Publishing Field Report 1 – Background

On how I rediscovered passion for literature, shifted from a CS major to a creative writing MFA student, and began building a writing practice from in the blind

I never had designs on being a professional writer. Despite an early love of reading and a proclivity for scribbling poetry as an adolescent, I think I always assumed I’d find a life working with computers, my first true passion. Straight out of high school, without much of any career path in mind, I went to Georgia Tech to study coding, for no other real reason than with the state’s Hope scholarship, I could go to school essentially for free.

After two years of studying calculus and code, though, I found myself inexpressibly bored. For some reason, I’d thought coding would be more creative, allowing me to create entire worlds out of thin air. I felt impatient without knowing what to apply my desire to. I was already spending as little time on campus as possible, preferring instead to spend my time with friends, playing in bands as my primary creative outlet. The future seemed too obscure and far away to worry about securing a destiny.

On a whim, based on an ad in magazine, I asked for the then recently released Infinite Jest for Christmas. Despite having read voraciously through grade school, I’d never read a novel that bucked its predicates so throughly and hilariously, and just like that, the entire world seemed open in a way it hadn’t previously, through nothing more than ink on a page. The following semester, finding myself engrossed in the novel far more than my other studies, I got up in the middle of a finals review for physics and walked out. I changed my major from CS to Science, Technology, and Culture, the closest thing to a liberal arts degree I could get at a technical school, which turned out to be surprising exciting despite the general sneer reserved among engineers for LCC studies.

One professor in particular during that time changed my life. I signed up for a class on postmodernism taught by Dr. Hugh Crawford where we were assigned Gravity’s Rainbow and A Thousand Plateaus, and almost immediately I found myself hooked on the far more widely ranging possibilities of literary language—a far cry from the formal rubrics of compiler-driven codebase, infinitely more exciting for its limitlessness, its lack of definitive ground rules.

Using the “free time” I would have previously spent on studying, I began writing almost every day. Out of the gate, I wanted to try writing a novel, skipping straight past poems or stories in pursuit of the big kill without a clue what I was doing except reading, thinking, and typing. By the end of that summer, I had a draft, and I was hooked. “Okay, now what?” I must have wondered, still thinking of myself as following a hobby, if one that, unlike playing in bands, required no collaboration, no equipment, no performance—just a body and a keyboard in quiet room. Without any clear purpose for the work besides showing my friends and family, I filed the novel away and started another immediately, feeling a little more certain of what I was doing, if still mostly devoid of imagining anything to come of it but fun. By the time I’d even begin to sniff the idea of publishing, I’d have written 3 full drafts of novels that would ultimately—thankfully!—totally fail to find their place besides as a vehicle for learning how to write.

So far, the one thing I’d made up my mind about for certain was that I didn’t want to have to sell my time to someone else. Since my early teens, I’d found freedom running my own small lawn service, mostly cutting my parents’ friends yards. I’d also learned to find freelance work online after writing in cold to allmusic.com, new at the time, and offering to write about the indie bands I liked that they hadn’t covered. My time was worth more than anyone could pay me, I decided, and anyway I didn’t need much money to survive if I restricted my expenses to rent, transportation, and food. Obviously, the cost of living was much lower in 2004, especially while living with roommates, and so it was easy to throw caution to the wind and do what I wanted, leaving the work of imagining a sustainable future to the future.

The more time I set myself up for, the more I found myself drawn into the tractor beam of writing more and more. I applied myself to the practice without any goal but to write well, like the books I loved, which were also expanding as I chased threads from DFW to his influences and beyond. I scoured his interviews for references and consumed them for myself the same way I had albums, reading anything that sounded interesting cover to cover whether I felt I was enjoying it or not. I needed more exposure, I realized, not only to what I already liked, but to what was possible, willing myself to continue to consume whether I understood what or why.

After graduating from Tech, and feeling the pressure of post-graduation reality, the most obvious way I saw to continue developing my newfound interest was to go back to school for it. I seemed to like writing more than I liked anything else I’d studied, without any proof that I excelled at it but my own imagination. At the same time, I felt up for the challenge, relieved to find that my boredom disappeared amidst a pursuit where there were no right answers, nor any real methodology to master besides what came hand in hand with the work itself. I still didn’t want to leave Atlanta, and I definitely didn’t want to get a real job, so almost without thinking I applied to several low residency creative writing MFA programs, perhaps most of all to see if my writing samples got me anywhere. After getting waitlisted at Bennington, I was admitted, and from that point forward, there would be no turning back.

I’ve already written a bit about my most memorable experiences as a grad student, so rather than rehash that, I’ll try to boil down my basic thoughts on going to writing school. An author’s most valuable asset, as I’ve mentioned above, is always time—time to write, to read, to think, to grow, of course, but also, if so willing, space to build connections and rapport within one’s trade, which might be as simple as finding friends to share your work or thoughts with, and as large as starting a magazine or reading series. I think I went into my studies with an ivory tower mentality, thinking that if I wrote as well as I could and forced myself to reckon with my failures, I could aspire to the highest highs no matter what. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, I still believe that’s mostly true—that one should protect one’s mind space from errant influence and aim their ambition not toward acceptance in the crowd, but to pursuing the work as work, wherever it leads.

To deny oneself the mystery of creation in exchange for commerce is to put the cart before the horse, and if what you’re honestly after is recognition, you’d be far better served working in probably literally any other field than literature. No quicker way to verify a dummy than to realize, this person thinks writing will make them rich and famous, when they could have been a lawyer, or a law clerk, or, hell, a sandwich artist. Getting an MFA proved this as true as ever, finding myself surrounded mostly by people who didn’t seem to get what I was doing, confused as to how I’d ever fit into Glimmer Train, much less the New Yorker, both of which seemed to be the carrot at the end of the stick for most everyone I met. Students in workshop seemed to have convinced themselves already there were right answers and wrong answers, the latter of which could and should get you barred from comprehension, and therefore publication.

All that horseplay was really no big deal, though. If anything, it confirmed for me that here was a game ripe for revamping, oddly satisfied to feel attrition against my attempts at originality despite having little else to go on but what I’d discovered in my own reading. I felt surprised so few other students had read Ben Marcus, for instance, an obvious innovator making work like no one else, but rather than feel damned by this, I felt inspired to keep digging. In this way, as much if not more so than the craft lessons and feedback I received, I realized that finding one’s place in a field didn’t always have to come directly for acceptance and success, but more so that nothing but experience itself could lead the way into the blind most others balked at. Likewise, working 1 on 1 with brilliant teachers like Amy Hempel, Martha Cooley, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz helped me see myself through another’s eyes whether I always agreed with them or not.

As a bottom line, getting an MFA not only gave me time to read and write, but steeled my mettle by revealing what else was out there and how little control even the professors had besides the words before them on a page. Almost immediately the only real death knell of the MFA mass mind—outside of going into debt, which I was privileged to not have to do—might be sticking one’s head in the sand and insisting that whatever talent brought you far enough to complete a draft should be your meal ticket forevermore. The finer point, instead, is manifesting time and space, if not quite yet community; seeking new ground by reading incessantly and widely; and perhaps most of all, refusing to be pinned down to a single ideology or approach. All the worst damage assigned to graduate studies even today appears to come more so from having hit a wall and let it own you, rather than hitting the wall, seeing it rupture, and peering through to the other side. Of course, that sort of collateral damage can be contracted almost anywhere, and it wouldn’t be hard to argue that the real formative hindrance one should seek to avoid is social media. For every ding dong that got derailed aping Philip Roth, I’d bet there’s thousands who seal themselves off from original thought by chasing likes.

I would like to underline, right here, the fact that having or not having an MFA means absolutely nothing to the page. Without question, young artists made too vulnerable to crosstalk may find themselves deflated, even destroyed, by being forced to face a lack of understanding in the holy land, and most MFA programs have probably produced more boring, basic writers than they have great ones. That’s just the nature of the game—if everyone could write compellingly without a lick of study, what would be the point of writing after all? And yet, simultaneously, the wide-open gate allowing anyone to write any word they want at any time without need of a production budget or outside assistance is the reason language retains its power as technology to this day. While it’s commonplace to hear literature is dying in competition with social media and TV, there’s never been a wider gap between the potential electricity in a sentence in a novel and a summer blockbuster, or a tweet. As always, the limits of one’s ambition, in a free press, exist nowhere but in the mind, and ultimately nobody needs a degree to build themselves a solid reading list and just keep writing, which in the end is really all you need.

Now that I’ve established my basic beginning mindset, I’ll turn in my next post to what followed finishing my MFA—in particular, tracing my discovery of online publishing and how that led to building a community of like-minded artists out of little more than passion and practice, and how over time that led to publication, finding an agent, and continuing to build. I’ll also share the means I found to continue to extend the space that college provided by default, learning to make a living from home as a freelance writer. As always, I’m glad to answer related Qs along the way, so feel free to comment or DM, and I’ll use those prompts in future posts. Thanks for reading!