Category Archives: Writing

James Agee and “Knoxville: Summer, 1915”

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Lisa Roney

James Agee, NY World Telegram & Sun, Library of Congress.

“We are talking of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.” So begins James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family, his semi-autobiographical masterpiece, in the short prelude called “Knoxville: Summer, 1915.”

I have always felt a special connection with Agee, not just because I admire his now-seldom-read maximalist prose, but because he grew up on Highland Avenue in Knoxville, where I lived for a couple of years while my father was in graduate school and where my mother’s mother lived when she was growing up. He goes on to describe the neighborhood: “It was a little bit mixed sort of block, fairly solidly lower middle class, with one or two juts apiece on either side of that. The houses corresponded: middle-sized gracefully fretted wood houses built in the late nineties and early nineteen-hundreds, with small front and side and more spacious back yards, and trees in the yards, and porches.”

By the time my family lived there when I was a child, the neighborhood had gone down and was no longer solidly middle class. My family lived in a five-room cottage that had been built in between some of the larger, older houses. The largest of those “gracefully fretted wood houses” that remained on our block was peeling and listing, and housed a large family that often borrowed money from my father the grad student to pay their heating bill. The kids were always angling for snacks. We did still have a large back yard that sloped down to a gravel alley. Across the alley, though, was a boy named Herschel who lived with his grandmother in what was apparently a muddy trash heap. He once threatened me by swinging the body of a dead cat over his head while he yelled obscenities.

I still have fond memories of living there—playing with the Kellys, who lived across the street and whose Dad grew hens’n’chicks in big pots on their front porch; making forays down to the old-fashioned corner store where we would buy a candy bar on occasion; sailing little bark boats in the puddles in our rutted driveway. One evening a driverless car rammed into the corner of our house, its owner having left off the parking brake on the steep hillside. My brother and I were allowed out in our pajamas to see while my father murmured with the errant car owner and the tow-truck driver. Seldom outside at night, I was fascinated with the sparkling street lights.

My mother also told me that her mother had lived on Highland Avenue as a girl, and when I later became aware of James Agee’s growing up there, I wondered if they had ever met. Agee was a bit younger than my grandmother, and the Avenue is a longish street, so the answer is probably no. But as I read A Death in the Family, I felt certain that the childhood Agee described was very near to the one my grandmother experienced. He mentioned Laurel Avenue, he mentioned Miller’s Department Store—and so had my grandmother. And those places really existed and were still extant during my teenage years.

Miller’s has by now been bought out, and the neighborhood that once housed families has largely been bull-dozed to make way for hospitals, doctors’ offices, businesses, and university buildings. There are a few pockets preserved, but it is a changed landscape.

Agee’s birthday was November 27, and so it seems doubly right to remember him during the week I visited the place that affected both him and me so powerfully. He’s also been recently remembered for his nonfiction work with documentary photographer Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and for the original article that Fortune magazine refused to publish, but that will appear in the March 2012 issue of The Baffler. I know I’ll watch for it.

That Agee did not receive unqualified praise himself assures me that he was onto something and in a completely unique way that audiences were not ready for. I wish more writers were “bloated with guilt” instead of fit as fiddles with their own self-satisfaction!

“I know I am making the choice most dangerous to an artist in valuing life above art,” Agee noted. And indeed, he produced a very small body of work before he died at the age of 45. But it is some beautiful stuff. Again, from “Knoxville: Summer, 1915”:

Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose.
Low on the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes.
Content, silver, like peeps of light, each cricket makes his comment over and over in the drowned grass.
A cold toad thumpily flounders.
Within the edges of damp shadows of side yards are hovering children nearly sick with joy of fear, who watch the unguarding of a telephone pole.
Around white carbon corner lamps bugs of all sizes are lifted elliptic, solar systems. Big hardshells bruise themselves, assailant: he is fallen on his back, legs squiggling.
Parents on porches: rock and rock: From damp strings morning glories: hang their ancient faces.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.

And he ends this passage: “Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.”

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from Mine the Harvest

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Lisa Roney

In celebration of and consternation with the holiday, here’s a sonnet from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s final collection of poetry, Mine the Harvest, published posthumously in 1954.

Tranquility at length when autumn comes,
Will lie upon the spirit like that haze
Touching far islands on fine autumn days
With tenderest blue, like bloom on purple plums;
Harvest will ring, but not as summer hums,
With noisy enterprise–to broaden, raise,
Proceed, proclaim, establish: autumn stays
The marching year one moment; stills the drums.
Then sits the insistent cricket in the grass;
But on the gravel crawls the chilly bee;
And all is over that could come to pass
Last year; excepting this: the mind is free
One moment, to compute, refute, amass,
catalogue, question, contemplate, and see.

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Surprise!

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Lisa Roney

A French tarot card


I have a tendency to believe in chance over direct and linear divine intervention. Maybe they are different ways of talking about the same thing.

But just last night I was bemoaning to Bruce how we have ended up where we are socially and politically today, and how I can’t believe that we could arrive at this situation after the sixties, the seventies, and even the eighties and nineties. So much for progress (though I have to admit I was always suspicious of that idea). I wondered aloud if the 9/11 terrorists have, after all, succeeded in their goal in destroying any semblance of shared values in this country and of emboldening the devil of hate.

Bruce and I were talking about the letter sent by Governor Rick Scott to university officials all over the state of Florida requesting—no, demanding—certain “information” about various courses of study. On the surface, like so many things, it looks not unreasonable. But there are two things disturbing about it: first, most departments and other units at state universities have never had a budget or staff to collect this kind of extensive data, which Scott demanded in one month. More disturbing is the fact that Scott’s letter doesn’t just make it clear what he intends; rather, he has assumed that we will all fall in line with his intention, and the mission he intends to force is that of vocational training for our students. I have nothing against job-production, and higher education is key in that effort, but to define it as the main or only mission for universities is scary. And changing the game on faculty and administrators everywhere without even saying that’s what you are doing—just slipping it in—is downright imperialist.

Another one of my tendencies is to careen downhill like a snowball collecting snow. Last night, the horrors of being an educator in Florida these days picked up my more personal dissatisfactions with my work and employment situation. At one point I said to Bruce these exact words: “I never imagined my life would turn out like this.” (I know, big violin.)

In the wee hours of the morning, when my insomnia becomes the provider of quiet reading time, I was therefore extra delighted to find this passage in Pascal Bruckner’s Perpetual Euphoria, which I’m also delighted to still be reading. Unlike so many books about happiness that I read, and so many of the books published now in the U.S., it is actually taking me days and days to read instead of a few hours. It has substance and breadth. I thought I would wait to mention it again until I was finished, but this coincidence (or divine intervention—take your pick) was just too good to pass up.

And chance goes beyond the juxtaposition of last night’s conversation with this morning’s reading. I discovered this book by sheer chance, not by some plan of information-gathering related to the subject of this blog (though I have been doing that). No, I was working on another project, a proposed textbook, and was thinking about Paul Auster in relation to a discussion of memory and memoir. When I looked at my decades-old lesson plans about Auster, I found a quote from the introduction to The Invention of Solitude that I had copied out. It was by Pascal Bruckner, and I wondered who the heck he was since the name was unfamiliar and he’s definitely not one of the literary creative writing insiders in the U.S. So I looked him up, and as chance has it, his book on happiness was just translated and published in English earlier this year. That’s what we call serendipity.

Lost illusions: since the Romantic period, they have been frequently contrasted with the heroic dreams of youth. Life is supposed to follow an inevitable itinerary from hope to disenchantment, a perpetual entropy. However, it is possible to oppose to this commonplace of dashed hopes another model: that of the blessed surprise, illusions rediscovered. The world of dreams, contrary to what is usually said, is poor and mean, whereas reality, as soon as we begin to explore it, virtually suffocates us with its abundance and diversity. “I call spiritual intoxication,” said Ruysbroek, a Flemish mystic of the Renaissance, “the state in which pleasure transcends the possibilities desire had envisaged.” To the principle of anteriority, which judges life in relation to a program, we must oppose the principle of exteriority: the world infinitely surpasses my ideas and expectations, and we have to get beyond them to begin loving it. It is not the world that is disappointing, it is the chimeras that shackle our minds. Answered prayers are dreary: there is something very profound in the wisdom that warns us never to find what we are seeking. “Preserve me from what I want,” keep me from living in the Golden Age, the garden of wishes fulfilled.

There is nothing sadder than a future that resembles what we had imagined. We are disappointed when our wishes coincide with what we are experiencing, whereas it is especially moving to see our expectations diverted by particular incidents. (The literature of happiness is usually a disabused literature: hopes have either been betrayed or, more disturbingly, fulfilled, and desire satisfied, that is, killed.) Pleasure arises more from a project repeatedly thwarted and turned in a different direction than from a realized desire. While boredom is always associated with equilibrium, joyous overflow occurs when the imagination has to yield to the greater marvels of the real: “I had to choose between the hammer and the bell; what I remember now is mainly the sound they made” (Victor Segalen). Every inspiring life is both an achievement and a defeat, that is, a marvelous disappointment when what happens is not what one desired, and one becomes sensitive to everything that makes life opulent, fervent, and captious. The defeat of an illusion always opens the door to miracles.

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The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Lisa Roney


Simon & Garfunkel could write and perform the most melancholy songs on the planet, but they also happen to be responsible for what is perhaps the most genuinely happy pop/rock song around.

What makes this particular cheerful song so real to me is the way it describes one specific moment of joy. It’s a joy in life’s small pleasures, and a kind of joy that’s not flashy, that someone else might not even notice. It is not the type of “happiness” that’s designed to make someone else feel bad for not “having” it. It’s the kind of genuine happiness that Pascal Bruckner describes—it arises spontaneously out of a simple moment.

Paul Simon is a superb songwriter for the very reason that he never shies from specificity. He has written beautifully in many moods, all of which are fully inhabited in his songs.

I’m sharing “Feelin’ Groovy” today for a couple of reasons: 1) it’s raining steadily and so the song will warm me up a bit, and 2) we just bought tickets to see Paul Simon in concert in December. I have a long, long history with Simon & Garfunkel but have never seen either of them perform, so this makes this morning extra groovy for me. But if you are more in the mood to let the rain (or snow) settle into your soul today, here’s an alternative, “Kathy’s Song.” Both are true.

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Perpetual Euphoria

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Lisa Roney

"Quite the happy dog" from Grashoofd on Dutch Wikipedia


“You can’t summon happiness like you summon a dog. We cannot master happiness, it cannot be the fruit of our decisions. We have to be more humble. Not because we should praise frailty or humility but because people are very unhappy when they try hard and fail. We have a lot of power in our lives but not the power to be happy. Happiness is more like a moment of grace.”

Today I bring you this quote from Pascal Bruckner, whose Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy has recently been translated from the French. I started reading it this week, and so far it’s offering a history of attitudes about happiness. He is definitely a like mind, and I love how straightforwardly he points out the irony in the misery caused by the obligation we feel these days to be “happy.” Truly, when that is the case it can’t be happiness people feel at all.

Here is the review in The Guardian and Observer from which the quote is taken. A fuller gloss on his argument can be found in his short article, “Condemned to Joy,” in City Journal.

A happy dog picture never hurts, but maybe happiness itself is more like a cat!

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Evolution of a Blog

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Lisa Roney

Human evolution by Jose-Manuel Benitos


Like politicking or not politicking, like speaking out or not speaking out, the question of whether or not to blog has been with me ever since I started doing so six months ago. It’s been an interesting experiment for me, and, for those who contemplate or are already embroiled in the practice, here are a few thoughts on its evolution.

One of the most salient issues for me has been the lack of respect for the genre of blogging. Often, of course, some derision is well deserved: the blogosphere is open to people of all stripes and all levels of quality in their writing. For this reason, in my profession blogging counts for nothing in terms of “research productivity,” and so I often wonder if it’s worth the time and energy it takes for me to do it. In academia, often the attitude is that one should be spending any writing time on more professional pursuits.

My department chair, in a moment of encouragement for my efforts, noted that it would amount to something if I ended up teaching a course about blogging, which he’s suggested to me several times that we should do as a department. After all, it’s an up and coming arena in the fields we are supposedly experts in. Still, as far as I know I’m the first one in my department to keep a regular blog for any period of time, probably because it is not “publication material.” Yet I have to view it with humor and irony that I could teach a course in something that as of yet is given no credence in terms of my own writing and research.

There are reasons for this, of course, and the main one is that no one but me judges what I write before it is “published.” I am responsible for all the choices and for the mistakes I make. There is no one of greater power and respect placing a mantle of approval on my work, and without that it’s hard to know what something is worth.

In fact, this is one of the challenges of keeping a blog, period. Because a blog has a relentless production schedule and because there’s not a staff of fact-checkers or copy editors, there’s a constant issue of accuracy and of writing quality. There’s no time to “workshop” it, formally or informally. There’s no time to even get your husband or friend to glance over it. When I taught a graduate creative writing workshop course last summer, I added the assignment of creating or updating an existing blog to my students’ usual assignments, and my students commented that the relationship between posting what were essentially rough drafts and at the same time being on public display was the scariest thing about it. I, too, have become familiar with the uneasiness of this, even in as small an issue as the typos that somehow find their way into the original posting and that I then scurry to fix. It often has a bare-butt feel.

Another striking aspect, which I find a mixed bag, is the sense of community inherent in blogging. On one hand, I have found learning about the blogosphere and trying to be a member of the outside community a real time-sink and struggle. I find it overwhelming. Occasionally I come across a blog that I admire and try to keep track of, but there are a lot of them, too many for me–at least so far–to comprehend fully. I need to do better at this, as I consider that side of the exchange just as vital as putting my ideas out there for others to see.

On the other hand, I do feel already more a part of a wider community of those sharing ideas than I have felt in several post-graduate school years. Some of this is small—my friends who read the blog, my brother’s long-term blog that I now actually read sometimes, those from whom I ask permission to borrow a photograph, a few strangers who respond to my blog (even some in disagreement). Some of this is in the numerous great conversations I have had with friends in person, via phone, and over email. I even have one friend who, leery of too-public a world, has started a great monthly email newsletter for her friends. Those things are valuable, and sometimes it does go beyond the merely personal connection. One entry that I cross-posted to Daily Kos reached 200 comments and was picked up by the AAUP’s blog editor. I have reached the point where the blog gets about 2,000 hits a month.

The fact is that I have had more feedback and more intellectual and narrative exchange because of this blog than I ever have had from publishing short work in “legitimate” publications. I virtually never hear from anyone when I publish in a literary magazine, other than its editor (god love ‘em). Even when I published in Harper’s, I heard from maybe two readers. The book I published was another story, and even now, ten years later, I still occasionally get an email or letter about that.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great to see your work in print, and book or magazine publication is still the ultimate end. That more polished work has distinct purposes that are also, of course, desirable and important. But there is something refreshing about the blog. There is not the “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” kind of professional career building of literary venues, or the highly uneven relationship with a “fan base.” Even though I desire readers, it feels more … well, based on genuine interest and a cohort of peers.

The best aspect of it for me, though, is the great discipline it has been for me as a writer. There is no putting it off and there is no perfectionism that prevents me from calling something ready. What that means is that as of this date, I have produced close to 200 pages or 50,000 words for the blog (including notes for forthcoming posts). If you’ve read it, you know that it’s been a process of sorting out ideas. Some of it has been better written and more interesting than other parts. It has been an evolving creature, and the skin it sloughs is invariably part of the deal.

I started the blog with the idea that these days, sorrow and crying are the emotional states we most often deny to ourselves. I started with “crying,” but have moved on through other kinds of grief and anger, as well as the occasional celebratory impulse. Various themes have emerged or been clarified for me. I’ve always had an interest in the genuine more generally, and the blog has transitioned through various emotions and prepares to examine more different ones and the notion of the genuine itself.

I never meant for the blog to be particularly political, though I knew that some people would be dismayed at a negative take on positive psychology. What I’ve found is a larger and larger connection to some political aspects of dominant positivity. I still think there is room for many different interpretations of the world aside from delusion, but I have discovered that for me the political implications of blaming people for their own unhappiness are huge.

For a while I thought I would run out of things to blog about. I haven’t yet. As my friend G said, “Oh, the world will provide you with plenty on a daily basis.” And so it does. It is like being on a journey, and I am looking forward to where it takes me next. I don’t travel a lot on a physical basis, so maybe I need this kind of adventure.

Thanks for coming along sometimes!

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Diving into the Wreck

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Lisa Roney


I’ve done it again, by accident this time. I’ve dived into the wreck of our time. It’s cast me back to my first discovery of the disaster of embedded sexism (and by association racism), and of Adrienne Rich’s wonderful poem “Diving into the Wreck.” That poem and the collection of poems named after it, which I discovered so many years ago, is still more than relevant and is much needed today, when we are still so often submerged in “myths/in which/our names do not appear.” It always amazes me that these angry white men can go on and on about “entitlements” when what they’re so angry about is the loss of their “birthright” of male, white dominance. Thank goodness some men have grown up and gotten on with it. And thank goodness that women like Adrienne Rich showed that “We are, I am, you are/by cowardice or courage/the one who find our way/back to this scene.” We are the one.

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Motivations

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Lisa Roney

Last Thursday, I cross-posted my tenure-related musing on Daily Kos. It has since been picked up by the new blog of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Academe. There has been a lot of great discussion, here on joyouscrybaby and already on Daily Kos.

All writers want readers, right?

It is great to enter the realm of public debate, but I have to admit that I also find it a little terrifying. I recently said to my husband, “What was I thinking becoming a writer? The entire premise of being a writer is that you want to be famous. I am so not a fame-hound.” It is not that way with doctors and lawyers and graphic designers and so forth. Some gain notoriety, but it isn’t the point of their work. It really shouldn’t be the point of a writer’s work either, but often it seems that it becomes that way. I have been struggling with this issue as I pass mid-life not famous. I haven’t stopped writing, but how do I value my own work under these circumstances? My blog has been partly about exploring what I care about more than lines on my c.v.

In addition, one of those who commented on Thursday’s blog eventually accused me of greed because I make somewhat more than the median annual salary in the U.S. It’s a ludicrous accusation, but I’ve been thinking a lot about my motivations in the past week.

So it was with eagerness that I watched this 10-minute video called “The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” that a person posted in response to the blog post on Daily Kos. It’s an animation based on a speech by Daniel Pink, a bestselling author on the subject of work, and is part of a project of Britain’s RSA (the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). Take the time to watch–it’s cool. Academia has operated (as least ideally) for a long time on the principles that Pink notes. It’s too bad that these ideas are catching on in the private sector at a time when they are under attack in university life.

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When New York Had Her Heart Broke (9/11)

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Lisa Roney

I have a friend whose birthday is 9/11. She and I have talked about how odd that is—to never be able to celebrate, as least not in public, the occasion of one’s birth. It becomes almost a secret. I want to tell her that we should never feel ashamed of being born, just as no one should feel ashamed of dying. So, happy birthday to my friend.

There is, however, both nothing and too much that one can say about the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I’ve already given the outlines of my experience of that day in this blog on the occasion of Bin Laden’s death. Saying anything today seems to me to take nerve, but it is probably nerve we need to have.

Philip Metres gives a good account of these conflicting impulses of silence and expression that face us over any such horrific event in his Huff Post article, “The Poetry of 9/11 and Its Aftermath.” His article also includes several poems related to 9/11, including Martín Espada’s beautiful “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100,” which ends with “Music is all we have.”

So for the next few days, I’ll post a song a day related to 9/11 and the dispiriting politics that have followed in the decade since. Just as George Bush squandered the world’s sympathy in his false claims of “weapons of mass destruction” and an ill-advised declaration of war on Iraq, our entire nation has squandered the feeling of brotherly love and egalitarian concern for each other that followed the attacks. Ten years after the 9/11 tragedy, that is a daily sorrow.

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The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Lisa Roney

Medieval man at writing desk; from Rodwell, G. F.: “South by East: Notes of Travel in Southern Europe” (1877). Public domain in the U.S.A.


Continuing on a theme of work this week, but closer to home, I’m thinking about layers of privilege. We think of class distinctions as being between people who work in factory, construction, and other menial jobs versus those who are in professions and managerial roles. But there are many class distinctions within the professions as well.

Recently, for a project I’m working on, I’ve been reading author biographies, and I revisited The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” issue published in June of 2010. The New Yorker publishes a summer fiction issue every year, and last year they chose to feature their top writers under the age of 40.

On the surface, the list is a paragon of progressive balance. Gone are the all-male, all-white lists of a few decades ago. A full half of the list is comprised of women, and there are 6 non-whites on the list. A variety of white ethnicities and persuasions are included, including at least 3 Jews. Several are immigrants or barely second-generation Americans. At first, the list looks like an ideal of the Melting Pot. Yet, poke a little bit and privilege raises its head again.

Of their 44 college/university degree admissions (a few of their degrees went unfinished), only 5 of them came from public universities other than the University of Iowa. These 5 degrees were: a pre-med degree at Peking University in China for someone who went on to get two master’s degrees from Iowa (an MS in immunology and an MFA); a bachelor’s degree from Eastern Connecticut for someone who went on to two graduate degrees at Johns Hopkins and Yale; a bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida for someone who went on to go to medical school at Eastern Virginia, study at Harvard Divinity, and finally receive an MFA at Iowa; and two MFAs, one from University of California Irvine and one from Hunter College of the City University of New York. There were 6 MFAs from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Of the 20 young writers, at least 4 have either studied medicine or at some point been on a science track in preparation for studying medicine. Two of them have MD degrees. (Three of them have fathers who are doctors.)

I think the best advice I could give to those wanting to be creative writers is: attend Ivy League institutions, get an MFA from the University of Iowa, or become a physician. Unfortunately, you can’t choose your father’s profession.

Not that all of those who get degrees from Ivy League universities or Iowa or who study medicine go on such meteoric rises to fame as writers. And not that no one with a more modest educational pedigree ever succeeds. But statistically those things seem to improve someone’s odds significantly. I am happy to say that UCF (where I teach) has just sent its first undergrad on to the MFA program at Columbia.

However, perhaps, as I suspect, the key statistical factor for success is being born into privilege and/or to families that are highly educated and well-connected.

Of course, there are a couple of sort-of exceptions on the list—Philipp Meyer claims to have been raised in a “working-class neighborhood” by a father who was an “electrician turned college biology instructor” and a mother who was an “artist.” Wells Tower’s parents were both teachers, and ZZ Packer has noted that her father owned a bar and her mother worked in a clerical or administrative job for the Social Security Administration, and that her opportunities came in a school program that recruited minority students into top universities.

A few others seem to be fairly elusive about their backgrounds—there were 4 of the 20 for whom I couldn’t find any specific or only vague accounts of their parents’ professions in an internet scan, though their elite schooling is front and center in bios. It’s hard to know whether that information gap comes from a mere focus on professionalism, as I’m sure many would assert, or if there’s also something else at work—a working-class shame or a desire not to acknowledge a background of privilege, especially when a writer’s work focuses on poverty like that of C. E. Morgan and Dinaw Mengestu. The latter, for instance, notes that his father worked for Caterpillar immediately after immigrating from Ethiopia, but not what he did there or what later jobs he had when, as Mengestu notes, his family moved to Chicago to pursue “middle-class comfort” and where he attended an elite Roman Catholic high school. Salvatore Scibona says that his parents didn’t have the money to pay for his college, but not what they did for a living. For those who will not be specific about their lives or who are cryptic, it’s impossible to know.

As a sideline, it’s also indicative of something that even when these young writers mention their fathers’ careers, they often don’t mention any career for their mothers. So, I found careers for 16 to 17 fathers/grandfathers, but only 10 for mothers. There may still be a large housewife factor for the mothers of prominent writers.

There’s a strong cultural belief that our country is a meritocracy, and I’m sure that a lot of people would explain all of this by noting that these young writers simply have more talent and drive than other young writers. Not only is admission to The New Yorker a practice that must select from the best, so is admission to these elite universities. I certainly do agree that they are a highly talented group, and I’m a fan of some of their writing. I’ll never forget reading Nicole Krauss’s “From the Desk of Daniel Varsky” in Harper’s in 2007—I thought it was the best thing by far and away that I had read in any of the big magazines in years, maybe ever.

But I also laughed out loud when reading an article about her in New York magazine (“Bio Hazards”) that talks about the trials of her being married to another hot young writer, Jonathan Safran Foer, receiving a six-figure advance on her second and third novels, living in a multi-million-dollar brownstone, and the privilege of her early life. “But what of it?” the article’s author, Boris Kachka, writes. “Authors through the ages have been well-off and well connected.” He goes on to note that Krauss thinks that “the writer’s biography” is “irrelevant at best.”

People, this is like white people saying that color doesn’t matter. Privilege is only irrelevant if you have it.

I won’t even get into how good-looking all these young writers are, especially the women.

But I will note that I am planning to expand my reading in regard to these issues. Perhaps I will even read B. R. Myers’s A Reader’s Manifesto, perhaps even The Communist Manifesto to which its title refers. Myers’s goal is to promote genre fiction over elite literary work, and there is nothing I despise more than the lurid fantasy novels that my students seem to love so much or the turgid prose and sexist characters in so much science fiction. I have no idea how to reconcile all these conflicts—I love literary fiction and nonfiction and poetry, I teach it to my students, and it’s where my heart is, but I’m starting to think that in the lower end of the creative writing world—itself a very privileged place by some standards, and where I live—maybe it makes sense to also advise my students to turn to genre writing, barring premier grad school options or medical school. It’s the place where our students, especially our MFA students, might actually have a chance. At UCF, we have even a couple of faculty members who write genre fiction. The idea of this shift makes my skin crawl, but I may be a snob in beggar’s clothing.

The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Father: statistics prof at University of Nigeria
Mother: University registrar
bachelor’s communications/political science, Eastern Connecticut State U
MFA Johns Hopkins
MA (African studies) Yale

Cris Adrian
Father: airline pilot
Mother: ?
bachelor’s English University of FL
MD Eastern VA Medical School
studied Harvard Divinity School
MFA Iowa

Daniel Alarcon
[immigrated from Peru age 3]
Father: physician
Mother: physician
bachelor’s anthropology Columbia
MFA Iowa

David Bezmozgis
[immigrated from Latvia to Canada age 6]
Father: ?
Mother: ?
bachelor’s English McGill
MFA University Southern California

Joshua Ferris
Father: stockbroker for Prudential, investment company owner
Mother: ?
bachelor’s English & Philosophy Iowa
MFA UC Irvine

Jonathan Safran Foer
Father: lawyer
Mother: president of public relations company
bachelor’s philosophy Princeton University
[no MFA but did undergrad thesis with Joyce Carol Oates]

Nell Freudenberger
[her wedding announcement lists John Lithgow as her godfather]
Father: TV screenplay writer
Mother: ? [career not listed in wedding announcement, though groom’s mother’s is]
bachelor’s Harvard University
MFA New York University

Rivka Galchen
Father: professor of meteorology
Mother: computer programmer at National Severe Storms Laboratory
bachelor’s English Princeton University
MD Mount Sinai School of Medicine
MFA Columbia University

Nicole Krauss
Grandfather: Ran Tel Aviv branch of Bulova
“the isolated splendor of her Bauhaus childhood home”, garden designed by “an Olmsted”
Father: orthopedic surgeon
Mother: ?
bachelor’s English/creative writing Stanford University
MA art history Oxford University/Courtauld Institute

Yiyun Li
[“grew up in a two-room apartment in Beijing with her mother, father, grandfather, and sister”; parents don’t speak English; immigrated to U.S. age 24]
Father: physicist
Mother: teacher
bachelor’s science Peking University
MS immunology Iowa
MFA Iowa

Dinaw Mengestu
[born in Ethiopia; immigrated to Peoria (later Forest Park, IL) at age 2]
Father: worked for Ethiopian Airlines, then worked at Caterpillar factory headquarters (“hope of rising to middle-class comfort”)
Mother: ?
attended “elite Roman Catholic high school”
bachelor’s English Georgetown University
MFA Columbia University

Philipp Meyer
[grew up in “working class” neighborhood]
Father: electrician/college biology instructor
Mother: artist
bachelor’s English Cornell University
no MFA, but fellowship at Michener Center for Writers in Austin

C.E. Morgan
[writes about working class people, but is secretive about her past]
Father: ?
Mother: ?
bachelor’s voice Berea College [“a tuition-free labor college for students from poor and working-class backgrounds in Appalachia”]
master’s Harvard Divinity School

Tea Obreht
[born in Yugoslavia, moved to Cyprus & Cairo following grandfather’s job at age 7, then to U.S. at age 12 or 13]
Grandfather: aviation engineer
Father: not mentioned
Mother: ?
bachelor’s University of Southern California
MFA Cornell University

ZZ Packer
Father: bar & lounge owner
Mother: worked for Social Security Administration
BA Yale University
MA Johns Hopkins University
MFA Iowa
Stegner Fellowship Standford University

Karen Russell
[notes that she finished her MFA with a lot of student debt]
Father: Vietnam veteran
Mother: real estate attorney
bachelor’s Northwestern University
MFA Columbia University

Salvatore Scibona
[claims to have been working class, parents wouldn’t have money to send him to college]
Father: ?
Mother: ?
bachelor’s St. John’s College, New Mexico
MFA Iowa

Gary Shteyngart
born in Leningrad
Father: engineer in a LOMO camera factory
Mother: pianist
bachelor’s Oberlin College
MFA Hunter College of CUNY

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
Father: academic physician
Mother: ?
bachelor’s Brown University
MFA Iowa

Wells Tower
Father: teacher
Mother: teacher
BA anthropology & sociology Wesleyan University
MFA Columbia University

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