Some of you may remember how I featured author Mandy Morgan a while before she was a success, and how I gave Rahul Kanakia a great review before he was featured in the Diverse Energies anthology. I am always overjoyed (what a weird idea… over-joy?) to discover new talent!
But today I learned that I actually helped new talent. Continue reading
ULLAGE, subs. (common). — In pl. = drainings, dregs of glasses or casks. [Properly the wantage in a cask of liquor.]
– Historical Dictionary of Slang
I made a bit of a promise with the Game of Abbeys graphic teaser I posted last month, so here’s a bit a follow through on the premise.
Depending on how well-received it is, I may do more, to play around with the other characters in the series.
ownshook n also eunchuck, oanshick, onshook, oonchook, oonshik, owenshook. Cp DINNEEN óinseach ‘a fool, esp a female fool’; JOYCE oanshagh ‘a female fool’ …
1 Foolish, ignorant person.
_ 1924 ENGLAND 318 Onshook—[a fool].
_ 1937 DEVINE 35 Ownshook—an ignorant, stupid fellow.
_ 1968 DILLON 149 Boy, Mike is the real oanshik, isn’t he?
_ C 71-99 If she saw someone swimming on a cold day, he would be referred to as an oonshick of a thing.
2 One of the men, usually elaborately dressed, who participated in a mummers’ parade; a Christmas mummer; FOOL.
– Dictionary of Newfoundland English edited by G. M. Story, W. J. Kirwin, and J. D. A. Widdowson.
Me and my girlfriend broke up over my bad grammar.
RAFTER _ To lie under your blankets with your knees sticking up.
– Dictionary of the American West by Winfred Blevins.
“Look Ma, no hands!” – the first walrus.
I have written quite a bit about the dangers of the MFA as currently conceived: in response to Chad Harbach’s controversial Slate.com piece, on Ani Shivani’s skewering in the HuffPost, and my take on Lev Raphael’s confession about his fellow MFA students that Raphael himself wasn’t too happy about.
But I write mostly about the dangers to the market as a whole.
Yesterday, author Rahul Kanakia—whom you can read at Clarkesworld Magazine, the Diverse Energies anthology, et al.—posted a brief analysis on the dangers of graduate work in general to the individual (“Why you should never, ever get an MFA“) but in a way that demonstrates neatly the pyramid dynamic I see developing in publishing and the MFA system:
Another way to think about it is this: the supply of professorships is not increasing. There was a time, during the 40s and 50s (with the GI bill) and again during the 70s (when women and minorities started entering college in greater numbers) when colleges had to increase in size very fast. The supply of professorships was HUGE. That is not the case anymore. At best, the number of professorships will stay the same. More realistically, it is going to shrink. Basically you will only get a professorship if someone dies. Now, each professor advises maybe 40 or 50 students over the course of his or her career; and only the single best student is going to advance into his (or someone else’s) chair.
In a profession that seems particularly prone to positive thinking, head-in-the-sand optimism, it is refreshing to see a writer stating an uncomfortable truth so boldly and clearly. You can’t sustain an economy based on recruiting people to be recruiters of people who recruit. Eventually, you run out of suckers, I mean students to justify new professors.
Celebrated American author Raymond Chandler once said: “The faster I write the better my output. If I am going slow, I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”
Some have interpreted this to mean you should write without thinking, also known as silencing the so-called “inner editor.” This is a meme borrowed from the cultural contagion known as pop psychology, where the primary obstacle to success is believed to be neither talent nor resources, but lack of confidence.
Another interpretation is that Chandler was talking about writing for speed or word-count, just getting the story down on paper no matter what.
I believe both of these interpretations, and the philosophies behind them, are missing the point. If you’re intentionally blocking your inner editor, or racing to finish X number of words by sundown, you’re still pushing, not pulling.
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