Very recently I learned that one of my favorite Mary Gaitskill stories, “The Nice Restaurant”, has never been collected. I still have the issue of the New Yorker it appeared in, and while I do own Mary Gaitskill’s work, it had never occurred to me she wouldn’t have collected it yet until a friend mentioned it in passing on Twitter and I was reminded, again, why for at least 20 years now, I save stories from magazines.

They fall through the cracks. They don’t always get collected, and sometimes the writer never becomes a published author, i.e., with a book. And so in my shelves there’s a collection of literary journals and magazines alongside the books. I go to them when I teach.

I’m thinking about it today in relationship to a new project I’m involved with, the Storyville app, launched by the man who helped make buying music on iTunes so compulsive, Paul Vidich. Paul is a former Warner Music exec and also a MFA graduate of Rutgers-Newark, and he has turned his attention to the short story, even, as Peter Orner notes today, some say it is dying. Perhaps even because of that: he, like me, has that same passion for saving stories.

Paul’s project is, as described over at the Fiction Writers Review,

focused on stories from newly, or soon-to-be published collections, as well as on rescuing lost shorts from forgotten collections, securing stories that have fallen from the literary canon by negotiating 2nd-serial, electronic rights from every major publisher in hopes of republishing them for the Storyville audience. The publishers are, of course, delighted. With marketing budgets for collections already slim due to low sales, a decision that only compounds low sales further, many readers simply don’t know where to find great stories in the marketplace.

When Paul invited me to be an adviser, it was like I’d found an electronic way to do what I’ve been doing for a while now.

In a new essay of mine up over at The Morning News, I talk about some of my reading habits and ways I tried to address a decline in my pleasure reading, or, as I like to put it, how the internet remapped my brain, and an e-book re-remapped it—and brought me back to books in general.  One of the things I’ve been enjoying recently is reading short stories on my phone, delivered via app, like Wells Tower’s “Raw Water” on the McSweeney’s app, for example. Being able to do this is something I’ve wanted for years, and even thought was necessary–I know some are skeeved out by the e-book, but I don’t think of it quite that way–I think of it as the story liberated from the page, in a sense, as if it got up and ran away to join the electronic circus. Before, leaving the house used to entail deciding which book I wanted to read later if I ended up in line or on the train–I can’t ride subways without something to read–and I used to sometimes walk out with three books in my bag. Now I like how I can relax a little, and if I end up waiting in the package line at the post office, read a great story on my phone.

I remember the first time e-books almost happened, and everyone decided they were never going to come to anything. It felt like the future had come and we’d said Not now. Technology was changing the music industry, film, television and pop culture, and it felt like literary culture was getting left behind. It’s almost the end of 2010 now, and the future is back and it doesn’t look the way we thought it would even two years ago: Indie bookstores are growing as the chains decline, and some are going to sell e-books. The Atlantic reinvented itself, turning a profit for the first time in years, and with the debut of his app for the Adderall Diaries, Stephen Elliott made the e-book even seem like last year’s news. Many have predicted the end of the printed book but I don’t really see it that way–I feel like watching my own consumption, it’s only gone up. I’m still buying books, but now I’m buying things I wasn’t able to buy before, and a story a week on my phone is an example of that. It’s not replacing anything in my life, it’s just a way to have more.

Storyville will send you a story every week to your iPhone or iPad (the Android version is underway, coming up in 2011). The first story, ”The Transgression”, comes from TNB Fiction Feature Author Ben Greenman’s new collection, Celebrity Chekhov, followed by “Miss Famous”, from Robert Boswell’s Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, and after that, stories from Daniel Kehlmann and Miljenko Jergovic. Check us out.

[In the previous installment, I detailed my undoubtedly flawed if also successful plan to apply to MFA programs. This week, how I made my decision to go, and some lessons learned.]

The assistant director’s point, that I would just have to get a job once I got out of the program, made me think, but I had instantly understood she was being responsible to me, even as she offered me what I thought of as the chance of a lifetime. And once I got to Iowa and saw how many people there had, like myself, packed up their lives and left, and the various problems–financial, marital, etc., that can occur as a result–did I understand why she offered this caveat. Connie Brothers was the fixer. This was her trouble-shooting in advance.

I had the kind of job I would try to get once I got out, in other words. Did I want to give it up?

To be clear, I was not just surprised to get in, I was shocked. I had applied with a chip on my shoulder, sending a story about a clairvoyant adopted Korean high school student in a coven. He worked with the police to find lost children. The story was filled with explicit gay sex, witchcraft and psychic powers and there was even a scene where he was possessed by a ghost. It was a mash-up homage to many of the books I’d read as a kid, and to my strange high school friends. I expected to be told, No thanks. I had even said to people, “I just want them to know what kind of freak I really am”, and we’d all laugh nervously and I would think, There is no way this freak is going to get in there.

And to that freak, they said, not only yes, but, Yes, and here’s some money. Come if you can.

Why did I do this, or think like this? Well, I didn’t believe people like me got into that program and I was acting out my resentment to the standards I imagined for them–a fairly youthful thing to do, though, this practice of making up answers for other people and then having vituperative reactions to them is an increasingly American mode, no matter your age or profession. And there wasn’t one Korean American openly gay writer I could think of–my Wesleyan professor Kit Reed even said, “If you move quickly, you’ll be the first.” And I now I am.

I was and am making it up as I went along. I don’t have a role model, per se. I am living this life off-menu.

But of course, you have to go because it is right for you, and not for any other reason. I liked my life back then and didn’t want to leave it: I had friends, a serious boyfriend, a shared apartment in Fort Greene I could easily afford, living with a painter and his beautiful pitbull mix dog, who sat at my feet while I typed on my typewriter and was too gentle even to chase the mouse that would sometimes appear near the stove. But the days of sitting and typing with the dog had become pretty few and far between under the weight of a 70hr-a-week job at OUT.

When I listened to my fears about going, they told me I feared vanishing if I went to Iowa. That I would go and my friends would forget me, my boyfriend break up with me (he had not gotten into Iowa), my nascent magazine career blowing in the prairie wind.

But I was tired already of writing to house style–it felt like ventriloquism, not writing. And I had other fears talking to me: I didn’t want to be another gay man in New York with a job he sort of liked in an apartment he sort of liked, waiting for the chance to trade up–living like that seemed like no life at all, but I knew a lot of people like this. Yes, I was doing work I loved and felt strongly about politically, with some excellent people, and startups can feel like an adventure, when they don’t feel like working for too little money and no health insurance. But I wasn’t getting any writing done. And worse, after I got off the phone with Connie, to my surprise, my boss told me I was in line to be promoted, made, perhaps, managing editor in a few months.

A job I would have been terrible at, because back then the last job I wanted was one that involved going around to make sure everyone’s work was done. And yet of course, it would mean prestige, and so it was tempting. Most of the best mistakes are.

I ran into an author friend as I tried out the idea of going. “Iowa?” she said. “Everyone is so competitive there, though.”

This came in via email last night from a reader, and I was actually writing a post to address this.

Q: I am debating applying to MFA programs but am not sure how worthwhile they are.  What made you decide to get your MFA?  I’ve heard some complain that MFA’s didn’t improve their writing while other writers said they wanted the degree purely so they could teach.  The programs are expensive and time-consuming, and I’m not even sure I want to teach, yet I would like to improve my writing and build a network.  Would I be able to do this on my own by taking workshops in the city and reading more?

A: I think a good place to begin is with this quote from The Morning News, in a discussion between Robert Birnbaum and Tobias Wolff. This is Tobias Wolff speaking here:

Sometimes someone will ask me, “Should I go to a writing program?” And I invariably tell them that they should not go into a writing program until they have gone out and worked for at least two years, and probably three or four would be better, and keep writing as they’re working. If they can do that, and their writing is getting better, then they should consider going to a writing program because it could be helpful.

In college, I had two writing teachers with opposing views of the MFA: Annie Dillard urged me to go right away, and Kit Reed said don’t go, in fact never go, get a job, preferably a magazine job, and just write.

I tried Kit’s advice first, which appealed to the loner contrarian I was back then. And so in the time between when I graduated college and when I applied, I moved to San Francisco, took a job in a bookstore and got a cheap apartment with two friends. I found an internship at Out/Look, the journal of LGBT studies and culture, and helped organize Out/Write, the first national LGBT writers conference in San Francisco. I published my first short story, “Memorials”, in the prize anthology for the Holt, Rinehart & Winston student literature prize and it was nearly included in a textbook–the textbook editor signed the story up and then cut it for space at the last minute. The editor of Out/Look gave me a chance to write a cover-story for the magazine after the writer dropped out–she knew I knew about the topic, the activist group Queer Nation–and I ran with the opportunity. That led to my first free-lance writing work. And at every chance I got, I went to cafes with my friend Choire to write. A travel article I published in Outweek brought me to the attention of David Groff, an editor then at Crown, who invited me to have lunch with him in New York to see if I had a novel.

My point in telling you all of this is that while I was not in an MFA program, I did find and participate with a community of writers, I sent out work, published, I took jobs that put me in touch with working writers and had career opportunities, such as that lunch at Crown, that many young writers today believe only come from being in a MFA program for those now-mythical ‘connections’. Which you do not need writing programs to find.

After two years, I moved to New York, taking another cheap apartment with another friend, and continuing my work as a bookseller, which, in New York, was terrifying–as in the pay, which meant questions like “Do I take the subway to work or do I save the money for a bagel for lunch?” My boyfriend of the time, also a writer, was very seriously sending away for MFA brochures. I was skeptical of the idea but thinking about it–I increasingly resented the time I spent at my day job.

I sat down and set parameters:

1. I wasn’t going to take out loans to do this. A writer’s life with high overhead of any kind is a curse, and New York was like that already. So I established the goal of getting a fellowship.
2. Failing getting a fellowship, I was resolved either to wait and apply again, or to go to state schools, with low tuition costs.
3. Going through the boyfriend’s brochures, I looked to see which schools had graduated the most professors–the credentials of the faculty, in other words. At the time, I noted three rose to the top: University of Iowa, University of MA, Amherst, and University of AZ, Tucson.

I decided to test the waters and apply just to those three schools. In October, I wrote to Annie Dillard and Kit Reed for letters of recommendation. This elicited a postcard from Annie: “Of course you’ll get in and I’m thrilled you’re applying, but am concerned you’re applying to just three schools! Apply to at least 9, which most do.”

My boyfriend was applying to 9 schools. This struck me as too much work, as I was unsure of the reputations of the other schools back then (I know considerably more now). I don’t recommend this small a sample, but in any case, by March, the happy result was that I was accepted at two of the three schools, Amherst and Iowa, with fellowship offers. Arizona turned me down. This was crushing to me, because I’d made it my first choice, despite the desire to study with Marilynne Robinson at Iowa.

Worse, in what seemed like an act of fate, my boyfriend of the time was accepted at Arizona and U Mass but rejected at Iowa.

By then, I was also an assistant editor at a little start-up magazine called OUT Magazine. The University of Massachusetts Amherst had offered me a tuition waiver plus a fellowship, and John Edgar Wideman had blown my mind by writing me a note, saying he liked my work. The boyfriend and I rented a car, drove up to Amherst and had lunch with Mr. Wideman, where we learned a hiring freeze due to the bad economy was going to mean faculty shortages within the program [again, note---all of this information dates from over a decade ago---U Mass has since recovered]. Connie Brothers, the assistant director of the University of Iowa’s program, then called me at work, offering double what U Mass had offered. My whole office freaked out, as did I. And then Connie said something I still think about.

“Before you say yes,” she said, “do you like your job?”

“I do,” I said.

“Well, think about it before you say yes, because we’re just going to have to get you another one once you get out of here.”

[This is one of two parts. Part two goes up after Thanksgiving.]

Yesterday, in my Fiction II class, as the students introduced themselves I asked them to speak about what they’d been reading over the summer. One student impressively admitted to reading both Underworld and Infinite Jest. Another, though, shyly said she was reading YA novels.

“I suspect they’re more fun,” she said.

“To read or to write,” I asked.

“Both,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “I think it has something to do with what Doris Lessing said once about 20th century literature, that it was a long cry of pain.”

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years since seeing that Lessing quote. Why does pain seem to be the only subject for literature? I thought about it again after the class. So many young writers focus on painful subject matter to the exclusion in some cases of story—they view story as a vehicle for pain. I have students who will try as much as possible to stick a reader inside a box of language describing only terrible things and who think that is, well, the job. Of the writer.

If this seems unfamiliar to you, think of the ridiculous people bragging about being a writer in spite of nothing terrible having happened to them. Or of the other people, who’ve made a career out of performing their pain, for life. And the problem is, as I discovered writing my own first novel, pain isn’t compelling subject matter, even if it seems like a surefire winner with awards committees, the student writer imagining it conveys gravitas and the respectful murmuring of the brave soul who described all those terrible things. David Mamet memorably and correctly, I think, dubbed it “affliction drama”.

And so after the class I was wondering just how to present this, and then I got home and found Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, and a book critic at Time, weighing on why the vampire novel is doing so well:

There was a time when difficult literature was exciting. T.S. Eliot once famously read to a whole football stadium full of fans. And it’s still exciting—when Eliot does it. But in contemporary writers it has just become a drag. Which is probably why millions of adults are cheating on the literary novel with the young-adult novel, where the unblushing embrace of storytelling is allowed, even encouraged. Sales of hardcover young-adult books are up 30.7% so far this year, through June, according to the Association of American Publishers, while adult hardcovers are down 17.8%. Nam Le’s “The Boat,” one of the best-reviewed books of fiction of 2008, has sold 16,000 copies in hardcover and trade paperback, according to Nielsen Bookscan (which admittedly doesn’t include all book retailers). In the first quarter of 2009 alone, the author of the “Twilight” series, Stephenie Meyer, sold eight million books. What are those readers looking for? You’ll find critics who say they have bad taste, or that they’re lazy and can’t hack it in the big leagues. But that’s not the case. They need something they’re not getting elsewhere. Let’s be honest: Why do so many adults read Suzanne Collins’s young-adult novel “The Hunger Games” instead of contemporary literary fiction? Because “The Hunger Games” doesn’t bore them.

I don’t actually think Nam Le’s book deserved to get spanked like that—I think he’s actually on the side of Grossman, perhaps more than Grossman knows. But I did agree with what he says a paragraph earlier: “If there’s a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.”

When I was studying creative writing plot was anathema and it was chic to say you wrote stories in which “nothing happened.” That was followed by people making the claim that they were writing “literary thrillers.” And for a while now I’ve been saying that considerably fewer literary thrillers were written than were said to be in process, but that what people were really talking about was this, a crisis of story.

On the way back from the Catskills over the weekend I listened to NPR, and heard a commentator address how fantasy was the hallmark of film, not fiction, and it made me think of this again—and think of Grossman’s contention, that many literary writers are boring the crap out of people with stylistic limitations imitated from the Modernists. As Grossman points out, Eliot did fill football stadiums—when it was Eliot. But what we’ve seen since Eliot is generations of Modernist imitators. If you are not Gertrude Stein, if you rip her style, you won’t really know what you’re doing, because…she knew what she was doing. Her style was hard-won, and it communicates her work perfectly.

In an interview I did recently for the literary magazine Redivider, coming out in the next issue, I was asked what I meant by trying to teach excitement. I agree with Grossman entirely. I said:

It’s more like teaching people to stay close to their excitement. The thing that I see so many people do with their books is they break it up into all these nutty little pieces where they’re talking to me about character development and backstory. All these phrases that were really just meant to describe something have suddenly become orthodoxies. And they’ve lost their sense of the unity of the thing. They keep asking me, “How do I develop my character?” And I say, “Tell the story?” I feel too many people are working from the wrong end of the stick. They’ve got something very abstract they’re trying to make specific and exciting, and they’re doing it in this Frankenstein’s monster sort of way. So it’s like, “Here’s my backstory sewn onto my character development sewn onto my climax, and now I add the ending and apply electricity!” It’s just a horrible way to live, and I think you’re much better off finding the character and the situation together, looking for situations that you think are really interesting. So the advice is, don’t be afraid to have a plot, and to tell a story. Too many writing students are trying to become masters of style and not masters of story, and they do so to their detriment. They have all these beautiful beautiful sentences and we don’t really know what they’re doing with them. Be sure to tell a story.

For an example of story crushing style, see my take on Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game.