After such Morrisonesque interludes from Six’s past, we return to the present setting of a revival tent in Alabama where the young preacher is about to deliver a sermon. Two years earlier he heard his calling, which “came over him like a fit; it hijacked him suddenly.” The story echoes the anxiety Mathis suffered during her own “crisis of faith” when she dreaded returning to the Workshop after the Thanksgiving holiday in 2009. Six’s crisis fittingly occurs in a public forum in which he is under pressure to produce inspiring wisdom for a congregation of judgmental listeners. He approaches the pulpit with absolutely nothing prepared, looking out at a sea of unsympathetic eyes. He hears mumbling, “He ain’t no bigger than a minute,” and his eyes flood with tears.23 But soon he finds his voice. Midway through the sermon a shout of “Amen!” rises from the crowd, unleashing a floodtide of spirit in the congregation. Suddenly “his anxiety was replaced with an ecstasy that spun like a ball of fire.”24
Mathis self-reflexively inscribes her triumph over her own traumatic experiences as a first-year Workshop student into the self-conscious and terribly blocked adolescent preacher Six, who eventually finds his voice and uplifts the congregation. Her method shares a long literary history of self-reflexive fiction dating back to Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.25 She came to the short story by way of memoir writing with Jackson Taylor. Now in the realm of fiction, she deftly debunks the notion of romantic inspiration as a reliable resource for creative inspiration, especially for generating moving lyricism on cue before a judgmental audience. Although Six had been “hijacked” by the Holy Spirit when he first heard his calling, he certainly has no means by which to consistently recreate that inspiration. He instead more pragmatically considers his audience’s expectations and selects his material for the sermon accordingly. Mathis would learn to summon her most powerful prose in precisely this manner, particularly under the guidance of Robinson.
In a “webisode” video interview on Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, Mathis dutifully recites the “three lessons” she learned from Robinson, all of which actively discourage self-reflexivity. The autobiographical impulse did not derive from Robinson, but was Mathis’s own, traceable to her earlier memoir writing, as well as her identification with James Baldwin. In him, she saw “a writer who looked like me” and seemed as though he “understood the singularities of my experience.” When she encountered his deeply autobiographical novel Go Tell It On the Mountain, “it was as though the two of us were huddled on the couch, just he and I, whispering our lives to one another.”26 But Robinson advised her to resist the autobiographical impulse by delving into her characters’ inner lives. “Primacy of character” was of the utmost importance to Robinson, followed closely by “truth telling,” described as being as “truthful as you can be in your writing at all moments.” Particularly challenging was Robinson’s insistence on being able to articulate, on demand, “five reasons for any character doing anything.” When asked in workshop sessions why a particular character stumbled and fell down a flight of stairs, Mathis confessed, “the most I could ever come up with was three.”27 The lesson remained unchallenged because of the authority figure at the head of the class. “It’s an impossible standard, one which I’m sure Marilynne meets but the rest of us mortals cannot,” Mathis told Winfrey, who smiled and turned to the camera with an earnest word of encouragement to the viewer: “Keep reading, see you soon, stay in touch online.”28
Mathis’s comment corroborates the sentiment of Thessaly Le Force and other students who have struggled to attain Robinson’s standards that govern her own practice. In the acknowledgments of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, Mathis praises Robinson for pushing her beyond her comfort zone, and for “the rigor of her standards, which urges me forward, even when I have reached my limit.”29 Mathis regards the hardship suffered under Robinson as necessary to her success, sounding a note Mark McGurl has observed in the masochistic strain of Workshop culture dating from Flannery O’Connor.30 For Mathis, subordinating her life to writing was a series of compromising trials that made adversity and hardship integral to the learning process. Learning with Robinson and her other Workshop instructors, she recalled, “made me want to be better, to do better, even when it was hard. . . . Especially when it was hard.”31 The creative writing instructor as martinet is now a pedagogical prototype that has spread well beyond Iowa. Many are convinced that badgering students is the only way to inspire growth. Some instructors such as Dan Barden in other programs have gone so far as to proclaim, “one of the things that makes me a good teacher, I’m convinced, is that I’m a bastard.”32 Creative writing professor Margaret Mullan has credited the harsh conditions of the sexist learning environment of her MFA training as a key factor in her success. Although “it was very much a guys’ program,” she insisted, “I kind of needed that. I needed to be kicked around a little bit.”33
The Iowa experience for Mathis reflects a clear pattern in which she faced “impossible” standards only Robinson could meet, felt pushed beyond her limits, and was pressured to defend her creative choices. Mathis grew as a memoirist under entirely different, and indeed opposite, nonviolent circumstances among the cadre of literary artists in the Mickey Mouse–themed studio under the informal and supportive tutelage of Jackson Taylor. Indeed, she was poised in that setting to become a memoirist of the caliber of her friend Justin Torres.34 His We the Animals was published by the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and received an Indies Choice Book Award under the category of Adult Debut along with nominations for several others. Torres never faced pressure to shift genres the way Mathis did when she adapted to short fiction against her natural understanding of herself as anything but a short story writer. Taylor’s scene—diverse, eclectic, and mutually supportive—was in her past by the time she arrived at Iowa. As Lan Samantha Chang has acknowledged, “there are huge cultural differences between Iowa City and New York a large number of students face when they arrive here.”35 Just as Sandra Cisneros in the previous generation adapted her poetry to conform to the short stories her Workshop instructors insisted she write, Mathis bent the natural shape of her creative spirit to fit the Workshop mold, particularly as dictated by Robinson. Her mentor drove her to write stories that she eventually turned into the novel, a process that left her in a state of “creative and physical exhaustion when I sent it off.”36 The prestige and professional rewards for enduring that process, however, were extraordinary.
The Whiteness of Workshop
Behind the trying pedagogy Mathis endured at Iowa after leaving the accepting one in New York, the shibboleth of narrative voice—and the specter of Toni Morrison—loomed large. According to Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, the writing program cliché of “find your own voice” arose in the post-1960s culture that valued creativity as exhibited in the works of the acclaimed African-American novelist Toni Morrison. Earlier eras alternately centered on “write what you know,” emphasizing experience as displayed by Tom Wolfe, and “show, don’t tell,” which fixated on craft as embodied by Flannery O’Connor. McGurl’s schema here is helpful in defining the social and pedagogical context of Mathis’s graduate education, one characterized by a culture of uniformity that depended on these mantras as rallying points.37 The novelist and critic Anis Shivani identifies “find your own voice” as currently the most conspicuous among the commonly believed and repeated sayings in MFA creative writing programs. Often it is used to tyrannize students into conforming to prevailing modes of expression. Such standardization conditions the social matrix of creative writing programs, he argues, so that they risk becoming havens for “talentless people afraid to independently carve out a broad career in letters as used to be the case.”38
Unlike Torres, whose minimalist memoir was the result of repeated workshop sessions that negated much of his original drafts, Mathis was escorted out of the genre altogether. We the Animals epitomizes the minimalism McGurl defines as a dist
inguishing characteristic of Workshop writing in “an aestheticization of shame, a mode of self-retraction,” one that paradoxically functions as a “form of attention-getting.”39 But once in the realm of fiction, her training steered her away from an aggregate voice, one that might don the pluralistic identity of the speaker of Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” for example. The Workshop’s formula was that “ ‘voice’ equals strictly private voice, not a universal voice.”40 Mathis appeased her workshop audience by withdrawing her voice from the narrative and placing it in her characters. McGurl describes this process whereby “the properly impersonal narrator must try, however quixotically, to relinquish her speaking role, distributing as much of it as possible to characters in the story and retreating to the back of the imaginary theater of fiction to pare her fingernails.”41
As an African-American woman writer, Mathis faced pressure to find her creative writing voice at a distance from her ethnicity, while also somehow replicating the achievement of Toni Morrison. Winfrey affirmed what Workshop members expected of Mathis from the moment she entered the program. “I can’t remember when I read anything that moved me in quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison,” Winfrey effused. This of course pleased Mathis, but it also set extremely high expectations. “It’s a great deal of pressure,” she admitted, careful to align herself with Morrison only insofar as she shares “coming out of a similar tradition of post-Civil Rights literature with black women as subject.”42 Comparisons to Morrison, she insists, should not reach beyond these shared categories of period, subject matter, gender, and race. In an op-ed she wrote for the New York Times after taking her position as a Workshop faculty member, Mathis was even more candid about the role of MFA programs in “inspiring inflated expectations—after all, the formalized study of writing isn’t an alchemical formula by which every student becomes Tolstoy, or even publishes a book.” She went further, observing the damaging effect of being held to such standards in the context of “the MFA’s workshop model” and “its intense scrutiny of new work [that] can be crippling for some writers.”43 Much of that scrutiny, she found, centers on voice.
Shivani points out similar abuses of the concept of voice as a superficial “subterfuge, allowing one to judge individual effort without making any real attempt to penetrate the infinite densities of style.” It becomes a vapory attribute of writing that requires little justification on the part of the arbiter, something “anyone can critique. How does one critique voice anyway? What does one say, except utter inanities? Your voice is too sarcastic. Your voice is too hallucinatory. Your voice is too boozy.” But such distinctions are moot, as Shivani points out, since voice is “something beyond critique,” because “you either have it or you don’t.” At the Workshop, voice often masquerades as code for another style of writing that the instructor and workshop peers expect to see. “I don’t think you’ve found your voice yet” is the message to young authors like Mathis, rather than those who, like T. C. Boyle, ostensibly conform to the white male “reigning voice, the Michael Chabon [and] Jonathan Lethem off-kilter irony.” There is pressure to “get with the program, the Manhattan-Brooklyn affectedness or else.”44
Creative writing programs have been known to stifle the voices of ethnic writers and steer them toward conventional forms of expression. Junot Díaz reports an incident in which a young Latino writer was told by his workshop peers that the diction of his story was too elevated, that people in the barrio did not sound nearly so intelligent. To Díaz’s disbelief, the “fellow writer (white) went through his story and erased all the ‘big’ words because, said the peer, that’s not the way ‘Spanish’ people talk. This white peer, of course, had never lived in Latin America or Spain or in any US Latino community—he just knew.” Worse yet, the instructor “never corrected or even questioned” the peer for making these racially insensitive suggestions.45 Siddhartha Deb reinforces Díaz’s position by observing how “the lack of diversity in MFA programs . . . seems to translate into the astonishingly narrow range of contemporary writing.”46
Lan Samantha Chang bitterly recalled Frank Conroy advising her in no uncertain terms that if she did not want to be typecast, she should avoid writing stories with Chinese characters.47 Anthony Swofford described the Workshop as “a very white place” when he attended from 1999 to 2001. “I’m sure that changed year-to-year, but my two years felt super Caucasian.” In addition, “there weren’t many economically disadvantaged students in 2001,” he told me.48 This is precisely the institutionalization of conformity that Chang herself rebelled against by aggressively recruiting both Mathis and Torres. Mathis is careful to factor in class, gender, and sexual orientation in calling for “MFA programs to take special care to admit and nurture . . . writers of color, L.G.B.T. writers, working-class and poor writers,” so that diversity is a “mandate” and “not empty policy-speak.”49 As the pedagogical equivalent of empty policy-speak, “find your own voice” can operate as a disingenuous mantra of diversity that really “serves conformism to reigning social platitudes,” so that “voice does not equal cultural difference,” according to Shivani.50
Patronage
Ayana Mathis did not suddenly appear on the porch of Oprah Winfrey’s media empire as some sort of literary foundling. Instead, she depended on a series of vital connections provided by her Workshop mentor Marilynne Robinson. Mathis has acknowledged that Robinson’s “sort of encouragement and endorsement has meant everything,” especially “in career kinds of ways, which is certainly not to be overlooked.”51 Two years after its launch in 2002, the Trident Media Group merged with the powerful literary agent Ellen Levine. Levine had served as Robinson’s agent for decades, brokering the breakthrough deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2004 for Gilead, her Pulitzer Prize–winning second novel after a twenty-four-year hiatus from the genre. Robinson cemented her status as the most acclaimed living writer in the world with her next novel, Home, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2009. So by 2011, the year of her pupil’s graduation from the Workshop, Robinson’s endorsement carried authority in the literary world matched only by Winfrey’s in the popular realm. Levine therefore responded promptly when Robinson summoned her to represent her pupil.
Soon after its establishment in 1980, the Ellen Levine Literary Agency became one of the industry’s most powerful promoters. Levine’s clients have won virtually every conceivable literary accolade, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Booker Award. The most well known of her clients’ titles have been made into major motion pictures, such as The English Patient, Holes, The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction, Ride with the Devil, and Housekeeping, the adaptation of Robinson’s debut novel from 1980. Levine has a record of representing Iowa Writers’ Workshop faculty and graduates, such as Asali Solomon, for whom she landed a prestigious contract, also with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reluctant to accept first-time authors, Levine makes an exception for “Workshop grads” such as Solomon.52 If the Workshop offered graduates connections to the publishing industry through the special fellowships Engle was continually negotiating during its earliest days, that tradition continues through the representation of Ellen Levine and the Trident Agency.
No single author of Levine’s is more renowned than Robinson. Upon Robinson’s retirement from the Workshop in the spring of 2016, Lan Samantha Chang declared her “the most distinguished writer in the United States right now.”53 With the backing of such a towering figure as Robinson, Mathis enjoyed a distinct advantage on the market as a first-time novelist. In an interview in 2013, Mathis mentioned that her agent, provided by a “well known author,” functioned as “the best advocate and guide I could ever have hoped for.”54 On Robinson’s advice, Levine offered Mathis guidance and representation typically reserved for established luminaries like Michael Ondaatje, the author of The English Patient.
The contract proffered by Knopf place
d the book in the hands of the most influential arbiters of taste in the critical community, whose lists Winfrey had been scouring in search of a second title for her online book club. Formerly a teen mother, Winfrey identified immediately with Hattie Shepherd, the opening chapter’s fifteen-year-old African American who names her newborn twins Philadelphia and Jubilee, much to the consternation of their father and grandmother. By chapter’s end, the twins perish of pneumonia despite Hattie’s efforts to save them. A moving scene depicts the young mother holding Philadelphia before her, the baby’s head lolling despondently. “ ‘Fight . . . Like this,’ she said and blew the air in and out of her own lungs, in solidarity with them, to show them it was possible.”55 The scene touched Winfrey, whose child also died in infancy.56 Winfrey said, “beginning with Ayana’s description of Hattie’s desperate efforts to save her babies, Jubilee and Philadelphia, I was right with Hattie, in her house in Germantown, Philadelphia.” She immediately wanted “to know Hattie, understand her and be introduced to everyone in her life.”57
Mathis understood that her deal with Knopf, arranged by Levine, arose thanks to a combination of talent and to some extent institutional privilege, as she discussed in an interview with National Public Radio in 2014. The Workshop MFA, especially with Robinson as her thesis supervisor, was hard won through dedication necessary to contend with rancorous workshops and an austere mentor. Realizing the advantages Iowa offered her, she now dedicates herself as a faculty member to making “writers of color able to take advantage of that kind of access.”58
A Delicate Aggression Page 44
