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Rumpus Book ClubTHE EDITOR’S DESK: Note From Austin— How to Make Money in the Arts, Selling You Back Your Dreams, the Rise of the Middle Class Artist
It occurred to me this morning, because the hottest party in Austin is the Fader/Levi’s party (that’s not really true, it depends on your measurements, it’s complicated), but it reminded me that the people making money in 1849 weren’t digging for gold, they were making pants. The people making pants were bigger even than the people buying the gold. You want to make serious money— don’t publish books, corner the market on pens.
The most common phrase I heard coming out of AWP, the Associated Writing Programs Conference this year was “Ponzi scheme.” It might have been Berni Madoff in the headlines, or it might be the continuing recognition of what the whole MFA creative program machine is/has become, or it might be something else altogether. I didn’t do an MFA, David Foster Wallace did, and for that reason alone I shouldn’t criticize. So I won’t. But the people inside the system are criticizing. There was a queasy unease among some faculty that they were exploiting people’s dreams. Even if what they sold had some value, were they calling it by its name? I heard it from Scott Hutchins, I heard it from Charlie Baxter, and I heard it from someone else. Three sources, unrelated: “Ponzi scheme.” This was coming from people who make a reasonable living teaching creative writing. Or some of them do, many writing teachers are just exploited adjunct faculty making pennies on the dollar with no insurance and a fuck-you note taped permanently to their office door. You learn it you teach it; you break it you bought it. They started out wanting to write, then they had a kid, or some other tragedy, and now there are bills to pay. Teaching seems vaguely related to those sinister dreams that got you into this mess to begin with. But most recognize that teaching and writing have nothing to do with each other. There are excellent teachers, writers who love to teach, and many teachers are excellent writers, and this is often the best job they can get. If Tobias Wolff and Jim Shepard and Aimee Bender are doing it, it can’t be all bad.
When people ask me if they should do an MFA, something I’m not qualified to comment on but something I get asked all the time, I tell them there’s nothing wrong with spending two years filling notebooks and not worrying about the rest of the world. It might also be helpful to meet other people who value writing above everything else, to realize you are not alone. But I say you don’t need an MFA to get published. That’s a myth. That’s the one reason you should never get an MFA for, to make connections. The professors in the creative writing programs don’t have the key to that door. There is no key and there is no door. If you went in for that reason try to get a refund. There’s no more gold in them hills.
Or so it seems from the outside. I didn’t go to AWP.
But South By Southwest is all about music. I watched a panel yesterday. Amanda Palmer and John Wesley Harding, and an agent from William Morris, and others. John Wesley Harding talked about going out on his own. The record companies didn’t have anything to offer him anymore. He sold 500 albums through his website. The album wasn’t recorded yet and the pre-sales funded it. He said it was the first time he’s ever made money from an album.
If you’re a huge star, a record guy pointed out, you need a big company to support you, a company with global reach. It’s the same for writers, I guess. But who cares about the monster celebrities, the books that sell a million copies, the seven-figure advance. What about the rest of us?
Harding talked about connecting with his fans, and creating music for the right reasons. If you don’t like making music, if it’s not an expression of something that has to get out of your head, then don’t do it. It reminded me of advice I’m always giving would-be-novelists. Don’t do it unless you love it. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. Go to business school if money is more important than the book. But that advice is also self-serving. It justifies my life. It allows me to equate publishing eleven books, being thirty-seven, and living in a one-bedroom apartment with a kid ten years younger than me, with the moral high ground rather than failure. There’s nothing wrong with making a buck.
Amanda Palmer was luminous. She and the moderator, a guy named Ryan with skinny arms and loose greasy hair patterning out and across his shoulder, spoke of the rise of the middle-class artist. Soon there will be fewer monster hits. We may never see another U2. There will be more artist like John Wesley Harding (like me!) who make a reasonable living (define “reasonable”). They aren’t superstars, but they have their fans. Since distribution is all point and click John can now make $10 directly for every album. And maybe soon writers will make $10 on every book they sell. Or nothing at all. Because maybe soon no-one will pay for content. They won’t pay for music, and the record companies will be replaced by dozens, or hundreds, of agencies servicing the needs of the artist, getting their video on YouTube, postering for a show in Winsor, doing blog PR.
The danger, Harding said, was when the artist was spending so much time running his “business” that he didn’t have the mental leisure to make art.
A woman raised her hand. She wanted to talk about a friend, an artist “doing it himself.” She said her friend sent out a well-crafted fundraising letter and raised $2,400 to make his first album. She made it sound so easy and I wanted to throw something at this woman, or spit, or storm out of the room. Because if you have those kinds of friends helping you put out your first album, or your first book, then you have too much. You don’t know anything about the place most people live in. You grew up rich even by the terms standards of your own rich country. Which happens. But let’s not make assumptions.
There will be money, and it’ll be made the same way Levi’s made money, the same way creative writing departments at schools like Columbia make money. It will be made the ways it’s always been made— hand over fist. The facilitators will sell you back your dreams plus ten-percent. They’re like dealers at the poker table where there are winners and losers but the house always takes a cut.
The middle class artist will partner with these people. The artist will take the train to houses populated with Facebook executives, funded by micro-ads. But there’s another catch too, one more reversal, after all would you rather be the man with a house on Bourbon Street and a cottage in Aspen, or would you rather be the bartender sleeping with his wife? Is the rise of the middle class artist a good thing? Who will moderate our desires? I don’t know, but I like it. I like the idea of fewer artists making huge cash and fewer artists starving and more artists just getting by.
All of that is to get here, Austin Texas. Amanda Palmer playing in a church on 8th Street last night, pounding the keyboard, shedding her jacket, pumping her fists, kicking her legs. She sings “Runs in the Family,” she sings ballads, hundreds watching from pews. I was there, I was backstage, I was in the front row and the balcony. I was on the guest list. I don’t mind being poor if I can get into the show. And after, in the hallway, before she steps outside to sign the “merch” and put in “face time” we’re introduced.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” she says, stopping for a minute. She looks at me and, I swear to god, puts her hand on my cheek.
“I really love your new album,” I say. “I’m such a fan.”
**
Special Editor’s Desk bonus track, John Wesley Harding and Amanda Palmer singing “Creep” in the hallway before the panel. Don’t say I never gave you anything.
March 20th, 2009 at 11:01 am
I certainly like the idea of more artists just getting by, but I’ve yet to see a viable model for the indie online writer, with very few exceptions (and no, Cory Doctorow does not count). Anyone?
March 20th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
I think MFA program’s are worth it for students who have talent, are willing to defend what’s non-negotiable about their work while being receptive to getting their ego bruised, and aren’t in it for careerist delusions. Those who get an MFA in hopes of “being a writer” are set up to fail and their money is better spent looking angsty in cafes. The student who just wants to park herself somewhere for two years because she wants a good excuse to write a lot of words and is crazy about books will get the most out of an MFA. The degree guarantees nothing, and some find this hard to swallow while others see it as a call to action.
March 21st, 2009 at 8:26 am
I should point out that I don’t think MFA programs are a ponzi scheme, nor do I think the teaching of creating writing is a ponzi scheme. As a student (and now teacher) of creative writing, this would be pretty inconsistent — even for me! But I did have that reaction to the AWP conference, with its odd sheen of desperate professionalism. Writing art is not a profession; it’s a vocation. As Steve says, anyone who’s in writing for the money has made a very bad choice. Get thee to b-school (though even that choice is looking dicier right now…).
March 21st, 2009 at 11:59 pm
I have an MFA and I am one of those adjuncts with the permanent fuck you note attached to my door. This article was so brilliant in so many ways and hit home for me. I, too have bought my own dream and been victim of the ponzi scheme being handed back to me. But, I’m not some kind of middle class faker. I am a real person with real pain. I have dreamed of being a writer since I was 4. The only time when I felt like maybe I wasn’t good enough was in my MFA program and afterwards and after moving to the Bay Area and facing so many arrogant, sharky people in the writing world. I don’t know why, but something about this bothers me deeply. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a critical household and there is only so much negativity that I can take. But something about the critiques arrested my development and I’m working hard at fighting my way out of it. I found the writing life after and in the MFA to be so competative. It kind of destroyed my joy for writing in a lot of ways. But, I am resolving not to let the final nail on the coffin sink in. I’m resolving to write, to finish what I’ve been working on, to believe in myself again. One thing that does bother me is when writers who are published don’t even realize that they are speaking from a position of privilege, or MFA program professors who have made it into a kind of “literary elite” make these kind of judgments about all the people below them on the MFA route. But, in some ways, I can see where they are coming from. It is a a business. But, at the same time: Some of us groundlings actually look up to the idea of getting recognized for their work, or for breaking in to the literary establishment, even of the ones who are just getting by. Because some of us are also just getting by, with our spirits. Some of us live for our creating our art and some of us are tired of people being so critical of our reasons for becoming artists. Of all the millions of unpublished nobodies with an MFA in this world, I guess I can speak for us all when I say: Onward! (No matter what the smug little fucker who ran my first MFA writing workshop told me about my strong female protagonist that smoked pot and kicks ass is “unlikable” fuck him. I’m going to write my shit anyway.)
But it’s like years of damage getting back to that position of unbreakability in one’s art. I think that the writing world if you are unpublished and 28 is really kind of snarky. I wish I could say otherwise, but I feel more at home talking about literature with my community college students who didn’t even know they like to read, then I do with other writers some times. Writers are too much of a finicky bunch. If I ever make it–by make it I mean publish something more than a propaganda pamphlet or a blog–then I vow at this moment not to be snarky about the people below me.
Maybe some of them, too will make it. And by the way, David Foster Wallace, the saving grace of the MFA program, killed himself. What does that say about the writing world? Stephen Elliot, this is a brilliant post…you have got it mostly right about MFA programs and their ilk. But, I have to just say…squeak bitterly from my place in the underground, that maybe some of us who have gotten our MFA’s are talented and unacknowledged and are struggling too–perhaps in spite of the criticism dished out on their writing, and the scensters and the self-effacing fear stopping them into silence, some of them–I mean us– are working from the heart. And at least that should count for something.
March 22nd, 2009 at 6:21 am
It does mean something. And it wasn’t just DFW that got an MFA. It was Michael Chabon and Aimee Bender and Charles Bock and a whole bunch of other great writers. I mean, so many great writers come out of MFA programs. I hope this essay doesn’t imply in any way that great writers don’t come out of MFA programs. They clearly do. Flanner O’Connor had an MFA. Many published writers I know also feel ignored, even some really successful ones. I don’t, I’m happy with what I’ve got. But I know many writers much more successful than me who still feel ignored. It might be part of writing. It might be why we write and what we’re writing about.
March 22nd, 2009 at 11:12 pm
Yeah…Maybe you have a point. Maybe that is what makes a writer a writer…is this feeling of being looked over…always being painted on the outside of the republic…their marginal status keeping them honest, but also reinforcing their own alienation from the polis. Who knows. To be clear: I don’t think your post belittled MFA’d writers. It’s the idea that an MFA is a ponzi scheme, and that people who make their living from teaching creative writing (like the people you heard saying it) go around proclaiming that it is, yet still get their bread and butter from the MFA machine. It shows how many MFA teachers just don’t give a fuck about their students. Call me an iconoclast, but shouldn’t there be some kind of striving towards “best practices” of MFA teaching just like there is for Freshman comp?
Your post is valid. It just got me thinking about what it feels like to have an MFA and reflecting on bullshit we sometimes face while in pursuit of dreams..and the catch 22 of it all. it just makes me emotional. Sorry for the diatribe.
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:56 am
Truly great writers are rare, but I don’t see any reason why some shouldn’t come from an MFA programme. Just as some others might come from anywhere at all. Throw of the dice, I expect.
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:12 am
I agree. The real question is, are you paying for an MFA or getting funded? I guess I don’t believe in education for profit. If you’re getting funded the MFA is probably a great idea.
March 24th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
I’m wondering if there are MFA programmes – or their equivalent – elsewhere in the non-English-speaking world. Here in Germany it’s not a tradition – and there are certainly decent writers – though there seem to be several recently-established possibilities at ‘new’ universities in the former East Germany.
And tertiary education for profit is generally not practised in much of Europe, with notable exceptions.
April 18th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
my name is stephen elliot turkfeld. just noticed. kinda cool.