The Personal Essay MFA
I'm at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, participating in the 30th anniversary celebration of their MFA program. Last night I spoke to a craft class of non-fiction and fiction writing students. The majority of the 15 or so students are working in non-fiction. I was somewhat surprised to learn that all of them are writing memoirs, and many of them are writing personal essays about their childhoods. The director of the program Beverly Lowry has written several novels and three non-fiction books--a biography of Harriet Tubman, a book about pickaxe murderer Karla Faye Tucker and a biography of African American entrepreneur Sarah Breedlove. Lowry told me it's difficult to get her students to not write about themselves, even though many of them are only in their twenties. (Their discussion this seminar was about Dave Eggers.) It's even harder, she said, to get them to do reporting. I told them about David Carr's book The Night of the Gun, and how it was an example of a reported memoir. They seemed somewhat unconvinced that reporting out their childhood memories would be beneficial. They wanted to create the atmosphere of what their childhoods were like from their own perspective, not other people's. It also troubled me was that they were not willing to put together a book-length memoir.
Thinking about it today I realized I had been too quick to judge. Right now, for example, I'm reading Terry Castle's brainy, beautiful book, The Professor. It's basically essays about her life--her quasi-friendship with Susan Sontag, a trip to Santa Fe with her mother, and a great longer essay about her college relationship with a professor. Next on my bookstand is Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read. Though as Sam Anderson pointed out in New York magazine, these are "both examples of what you might call the personal-academic essay—a hybrid that cross-breeds two oft-critiqued genres: memoir (engaging but shallow) and literary criticism (deep but dull)." I think it's got to be engaging and deep for me to fall for it.
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