not your style, allow the tools and tricks you learn from one to inform the other. Sentences in literary nonfiction have to sing just like they do in poetry. Side note: I found that teaching multi-genre creative writing to high school students made me confident enough to try writing fiction for the first time in years. If I can teach it, hell, I should be able to do it.

Any other ideas?

Thanks to Idra Novey for some of the ideas about translation.

Last night, I saw Edith Grossman, writer, translator, and critic, speak in conversation with Mary Ann Caws. The talk was fascinating–it was on the occasion of Grossman’s recent book “Why Translation Matters,” a collection of essays on the practice of literary translation. (Grossman has translated “Don Quixote,” many of Gabriel García Márquez’s works, and much more.)

The most interesting conversation of the evening came from a question posed by Kamy Wicoff, author and founder of the website SheWrites.

Wicoff talked about being stumped at how works have many lives–many iterations–in translation, while the original work in the original language doesn’t get revisited or updated for contemporary readers in that original language. Jane Austen will never be translated into contemporary English while there is probably a new Spanish edition every generation.

I think Wicoff has a great point. And one that I can’t quite wrap my head around.

I think it’s awful strange that non-English readers may have a better sense of Shakespeare than I do. They read translated versions that may be written in a contemporary version of their language, one that doesn’t sound foreign to them. I, on the other hand, read Shakespeare in Early Modern English, which means that as a high schooler, it was like reading a foreign language. Perhaps international readers can have a greater appreciation of Shakespeare than I can.

What does it mean that literary works (and plays, and poems, and memoirs for that matter) are resuscitated and revised and revisited only in translation while they only have one form, one life, in their original language? Should we be updating Old English texts into Modern English?

The 2009 Oddest Book Title prize has drawn a record number of submissions, including the gem at left.

Fuck Yeah NYRB Classics!! Via The Millions.

American Psycho…the musical!

One poem, translated 31 ways. Via Silliman’s Blog.

What would your favorite TV characters read?

Choose your own literary elite nickname. Mine is ‘Helpless Drunken Cobra.’

Is Shoplifting from American Apparel the new Catcher in the Rye?

Our pals at Awkward Press (publishers of the very enjoyable Awkward One) are currently accepting submissions for their upcoming issue Awkward Two. Details here.

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