In Defense of Junot Diaz's Critique of MFA Programs

By this point, most of us have already read part or all of Junot Diaz's critique of MFA programs in the New Yorker as being oversaturated with white faculty and white writers.  If somehow you've been hiding in a capsule hotel with a nasty case of Malaria so you haven't been able to catch up on the world, you can check it out here:
 

Are MFA programs too white? Junot Díaz reflects on his experience: http://t.co/ebVcYqyM2u
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) May 4, 2014


Anyway, Junot Diaz doesn't need me to defend him in any way, but I do have a few things to add to this discourse concerning the role (and also the constraints) of race in workshop.  Here are my thoughts:

1.  Most of the pissed-off comments on the New Yorker website are by white educated readers, which proves the very point Junot Diaz was making about our cultural inability to tolerate, moreover, accept race as both a construct and also a cultural and literary reality for writers of color.  In fact, the response of most of the posters mirrors the response of many writers I knew in my own MFA workshops concerning race, who either saw race as an ideological and thematic obsession for writers of color that made their writing polemical somehow (because writing about being white is never polemical), an impediment to some imaginary "pure" prose school that was supposed to focus on the universality of human beings and not their particularities, or a direct challenge to literary realism that has been dominated by white, upper-class, heteronormative, East Coast writers for so long now that the"white" narrative has become a synonym for "neutral," "standard" and "uncontroversial."  In fact, whiteness is still part of the literary default settings:  if an author doesn't specify the race of a character, most readers still assume s/he's white unless there's a stereotypical race marker.

2.  One thing most commenters failed to understand about MFA programs is that they don't share the same theoretical training or theory-obsessed culture as the English PhD programs that MFA programs are usually part of.  For example, critical PhD students rarely enroll in MFA workshops because of enrollment caps in workshops and many MFA students avoid literary theory classes whenever possible.  What this means is, it's very possible (and also very normal for MFA students) to avoid any and all conversations intersecting with minority discourse, postcolonialism, queer theory, marxist theory at all.  The point is, most MFA programs are dead spaces for the examination of racial discourse and the analysis of non-white cultural/racial narratives.  In fact, in most MFA programs not located in Oakland, California, race becomes a venereal disease that no one wants to talk about.  They don't even wanna touch it.

3.  As a hapa who reads white but is actually part Asian (Japanese) and part white (French and British), I'm actually on both sides of this dynamic.  And I have to say that I mostly agree with Junot.  I encountered a shitload of resistance when I wrote about non-white characters during my MFA years in part because of the assumptions that other writers made about my own race (which filtered what they believed I was allowed to write about and what I wasn't).  I remember in one piece I submitted to workshop, I had a desi character who I was very fond of.  For a draft, I found her to be smart, independent, complex, and intriguing.  But the workshop completely rejected her characterization, not because they found her to be an Indian stereotype (for this would assume familiarity with Indian culture), but because they didn't understand why I had an Indian character in my manuscript at all.  One white student even suggested that I put an Indian character to spice up my chapter.  That's a verbatim quote, by the way.  And when even one of my Pakistani writer friends (another desi!) in workshop vouched for both the cultural authenticity and also the uniqueness of her character, the workshop rejected his comments and then spoke over him.  Think about that for a second:  a group of mostly white writers telling a hapa writer and a Pakistani writer what was culturally authentic and culturally permissible in workshop about non-white people.  The reality is that having mostly white writers and mostly white faculty can create a hostile MFA atmosphere in which people either deny that race exists at all (either in the world or on the page), they treat race as if it were some cultural crusade to punish white people or they assume that race in fiction and in workshop is always an act of tokenism, shallowness, political correctness, white guilt or even more paradoxically, of racism.  Even worse, many white writers and faculty treat race, the issue of race and racism and racial constructions like a didactic exercise that writers bring into workshop in order to teach the workshop something, as opposed to simply being a reflection of non-white reality.  There must be a reason why there are non-white characters in this short story, they say inside their minds.

4.  Of course, writers in workshop should call out racist, hackneyed or shallow characterizations of characters of whatever race, but this shouldn't create a culture of fear or intolerance in which either people are too afraid to talk about race and racism or deal with race or racism in their own writing, or where writers are denying the cultural vocabulary of writers of color (or characters of color).  And yet, I saw this shit all the time in my MFA where white writers were the most intolerant to the topic and the examination of alternative racial realities in writing.  And the thing is, there were more than a few writers of color in my MFA (desi, Asian American, Latino), but none of them ever contributed to the discussion of race in class whatsoever.  In fact, most ran away from the topic at all, maybe because they didn't want to get dragged into the cesspool of race, derail the workshop flow or maybe they didn't share any "radical" views about race at all.  Or maybe they believed that art was about people, not race, and so they sympathized with the subtle white persecution of race in workshop.  Either way, and this is precisely where I partially disagree with Junot Diaz, even the inclusion of more writers of color in workshop doesn't necessarily dismantle the structure of white supremacy that operates silently sometimes inside workshop.  Especially if those writers of color have been trained (brainwashed) to believe that literary merit, not the translation of literary merit through the lens of class, race, gender, etc., etc., should be the sole criterion of workshop analysis.

-To read more about my thoughts about the construction of race in writing, workshop politics for writers of color, and the importance/impossibility of writing non-white cultural narratives, you can go here.

-Additionally, to read more about the ongoing problematic of teaching creative writing workshop as an instructor of color, and also the no-win situation of being a writer of color inside a creative writing workshop, check out Matt Salesses smart piece in NPR, "When Defending Your Writing Means Defending Yourself."

The Spaces in Between

The period between March and June has always been, and will probably always be, a dramatic time in my life.  Most of the best (and also worst) news I've received is during this time frame.  For example:

1.  Winning the Sparks Prize

2.  Getting rejected from the JET program (for being too old)

3.  Getting accepted into SC's PhD program in Literature and Creative Writing

4.  Hearing back from all the tenure track jobs you applied to, where they gush about what an insanely large and especially talented pool of candidates there were, which made their job especially difficult

5.  Seeing my short story on Tin House's website

6.  Getting accepted in Notre Dame's MFA program

7.  Visiting Rome, Hong Kong, Macau, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Tokyo, and London

8. Finding out whether I'm getting (re)hired at UC Irvine after an exhaustive application process

9.  Getting married to LB, something I never thought I'd do and something I never wanted to do until we fell in love

This list could go on.  If we were at a café, this list would go on.  But the point is, shit always goes down this quarter.  Sometimes, it's bad.  Usually though, it's good.  But it's always crazy enlightening (and crazy dramatic too).  So, it's with immense curiosity (and slight trepidation) that I wait to hear the state of the world for me in 2016.  Stay tuned, people.  Shit could get crazy.

 

AWP Conference 2016 (LA)

Remarkably, it's been ten fucking years since I've been back at AWP.  The last time was in Atlanta in 2006, back when I was a confident, driven, ambitious, but also paradoxically naive, trusting, and hyperidealistic MFA student whose only aspiration at the time was to publish short stories and essays in the best literary journals possible.  The idea of publishing novels was fundamentally foreign to me for the simple reason that I hadn't written a novel yet, nor a collection of short stories.  There was no lofty expectation because there was no product.

Ten years later, I'm both amazed, horrified, and also humbled by how differently I look at the publishing industry in general and at my literary ambitions in particular.  Unlike ten years ago, I have a bunch of stories and essays published in a number of legit literary journals, but it's no longer enough for me anymore.  Also, unlike ten years ago, I have several manuscripts that are ready for publication.  I have more than a few realistic publishing possibilities with several awesome indie presses (though they remain merely possibilities until those manuscripts become material objects of art for public consumption).  I have--I always seem to have--several agents and a senior agent at a major New York publishing house reading my novels.  I have two rad lecturer positions at UCI and CSUN teaching literature, writing, rhetoric, research, and creative writing.  I have probably too many advanced degrees now, but whatevs.  I have a network and a community of friends (many of them APIA writers, but certainly not all of them).  I have some fans who follow me on Twitter because of the things I've written.  Most importantly, I feel--possibly irrationally, possibly delusionally--that I finally have momemtum in my writing career.  So, I apologize for this self-indulgent recollection, but the point I'm making here is that I see this conference in such a different way than I did before because I bring a different emotional and professional technology than before.  I feel like I can almost touch my future, as absurd as that sounds.

Among other things I did at this year's AWP, I got to:

1.  Attend readings from Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, Jonathan Lethem, Geoff Dyer, Leslie Jamison, Maggie Nelson, my friend and mentor Percival Everett, Shonda Buchanan, Judy Grahn, Joyce Carol Oates, and Peter Ho Davies, which were all pretty amazing.

2.  Attend a fascinating (and inditing!) panel by Adam Atkinson, Lillian Yvonne-Betram, and Sarah Vap (an SC student) that presented the results of its survey and data collection about race and racial representation within PhD programs in Creative Writing.

3.  Talk to editors of several of my favorite indie presses and do a tiny bit of politicking (almost all of it unplanned and unintentional)

4.  Make new writing friends and also do some networking (which never hurts in this business)

5.  Most importantly, meet up with and reconnect with former professors and old friends from my MFA and PhD years, many of whom I haven't seen in years and whom I've missed, sometimes terribly, including Steve Tomasula, Marc Irwin, Joshua Bernstein, Chris Santiago, Lily Hoang, Gwendolyn Oxenham, Casey and Denise Hill, Heather Dundas, David St. John, and Percival Everett (who hugged me and then said, "What's going on, brother?")

6.  Buy a shitload of books and literary journals from indie presses

7.  Remember again why I'm a writer, a writer before I'm anything else in the professional and artistic domains

This Will Sound like a CIA Cypher

I wish I could give more specific deetz about this astonishing development, but I just can't.  It's just not possible.  This is the one thing I can tell you in my infinite vocabulary of vagueness:  one of the most respected editors at one of the most respected publishing houses is now reading The Ninjas of My Greater Self.  I can't even tell you how it worked out this way because that too, my dear reader and anonymous friend, is top secret, but suffice it to say, this is a rare and amazing opportunity.  I really don't know what's going to come of this, and I realize the odds still aren't in my favor even with this opportunity because publishing is a motherfucking business not an art gallery, but for the past ten years of my life, it's felt like literary agents (not talent or vision or even the product) have been my greatest obstacles to publication, and for a few weeks or months or however long it takes this incredibly gracious and brilliant editor to read my novel, that obstacle has been removed.  This is the first time I can say that.

Writing at the Powell's Café

I'm at Powell's right now, sitting in the café and looking through the window across Burnside.  This is a view (dream) I've enjoyed many times in my life, especially the three years I lived in Portland, back when my only dreams concerning my writing, was publishing my short stories in great literary journals and someday getting into a legit MFA program.  Eleven years since I was here last, I can't help but take a personal inventory of my life, noting the achievements I've fulfilled and those that I'm still trying to achieve.  Among other things, I realize that:

1.  Contrary to what I assumed in 2003, when I took my first fiction workshop at the age of 28 at Portland State, publishing a short story in an excellent journal, even publishing a bunch of short stories in many respected journals, doesn't mean you've "made it" at all as a literary fiction writer.  Or maybe it did once, but then you begin moving the goal posts with each tiny success

2.  Getting accepted into a legit MFA program doesn't mean you've "made it" either

3.  Ditto with a legit PhD program

4.  Ditto studying with famous authors (all of who have tried, each in their own way, to get their agents to pick me up as a client)

5.  One of my biggest fears since the day I realized I wanted to be a literary fiction writer, was not publishing my novel, short story, and memoir manuscripts.  My second greatest fear was being one of those professors who teaches writing, but who hasn't published his books.  Right now, these two fears resonate with me, not because I think I'll never publish my manuscripts (actually, I think I'm incredibly close right now because I have many agents reading my first and second novels and just as many indie presses reading similar and different manuscripts), but because before you're a published author in the book sense of the word, you're nothing.  Or at best, you're simply a published author in the literary journal sense of the word, which isn't the same thing.

6.  As I was talking to my good friend Leigh, two nights ago, at this vegan trattoria, it hit me that as a fiction writer trying to make a career publishing his novels in hard copy, I'm essentially fighting for a lost world.  A world that doesn't even exist anymore to anyone except literary fiction writers

7.  I need to find an illustrator and a coder and then finish my electronic novella, Dukkha, My Love, as soon as possible because I can still leave my mark in that medium, regardless of how long it takes me to publish my other work

8.  On the flip side, at the cost of sounding smug, I'm happy with life right now.  I'm in love, I'm married, we have a bomb loft apartment in DTLA and two small dogs that we absolutely adore.  I have an awesome gig teaching hybrid class of lit, creative writing, rhetoric, and comp, at a great school (UC Irvine).  Besides that, I'm healthy.  I get to travel with my boo at least once every year.  And with the exception of this annoying reoccurring red patch on my cheek (that is either eczema, seborrheic dermatitis, or rosacea--and makes me feel like an angry lush clown), I think I look pretty good for my age.

9.  I think I'm at a very major threshold here.  I'm hopeful, shamefully, possibly even unjustifiably hopeful about my future.  My hope is that in a few years, I get to come back here to Powell's not as a customer, but as an author.  Until then, I keep fighting, keep submitting, keep improving my manuscripts

Riffing with TC Boyle

Every time I meet up with Tom, it invariably becomes this dope riff session on writing, culture, and music.  We end up talking about our favorite writers, our MFA days, our different views on craft, SoCal cultural mythology, East Coast/Midwest nostalgia, famous writers we've worked with who changed our life, a short bitch session on literary agents, random Rock'n'Roll references, followed by a short Q and A where I ask him questions about reading for the New Yorker Festival and going on tour in Europe and his revision process.  Today, more than ever, I felt like we were two friends in two very different stages of our literary career, just kicking it for a half an hour.  Some of the highlights of this convo included:

1.  Tom gave me some love for "The Invisible Dress," a chapter from my debut novel, The Amnesia of Junebugs, that he read as part of the Writer-in-Residence deal at USC.  He said it was one of the best things he's read of mine in a while, but then he stopped himself and said, "but you've written a lot of great stuff, so . . . "  I laughed when he said that

2.  After he said that sometimes he likes to "rewrite" classic short stories like The Overcoat, we began crooning about the Russian masters like Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, all of whom I read voraciously in college.  Diary of a Madmen, The Nose, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Possessed, Notes from Underground, The Idiot, War and Peace, The Kreutzer Sonata, and The Death of Ivan Ilyich, were some of my most treasured novels back then.  And for Tom too, a connection I didn't even know we had

3.  Tom told about his experience being an editor for the Best American Stories 2015, which honestly, sounds totally fucking exhausting.  It was especially interesting to hear him talk about how he picked thetwenty stories for the collection

4.  Tom talked about switching from Viking to Ecco, his sadness about leaving one editor and his happiness about working with another

5.  Tom said he thought this was gonna be my year.  I told him I hope he's right.

6.  Tom asked me how things were going at UCI (very good).  Then, he asked me if I was applying to tenure track jobs this year, which I am.  I explained that I'm applying to every decent, great, and awesome, tenure track job out there located in or near a major metropolitan area, even jobs out of my league, because you've got to.  Someone will get those jobs, why not me?  He replied, "Now, you just need a book contract and everything else will fall in line for you with your PhD."  In his own sweet but indirect way, Tom implied that he's waiting to write a blurb for me and honestly, I can't wait for that.  In fact, sending him, Aimee, Percival, Valerie Sayers, Frances Sherwood, and Steve Tomasula emails for blurbs will be one of the sweetest parts of finally getting a contract because I'll get to thank them for all of their support, advice, and insight over the years

7.  Tom talked about his days as the fiction editor at the Iowa Review where he basically picked the stories he liked the most, and then sent his recommendations to Robert Coover who picked from Tom's shortlist all the way from London

8.  Tom talked about how fucking slow McSweeney's is, even with marquee writers like him.  They bought one of his stories a million years ago and still hadn't published it yet, which eventually made his agent, Georges Borchardt, badger them a little bit.  "I really don't care," Tom explained, "because they already bought the story."  Must be nice to have such an illustrious publishing career that you actually don't give a shit when McSweeney's gets around to publishing your short story.

9.  Tom and I agree that Tobias Wolf's Bullet in the Brain is one of the gold standards by which other short stories should be judged

10.  I feel like now, more than ever, Tom is waiting for me to make it big.  I feel like my time is coming.  He feels like my time is coming.  I know he believes in me as a writer with talent and stubborness to burn, which is an amazing source of confidence and support for me, but now I have to go out and slay this dragon myself.  I'm the only one who can do it.  I know he'll be cheering me from the sidelines, which I feel blessed about

Why the VIDA Count is only Part of the Solution

The VIDA Count is a powerful and necessary project that analyzes the data of gender of inequality in literary journals.  And while the yearly results are sobering, horrifying, and eye-opening, and while they confirm what many of us have known all along about the publication industry, at the same time, I believe the VIDA Count project also has its own methodological issues and blind spots.  These issues outlined below do not in any way detract from the value, the validity, and the crucial importance of the project, but I do think they can expand the discourse.

1.  As Rob Spillman (the editor of Tin House) explained in Flavorwire, despite the clear importance of literary journals striving for, and actualizing, gender equality on the page, there are reasons why gender inequality can happen in even the most feminist-minded literary journal.  For one thing, female and male writers respond differently to rejections and solicitations.  According to Spillman, male writers submit a 100% of the time when solicited, women, only 50%.  And male writers are four times more likely to resubmit after a good rejection than female writers.  Equally problematic, female agents are more likely to submit the work of male authors than female ones.  Additionally, both female and male fiction/CNF writers are more likely to submit work with male protagonists.  Much of this is obviously acculturation, which can be changed when more and more journals include the work of women, and when female writers are encouraged and even expected to become writers as male ones already are.  Hopefully someday the VIDA Count will render itself obsolete.   But until then, we have to keep fighting.

2.  Just as importantly, male stubbornness and male privilege are obviously connected to the skewed publication statistics.  Many teachers consciously and unconsciously encourage male communication in the classroom (which is incredibly hard to quantify) by allowing them to dominate classroom discussion, interrupt female students, repeat earlier comments, and write unfocused essays that often show less polish and control of language.  Some teachers also have failed to create adequate safe space--for less vocal students, introverts, and students with different communication styles, for example--to explore new ideas out loud, process information in their own way, and communicate differently than in classroom sound bytes.  And some teachers and parents (un)consciously reinforce patriarchal codes of cultural male centering by (un)consciously encouraging male students to be "leaders" in the classroom by greenlighting their communication and (un)consciously dismissing, limiting, controlling, and/or confining female student communication.  Pedagogy connects to the publication industry in a very specific way here:  when many male writers (myself included) get rejected, we think the fiction readers or fiction editors that rejected us are (probably) idiots, world-weary wannabes, and captious assholes.  We tend to assume they're wrong, not us.  By and large, many male writers do not doubt themselves or their writing ability because they've been encouraged and celebrated from an early age (I'm probably the only male fiction writer I know who was openly discouraged in college from writing fiction).  But many female fiction/CNF writers respond very differently to rejections I think, which is how they can sometimes take themselves out of the slush pile, which is bad for the industry.

3.  One of the most important aspects of the VIDA Count is also one of its primary weaknesses:  it focuses almost exclusively on literary journals.  And while literary journals are a necessary part of the arts subculture in America, they're also very limited to a certain extent in terms of cultural impact.  Novels published by both indie and major publishing houses are the major players here for the simple reason that in addition to good PR, excellent editors, and a media-savvy business manager, publishing houses can also give writers minor fame, an advance in the absurd range of $150-$2 million, and a fast track to tenure track positions at prestigious universities all across America.  For exactly these literary, financial, professional, and cultural benefits of publishing novels through respected publishing houses, I think the VIDA Count is a crucial but incomplete project that could really affect positive change in the publishing market by focusing its number crunching on books, which can radically change writers lives in a way that literary journals simply cannot.  No one can live off an essay published in The Georgia Review, but many commercial fiction writers, and a select elite list of literary novelists, could live off their writing, their art, and their talent, if they wanted to, which means there's a lot more at stake in book publishing in terms of representation, quality of life, and professional equity.  More importantly, while many readers who aren't writers read novels, they don't generally read literary journals.  The biggest demographic of literary journals is . . . ourselves.  But a published novel can be a demographic magic bullet that cuts across class, racial, and even educational lines in a way that literary journals can't.  For these reasons, I think the VIDA Count can do much more with its collective statistical analysis. 

4.  In the other direction, the numbers for the publication of APIA novels shows a surprisingly strong counter-current to the overrepresentation of male authors, which I think is both good and bad.  For example, based on fairly thorough (but definitely incomplete) research conducted for my dissertation appendix, I discovered the following things concerning Asian American novelists, which shocked me:

One, there were over twice (approximately 2.36 times) as many published Female Asian American novelists as male Asian American novelists between 1992-2012.  Two, female Asian American novelists published over three times as many novels as their male counterparts between 1992-2012.  Three, 77.7% of all female Asian American novels were published in major publishing houses.  Four, 56.2% of all male Asian American novels were published in major publishing houses.  Five, in direct comparison, female Asian American writers published 4.25 times as many novels in major publishing houses as male Asian American writers and 1.55 times as many novels in academic or independent presses as male Asian American writers.  Six, only 22.2% of all female Asian American novels were published in independent or academic presses.  Seven, conversely, 43.7% of all male Asian American novels were published in independent or academic presses. Eighth, there has only been one male Japanese American literary novelist published in the past twenty years.

Now obviously, there were a number of deliberate constraints in my research that had to due with connecting this data to the central argument of my dissertation.  But as a hapa fiction writer, this is in fact my reality.  For one thing, my data only dealt with APIA novelists, intentionally excluding short story writers, CNF writers, poets, and essayists, to name a few.  For another thing, I included reprints in the same time-frame (1992-2012) because for many readers, those novels might as well be new works.  For still another, I deliberately relied on novels that were locatable because I was partially focusing on how the constructions of APIA masculinity and the orientalization of APIA fiction in general affect the cultural imagination.  So while an APIA scholar might very well locate several unknown APIA novels in that 20-year range, very few non-scholars would.  In any case, if this data holds up (and only more research and new time-frame ranges will tell), the VIDA count could expose the gender inequalities not only within the market of literary journals, but also the gender, racial, and cultural inequalities between genres, sectors of the publishing industry, publishing houses, and even within certain racial and cultural frameworks like APIA publishing.  Furthermore, further statistical analysis could very either contest or reinforce my own research which shows a strong cultural tendency to gender the APIA novel in a way that seems very orientalist.

5.  The majority of editors and agents in the New York publishing industry seem to be white college-educated women.  I'm not sure if that's still statistically true anymore, and even if it were, I'm not sure how it would be proven, but if true, and if the vast majority of literary journals continue to have white male editors (two big ifs for sure), this parallelism suggests a potential gender correlation between the dominant gender of the editorial staff and the dominant gender of published authors (i'm not sure how the numbers work for non-APIA authors).  And the obvious conclusion of that potential correlation would be that both literary journals and publishing houses need to show greater equality in their publication list, both in production and aspiration.  Sometimes, though, this equality must move in opposite direction.

Aragi Agency Asks for Full Manuscript of Amnesia

At this point, it's just a request for a full manuscript.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Still, it's hard not being a tiny bit giddy when Frances Coady, one of the two stellar agents at Nicole Aragi's top-shelf agency, asks for an exclusive of your debut novel (which I couldn't give her exclusively since I already have three other agents reading full manuscripts).  I know that Frances Coady is a widely respected, admired, even feared former publisher at Picador and Vintage.  I know she is a hands-on editor who works with authors line by line if necessary to strengthen not dilute a book's force.  I know she values and understands the importance of the graphic elements of a novel (e.g., the cover design, the format, possibly even the font).  I know that in the publishing world she is an absolute giant, both equal to but also complementary with, Nicole Aragi.  I know all of these things and honestly, it makes my head spin.  But I don't know the most important thing, namely, whether she'll like my novel.  That's the only thing that matters.  The only thing I care about right now.  I'll do my best not to freak out, but that's pretty much impossible . . .

Three Agents Read Full Manuscript of Amnesia of Junebugs

Well, if there's one thing I'm completely sure of right now, it's my ability to write a decent query letter.  I now have three (plus) agents reading full manuscripts of my debut novel, The Amnesia of Junebugs, which is pretty damn exciting.  I'm not surprised that AMNESIA is getting lots of interest from agents considering it's a transnational, multicultural, multiracial, urban, character-based, literary novel.  Right now, multicultural novels (and multicultural narratives in general) are in with America's changing demographic.  Linked short stories are in again too and AMNESIA straddles the space between a novel and a collection of linked stories (that come together at the end).  I'm cautiously optimistic (as I always am) because I think this novel is finally ready for prime time, but only time will tell.  Stay tuned!

What I Learned from Friday Night Lights (The TV Show)

Yo, college football starts this week, which means, it's time to watch every damn season of Friday Night Lights on Netflix and gorge myself on top 25 games every Saturday until I get hungover and burnt out (which also happens every year).  FNL might seem like a strange place to find inspiration for anything besides cocky running backs and bone-crunching tackles, but actually this series is an excellent case study in characterization, world building, and plot structure, among other things.  Somehow, this show gets you to care about the characters and to see them three-dimensionally, something that sports series rarely do (cf. Ballers).  In fact, the character development isn't just fantastic in this show, but the series itself raises a bunch of important questions about class, race, gender, poverty, institutional racism, religion, bigotry, violence and greed, while making football seem both magnificent and destructive.  Beyond that, FNL had a small but loyal group of followers that gave it a cult status.  Even more remarkable, most of these loyal fans aren't even football aficionados either.  When my books come out in the next couple of years (inshallah), I hope my readers will be exactly like the viewers of Friday Night Lights.  You can't ask for anything more as a producer or a (non)fiction writer in my opinion.

Next Summer, I Will Do Nothing Except Watch Romance Anime and Munch on Senbē Crackers

This post is written from a place of privilege to a certain degree.  While my lecturer position isn't as good as a tenure track job, my workload, bennies, and pay at UC Irvine, are a hundred times better than that of my friends adjuncting their hearts out, hoping and praying (just as I am) that one day they'll get the ideal academic gig.  So, I write this post with a tiny amount of guilt, understanding that things could be so much worse.  That said, I was lucky enough to have my first paid summer off as an academic and It's honestly shocking how busy I was in like a good way.  Yes, I wrote the fuck out of this summer, completely restructuring and rewriting my first and second novels multiple times.  Yes, I sent out query letters for AMNESIA to a few agents that I thought might be good matches.  Yes, I sent out several different manuscripts to several stellar indie presses, including my experimental memoir.  Yes, I read more than a few novels and several graphic novels too.  Yes, LB and I traveled to Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Tallinn, which was honestly, one of the most amazing vacations I've ever had (I'm completely broke right now and I don't give a shit because it was completely worth it!).  Yes, I got to see both our families, which was amazing (not to mention insanely draining).  And yes, I played the shit out of my PS4 because I finally could after teaching for 9 months straight.  For the record, I was especially captivated by The Last of Us, Final Fantasy X, Infamous Second Son, and The Walking Dead.  In so many ways, I had one of the best summers of my life and I don't say that lightly.

But that said, this summer was also completely exhausting.  Time flew by in a way I haven't seen since high school and often I felt like I was barely in control of my life.  I wouldn't have done it differently and I have only gratitude for this summer, but next summer, I think I'm gonna make as little plans as possible.  At the very least, I plan on living like a minimalist.  I hope to do nothing except eat nori senbē crackers, drink ocha, and watch romance anime.  Maybe I'll cry a little, nibble on chocolate, and then go back to revising NINJAS.  That sounds like a perfect summer (for at least one week).  Of course, part of being an emerging novelist and professor means conceding much of your power to other people who control your destiny (e.g., the department chair, the dean of your school, the program coordinator, the literary agent, the acquisitions editor, the fiction reader), and that's probably the hardest part of this gig:  working your ass off for something that ultimately isn't in your hands after a certain stage.  So, thank you universe for this exhilarating summer.  But next summer, please be much more chill in the GenX sense of the word.

The Best Way to Submit A Query Letter

LB and I are about to go on vacation in Scandinavia, so I'll be incommunicado for the next couple weeks.  But since six months to an author feels like six weeks to a literary agent, I thought it was a good move to send out some laser-targeted query letters and manuscripts to a few indie presses and agents.  This way, instead of sitting around and wondering what's going on, I'll be walking the streets of Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki looking for the next perfect Instagram shot instead of worrying about marketability and plot lines.  Everyone wins!