(Scott Blackwood, Lori Rader Day, Tod Goldberg, Kat Falls, Mary Anne Mohanraj) The writing is what matters—or is it? The longstanding argument between literary and genre writers proves that, sometimes, it's about more than the words on the page. Writers and teachers of both commercial and literary fiction discuss how that battle plays out in the creative writing classroom. Should students be allowed to write whatever they want? How do we teach students who write in genres we don't read? What lessons might come from genre-bending? What resources do we turn to?

Published Date: August 29, 2012

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Chicago on March 3rd, 2012. The recording features Lori Rader-Day, Scott Blackwood, Kat Falls, Tod Goldberg, and Mary Anne Mohanraj. Now you will hear Lori Rader-Day from Roosevelt University provide introductions.

Lori Rader-Day:

All right, welcome to Who Doesn't Want to be Popular. And you can see how popular we are. Sorry about that. Adventures in teaching with, for, around, and through commercial fiction. First, just a short intro, and then we'll intro the panelists who you're going to want to know.

Tod Goldberg:

Hold on, I'm sorry, are you-

Audience:

[Inaudible 00:00:50].

Tod Goldberg:

No, it's my fault. I shouldn't have-

Audience:

She's running.

Lori Rader-Day:

Mary, don't Run.

Tod Goldberg:

She literally sprinted away from-

Lori Rader-Day:

She literally ran. She ran.

Tod Goldberg:

The sound of your voice was causing her ticks.

Lori Rader-Day:

Wow. This is really good for all my writerly self-doubt, I have to tell you.

Audience:

[inaudible 00:01:09] Midwest [inaudible 00:01:10]-

Lori Rader-Day:

Screw her.

Audience:

I know who [inaudible 00:01:14] around look like Grant Wood.

Lori Rader-Day:

Oh, exactly.

Audience:

[inaudible 00:01:17]-

Lori Rader-Day:

It's going to be depressing over there. You guys are in the right place, trust me.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Gothic. No, they're in Ascots, I'm sure. [inaudible 00:01:25].

Lori Rader-Day:

Okay, that was a little bit shattering, actually.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

[inaudible 00:01:34] introduce yourself.

Lori Rader-Day:

I will. I will. I will. Under control, Mary Anne.

Tod Goldberg:

Maybe take off your pants.

Lori Rader-Day:

Tony Morrison once said, "If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." Write the book you want to read, it's advice creative writing teachers give every day. But what if our students want to write about vampires? What do we say? Vampires are so 2010. Let's face it, when young writers enter our classrooms they sometimes have limited experience with narrative. The stories they know and want to use as a launching point often come from a lifetime of reading and participating in what we know as genre.

Genre is a pretty loaded word for an AWP conference. I heard a writer on a panel yesterday do linguistic contortions to keep from admitting that her book had a vampire in it. Maybe you know this already, but genre isn't always up to you. When I was in my MFA program, I got the opportunity to show a few chapters of a manuscript to a published writer outside my program. He said, "Congratulations. It's a mystery." I didn't know that. Up until that moment, my opinion of reader response theory was that if the reader created the text-

Tod Goldberg:

Did she just say reader response theory?

Lori Rader-Day:

I did. It's okay. It's okay. I'm not that person.

Tod Goldberg:

Okay.

Lori Rader-Day:

If the reader creates the text, then why doesn't the reader meet me at my fucking desk every morning and finish my thesis for me? I wouldn't exactly say... I got the dibs on the first swear word, yo. They're recording us for AWD. It's awesome. I wouldn't exactly say I was open to outside interpretation at the time. Genre labels have more to do with the book your reader will read with where the booksellers unpack the boxes inside the store, than it does with the book you think you've written. That's in part because the line between literary and not is wavy, shaky, broken. And maybe, we hope, disappearing. The epic battle between genre and literary fiction has waged for generations. You've heard about Nathaniel Hawthorne's disdain for the damned mob of scribbling women who vexed him. They vexed him because they were outselling him.

It's true. He died in 1864. We don't propose to fix up the peace treaty here today. We're not going to spend a ton of time on genre writers who are now in the canon, or canonical writers who dabbled in ghosts, monsters or dragons. Or even contemporary writers considered literary who suddenly go off and write a sci-fi dystopian novel and win all the prizes. We hate that guy too. What we do propose is that we have a conversation about bringing popular fiction into the creative writing classroom in ways that allow students to write the stories about which they feel most passionate, and to set up classrooms as a place to respect creative work in all forms.

Our panelists today, Scott Blackwood. Oh, you get applause, that's nice. Is assistant professor and director of the MFA programming in creative writing at Roosevelt University here in Chicago. He's the author of the award-winning short story collection, In the Shadow of Our House. And the novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here, which won the AWP prize for the novel, the Texas Institute of Letters Award for best fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN USA literary award for fiction. Blackwood was named a 2011 Whiting Writers Award recipient. Pretty big deal. We're very proud of him. And he holds an MFA in creative writing from Texas State University.

Kat Falls. Yay. All right, see. Kat Falls is the author of the two middle grade, and somebody asked me what that meant, so I'm going to tell you. It's for children ages eight to 12. So younger than young adult. Two middle grade sci-fi adventure novels, Dark Life and Riptide, set mostly in the ocean under the water. The series has deals in 18 international markets. Dark Life was featured on the Today Show as a pick for Al Roker's book club, and is in development at Disney with Robert Zemeckis, attached to direct. Falls received her MFA in screenwriting from Northwestern University, and is now an adjunct lecturer in Northwestern's MFA program in writing for the screen and stage. Her latest book, The Fetch, a dystopian young adult novel, will be released in January 2013.

Tod Goldberg.

Tod Goldberg:

No, really. That was weird.

Lori Rader-Day:

Is assistant professor and director of the Low Residency MFA program in creative writing and writing for the performing arts at the University of California Riverside's Palm Desert Campus. He's the author of nine books of fiction, including two short story collections, Simplify, and Other Resort Cities, and several novels including Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as well as the popular Burn Notice series. Goldberg holds, it's hard to say, an MFA in creative writing and literature from Bennington College.

Mary Anne Mohanraj. Now they got it. Is the author of the novel in Stories: Bodies in Motion, and nine other titles. Bodies in Motion was a finalist for the Asian American Book Awards, a USA Today notable book, and has been translated into six languages. She founded the World Fantasy Award-winning in Hugo nominated magazine, Strange Horizons. She earned an MFA from Mills College and a PhD from the University of Utah, and is now assistant clinical professor of fiction and literature, and associate director of Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

And I'm Lori Rader-Day. I write crime fiction and teach at my alma mater, Roosevelt University, and also for Story Studio North Shore, a community writing center here in the Chicago land area. To get started, maybe a little context, Mary Anne, you were thinking we might need to do a little defining of terms.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

People argue about it.

Lori Rader-Day:

They argue. Yeah, they do. Do you want to define popular and/or commercial? Or how do you want to start?

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Okay. Oh, I'm starting.

Lori Rader-Day:

You're starting. This is your idea.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Okay. Well, the title of the panel is Adventures in Commercial Fiction, or something like that. And that actually surprised me and confused me a little bit because I feel like I was just at a panel yesterday where someone was talking about how there were all these literary novels that are bestsellers. If you're talking about something like The Lovely Bones, or Michael Chabon's, work or Margaret Atwood. That certainly seems very commercial. I think when people use the term commercial, they often mean bad. And they are using it as a way to dismiss a certain category of writing.

And I just find it problematic. And I find the term literary fiction is a frustrating term for me, because I feel like there is a lot of mainstream fiction that is literary, and a lot that isn't. And there is a lot of genre fiction that is literary and a lot that isn't. I would use Austin as an example of literary romance. And there are so many examples. Michael Chabon, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez, you can make a huge list of literary science fiction, fantasy writers. George Saunders. I don't know, when I'm teaching my students, I often start the class talking about, in this class I'm okay with you bringing in work in any genre, but we are going to be working to make the work better, and striving for art.

Lori Rader-Day:

Do you consider yourself genre writer, literary writer, genre/literary, or just a writer? Who wants to take that one?

Tod Goldberg:

I'll take that one for 500.

Lori Rader-Day:

Awesome, Tod.

Tod Goldberg:

I consider myself first and foremost a fashion model. I think a lot of people agree with that. When you have abs like this, you can make a lot of bold statements. I come from a family of writers. I didn't ever really understand genre as a kid, per se, but I knew that the first books I ever read, I read because my brother gave them to me. And they were the Robert Parker, Spenser novels, the dime store Spencer novels. They were these nice little paperbacks. But my brother was publishing books by the time he was 20, and I wanted to emulate him in most ways other than the way he looks and his general size. And a lot of the way he dresses also. And he had written a lot of books, and he had been producing intelligence shows for quite some time. And I said to him, when I was 16 or 17, "I want to be an author like you are."

And he said, "Don't be an author, be a writer, so that you always have a different way to tell the stories you want to tell. So you can tell them in fiction, you can tell them in nonfiction, you can tell them in journalism, you can tell them in screenplays for television or for film, but always have an outlet for any story you want to tell." He didn't include poetry then, because I don't think he'd ever read any. And I clearly didn't have the countenance of a poet. I didn't have the angst. Yet, but I do now. I'm going to put some prose together later and break it up weirdly.

I always consider myself a writer because that way I'm allowed to do whatever I want to do. And if I want to throw a ghost into what might otherwise be a literary short story, that I'm not afraid to put that ghost in there. And I tend to look at my favorite short story writers from... The writers at first inspired me to really write professionally, people like Richard Ford or Denis Johnson. Where their stories, if they had been written in the 1950s, would be considered noir. It's a guy with a gun with a problem, and that problem is usually a woman. And they're going to drive through the Midwest, and eventually there's going to be a fight. And so I look at those kinds of stories, those dirty realist stories, and I think they're only called literary fiction because they appeared in something with the word review at the end of it when they first were published, versus in something called gunshots or plots with guns, or things like that.

I think being just a writer versus a writer of any genre allows you that freedom to do whatever you want to do and not worry about how it's going to be perceived. That being said, I will say that when I've written straight crime fiction, so when I was writing Burn Notice, for instance. I did turn off a lot of what would be my normal literary introspection. No one wants to hear about Michael Westin pondering the depth of his sadness, they just want him to shoot someone in the fucking leg. And so I think there is a different approach to mainstream commercial crime fiction than there is to writing a short story that's going to be in The Kenyon Review. There's a different kind of writing that's involved with that.

Lori Rader-Day:

Does anybody else want to take the...

Scott Blackwood:

Well, I just wanted to add to it. Tod was saying the whole... Sorry, my voice is going a little bit.

Tod Goldberg:

Did you drink this week?

Scott Blackwood:

No, I did not. Can't believe you would bring that up. AWP is recording this, but they're not necessarily keeping it, especially. But I did want to riff on what you'd said about Denis Johnson and the noir stuff. Because in a book, which I think his best book, at least in my head, Angels, which is his first novel. It's the women and children in peril narrative. It's the ex-con narrative trying to somehow make it back. But yet, no one had ever seen anything like this combined with his poetic sensibility and his just exquisite control over language. And there's this incredible scene in that book where Bill Houston is walking down Clark Avenue, right around the corner from where I used to live, and he's contemplating whether or not he should steal a woman's purse.

And he's in this drunken revelry and self-hatred and self-loathing. It's so at odds. You can feel him coming apart even as he's going to steal her purse. And so, genre is always a part of great fiction. It's always competing for the stage, and it's often driving the story. Now Johnson's after other things, like you're talking about. And I think that's the great thing, it pulls you through it and fools you temporarily into thinking it's something that it isn't. Meaning, a story that you know, and know well. And then shifts suddenly and you're in terra incognito, you're cast out there. But I think, yeah, one of the things that John Gardner, I brought my Gardner book, I'm so old school, right? I've got it all marked up from 19, I don't know, '90, '88. But one of the things he talks about is we don't often write what we know in the sense of when we're talking to students about write what you know, or that old saw. We write the stories we know, and there's a very big difference.

And I was surprised how much he wrote, when I went back and looked at this, how much he wrote about genre and the uses of genre, and elevating genre to a higher level so that it could do your bidding, essentially. And do your work to get at a question of maybe what makes us fully human, and the contradictions inherent in that. It was really interesting to see how much he talks about Shakespeare doing that. My favorite book growing up, I remember my dad reading it to me in kindergarten, first grade, was Robinson Crusoe. And what is Robinson Crusoe, but a inherited series of shipwreck stories that Defoe got ahold of and knew was in the air. Everyone was talking about them. He incorporates it into the book to get the full experience of what this is like, how this person was deeply changed by this. And now we have Castaway, of course, with Tom Hanks.

Tod Goldberg:

Can I say one other thing that just occurred to me? If you ever want to see something fascinating, the first movie version of The Great Gatsby, Gatsby is a Tommy Gunn totting gangster, which is what he is in the book too. In the first frames of the movie, you can see it on YouTube, the first 15 minutes of the first Great Gatsby movie. And he's literally driving in a car with a gun saying, "Oh, you dirty rats, I'll get you. Oh, Daisy." And it's fairly amazing. But when you think about it, The Great Gatsby's a classic noir. It's the hapless rube. There's the guy who's not what he seems to be, there's the femme fatal. There's a murder, of course. There's a gangster who's controlling everything behind the scenes, you don't really see until towards the very end. And it's the great American novel, other than the ones we've written, naturally.

And I'm always fascinated when people talk about how there's no history of great works of genre. Of course they're fuck tarts. But when you look at The Great Gatsby, it is the template for the pulp novels that came out after. It's even the same size as the pulp novels, it's 168 pages or something.

Now, granted it's the only pulp novel where there's boats against the current, and all that sort of thing. But I think that is that template where you look back and say, why has American fiction tended to go towards people doing some sort of crime? Well, it's right there in that epic novel of the beginning of our 20th century. And that's all I'm going to say for the rest of the time here. It's my only smart thing.

Lori Rader-Day:

At the universities where you teach now, is there an institutional approach to admitting and working with students? Is there a policy, or do you just let what happens happen?

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Can I?

Lori Rader-Day:

Yeah.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

I'm going to cover a couple though. I did my MFA at Mills College, and I brought a fantasy novel in to my advisor at some point, and she told me that she didn't know how to critique it and didn't know how to work with it. And she very earnestly told me this. She wasn't angry or dismissive, or whatever, she was just bewildered. And we had this conversation where, and I was 23 at the time or something, and I said something like, "Well, can you talk about plot and character and theme and structure at least? And we'll work on those parts." And she agreed to that. And I wish, in retrospect, that I had said to her that, well, one, that she probably had read fantasy novels and not thought of them that way. But I also wish I could have asked her to read a couple things. That's a lot of where I come from on this subject overall, when I feel like my students who are bringing in this material, I can't teach them properly unless I know what the excellent examples are that they should be striving towards.

And they're going to write it badly, they're going to write it... And in fact, I would say they write it... Beginning writers of fantasy and science fiction do worse than beginning writers of mainstream prose. And I think it's for the same reason that a lot of composition teachers tell their students they can't write abortion papers, because there are these incredibly heavy tropes in the air that the authors that these young writers have absorbed, and it's difficult to think clearly about them. They're churning out stuff with elves and crowns and whatever else, and the instructor's like, oh my God, I don't want to see another elf. I don't want to see another vampire.

And I have great sympathy for that, because often they're written really badly. But I've been in that position of writing the really bad versions of it. When I was doing my MFA, I spent six weeks over the summer at Clarion, an intensive science fiction fantasy writing workshop. And my writing was worse. My writing was noticeably worse when I was trying to write fantasy. And I think it was just that these huge archetypal tropes were overwhelming my writing. I don't know if that's helpful.

Kat Falls:

I hit that. Have you looked online at the trope page?

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Yeah.

Kat Falls:

It's one of those rabbit holes you can get lost in. And it's looking at tropes in, it's literature and live TV and film. It's pretty much [inaudible 00:21:21] every category-

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

... isn't it? Isn't it called TV Tropes?

Kat Falls:

TV tropes. It is. And some teenager took my book and found all the tropes and listed it on the page. So I have a page. And I've only looked at it once because I realized it was going to freeze me up to know I had hit some of them. It was really disturbing because I hadn't seen the page until then. And then I had to follow all the tropes through all the examples and read. And it's dangerous, because once you're aware of them, the name of the trope is in your mind while you're starting it. And I'm like, oh, I just did a cousin Oliver.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

And there's some trope you want to avoid, like the magical negro and-

Kat Falls:

They are a lot of tropes you want to avoid.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

The woman in the refrigerator.

Kat Falls:

[inaudible 00:22:03].

Tod Goldberg:

The magical negro.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Yeah.

Tod Goldberg:

Oh, like from The Shining and The Green Mile.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Well, it's the one where the wise black person shows up partway through the text to guide the white person in their adventure.

Kat Falls:

My husband directed Aida, and they talked about the magical negro throughout the process, because Aida very much comes in and changes all of Egypt and Nubia with her presence. Yes.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

[inaudible 00:22:27].

Kat Falls:

It's very magical.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Anyway, this is getting off this side [inaudible 00:22:31]-

Tod Goldberg:

What was the original question?

Lori Rader-Day:

Well, I was going to hit one on there.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

You guys remember [inaudible 00:22:34] what the original question was?

Kat Falls:

It's about your program.

Lori Rader-Day:

In the institution in which you teach right now-

Kat Falls:

[inaudible 00:22:41] give us a break.

Lori Rader-Day:

... how do you operate with students? How do you work with them?

Kat Falls:

Can I hit that one?

Lori Rader-Day:

Yes.

Kat Falls:

I'm at Northwestern in the MFA program, which is for screen and stage, so it's not even creative writing prose. But what's interesting is the mix that gets, because when you get playwrights... I'm running a graduate workshop right now, and I have 12 grad students all getting their MFAs. Six are bringing in plays to workshop, and six are bringing in screenplays. And the screenplays tend to be genre oriented. I have a guy writing a screenplay about zombies. And then the playwrights are very serious. And it makes for a great workshop because they are pushing each other. And I'm watching the screenplay writers help the playwrights tell a more interesting story, push a little bit for bolder choices instead of keeping it in a living room. And absolutely, the playwrights are pushing screenplay writers out of cliche saying, come on, can't you do better? And it's a very nice mix, and they're very respectful of the two skills.

Going back to the question previously on, are you a genre writer? Since I write middle grade fiction, I had to learn to do it coming out of screenplays, although I found that it was really similar keeping my word count down and keeping the page really white so your eye moves fast down it. But I had read, when I started to write my first book, the first middle grade book that I wrote, and the first book I wrote, I read an interview with James Patterson about how to write genre fiction. And his very first novel I think won the Poe. And he said, "I've never written in that style again. I now-

Tod Goldberg:

He's never written again.

Kat Falls:

Well, there's that. But his rules for writing really highly, highly commercial genre fiction were, keep your sentences short, do not care about the language, only care about the story. Which I actually laughed at when I read it. And then I'm starting to write aiming my work at 11 year old boys, and boys in particular who don't read. And I realized I, to hit that, had to keep those words in mind. I had to keep my word countdown, first off, because they only want a novel that's 60,000 words. But also because boys don't want to see a big chunk of black text, and they don't want all the literary descriptions of a world. Which is hard when you're doing science fiction because you want to spend your words on creating the world. But they won't read it, they'll skip that part. So it is interesting that children's fiction tends to be written like genre fiction even when you're not trying to, when you're trying to keep it with more interesting language it's hard because you still get your short sentences.

Tod Goldberg:

Can I answer the institutional question? In terms of the institutional ability to take students and that sort of thing that are writing genre fiction, when I started the Low Residency program, I'm the first director of the program, so I got to imprint it with what my views were. What's fortunate is that UC Riverside, the main campus MFA program also is the home of the Eaton collection of science fiction, which is the largest collection of science fiction in the library anywhere in the country. They have an annual festival that I never attend. But I knew, coming from my own MFA experience, that I didn't like students being told what they couldn't write. There were students who were told that they couldn't work on novels in the program that I was in, which, it's absurd. You can write whatever you want to write. You're going to pay $35,000 and someone's going to tell you what you can't write. It's just absolutely crazy to me.

And so I knew when I was starting this program that we were going to be open to any kind of genre fiction that we could help people with. If they wanted to write literary fiction, they could do that. And also, it's for the performing arts as well, and nonfiction and poetry, so there's screenwriters and playwrights as well. And if you're writing screenplays, you have to be open to commercial stuff, otherwise everything's going to be about a Frenchman sitting in a room staring at a potato, wondering about the Venetian wars or something. And no one wants to see that, no one wants to read that. But-

Kat Falls:

[inaudible 00:27:12].

Tod Goldberg:

I knew that if someone sends in a script that's a spec Buffy the Vampire Slayer from 15 years ago that they've been hoarding all these years, if it's good, we can teach them to turn that Buffy spec into a Mad Men spec just by changing some things around. But we had to be open to getting thrillers, both in screenplays and in fiction. So I made sure to hire faculty that were open to that same thing, and to make sure that the students that were coming in that were writing literary fiction, were going to get a broad base of what it took to be a commercial writer as well.

Now, we did a panel in Denver a couple years ago on the same thing where it was five writers. And the gentleman in the fourth row there, Anthony Neil Smith was there as well.

Lori Rader-Day:

Five male writers.

Tod Goldberg:

Five male writers, all very attractive, including Stephen Graham Jones. So handsome.

Lori Rader-Day:

Very handsome.

Tod Goldberg:

And we were talking about the ability to write commercial fiction and genre fiction in the academy, as it were. And there was a guy who said, "How dare you besmirch the honor of the word. How can you get away with that in the world?" And I remember saying to him, "You talk like someone who hasn't been inside of a Barnes and Noble in the last 20 years. This is what people actually fucking read." And the most important book for the person who's going to be in your MFA program in seven years is the Harry Potter book that they read seven years previously.

And you have to start understanding that the kids that are going to come into MFA programs that are going to be 23 or 24 or 25 years old are coming from a history of reading, a lot of fantasy, a lot of crime. They're watching a lot more television, they're reading stuff on their phones and whatnot. And it's not all going to be about the dark night of the human soul. It's going to be about people with guns and people with fangs. And you had to start changing for that. And what I think you're finding more and more often is that these programs, not just like my own but across the country, are popping up that are more specialized because people are starting to realize that either you are ahead of the curve or you are the curve. And that means you have to start opening up the opportunity for people to write what they want to fucking write in MFA programs, and not just over and over again write minimalist short fiction.

Lori Rader-Day:

Yeah. All right.

Scott Blackwood:

Thank you very much.

Lori Rader-Day:

I want to give Scott Blackwood a chance here, because I know a little bit about his MFA program. He's also the director of his program. I would say they're a little more hesitant than that.

Scott Blackwood:

No.

Lori Rader-Day:

No?

Scott Blackwood:

Not hesitant.

Lori Rader-Day:

Liar.

Scott Blackwood:

Well, yeah, I agree that people need to write the story that they want to write, but what I've found too is that they haven't often read that widely, so the stories they know are pretty limited. And so I'm hoping to persuade them that there are stories that can combine elements that they like, or maybe were really captured by early on. And with that more internal strife. One of the interesting things, and I'm a huge Joseph Campbell fan, I loved The Power of Myth and the whole idea of the hero's journey, but that's been preached and preached, a hero's journey. To the point where what I found was when people would bring in what would be called genre fiction, or whatever, they would adhering to the hero's journey. And that, by God, we're going to have a hero's journey here. Without recognizing that all the tension can't come from the outside. It can't be conflict imposed on a character for it to work, otherwise readers run away if there's not a deeply human element and internal strife, and things internally where change is possible.

But I've changed my mind over the past four years of directing the Roosevelt program. One of the things that struck me was the success of a couple of students. And they were admitted, I was worried about them because they go back to the TV tropes, they were pretty much in that world. Totally predictable. I could predict within pages, or sometimes many chapters ahead, what's going to happen. And so they weren't taking the materials of genre and using them in a way that's surprising and unique, and developing characters that were unique and responded to the outside world in unique ways that would engage a reader. I have a six-year-old daughter and a 20-year-old daughter, and the six-year-old is reading, or we're reading Harry Potter to her, and she can handle complex things. I think we often underestimate how sophisticated readers are. She's on Harry Potter four now, by the way.

But the thing about Harry Potter is there's internal strife. These are conflicts that 12 year olds are going through, and 13 year olds and 14 year olds. These two examples, I'll just call them for anonymity's sake, A and K. Student A came in a strong writer, command a sentence, and knew how to interest someone in a scene, but he was writing very fast. He wrote three novels while he was at Roosevelt, in two and a half years. That's moving. And that's not socially engaging. Not necessarily recommended. But the thing was that he was really trying to capture an audience. He was very specific about what he wanted to do. He had a noir novel. And then, very interestingly, he decided he would write a fantasy sci-fi novel that was about a 14-year-old girl.

A didn't know very much about 14 year old girls, let's just be honest.

Lori Rader-Day:

Didn't know any girls.

Scott Blackwood:

Okay, we can go there too. He didn't know any girls. So it was really interesting watching him str... And I was his thesis advisor. So we worked on, he presented the basic story outline of the hero's journey. The hero's journey, this planet in which girls played and women played a minor role. They were very male dominant, and you could see the reversals coming. But he didn't understand what 14-year-old girls struggle with in this world. As we were getting into it, he wasn't tying into those conflicts, the contradictions that are going on inside the student. So initially I was put off by it because it was so surface, and I worried about that. But then it began to change, and we focused on the dissonance, internal dissonance of a character, and how the outside forces were going to stir those things up and force her to be in a position of changing.

And he took off with it. It ended up being a 375-page novel that was actually, I was shocked and amazed that he pulled this off. Engaging. The student K was in my first two workshops, and literally by the end of the first two, and we talked about form, we talked about tension within sentences, paragraphs, and those kinds of things, and she wasn't getting it. And I just would beat my head against the wall trying to figure how can I approach this? What's a new way? And I was so worried that the thesis was not going to come together because it was so predictable. Just cliche after cliche. Something happened though in the middle of that writing, the more we focused on, again, it was a coming of age story about a camp. A summer camp, and this girl's coming of age at 12 or 11.

It was TV tropes, afterschool specials. Those of you who remember afterschool specials. Again and again and again. But then we found something in that character that was quirky, that was contradictory, and the push-pull of movement. And that changed everything because it affected the plot. What would she do next? Well, this contradiction is pushing her this way, and then unexpected things began to happen. And then another unexpected thing. And so it was amazing watching her grow, and she produced a really pretty amazing... I would call it the recovery thesis. She suddenly is off in these directions I couldn't predict, and produces something that is worthwhile. I don't know if it'll ever be published, I really don't. But she felt like, and she knew internally that she understood story and structure and what made a novel work. And if you got that, you don't need much else. Anyway, two success stories anyway.

Lori Rader-Day:

I read some of that early K business. How do you help prepare the other students in the room to help someone with a book in a genre that they don't read? It was young adult, I had trouble helping her.

Scott Blackwood:

Oh, are you asking me?

Lori Rader-Day:

Well, anyone can jump in.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

One thing I'll do is try to remind them of things that they probably have read that they are not thinking of as part of that genre. Yours was young adult, right?

Lori Rader-Day:

That one.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Oh, so that one-

Lori Rader-Day:

That camp story.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

... in particular. There's all kinds of classic examples that they probably ran into at some point, even including, was it Treasure Island that was the... No, yours was [inaudible 00:37:34] Robinson Crusoe. That makes Treasure Island is more what I was thinking of as a boy's adventure story kind of thing. And again, I guess I keep invoking the great examples. So if my student is trying to write a bad imitation of Robert Jordan, who is in himself a very popular but bad imitation of Tolkien, I will not reference Robert Jordan. I'm going to push them to the Tolkien, and I may even bring in examples for them to look at so they see what they ought to be aspiring towards.

And they may never have read the Tolkien, they may have only encountered the bad imitations. Which is something you were talking about. I think one of the questions we have to ask is, why are they so drawn to that material? Whether it is the tropes of fantasy, the kings and the quests and the hero's journey, if that's what's speaking to them. Or if it's the noir, the woman to protect and the gun and whatever. Those are really powerful. Why is romance 50% of the fiction market? What is leading so many people to read so many copies of that? That's what I spend a lot of time talking about is, what is it in this story that is drawing you here? What is the core that you want to protect and work with? And can you shed some of the magic rings and et cetera stuff that's-

Kat Falls:

Can I get that one too? It is a good question because the playwrights didn't know how to look at the screen play writer's work, how to critique it. They were worried. But of course, the core of telling a good story are all the basics of a character arc. But more than that, because of their worries, we talked about what genre is, especially for film, but it is for books also. And it is the promise of a certain emotional experience. Each genre you're drawn to because you know what the story's going to be and you're going to feel a certain way, whether it's horror, or in the case of science fiction, fantasy, a sense of awe at another world. And once you know that's the emotion you're trying to evoke in the reader of the screenplay, or the viewer, it was a lot easier for the people who were not writing genre fiction to see what the author's intent was so that they could help craft a scene that would evoke that in the listener.

And it was all about learning what the genre fiction writer was trying to do. And just to say, I'm trying to tell a good story is not helpful for the other people in the workshop so that they can help you. But once it got very specific is, I want to scare the pants off someone, then they could look at the elements within a scene and say, well, you're not making use of setting, you're not making use of the character's worst nightmare. So it was helpful that way.

Tod Goldberg:

May I respond?

Lori Rader-Day:

Yes.

Tod Goldberg:

I guess I can, because I'm on the panel. I think the onus is not on the students to read up on the genre that their classmate is writing, it's the onus is on me to have taught every single person in that class well enough that it doesn't matter if you're writing crime fiction or horror fiction or fantasy or whatever, and the other people are writing literary fiction. Writing is writing, a story is a story. What works in literary fiction has to also work in a fantasy novel. And that is that the reader has to want to turn the page. That means that you should be able to, even if the person walks into the class and says, "Oh, I don't really like to read anything with unicorns or cyborgs," that the writing is so good that it doesn't matter. That it captures that reader's attention.

My job as a professor is to provide each and every student with a basis in lectures or in reading or whatever, and for me to talk to them about their own work that they can see what's important in every single book. Now, does that happen in every single workshop? Of course not. Someone eventually will say, "I didn't get it because I didn't realize the unicorn was also a cyborg." And that sometimes is a result of people just not reading very closely, which can happen in anything where the writer is overwriting. And that's generally what happens is that when there's that disconnect, at least in my classes between the writers of basic regular literary fiction where it's a man upset about the sadness he feels for his mother or whatever, and then someone who's writing about a unicorn that's a cyborg. It's that the person has spent 45 pages filling in the backstory of the history of cyborgs, and then on page 15 says, "And then he turned around, he had a horn and he was a unicorn." And the other people have lost interest.

And it's just simply about starting your fiction at the last possible moment, getting in and out of scenes, all that stuff that we learn regularly. But I think it's so important for professors of creative writing to let their students know that they don't need to be the expert. I'm the expert. I need to know it. And if I can guide that classroom discussion, say, "Okay, no, you need to think about this and this and this," then it opens up larger avenues of conversation. Not every single student needs to know about every single genre. I need to have at least a passable knowledge so that I can be a good teacher. So I read all the stuff that I need to read, and then I try and synthesize that to the students.

Doesn't always work, naturally. But I think what happens when you have these mixed classes, particularly if there's a magical negro in it, is that the students begin to have an appreciation for a wide array of literature, and they get outside of their comfort zone, and then they want to start experimenting. You guys all know what it's like when someone finally reads an Aimee Bender short story, and then every story they write after that has a talking fingerling potato in it or something. And you're like, okay, you're going through your Bender period. Okay, let's get some realistic fiction for you next. It's a talking fingerling potato who's driving through Great Falls and is going to shoot geese.

It's our job as teachers to keep them on a path where they can experiment and then finally find the best way to tell those stories. It's not the other students' job to figure all that stuff out, in my opinion.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Can I go?

Lori Rader-Day:

Go ahead. Sorry.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Just as an odd anecdote I guess is, Lori read my AWP bio, which is my very respectable bio, and it doesn't mention... And I should have given her the other one, because the other one has much more genre stuff, including-

Lori Rader-Day:

I just cut it in half. It was really long, sorry.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

I spent 10 years writing erotica and publishing erotica, and I'm far more bestselling in erotica than anything else. One of the books-

Tod Goldberg:

Do you have any of those here, by the way?

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

On the internet. Amazon carries them. And I've actually, recently this fall I wanted a fun project, so I started writing a science fiction erotica book. And it's embarrassing to talk about at AWP. I have to get over it. People ask, "What are you working on?" I'm like, "Oh, I'm stuck on this literary novel." Which I am, that's sitting in a drawer, and I'll come back to it at some point, but I'm having a lot of fun with this. And it's two genres, and it's like two bad genres, science fiction and erotica. Noir is sort of respectable, so you can talk about noir.

But what is fun about it is something Tod was saying is that I can show this to people in my writing workshop, I can show this to strangers, and they're like, "Well, I don't usually like science fiction, but I like this. I don't usually like erotica, but I like this." I've heard that so much I'm a little sick of it. But what I want to say to them is, well, you've probably only read the bad stuff. You've probably only encountered the bad stuff. There's a lot of really good stuff. If you are working in these areas, I think that's one of the things you should expect to run into, is that there's a whole education process you end up going through over and over and over again.

Kat Falls:

Mine was a minor tip. If you are running a workshop class where there are more literary writers and more genre writers, just so they can help each other within critique, I realized just in the last few weeks that the more literary writers needed just a little help looking at the writing. And the biggest issue was metaphor. They were looking at things as being metaphors that actually weren't metaphors. [inaudible 00:46:21] Well, someone said he walked mechanically across the room, and so they assumed he was a stiff up type person. I'm like, no, he really is half mechanic.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

There's a resource that helps with that, I mean specifically-

Kat Falls:

That's just don't take everything at a metaphor level, it could be literal.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

There's... Oh God, wait, I'm blanking on it. There's a site that came out of a famous science fiction workshop where they came up with... I'll come up with the name again. Where they come up with a whole list of common science fictional issues that come up in the workshop. And that's actually-

Kat Falls:

Oh, that's interesting.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

And that's actually one of them. They would call that a mistake on the science fiction writer's part, and it should be very clear to the reader whether it's metaphorical or whether it's [inaudible 00:47:09] actually clear. And so-

Tod Goldberg:

He was made of steel.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Yes, exactly. That is exactly, it was like that. And they still were hitting the metaphorical level. I'm like, no, really. Oh, I remember. It's called the Turkey City Lexicon and-

Lori Rader-Day:

What's it called?

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

The Turkey City Lexicon, it's on the web.

Lori Rader-Day:

Turkey, Turkey.

Tod Goldberg:

Turkey.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Turkey, T-U-R-K-E-Y. It came out of, I don't know, some city in the south, the turkey city. I can't remember. Anyway, but it's a long list of things like the idiot plot is when everyone in the story has to be an idiot for the plot to work. But in science fiction, you have the second order idiot plot, which is where everyone on the planet has to be an idiot for the plot to work. And so there are a bunch of-

Kat Falls:

So these are things you want to avoid.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

These are the things you want to avoid. But that happened a lot. And that you see, the Adam and Eve story is one that... I used to edit a science fiction magazine, we saw it constantly. Came in over and over and over again where there's a man and there's a woman, and they're wandering through this blasted landscape, and you have this whole story. And at the end you discover that, oh, this is Adam and Eve. And it's just, writers think they invented it, and they don't know that it's been told many, many, many times. And so it saves you some time.

Kat Falls:

That could be said about most young writers, that they think they've come up with a great idea and you're like, "Yeah, I've seen that every semester."

Scott Blackwood:

Yeah. Well, I was thinking about one of the things that happens, of course you have the Vampire series and the zombie series. Is people think, well, I better get to work on that vampire novel or zombie novel. But it's too late. Commercially, if that's what's driving you to get that out, it's long gone. By the time that gets to somebody, that's a fad that will play out in the publishing world. So you're just chasing your tail, essentially. And that's what I talk to students about, don't get caught up. Write the stories that you want to write as opposed to what you think will sell. You have no idea what will sell, basically.

Kat Falls:

I used to believe that. And do still, although there are flukes. And that is, I had this series that Scholastic bought, Dark Life. And my agent wanted me, before my first novel came out, to come up with an idea for the next novel just in case something didn't go well that I didn't get then stuck and say, "I can't write." And he said, "Please come up with a synopsis. And I'll even see if you write a few first couple of chapters if I can sell it. And here's what I want you to write." And I started laughing and thought, okay, tell me what you want me to write, because that's really how it works. You tell me and I'll be able to write it. He did this thing. He said, "I want you to write up. I want you to write a YA next because your readers are going to get older, and they can follow you."

I thought, okay, that's good advice. And then he went to the paranormal romance thing because of Twilight and all of them. And he said, "I'd like you to, instead of just sticking to science fiction, try and get a paranormal element. See if you can get a love triangle. And I'd like the lead this time to be female, because YA is far more bought by women/girl readers." And I just laughed at him and I went, "That love triangle, you want two boys and the girl, kind of twilight?" And laughed at all these limits he put me on. But then it became this really fun writing exercise, given all these limits that were, what was selling right now, how could I come up with a story premise that took them and yet pushed them to be something new? And it was a fun writing exercise. And I actually did come up with something that answered everything that he had, and yet is nothing, hopefully, that has been seen. At least in YA fiction.

Tod Goldberg:

Mermaids?

Kat Falls:

No, I actually am... My homage is to The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Tod Goldberg:

But think about mermaids.

Kat Falls:

And then he was able to sell it really, really fast. Mermaids was last year, actually. In YA there were six mermaid books.

Tod Goldberg:

Really?

Kat Falls:

Yes, there really were. Including one called Pardon My Fins. And I went, [inaudible 00:51:19] that be worst title?

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Yeah. No, my agent just asked... I had a mystery thing I was showing him, and he was like, "Can you make it a woman?" And I'm like, "I wish I could. I really wish I could." Yeah, this was early enough in the process that it wasn't, can you make that a dog?

Scott Blackwood:

But what's interesting is you guys are tapped in to the publishing industry, and so the timing is going to be right. Whereas for someone who's struggling to get in, I think they're going to be way behind the curve on that one. That would be my one thing. I was remembering, just as a side note to this, but when Justin Cronin, wrote The Passage. I felt so bad for him in the New York Times when they interviewed him, because he was put in a position where he had to defend his vampire trilogy. He couldn't just write it and-

Lori Rader-Day:

The Passage?

Scott Blackwood:

Yeah, the first book of a trilogy of some kind. But it was painful to read because he'd been put in a position to defend this. Clearly the writers were out to get him. And he kind of stepped in it in the interview because he said, "Well, and this is a piece with all my other work." And having read his PEN/Hemingway winning book, this was not a piece of that. Or that I could see thematically. But he was going to great pains to do it because he was feeling shamed. And it's too bad because he's a terrific writer. It is like, wow, how did this happen?

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

I think it's really... Last year-

Lori Rader-Day:

[inaudible 00:52:55] Mary Anne.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Well, I was going to talk about Chabon and Atwood. Was Chabon was last year's guest of honor here, is that right? Am I remembering right? Michael Chabon? Or two years ago? I don't know. [inaudible 00:53:04].

Lori Rader-Day:

Two years ago.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

So Chabon was guest of honor here, and Atwood was guest of honor here.

Kat Falls:

She fell asleep.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

Okay. I was very tired, but leaving that aside. I fell asleep 45 minutes into the speech.

Kat Falls:

I just thought they should know.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

I love both of these writers. I think they're brilliant writers, but they have very different attitudes to where their work falls in genre. And I think it's really interesting looking at how they publicly deal with that. In that Chabon is absolutely unabashed. He's like, I'm going to write what I want to write, and if it's going to have golums or superheroes or Frankenstein, all of which are in his novels, he is like, that's what I'm going to use. That is absolutely, I'm writing about the Holocaust. Jewish golums are integral to what I want to do, and I'm going to do it, and people are going to cope. And I'm going to win big awards. And there you go.

And Atwood has written all these wonderful books, but one of them, The Handmaid's Tale, is this dystopian far future feminist nightmare book. And she won't call it science fiction. And I think it comes from her having an idea of what science fiction is, as being boys and rocket ships. I would say it comes out of ignorance, really, that she's not aware that there's a huge tradition of exactly what she's doing of social science fiction, of feminist fiction that is questioning all of these social tropes. I don't know, I guess this is advice as, how are you going to frame your work? Once you start writing this and you have to talk about it in the workshop or in the world, how are you going to talk about it?

Tod Goldberg:

May I say one thing about Margaret Atwood? I think it's a fantastic point. I was remembering a horrible experience I once had with Margaret Atwood. This was a long time ago. I had just graduated college, and I had written my senior thesis as an undergraduate on a comparison between The Handmaid's Tale and Marge Piercy's, Woman on the Edge of Time. Which for those of you haven't read, is this feminist science fiction novel about a woman on the edge of time.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

It's a really good title.

Tod Goldberg:

It's a fantastic book, or at least it was when I read it in 1993. So it's probably dreadful now. At any rate, I'd written this paper and I got an A from the teacher in the class. I was the only frat boy in the class, women in feminism and literature. I picked up a lot of girls. They didn't keep me. So she was doing a book signing at Dutton's Books in LA, and I think this is for Alias Grace or something, it was a long time ago. And so I had my stack of Margaret Atwood books, and again, I was the only guy there. And I thought, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to bring my senior thesis with me, show it to her. Here's a fucking moron. And so I walk out to her at the end of this big line, and I'm showing her all my books.

And I said, "Also, I wrote my senior thesis as in the comparison of Handmaids Tale and Woman on the Edge of Time." And she looks up and she says, "What did you conclude?" And I said whatever I said, I don't remember what I said because it was Margaret Atwood was sitting in front of me. And she said, "You're wrong." And I was like, oh my God. And then she's like, next. And I didn't read a Margaret Atwood book for 10 years after that because I was so upset about it, but I was probably wrong, because she'd clearly written the book.

But I recently had a student who was writing dystopian fiction read both of those books, and she's writing dystopian and sci-fi feminist stuff. And she read them and she's like, "These feel anachronistic to the 1970s, and I'm a 21st century woman." And I was like, you know what? She's probably right. But she said, "I'd never seen anyone actually do this sort of thing. That you can do this in science fiction, you can have these large societal thoughts about the real world that we live in." Because both those books, at least somewhat, are about America. And so even if she doesn't agree that she's writing science fiction, she's inspiring science fiction writers, and I think that's enough, irrespective of what her original intention was.

I am still upset about that.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

[inaudible 00:57:21] said something mean to me once, and I still haven't gotten over it.

Lori Rader-Day:

I don't even know where to go from there.

Tod Goldberg:

Questions?

Lori Rader-Day:

How about one more question here and then we'll open it up. What advice do you have for writing students who want to slay dragons or vampires in their work, who may be feeling a little bit out of it here at AWP or surrounded by poets with bowties?

Tod Goldberg:

If anyone's wearing a fucking bowtie in this room, could you please stand up and explain it to me? Is anyone in a bowtie?

Lori Rader-Day:

No.

Tod Goldberg:

I have one very simple piece of advice, and that is that writing finds its margin. And if your margin isn't AWP, stop coming. Stop wasting your money. There's a community out there that will support your writing. Good writing is good writing. I feel like the students who are writing science fiction or crime or romance, which you didn't bring up.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

I mentioned it.

Lori Rader-Day:

Briefly.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

I didn't bring up the mysteries where the cat solves the crime either.

Tod Goldberg:

Right. Well, there's no helping the people who write the fucking cat mysteries. Cats can't solve crimes, they're fucking cats. I think that the best thing [inaudible 00:58:32] that you can tell those students when they come here and they don't want to go to the pedagogy of the feminist nonfiction memoir or whatever, that they don't find these panels, is that your community exists on the internet for the most part. You'll find these people online and you can talk to them about this stuff. And I think the fantastic thing about most genre writers is that you can write them, and talk to them on the internet. You can email them. It's going to be pretty hard for you to email Tim O'Brien and say, "I'd like to talk to you briefly about the man you shot, or the things they carried just for a couple minutes." But if you email me and say, "I want to talk to you about your second Burn Notice book," I'm just like, thank God, at long last I've been discovered.

But I think genre writers are far more open to actually talking to aspiring writers because they were in that same place. They didn't have that peer group, particularly if they went to graduate school, and they're happy to answer those questions. And I just think also that the sort of, I'm going to say a term I learned from listening to Rick Santorum. The elitism that is portrayed against writers of genre fiction you can find in places like this, ends up being nullified when you go to the store. That's where the real world is. The real world isn't always at a place like this. The real world is when you look at the LA Times or New York Times bestseller list and every single book there has a gun or a space alien in it.

And you can understand that what you're doing is not marginalized. What you're doing is the most popular form of writing there is. And I think that has always helped my students when they come to hear writers at AWP, or different conferences. And they say, "What they're saying doesn't appeal to me." Well, what they're saying doesn't appeal to most people, as it happens.

Kat Falls:

Can I do that one?

Lori Rader-Day:

Yes, absolutely.

Kat Falls:

What I say to my students is, writing is hard. It just is hard. And the place you want to get is when you're working in the flow, where all of a sudden you're in a magic space and the writing's just coming. And your whole life should be designed to get to that place. The way you set up your day should be the ideal time for you to write in the right circumstances. And certainly, what your writing should be the easiest access to getting there where you're in that magic space. And don't make it harder than it is. Because the ones whose writing I see stumble, the ones who get stuck, the ones who suddenly have these intricate problems they want you to talk to them for an hour about, are always the ones who are pushing themselves to write what they think they should write. And they get stumbled up on the shoulds.

And when you try and unpack all those shoulds and find out what they love and what they read at 1:00 AM, and stay up to read instead of going to sleep when they should, it's always their secret passion that they're somehow embarrassed about, like sci-fi erotica. And you say, "Write that. If you want to try the other thing later, try it later, but write that for now. And at least get to the poor place where you're in the magic flow place." And when they start getting there, they don't go back to doing what they think they should be doing.

Tod Goldberg:

Magic flow seems like a [inaudible 01:01:53]-

Kat Falls:

Okay, magic flow. But the flow that-

Tod Goldberg:

Magic flow.

Kat Falls:

... athletes talk about when they're in the flow.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

In the zone.

Tod Goldberg:

Zone.

Kat Falls:

In the zone.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

I have some [inaudible 01:02:04]-

Tod Goldberg:

... is a good length.

Mary Anne Mohanraj:

I agree with Tod that if AWP isn't working for you, there's some others. I want to give you some other convention suggestions for science fiction, fantasy specifically, because those are the ones I know about. And I do come to AWP every couple of years, but every year I go to WisCon, which is in Madison, Wisconsin on Memorial Day weekend. It's called WisCon. If you google that and sci-fi conventio