DEPENDING on your viewpoint, the daily news about literature and publishing depicts either chaos or a progression of events leading to reformation. Thirty years ago, when we entered the literary field, the old guard was giving way to young professionals, who inherited and completed the corporate aggregation and conversion of literary publishing from an art-based to a commodity-based industry. Those young professionals are now nearing the ends of their careers, and we’re on the cusp of another generational change. Across the coming decade, new editors and publishers will take up challenges and opportunities in an industry greatly altered from the one their predecessors inherited. The statistics give the lay of the land:

A recent National Endowment for the Arts study reported that in the U.S. some 15 million people currently engage in creative writing, mostly “for the purposes of personal fulfillment.” The same study reported that nearly half of Americans ages eighteen to twenty-four read no books for pleasure and that among high school seniors only 35 percent are proficient readers. In spite of this precipitous drop in reading, 400,000 books were published or distributed in the U.S. last year, up from 300,000 in 2006. The increased rate of production is augmented by large numbers of writers schooled at college and university writing departments. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), which comprised thirteen programs when it was founded in 1967, now includes 465 programs, and creative writing classes are offered at most of the 2,400 English departments in North America. These writing programs and classes are graduating many thousands of aspiring writers each year.

Meanwhile, pressure on commercial publishing profits recently prompted HarperCollins to announce a publishing program that replaces author advances with profit sharing and led Random House to indicate forthcoming changes to its executive staffing. Newspaper business page articles forecast the end of print periodical publishing, and among informed commentators, pessimists and optimists alike, there’s a sense of detachment and weary resignation. Yet in a well–modulated phrasing of conventional wisdom, a recent New York Times Book Review essay concluded that amid all the noise, there’s bound to be some music.

True enough, but we think there are more telling interpretations to be gleaned from the news. In 1982, at the AWP Conference in Boston, R. V. Cassill, a founder of the organization, gave an address in which he suggested that the time had come for writers to think of moving away from college and university departments. At the same conference, Donald Hall delivered the keynote address, “Poetry and Ambition,” which began with the statement “I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your ambition is to write great poems.” (The essay is available in our Archive.) He defined ambition as the desire to make the words live forever. He went on to cite what he termed Hamburger University and the McPoem and encouraged his audience to employ more time in revision and greater restraint in making submissions, given the rapid and voluminous literary output occurring in what now seems a far less industrious time than the present. In another essay, Hall called the creative writing program the circus entrance to the English department. Hall, in an interview we’ll publish later this year, has softened his views, but his emphasis on excellence over mediocrity remains.

Would-be authors seeking guidance and reassurance often ask, Is my writing worthwhile? Can I succeed? Do I have what it takes to be a writer? When we set out on the literary path, we asked these questions of one of our teachers, James Alan McPherson, who had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and he answered, none too politely, “I’m not God.” We left his office perplexed and faced with finding answers the only way we could—by doing. A few years later, during a teaching stint at Washington University in St. Louis, we sat in on Stanley Elkin’s graduate writing class, where a student, anxious over peer criticism on his manuscript, undertook a plea on his own behalf. Elkin cut him off: “No one asked you to write.” The young writer was of course frightened and could barely have recognized the love in Elkin’s eyes. Life is precious, after all, and no one knew that better than Elkin, whose chronic illness took its toll daily. He wasn’t telling the student whether to write or not to write, or even how to write, but to be resourceful, intelligent in making choices, and, whatever else, not to waste time. Hall has stated the problem this way: The danger of writing workshops is that they trivialize art by removing the terror. Across time, Jim McPherson’s refusal to be oracular has been one of the most useful pieces of advice we’ve received.

Our own upbeat response to the would-be writer’s perennial question is: Few are called; many answer. The statement is usually greeted with laughter and relief. The self-evident truth, if not comforting, at least provides orientation, and so great are the hopes and desires of even the most well-grounded and modest of us, that few hearing the truth have been deterred by it. Among the many reasons to write, personal fulfillment is a strong motivation but no particular indication of the quality of the result. To quote Auden, “The degree of excitement which a writer feels during the process of composition is as much an indication of the value of the final result as the excitement felt by a worshiper is an indication of the value of his devotions, that is to say, very little indication.” We honor creativity as a human need, yet we’re no great proponents of the contemporary cult of creativity that potentially puts a kindergarten glow on any and all aspiration.

It is much easier to publish than to write something worthwhile. In the realm of fiction publishing alone, even in today’s depressed market, upward of 6,000 new titles are published each year. And it’s no more than obvious to say that there are not that many worthwhile new works of fiction created each year, but every publishing house has a complement of editors and seasonal catalogs to fill, and titles are needed to run the business, to say nothing of the surge in self-publishing. Among the thousands of new novels and story collections published annually, there are perhaps some fifty to sixty that have immediate literary worth—books whose level of artistic achievement and vision recommend them as rewarding, if not essential, to readers committed to literary excellence. These titles justifiably claim contemporary eminence—that is, prizes, inclusion in annual lists of notable books, media and review attention, word of mouth, and moderate to substantial sales—but among these successful titles, only a few have a potency that will survive beyond a generation or two.

Reading is democratic, art is not. Literature is essentially an exclusive field. Not only is talent unequally distributed among individuals, but the luck of its cultivation has long favored those who have money, time, education, position, and the will to claim these opportunities for themselves.

Recent decades have seen a shift away from the old literary canon, and following on affirmative action, diversity, political correctness, and the proliferation of writing programs, we can now cite the digital revolution and the Internet as the key agents of literary change. The essence of the change is less clear.

In the early 1990s, Douglas Copeland, the cult writer who coined the term Generation X, remarked in Wired that the Internet had become a cross between a bordello and a shopping mall. Almost twenty years later, sophisticated advances in technology and marketing have yielded exponential growth in Internet commerce. Privateers, corporations, and individuals are fully invested in the Internet as the medium of information and enterprise, two words now all but synonymous within the creation of virtual communities. Central to our era is the unfolding of an autonomous phenomenon that at its best embodies transcendent human connections, and at its worst, a Tower of Babel. Faced with the very real possibility of a decline in the quality of human interaction and discourse—the basic transactions of civilization—the writer is no less important to the nature of a technologically determined future than the engineer, investor, or CEO.

In the literary sphere, the Internet tends to amplify the legitimacy of anyone’s work and of anyone’s opinion on anyone else’s work. Where everyone is an author, everyone is an authority. Where all works count more or less the same, nothing counts greatly; and where popularity defines quality, the median, if not the lowest common denominator, becomes the standard. Mass-marketers, retailers, and advertisers can promote democratic ideals and channel the vox populi without cynicism; indeed, they do it with good intent in the pursuit of consumer happiness and economic benefit—there is success, joy, affirmation, good work, and life in it all—yet there is also a general loss of discernment of intrinsic worth. Devaluation is the flip side of inflation.

Contributing to the confusion is a sense of entitlement born of social policy and bled into many people’s thinking about art. The notion runs, for instance, that because one writes a novel or story, it should have its place among other works. All the reading, the study, the discipline and labor, or perhaps simply the inspiration that anyone expends should be acknowledged and rewarded, because it is, after all, one’s own, and each individual counts every bit as much as the next. Malcolm Cowley, in a writing class at Stanford University, once cautioned his students to remember that it is as hard to write a bad novel as it is to write a good one. He did not refrain from judging but indicated how to do it with kindness. In the free-for-all of voices and opinions online, meanwhile, where discernment is lacking, rudeness and barbarism flourish in the guise of invigorating, or at least provocative, conversation. Everyone wants to be heard, but is anyone really listening?

It’s common for a literary magazine with a circulation of a few thousand readers to receive tens of thousands of manuscripts a year. Nine out of ten writers sending a manuscript to a magazine have read very little, if any, of the magazine.

In an undergraduate writing class, a student proclaims, I’m not a reader; I’m a writer. The comment comes with an air of disbelief at having been asked to read and, moreover, at not being taken seriously. It’s precisely here that the teacher is on thin ice. The student has paid the tuition, enrolled in the class, will grade the teacher in a performance evaluation at the end of term, and expects full credit for existence on par with the teacher. Some teachers, rather than abandon this circumstance and the livelihood that goes with it, may follow a safe pedagogy that instructs without enlightening. As Ezra Pound observed, the problem of the teacher is how to string out his lessons so as to be paid for his time.

An early teacher of ours, Peter Taylor, who sometimes seemed puzzled to find himself teaching, though he’d been doing it for years, believed that writing could not be taught but that reading could. In the 1980s, when Cassill and Hall questioned the rise of writing programs, the accepted view among established writers held that whereas it was unreasonable to expect many students to become first-rate literary artists, it was worthwhile to teach lovers of literature to be better readers and thereby to encourage an appreciative audience for quality work. Indeed, the middle-aged core of today’s literary audience consists of writing program-trained readers. What’s changed, however, is that few, if any, of those in charge of programs seem to question that writing can be taught. A body of academic codification has grown up: pedagogical papers and symposia whose thrust seems more suited to scholarly activity than creative inspiration. What’s also changed is that younger people are not generally reading, and those who do read and who enter the writing programs—by the thousands—fully expect to receive laurels; and for the most part the size of the writing workshop world (students, teachers, alumni), tiny though it is within popular culture, suffices to sustain expectation. The program system reinforces itself, as it’s meant to, and a writer may find less apparent reason to question the work on the page than to lament the world’s indifference and to rue the vagaries of agents, editors, and publishers whose influence derives from strained, self-reinforcing, commercial systems.

The experience of shared enterprise and belief engendered by bricks-and-mortar writing workshops is mirrored in new writer/reader communities online. In both realms, and in the synergy of the two, the desire to write and the desire to be read occur in the context of the defection of readers and of publishers from literary work, though the rate of literary production is at an all-time high. The digital revolution coincides with a watershed generational change as the existing literary audience rapidly ages, and unless clear, studied focus is given to engaging a new generation in reading, the outcome is likely to be aging writers who write mainly for each other, young writers who are ill-read, and the replacement of art and excellence by professionalism, or indifference.

In earlier, less media-saturated times, when the written word was more central to daily life, a writer might never need question that an audience for writing existed but only wonder whether some portion of that audience would be attracted to the writer’s work. Especially in the heroic atmosphere of twentieth-century America, with iconic personalities dominating the media, writers could easily succumb to the notion that readers existed mainly to affirm the writer, and until recently readers conspired with this view. But today, when apparently everyone can be an author and proclaim worth equal to any other author’s, and with fewer and fewer people finding reading worthwhile, the continued existence of a receptive literary audience depends, in part, on writers, would-be writers, and teachers of writing grounding themselves in the belief that writing is an act of generosity, of gift-giving to readers.

The publishing industry—that cataract of readers and writers—finds itself at once contracted by falling sales and outdated business models and upended by the promise of the Internet. The Internet is predicated on ease—speed, efficiency, immediacy of production and revelation—and this can be a wonderful thing for readers. But literary enterprise remains an arduous craft buoyed by the unequal distribution of talent and the challenge to even the most gifted of making a life that permits them to work. The challenge to a society that values literature is to translate the democratic advantages of the Internet to literature without leveling the topography of achievement. The publishing industry may be much decried for its gatekeepers, commercial instincts, and unresponsive nature, but it did function for a long while to ensure that the best work, with a few exceptions, found the shelves. In an Internet age, when the shelves are available on your Kindle or laptop 24/7, such discernment must be taken up by readers themselves—and for this, we need teachers, editors, and writers who will not give up their highest aspirations. By virtue of a dedication to excellence, those who care can bring the digital revolution to serve a literary reformation.

 

IN our new issue, you’ll find a high-tension excerpt from Richard Bausch’s new wartime novel; a chapter from Donald Hall’s forthcoming memoir, relating his youthful trials at becoming a poet; a moving personal essay for dog lovers by Tom Grimes; a trilogy of razor-sharp short short stories from Barry Gifford and newcomers Louise Jarvis Flynn and Holly Wilson; and the magnificent and meditative poetry of Matthew Dickman, Mike O’Connor, Alberto Álvaro Ríos, and Jennifer Tonge. Also in the issue, Broadway lyricist Lynn Ahrens hilariously reports her Oscar nomination and trip to the Academy Awards, and Rick Bass reflects on our oil addiction and the price of fighting it. Our classic story, Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel,” begins gently and escalates to murder, subtly probing the meaning of complicity. The issue rounds out with First & Second Looks at not-to-be-missed books, in which we introduce poetry reviews—of a recent Nobelist and the early, unknown Robert Frost—as well as three innovative nonfiction books and a small jewel of a novel a few years old that reminds us that a publisher’s mid-list can be set with treasures. This issue’s Readers’ Narratives take us from a California ranch, where a falconer hunts a duck, to a Colorado DMV, where a transsexual attempts to change the gender designation on his driver’s license. We also witness two vastly different sexual encounters—one made by a romantic lover in the Vienna of 1937, the other by a young woman waking up to a tense morning-after in Santa Monica. Finally, we visit Jerusalem on a Sabbath and San Francisco on a January day to round out six unique explorations of destination and voice.

 

CONGRATULATIONS to Narrative’s assistant editors, Thad Nodine, whose novel Going Home won the 2007 Dana Award, and to Eileen Cronin, who received the 2007 Washington Independent Writer’s Award for short stories. Also, our congratulations go out to Skip Horack, who received the Bakeless Prize for his story collection The Southern Cross, which includes “Blue Bonnet Swamp,” originally published here and available in our Archive. Many congratulations as well to the recent winners and finalists in our 2008 Love Story Contest.

The deadline for submissions for the 2008 Narrative Prize is June 15, and the deadline for the First-Person Story Contest is July 31.

 

OUR next Narrative night will be this autumn in Seattle—details to come. In the meantime, we’ve posted photo features of recent Narrative Nights in Santa Fe and San Francisco. We hope to see you in Seattle, or if not there, then at an upcoming Narrative Night in New York City in January 2009.

 

GOOD wishes for the spring and summer. In July watch for the unveiling of our new site design with many new features and opportunities for readers to take part in discussions and in creating content for the magazine.

 

—Carol Edgarian and Tom Jenks