I have been meaning to write this post for a while now because it’s something I think about daily, something that has become unavoidable in my life. If you go back and read my post about getting an MFA, you’ll see that I don’t regret going to graduate school for writing or the loaned money that it cost me. But just because I don’t regret it, that doesn’t mean I’m content with the consequences. I know many people who made the choice to pursue a writing degree and are now completely underwater in loans with little hope of surfacing in the near future. To think that you’re going to spend the next ten or fifteen years paying the minimum payment, accruing compounded interest that will eventually double the original size of the loan, is something that, I think, can seriously hinder a young writer’s inspiration. True, writers throughout time have struggled financially and it could be argued that it positively influenced their work (Faulkner, for example). But their financial troubles were more along the lines of “how can I pay rent, how can I eat, how can I drink this month” and not “how am I going to do all that and pay $500 in student loans on top of it.” What it all comes down to is that young writers are doing themselves a great disservice by taking on so much debt and unless you have a hustle outside of writing that pays well, you may never get out of that debt.

Universities are learning what a great money-maker the MFA is, which is why more and more MFA programs start up every year. Despite the economic issues we’re having right now, it’s still incredibly easy for students to get loan money. This is a recipe for financial ruin. What’s even worse is that the demand is there for the MFA; search the internet and you will find blogs dedicated to people applying for an MFA, complete with stories of a young writer not being accepted year after year but wanting so bad to get an MFA that he or she will continue applying every year until they are finally admitted. You don’t think universities notice this? If there is a student willing to take out some loans to go to school for a degree that confers on you almost nothing (in a job possibility sense), universities will create a program to cater to that student to increase their revenue. I’m not trying to paint universities as demons, they do indeed want you to learn and expand yourself, but they are businesses first. Don’t ever forget that.

Very few writers actually make good money; writing should be about the words, not about any financial reward that comes from it. If you get into writing thinking you’ll earn a livable wage from it, enough to support a family and buy a house and have all the conveniences of modern life, you will be in for a surprise. Many people do make money from writing, but they are still a small percentage of the total pool of writers in existence who make nothing. Being successful in writing is hard enough, so don’t purposefully put another roadblock in your way in the form of debt. If I learned anything from my time in an MFA program it’s that your writing, the way you approach it and the places it can lead you, are wholly up to you. You don’t need to drop loads of cash that you don’t have to buy the time to write — you have that time to write right now.

I’m lucky. I have abilities outside of writing that allow me to earn a good living and as such I am taking an aggressive stance on repaying my student loans. I’ve reached a point where I just hate that I’m in debt, it makes me feel trapped, and I want to pay it off sooner than later. When I finally claw myself out of the hole that debt is, I know the air will be much cleaner and I will feel much more liberated. Why? Because I will have far fewer monthly bills, allowing me to instead spend that money on something worthwhile… like life.

This talk of Writer’s Poverty reminded me of Jessi’s post from a few months back questioning why aspiring writers don’t read more literary journals. This was quite a popular essay and even got us linked on the Huffington Post. In her entry Jessi speaks to the contradiction that literary journals want you to read their publications before submitting, but if a writer were to subscribe to all the journals to which he or she might want to submit they would go broke in the process. There is no possible way that every writer who submits to a journal could actually afford to read that journal.

I used to subscribe to a handful of journals, most notably the Paris Review and Zoetrope: All-Story. I ended my subscriptions because, essentially, the work they printed bored me. That’s not to say I was completely unimpressed by anything published in these magazines; I was, however, more often than not nonplussed about each issue as a whole. But I’m willing to give the whole thing another shot.

So I think I’m going to subscribe to some literary journals. I have, for a few years now, wanted to subscribe to The Sun. Every opportunity I’ve had to read one of their publications left me happy I had cracked their covers. It’s also a boon to their journal that they publish monthly and are completely ad-free. But beyond that, I’m not sure to which journals I want to subscribe. Ultimately, I’m looking for some cutting edge work that actually excites me. I’m fatigued by the “me-me-me” writing style about privileged and disaffected youth that seems to permeate the world of the modern short story, so any journal that publishes that kind of stuff is out. I’m also not a big fan of a magazine like the New Yorker… granted, they publish some really great journalism but I, however, am more interested in fiction. I think the New Yorker publishes very safe fiction. But I also don’t want to read stories aping some sort of post-modernist style that don’t really have anything to say; that screams to me safe masquerading as rebellious. So where, dear reader, should I look?

I’ve been dissatisfied with the novels I’ve been reading lately (Nightwood by Djuna Barnes and I’ve Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina for two) and literary journals could be the perfect thing to read on my daily commute. I’m thinking of subscribing to maybe five different journals. Let’s count the Sun as number one. Four more to figure out.

If there was ever anyone’s ire you should avoid, it was Hunter S. Thompson’s. The man knew how to vent his frustrations. So when the late author’s “DVD, uh… I don’t know what the hell brand it is” doesn’t work the way he anticipates, and all the new wiring causes massive confusion with his own audio/video system, he gives the company who installed it for him an earful on their answering machine. After some yelling of expletives and threats, he finally concedes that if they don’t do something about this problem immediately he will write something nasty about them. “Go to any bookstore, any magazine rack and look, you can see what the fuck I can do to you. And I will!”

Edit: There’s been some skepticism about the authenticity of this recording around the internet. Some argue that it doesn’t exactly sound like a phone recording would and that Thompson’s voice was a little bit deeper than what the recording purports; maybe these people have accepted Johnny Depp’s Thompson as the truth? Still, the attitude is there and the flow of thought sounds, to me at least, to be authentic. The way he moves from one thought to another, how he speaks to someone in the room with him, how he gets flustered as his anger leads him places… What do you think?

Thanks to Gizmodo.

The man responsible for sparking my interest in both reading and writing, Jerome David Salinger, has died. BBC News is reporting that he “died of natural causes, his son said in a statement released by his literary agent.”

I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering what kind of craziness is going to ensue from this. If you remember, Salinger hasn’t published anything since the 60s. But that doesn’t mean he had stopped writing. With the dubious stuff his children have done in the past (“Dream Catcher,” anyone?), I’m sure we’re going to see the floodgates open up and a deluge of previously unpublished work come out. Think of all the money a lot of people stand to make off this sad news.

For now, though, as we wait to see what happens next… check out my previous feature about my own personal Salinger Library including links to places on the internet where you can read his entire (published and uncollected) oeuvre.

Dear people:

Today I stumbled upon the very awesome blog Letters of Note. In their own words, “Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos.” From the letter of a child detailing his rocket ship designs “to a top scientist,” to a letter from Einstein proclaiming that “the word God is nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness,” this blog could entertain you for hours. But what struck me was a letter from Kurt Vonnegut Jr to his family after he escaped Dresden at the end of World War II. The experiences outlined in Vonnegut’s letter are both horrifying and incredibly worthy of respect. And on an even more visceral level, it makes me feel like writers today are all academic pansies. How many modern writers do you know “were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters” or lived through a massive bombing raid that “killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden?” Horrible as it may be, it’s also pretty badass.

This experience of Vonnegut’s and the events outlined in this letter are what inspired his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which was what his underground slaughterhouse-cum-prison was known as to his German captors. Vonnegut’s letter is not only an enlightening piece of literary history, it is a fantastic document of world history as well. It demonstrates to us how awful war is, how children writing to their parents had to begin letters with statements like “I’m told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than ‘missing in action.’”

I’ve posted the scans of the letter below, which were originally available here at archive.org. If you check out Vonnegut’s letter at Letters of Note, you can read it transcribed as well and may soon find yourself sifting through all the other letters in their collection.

The internet-as-publisher has, for a long time, been given a bad reputation by the literati and print publishing world. Work published online has been seen as somewhat inferior to work published in print, mostly because it’s labeled as more of a vanity thing. Anybody can start a website or blog and put their work out there. Moreover, anybody can start an online literary journal and distribute the work of others. There’s little oversight, or at least it may be perceived as such, and the quality of both writing and editing is suspect. Print, however, has a long history of authority and quality and is therefore, by inertia alone, the top tier of what any aspiring writer could want.

But if running this blog for what’s coming on a year has taught me anything, it’s that this assumption, which once held validity in the public eye and in my own mind, has become completely false.

True, getting accepted into a respected print journal is an admirable accomplishment and a noble goal. But I’m inclined to think that the more important accomplishment for any writer is obtaining readership. The internet, as compared to a printed journal, offers near unlimited readership. More than that, upon being published online your work is submitted to an easily searchable digital library that will never go away. Being published in print limits you not only to a journal’s regular subscriber base and the booksellers through which they may distribute, but you’re also limited by time. How long before any particular issue of a journal goes out of print forever? Six months? One year? And what of that aforementioned subscriber base, how many people does that really entail? Is it in the thousands or merely in the hundreds? When you publish your work in a print journal, how many people are actually reading your story?

Let’s look at this question from a different perspective: technology. Ten years ago, at the beginning of the new millennium, how many people who you knew had a cell phone or an mp3 player? Ask yourself that same question but apply it to the present time. Do you know anybody right now, apart from maybe a grandparent or two, who doesn’t have these things or some device that does both? Now let’s think about books and technology. The phenomenon of the e-reader has yet to fully take off, but the Amazon Kindle has certainly proved to be a success and Barnes and Noble couldn’t keep up with the demand for their new Nook over the holiday season. As these devices mature, as the technology progresses, as the prices decline, all people who love reading will own an e-reader. It’s not a question of “if” it’s a question of “when.” Trust me, I love the smell of an old book as much as anybody out there; I love digging through the stacks at a used bookstore looking for treasures. Books-as-ephemera is my thing, as I’ve said many times here. But the reality is that era is over. Our lives are infiltrated by all things digital more and more everyday and to deny it, or to cling to the past out of nostalgia or fear or whatever, is simply being a luddite. There’s nothing wrong with appreciating something for the sake of nostalgia, but to deny something wholeheartedly because of nostalgia is akin to sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming “I can’t hear you!”

The truth is, while printed books will always remain for the sake of nostalgia, as collector’s items, as a higher-priced “print!” edition to accompany a digital download, the internet and digital media are unequivocally the future of literature.

I am surprised daily by the amount of traffic this blog receives and it’s enlightening to see which posts garner the most traffic. Even more interesting than that, a number of posts have been viewed by over a thousand people. Each month is better than the last in terms of traffic and as long as the content here is worthwhile to people, that trend won’t subside. The print publishing world is a constant struggle, an uphill battle filled with middlemen and people who all want a piece of the pie. Online, however, you are in charge of everything. There are no page or word limits. It is a true Democracy on the internet, despite it being viewed as a digital Wild West. If you produce quality, people will come. There is no agent or editor determining whether or not your writing is marketable, there is no undergraduate or MFA candidate sussing out the best stories for their university’s journal… there is only the reader. You write for yourself and the reader alone will determine your work’s worth.

I admit, this idea is not yet fully realized but it’s silly to deny that it won’t soon become reality. It’s also silly to think that middlemen will go away; they won’t. Editors are important to cull together a collection, much as a curator does for a gallery exhibit, but publishing and editing and writing will be much more populist in the near future. Agents may have a tougher time in the future, as they will be less necessary (if at all), but if there’s money to be made someone will figure out a way. Ultimately, though, despite the quantity of writing that will be available online, the quality of the work is what will make a writer both prevalent and relevant — not their access to print.

What do you think?