MFA vs NYC vs Sci-Fi*

So, MFA vs NYC is an interesting book. Sure to be a classic, using the traditional definition of the word classic: an inaccurate work that everyone cites, riffs on, and otherwise tangles with. We'll be talking about MFA vs NYC in the way we talk about McWorld vs Jihad, or red state vs blue state.

The book is an anthology of essays about either MFA programs, or working as a writer or in publishing in New York City, or a few other related topics. Several of the essays are already online—Alexander Chee's and Emily Gould's personal essays are easy to find (the latter was widely linked to because it is about a person who made and then lost a lot of money), and the essay about the CIA's influence on MFA programs everyone was talking about a few weeks ago is also in here. Plus, there are older reprints; you can cobble together around half the book if you're a diligent Googler. There are newer pieces as well, not all of them personal essays. The best piece is probably Frederic Jameson's dismantling of The Program Era, which was the MFA book everyone was talking about three years ago.

One doesn't review MFA vs NYC—one reviews one's own life after reading it. I'm NYC. I started publishing with the first dot com boom; I got small pieces in New York-region content plays Feed and Disinfo.com, and parlayed that into writing regularly for the Village Voice (even getting a personal essay in there my first time out) and various magazines that were popular in the city then: Silicon Alley Reporter and Artbyte and others I hardly remember. Artsier stuff appeared in Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, which paid in prestige, and also reprinted in prestige, as I have an essay in Before and After: Stories from New York, in the before section (this will be important later). I also edited books for Soft Skull Press when it was run out of a basement (and into the ground) by Sander Hicks. So, New York. I didn't have a full-time day job in publishing and wasn't making huge bucks; I was a term paper artist and living in Jersey City, which despite being in the wrong state is closer to Manhattan than most of Brooklyn and Queens.

Then, 9/11. Many magazines died on 9/12, claiming that their incoming checks had been destroyed along with the Post Office near the World Trade Center. The economy had collapsed the previous April, so the writing was already on the wall. The spine of Fast Company was everyone's barometer as it went from phonebook-sized to a slim pamphlet. But it was 9/11 that ended my NYC play. The sort of politics I wished to write about were destroyed, as I found out when the Voice killed a piece I was working on about the conflict between the antiwar movement and the pro-war "antiwar" movement. The latter floated as its slogan "Justice, Not Vengeance", which simply ceded the debate to pro-war forces. (PS: so many years later, everything the actual antiwar movement said came to pass, so we were right and you all were wrong.) The dot com money went up in smoke too, and as more people started learning to navigate the Internet, I lost interest in writing about it. Reportage could become service journalism too easily.

I concentrated on fiction, and for a while was all over the place: science fiction and horror, yes, but several of my early stories appeared in men's magazines like Razor, and in scene-y little zine-ys like Rag Shock. (Scene-y enough that it is nigh impossible to Google!) I started this blog, and began focusing more on genre publishing since, frankly, it's the sort of fiction one is allowed to publish without a pedigree. I'm not from a wealthy or even middle-class family, and though we're recent immigrants, Greece is without cachet in NYC publishing. Plus, we were poor in Greece too! Anyway, in 2004 I left New York and that DQed me as an NYCer. It really is impossible to keep up with the scene from the outside, even with the Internet.

I eventually got an MFA, after publishing a couple of books and a few dozen stories, but it was with a low-res program with a commercial/professional orientation, and thus doesn't count as "being MFA." It helped primarily in that Japanese firms like advanced degrees, and I got my job at VIZ, my first-ever full-time job, soon after graduating, at a good-for-publishing salary partially because of the degree.

So...the book? Yes, of course, the book! Some good stuff. There aren't two cultures to American fiction, but NYC and MFA are two of the cultures of American fiction, I am convinced. A third culture would be genre fiction. A fourth, as hinted at in the piece about judging Amazon's Breakthrough Contest, might be self-publishing. I would count prose poetry as a separate culture as well, despite its association with MFAs simply by being a species of poetry. (Prose poetry is like the plain-dressing Mennonites who look like Amish but get to use lightbulbs...of American fiction.) This title does capture the essence of the two cultures, both of which are teleological—they exist for the end of creating writer identities. Books? Ehh. Is there an emoji for waggling a hand as if to say "Maybe, maybe not"?

NYC creates writer identities the threshing floor of shit jobs, the intermittent feedback of windfall freelance paydays, and real estate prices that keep even writers with six-figure advances poor, sometimes desperately so. Partners Emily Gould and Keith Gessen gained first-novel advances of $200,000 and $160,000** within a couple of years of one another, and they ended up together, broke, anyway. Only partially thanks to their sick cat Raffles (RIP). It is not possible to be a starving writer in New York City; you just starve, or you write and make good*** by landing a real job in publishing or periodicals. Or you leave, of course.

MFAs do this via pre-selection—where you go is what's more important than anything else. If you want to teach, you need a book, but you also need to be a graduate from a higher tier school, as you will only be allowed to teach at schools with less renown than the one from which you hold a degree. Get a low-res MFA for the teaching credential, and you had either make a big splash with your novel, or you'll end up a perennial adjunct at even shittier schools or working at a community college. The psychodrama of the workshop is also important, because here is where your writerly identity (not the work itself, not skill) is forged. It's how you develop taste, and how you learn to live cheaply in chockful-of-snore college towns, and how to deal with bureaucracies.

The book is full of complaints, which is no surprise since American fiction is in pretty sad shape. One fellow fumes that at his adjunct gig, he had to talk seriously about orcs with a student. Another, an agent with seventy-five clients, complains that most submissions he receives aren't very good. (Dude, you can stop reading them if you have seventy-five clients already!) MFAs tend to be happier, because they only fall victim to human gurus such as Gordon Lish. Even the most narcissistic man is much more caring than the entirely uncaring, even malefic, island of Manhattan.

A number of the essays could have in fact been blog posts. The pieces are separated by quotes from other writers discussing their own time in NYC or an MFA program. These look like nothing more than frequently reblogged tumblr memes, minus the cat pictures. The Internet has already taken over American non-fiction; the two cultures are Listicle and Long Read, and the writers here are really engaging in that struggle, not in the struggle between the MFA and the NYC.

MFA vs NYC is actually a rearguard action against the Internet, which has radically distributed the writer identity. Talk to a kid, and you might get the name of a fanfic writer as his or her favorite. And it's not just kids; a fanfic writer, E. L. James, is the most successful published writer of the last several years. Everyone reads and writes constantly, even if just tweets and tumblrs and YouTube comments. Did you know that you're a fag and you suck, fag? Oh no, is that last sentence snark or smarm? Nobody cares; identity-writers are concerned with that stuff. By pinning a tail on the donkeys of MFA and NYC, the book is asking its readers to chose an army, so that we can have a pretend war and thus be distracted from the fact that there are people putting poorly conceptualized and poorly written serial-killer novels on Kindle for a buck and becoming millionaires with "fans."


Both NYCs and MFAs want readers, not fans. What they get instead, given the dominance and ubiquity of the Internet, is the chance to daydream that they had been solicited for MFA vs NYC.










*"Sci-Fi" as a term is both an NYCism and MFAism these days. People inside the genre call it SF, of course. But people outside the genre, especially in San Francisco, see those two letters and think of the city. Thus the reading I attended once where Kim Stanley Robinson was introduced as one of "the most innovative writers of San Francisco novels."

**By way of contrast, my first novel advance was $3000, from an independent press run by two guys in two different apartments in San Francisco and Portland. The highest advance I ever got was $14,000, for an anthology for which I had a co-editor, and that required us to pay our contributors out of our advance. So I got to keep about 25 percent of that $14,000. Ten years after my first novel, subsequent advances have ranged from $500 to $6000, and I'm now writing a novel for one of the co-founders of my first novel's publisher—he's still paying $3000. In my NYC days, there were articles I earned $3000 from writing. Most of the ninety-five or so short stories I've published have paid somewhere between a nickel and a dime a word, or between $100 and $1000 depending on length, with a big cluster at around $250. Occasionally, I've licked $1500-$2000 for short stories, but only after multiple reprints or when cracking one of the rare markets that pays very well: a men's magazine, a Best American volume, Tor.com. For NYCs and MFAs, most short fiction is just a favor you do for someone you hope will be in a position to help you one day.

***You know you've made good when you eat at the same good restaurant, at the same table, every day. Dinner is better than lunch, but with the collapse of publishing as we know it, lunch will do.