Given this ardent advocacy for student publication, one might expect Mathis to foreground the importance of navigating the literary market in her current approach to teaching creative writing as a faculty member at the Workshop. Yet the Workshop’s enduring anticommercial myth that sets literary culture at odds with mass culture is apparent in her claim during a video interview in 2013: “First novelists shouldn’t think about publication or their careers. It’s very dangerous to begin thinking, what will an editor like? What will people want to read?” she said, shifting her tone to a panicky whisper with her eyes wide in a sarcastic look of anxiety. Too much “tailoring of your writing in terms of the impact it has on one’s career can make the writing inauthentic,” she warned. The advice clearly suggests that she did not write Hattie with the intention of having it selected by Oprah for her new book club. “It’s important to keep that off the table as much as possible.”59 Historian R. Jackson Wilson has likened the taboo of raising the question of capital with respect to literature as tantamount “to wondering who picked up the check after the last supper.”60
As her incredulous reception of Winfrey’s phone call shows, Oprah’s Book Club members collectively did not make up Mathis’s imagined audience. Instead, they consisted of her Workshop faculty and peers. In this sense, the Workshop’s insularity means “essential feedback mechanisms” from audiences in the broader industry “are blocked, and the programs” like Iowa’s “are indifferent to markets,” as Shivani and McGurl note. However, for every instance in which first-time novelists like Mathis achieve acclaim without any attempt to promote themselves in the literary market, one can identify a T. C. Boyle among students, or a Kurt Vonnegut among faculty, who were acutely aware of markets and audiences, and deeply tapped into fluctuations of mass market tastes. Poetry remains a different case altogether, as that side of the program “has explicitly stated its disinterest in broad readership.”61
The Workshop Author in Mass Culture
Without Torres’s encouragement, Mathis is not likely to have applied to Iowa. Without Torres flagging her file for Chang, she might not have been admitted. Without Robinson, she would not have had access to her literary agent Levine; without Levine, no Knopf; no Knopf, no Oprah. This chain of delicate connections might have broken at any point. But powered by the endorsement of probably the most acclaimed living writer in the world, and credentialed by the foremost creative writing program in existence, she seemed destined for a publisher of Knopf’s stature, if not a patron of Winfrey’s command over mass culture. Robinson and Winfrey together backed The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a rare instance of a “literary bestseller” in the publishing industry, and a feat of both popular and critical success that only Dickens was consistently able to achieve throughout his career. For all the pieces to fall into place so perfectly, it was “a kind of fluke,” a “miracle for me,” according to Mathis.62
The selection of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 represents a milestone in Workshop history, like John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp being made into a film that established the program as a vehicle for ushering literary culture into popular culture. The successes of Mathis and Irving suggest the profit potential of an Iowa MFA. To many authors, however, such as Jonathan Franzen, commercial success is mutually exclusive to literary excellence. Franzen feared that his novel The Corrections would be tainted if Winfrey adopted it, so he refused to allow it to be a book club selection. In 2004, he said, “I feel like I’m solidly in the high-art literary tradition. She’s picked some good books, but she’s picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional [ones] that I cringe, myself, even when I think she’s really smart and she’s really fighting the good fight.”63
Interestingly, Mathis also does not approve of many of Winfrey’s titles, noting how “she picks a wide range, some that I like, some that I don’t like.” But where she differs from Franzen is in her capacity to see that by blending genre fiction with literary works, “Oprah’s Book Club breaks the barriers down . . . it breaks assumptions down, and that side of it is helpful.”64 In particular, she saw the benefits of enriching the reading of those who “normally say they only like to read mysteries or thrillers” and “may be intimidated by this strange ‘literary fiction’ label.” With Winfrey’s endorsement, these readers are more likely “to pick up a book” like hers “and enjoy it without worrying about the label,” according to Mathis.65 More than crossing boundaries, Winfrey’s book club selections change the climate of the industry decidedly away from popular genre fiction toward the more challenging material she typically recommends. Winfrey is less interested in making bestsellers out of genre fiction than she is in turning literary novels into bestsellers, in the process bringing previously detached aesthetes—literary artisans toiling in anonymity—onto the center stage of popular culture.66
Franzen found no such progressive liberation from labels and mainstreaming of intellectual authors in the club, but instead saw it only as a tool of corporate media aligned with the malignant forces of capitalism. “I’m an independent writer and I didn’t want that corporate logo on my book,” he said, regarding it as a Faustian deal with commercial media’s obsessing over “consumer advertising and consumer purchasing.”67 Franzen’s rejection of Winfrey situates him as the white male humanist condemning the black female producer of mass media in a misogynistic rejection of both female and mass culture. In his phobia over commercial media, he overlooked the benefits that accrue to women and the black community from the spread of works like Mathis’s. It is no small achievement—perhaps greater than the personal fame and wealth Mathis herself attained after her book’s selection—that an online discussion of her novel on Goodreads among African-American women turned squarely to gender discrimination within their community. As forum contributors began to blame Hattie for the problems encountered by her children, others objected. “It’s always easy to place more blame on the mother,” a reader named Kisha argued. “That’s the way society is set up, especially in the black community. We don’t force our men to take responsibility, instead we make excuses for their actions and persecute the woman.”68
The reach into the African-American community with a novel like Mathis’s would not have been possible through the marketing engine of Knopf alone. When her book was adopted it literally became a new product, inside and out. The Oprah’s Book Club logo appeared on the cover of all copies; a special digital version offered notes and a reading guide for clubbers to organize their discussions and meetings. Winfrey’s notes on her favorite passages also appear in the digital editions, for the Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook devices, available for purchase on the iBookstore and online e-book venders. A host of video clips featuring brief interviews with Mathis appear on the Oprah website. When news of the novel’s selection struck, Knopf swung into action, recalibrating the packaging of the literary commodity itself as well as the scope and scale of its production, print run, and distribution. “We obviously had to advance our on-sale date,” Knopf spokesman Paul Bogaards reported. “This is a book that everyone at Knopf is completely enamored of. As a result of Oprah’s endorsement we took our printing up to 125,000, from 50,000.” Much to the company’s delight, “All kinds of retail windows have opened.”69
Reclaiming the airwaves from the National Football League and its predominantly male audience, Oprah devoted several hours worth of material to Mathis and her novel for a program titled “Super Soul Sunday.” In 2013, a special edition of “Oprah’s Soul Series” aired on Super Bowl Sunday, February 3, on Oprah’s Sirius XM radio station, her Facebook page, and Oprah.com. Mathis answered reader questions on the VYou social video platform, as 13 million members converged on the official Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 Goodreads forum. Still more splintered off into their own mobile networks for discussion of her book via GroupMe, in addition to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds (#OprahsBookClub). Print literary culture, and Knopf in particular, had never seen such a thorough multim
edia campaign for a single novel. The greatest reach in all of this was of course the combined media of Winfrey’s television network OWN (the Oprah Winfrey Network, which was formerly the Discovery Health Channel), which attracts 85 million viewers, and O, The Oprah Magazine, read by 15 million per month.70
The first ever title by a Workshop author endorsed by Winfrey, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is also the program’s first work to be embraced by ethnic women readers in the mass market. Workshop authors have in several cases courted broad female audiences through women’s fiction with romantic themes. Anthony Swofford, for example, courted that market with his novel, Exit A, but was unsuccessful. Access to these and other lucrative markets, Workshop students have been aware, occurs through the program’s internal system of privileges, dispensed from “certain übermasters” (Chang and Robinson in Mathis’s case). As seen in Cisneros’s comments on the system, many faculty “exercise disproportionate control over the distribution of rewards and honors” determining access to the most powerful publishers.71 Defiance of that system, as many have discovered, can result in dropping out. Alumnus Joe Haldeman recalled that although he was not “harmed by a workshop, obviously some people are. Sometimes they’re discouraged enough to quit writing.”72 To this end, “outright challenges to the authority of the masters,” who have typically been program directors and the most distinguished authors among the faculty, “must be rare indeed,” because the “system measures its success by the frequency of non-events” in this sense.73 Mathis was precisely such a non-event. Her decision to meet rather than to challenge Robinson’s authority paid rich dividends by providing her access to her agent Levine and the lucrative market beyond.
The impact on sales of an endorsement from Winfrey is enormous. After receiving her blessing, A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle, sold 3,375,000 copies; James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces sold 2,695,000; Elie Wiesel’s Night, 2,021,000; and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, 1,385,000.74 Now that Mathis has demonstrated that Workshop authors can reach this elite circle, the value of the Iowa MFA has risen. Winfrey’s media corporation virtually eliminates dependence on publishers as the determining factor of authors’ long-term prosperity.75 For those fortunate enough to earn it, her endorsement takes away any concerns regarding publisher loyalty, such as those that consume authors like T. C. Boyle. “A first run of five hundred thousand copies, just like the record industry, may be great for a few authors,” Boyle says, but he wonders “if they’ll have sustained careers or not. Or are their expectations up too high after one success, which was orchestrated by the publisher? Will the publisher sustain you?” he asks. “Or you [publish] one or two books and you’re gone?” Far more powerful than any one publisher, Winfrey-owned media can single-handedly sustain an author, as the sales figures of her selections illustrate.76
As the list of Winfrey’s choices makes clear—with titles ranging from Tolstoy and Faulkner to Morrison and McCarthy—trade and romance genre fiction are not the staples of this system as many frustrated male Workshop students from the 1970s assumed. The “genteel tradition” of literature, one alumnus groused, “is being shoved rudely aside by our commodity-driven world” in New York publishing, where “demographics, gender, ethnicity and above all, marketability are the yardsticks by which literary talent is measured and presented to the American public.” While Winfrey’s club members fit the profile of “women over forty” who constitute “the overwhelming majority of novel readers,” this does not mean they are all reading Danielle Steel, as evidenced by the challenging list of works they have devoured at Winfrey’s behest.77 Yet that stereotype of daytime drama TV viewers, precisely the time slot Winfrey’s talk show occupied through 2011, persists in its association with Oprah’s Book Club.
Although the number of voices like Franzen’s openly deriding literary culture’s movement into mass culture through Oprah’s Book Club have diminished in the decades following his clash with Winfrey, the stigma of such highly commercialized broad appeal persists. “Thanks to Oprah,” Hector Tobar of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “Mathis is now the beneficiary of the book world’s most precious and rare commodity: buzz.” Tobar claimed that readers anticipating her novel to be “a great work of narrative art are going to be disappointed.” For him, the wall between mass culture and literary culture—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—still exists. Reviews like his vehemently oppose crossovers like Mathis, the author of what he calls “a competently written melodrama that only intermittently achieves anything resembling literary excellence.”78
Yet new evidence points to the increasingly challenging nature of the works selected by Winfrey, and more importantly, the mass audience’s eagerness to adopt them. While the club increased sales of its selected titles, in the twelve weeks following her nominations there were declines in sales for mystery and action-adventure novels, and also for romances. Because of the longer and more difficult nature of the book club selections, readers turned away from their usual lighter fare; weekly adult fiction book sales declined because readers were absorbed in month-long explorations of more challenging texts at a much deeper level, time extended also by the frequency of discussions both online and in person.79 The club disrupts the consumer spending pattern of a steady diet of several Nora Roberts novels per week, for example, replacing it with immersion in a masterpiece like Anna Karenina. As for the therapeutic purpose of the reading promoted by the club, its medicine is hardly easy and coddling, but can prove quite caustic and disturbing, as seen in club selections such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.80 Even Mathis herself underestimated Winfrey’s literary acumen during their first conversation. The media mogul read lines from Morrison’s Sula to illustrate similarities in tone and literary technique to passages in Mathis’s novel. “It’s clear that language really resonates with her, and that she’s a very literary, passionate reader,” Mathis gathered. She knew Winfrey had “read a lot of books,” but “was surprised by the literariness of her viewpoints.”81
Even if there was a grain of truth in Tobar’s claim that melodrama intermittently takes over Mathis’s narrative, her online presence as packaged by Harpo Productions appears to have a distinctly richer, more edifying purpose than that of the producers of Days of Our Lives, or sensual trade romances. If Mathis’s critical reception is any indication—in a highly unusual achievement for a debut novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie graced the cover of the New York Times Book Review in 2013—she has proven herself worthy of the sales generated by Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. The Oprah Effect is not just financial; it is also cultural. The club’s educational mission “floats above commercial interests.”82 This in turn builds courage in readers to expand their understandings of these texts toward self-help/realization, a form of bibliotherapy that has always coursed through the lives of the most elite and respected of readers. The corrective emotional response of deep engagement with literature is epitomized by “6 Things Ayana Mathis Knows for Sure About Sticking With It,” featured on Oprah.com. It mentions the poetry she read as consolation when “she was broke” and on the brink of homelessness, the way she sustained herself on inexpensive fare, and how she persisted in her efforts to find resources and cash—all foregrounding literature’s capacity “to startle us out of a deep-sleep of death into a more capacious sense of life,” as one avid reader said.83
As is clear from “Why Get an MFA?” a piece Mathis wrote for the New York Times in 2015, she is acutely aware of the need to diversify Workshop culture. With The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, she represents the Workshop’s first step into the world of Harpo Productions. Her success demonstrates how the program can be allied with other commercial media powerhouses to awaken and mobilize new readerships. Her alliance with Winfrey offers a progressive twist—distinctly twenty-first century, radically diverse, and socially progressive—on Paul Engle’s aggressive corporate enterprising of the Workshop’s first era. With its peerless status, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop continues to define contemporary literature. The prog
ram’s privileged access to the publishing industry’s most powerful agents, publishers, and promoters can now advance literature as an agent of social progress at the height of the digital revolution. Before Mathis, no Workshop member had tapped into cross-platform resources for publicity on the scale of Winfrey’s media empire. Through such unprecedented reach, the Workshop is now poised to realize the full potential of Mathis’s credo that, in its most noble function, “literature is a triumph of radical empathy.”84
Epilogue • No Monument
Engle’s Legacy and the Workshop’s Future
No monument stands in honor of Paul Engle in Iowa City. There is no bust of him in stone or bronze by the river next to the Iowa Memorial Union, where the old converted Quonset huts once housed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Engle’s name, however, does turn up among those of the many Workshop members, from Flannery O’Connor and Kurt Vonnegut to Marilynne Robinson, whose memorable words are set in brass on Iowa Avenue’s Literary Walk connecting the heart of campus to town. Bearing a quote he penned in 1957 at the height of his poetic ambition, his inscription reads, “Poetry is boned with ideas nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.”1 In 1990, over a decade before the Literary Walk was completed, Engle had already designed his own monument, a project he quite literally took to the grave. The epitaph on the tombstone where he was laid to rest in 1991 in Iowa City’s Oakland Cemetery reads, “ ‘I can’t move mountains. But I can make light.’—Paul Engle.”2
In the absence of any road, scholarship, building, or academic chair bearing his name, Engle seems to have crafted his own public memory.3 His indefatigable obsession with packaging and marketing the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and International Writing Program—a lifelong dedication to winning countless donors, investors, publishers, corporations, governments, faculty, and students—culminated with his attempt to name his own legacy. By casting himself as a Promethean figure imbued with the power to “make light,” he credited himself for illuminating the once culturally barren wasteland of Iowa with the literary world’s most brilliant minds. Not even his most ardent detractors could deny his achievement of developing a fledgling creative writing program, consisting of “one little class” of eight “brilliantly untalented” students inherited from Wilbur Schramm, into the most influential force in contemporary literature.4 The marker both triumphs and gloats in a final gesture intended as much for the gratification of his admirers as for the retribution of his rivals. This conspicuous self-designed memorial befits the young Rhodes scholar who arrived at Oxford with bits of Iowa manure still clinging to his shoes.5 In defiance of New York publishers and Ivy League academics, Engle dared to make Iowa the literary capital of the world. With his signature delicate aggression, Engle made light by attracting literature’s brightest minds since the 1940s.
A Delicate Aggression Page 45
