I think the worst thing about spending a day in the woods -- which is otherwise a perfectly wonderful experience to me -- is the return to civilization when you have to go into a coffee shop dusty, tired, and, my own personal horror, in flip-flops. That last were necessary because I'd soaked my shoes walking in a river. I was fortunately on the other side of the hill, in some town called Felton, where nobody knows me, and the Peet's was pretty deserted.

We had a family get together in Henry Cowell Redwoods. There were no redwoods in the part of the park we were in, but there were plenty of oaks and bay laurels.

I suck at skipping stones, for the record.

Kate Beaton is absolutely one of my favorite cartoonists right now, and this comic is an excellent example to show why. Kate writes and draws comics about literary and historical figures (she's Canadian, so I've been learning about the history of her country through her comics), with an arch humor that can be anachronistic but still captures the character of the people she draws. Her LiveJournal and website have tons of comics on them and you will spend hours reading and laughing, trust me. If you don't, I'm sorry -- it's just not going to work out between us.

Originally published at Jennifer de Guzman.

Bob Dylan in Central Park, 1965 by Richard Avedon

I finally watched Don't Look Back, the cinema verite documentary of Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of England. It's a fairly fascinating glimpse at the in turns surly, sarcastic, and earnest young artist. He meets Donovan, Joan Baez is there and then she is not, two British schoolgirls stand on the street outside his hotel, sighing, "Isn't he lovely?" when they catch a glimpse of him; he challenges a frankly befuddled writer for Time magazine, he gets into a drunken, high argument about someone throwing glass in the street; he gets called an anarchist. He is thin as a rail, a waif of a man, with hollow cheeks, surely the result of amphetamines, and in every hotel room, the framed illustrations of birds are crooked in exactly the same way.

Originally published at Jennifer de Guzman.

Perhaps one of the luckiest things to occur in literature happened when Gabriel Garca Mrquez was attending law school and working as an apprentice journalist in Cartagena. Colombia was in the midst of violent political upheaval, which Garca Mrquez had escaped from when he fled Quito. Bragging one night at a restaurant about his happy-go-lucky life, he was brought to a realization when, as he writes, his editor "stopped me cold: ' Just tell me one thing, Gabriel: in the midst of all the damn fool things you do, have you been able to realize that this country is coming to an end?'"

Inspired to get "dead drunk," Garca Mrquez fell asleep on a park bench and "a biblical downpour left me soaked to the skin." An antibiotic-resistant pneumonia was the result, and he had to go to his parents' home in Sucre to recuperate. Three of his friends sent him a crate of books to keep occupied him during his convalescence:

There were were twenty-three distinguished works by contemporary authors, all of them in Spanish and selected with the evident intention that they be read for the sole purpose of learning to write.... Fifty years later it is impossible for me to recall the entire list, and the three eternal friends who knew it are no longer here to remember. I had read only two of them: Mrs. Dalloway by Mrs. Woolf, and Point Counter Point, by Aldous Huxley. The ones I remember best were those by William Faulkner: The Hamlet, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and The Wild Palms. Also Manhatten Transfer and perhaps another by John Dos Passos; Orlando by Virginia Woolf; John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath; Portrait of Jenny, by Robert Nathan, and Tobacco Road, by Erskine Caldwell. Among the titles I do not remember at a distance of half a century, there was at least one by Hemingway, perhaps a book of short stories...; another by Jorge Luis Borges, no doubt stories as well, and perhaps another by Felisberto Herndez, the extraordinary Uruguayan storyteller my friends had just discovered with shouts of joy. I read them all in the months that followed, some of them well and others less so, and thanks to them I managed to get out of the creative limbo where I was foundering.

If I were to quiz a dozen male MFA students, I'd bet that more than a few of them would cite Faulkner as a significant influence on them, too. Fifty years ago, Garca Mrquez was influenced by the newest American literature available to him. Now, writers are influenced by eighty-year-old American literature (The Sound and the Fury was published in 1929!). Here I am among them, with Steinbeck as my man on that list, but I have been making an effort to read more contemporary works. Right now, with YA literature in my sights, I've been turning to my favorite of that category -- Francisca Lia Block.

Perhaps it would be a good idea if MFA programs included contemporary literature seminars. There wasn't anything along that line in the SJSU program, so I'm undertaking an independent studies initiative!

Originally published at Jennifer de Guzman.

The results of the Bulwer-Lytton contest are in, and they're pretty amusing.

The Bulwer-Lytton contest, for those that don't know, is an award given for the worst opening sentence of an imaginary novel. It's run by Dr. Scott Rice, who was chair of the San Jose State English department when I was an undergraduate. It's named after the author of Paul Clifford (which opens "It was a dark and stormy night..."), now-obscure Victorian Novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Prof. Rice is responsible for me reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman in the first place, so I am forever indebted to him.

Fun fact: Andi Watson alludes to the Bulwer-Lytton Contest in Glister 1: Haunted Teapot, in which the eponymous teapot is haunted by a Bulwer-Lytton stand-in, who is incensed that his legacy is that of a contest that rewards purposely bad writing.

Originally published at Jennifer de Guzman.

For the past few months I have been working on revising my novel Sliver of Light, at the request of an editor, to be more suitable for a young adult audience. She gave me some excellent tips for how to do this, and I did a little supplemental research by taking a look at some of the popular young adult novels published right now.

What I discovered is very bleak: suicide, eating disorders, fatal diseases, family tragedy, social cruelty. It gave me hope and a little reassurance, not only because Sliver of Light deals with a couple of these subjects but because it told me my own adolescence was not nearly as anomalous as it felt at the time. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Katie Rophie gives an overview of these dark books that are on young adult section shelves right now.

It brings to mind my senior year of high school, when I was a little more circumspect about sadness (I had discovered The Smiths toward the end of my junior year -- it helped), and was also an editor of the school literary journal. Needless to say, a lot of the work published was what people call "dark." My art teacher, Mr. Cory (who was also the teacher adviser for the school's Christian club) asked me, with a little of both bafflement and disapproval, why teenagers had such turns of mind, why they were drawn to the depressing. I answered something along the lines of "Because life is hard."

I think it's important to remember not to view such a statement by a seventeen-year-old who seems to have no real problems as outsized dramatics. When you're a teenager it's true: Life is hard. You're beginning to see how profoundly you can be disappointed or disappoint others yourself; you can be taken aback by cruelty, both that of others and, shockingly, that of yourself; you feel the pressure of the future as you're pressed about colleges, about majors, about extracurriculars; you begin to keep secrets about your thoughts, about what you do; and sex! my god, sex is so confusing. It's all so new, too, so of course it feels overwhelming.

What appeals to you, then, is something that seems to hold a mirror up to your experience. Rophie expresses this well in her article:

It might appear to adults casually perusing Wintergirls and Thirteen Reasons Why that the kids and experiences within their covers are fairly uncommon and overwrought. But it seems that the extreme and unsettling situations chronicled in these books are, for many teenagers, accurate and realistic depictions of their inner lives. Your whole family may not have died in a car wreck, but it sometimes feels like they have. Everyone in the school cafeteria may not be plotting to kill you with bows and arrows, or knives, or mutant killer insects, but it feels like they are. In the theater of adolescence, with all the sturm and drang of separating from parents, with the total stress of just having to be yourself in the hallway at school, perhaps these books feel, at times, like a true and reasonable representation of daily life. It may be that the feverish drama of a 15-year-olds private universe finds its natural form in these tales of destruction and death.

One thing that Rophe doesn't explore is of interest to me: Why are most of these books targeted toward teenage girls? The shelves are full of books with descendants of Esther Greenwood, but where is the Holden Caufield for the 21st century boy? (Like Mason in Cut My Hair by Jamie S. Rich?) There are so many outlets for girls' emotions -- they can run away with fantasy and barely repressed sexuality with Twilight; they can identify with difficulties of body image and depression with Wintergirls and 13 Reasons Why, but where do boys find the same models for what they're feeling? I worry about them -- that their inner lives are unexplored and unexamined, both by themselves and by adults. It seems that young adult fiction has found its market, and the market is shaped by gender roles that I find troubling, that say that girls may be contemplative but boys may not and are not.

But in all, I'm glad that young adult fiction is now embracing rather than expressing bafflement at the teenage mind, not disparaging it, not implying that it should be something different. I remember what I thought when I answered my teacher but did not say: Why are you asking me this as if teenagers are another species that you have no experience with? Haven't you been a teacher for years? Weren't you ever a teenager? Don't you remember what it was like?

A child could have been born and grown into a teenager in the time since I graduated high school, but I like to think that I remember what it was like. I no longer have my journals from that time. I destroyed them -- that's how hard it was. But I remember a drawing I had made of myself, faceless, in the inside cover of one of them. I felt hated and unrecognized -- do I want to forget that feeling? No, because it was part of my life. Right now, I feel like the best way to redeem that girl I was is to show other girls like her that they're not alone.

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Originally published at Jennifer de Guzman.

The latest Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now comic, written by me and drawn by Brian Belew, is up now at Robot 6. Father's Day! Kung fu!

Originally published at Jennifer de Guzman.

Brian and I have a story in the new Image anthology This Is A Souvenir: The Songs Of Spearmint & Shirley Lee. All the stories are based are songs by the band Spearmint, which I had not heard of, but Eric Stephenson set contributors up with some songs, and I soon decided that the song "The Leopard" inspired me. Their songs lend themselves well to stories, as do those of the band in the other Image anthology we contributed to, Put The Book Back On The Shelf: A Belle And Sebastian Anthology.

The books looks lovely, and is a big 12 x 12" size (like an album), with stories by cool comics people like Chynna Clugston-Flores, Jamie S. Rich, Jamie McKelvie, and Marc Ellerby, all in full color.






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Originally published at Jennifer de Guzman.

Giving Critiques

In an MFA workshop, you will give critiques -- often for two or three pieces -- every week. This consists not only in taking home a fellow student's printed work and writing your critique down, but in a critique discussion with the rest of your class. I don't know about anyone else, but I often worried more about giving critiques than receiving them. What makes a good writing critique? I wanted to be helpful, and didn't want to misinterpret my fellow students' work, be too hard or, because of worries about being to hard, be too easy on it. I worried about giving advice to people whose skills were more advanced than mine. I worried about telling people I liked that I didn't like their stories so much. I realize now that those are the natural worries that can, if used properly, result in giving a helpful critique. These are the questions I kept in mind as I read for critique. It's risky trying to guess at authorial intent, but the text can give you clues about what the author is trying to effect and can lead you a better reading of their piece.

• Is it humorous or serious? A little of both? Once you answer this question, you can determine if something is working as humor, or if something is unintentionally funny in a serious piece, or if the author is achieving the kind of mordant humor s/he's going for.

• Who is the intended audience? It isn't always you. This one requires a little imagination and empathy. You have to put aside your reading preferences and work on determining if teenage girls or older men, or who ever you think the audience is, might enjoy the piece. Acknowledge your limitations as a reader to the author, but don't use it as an excuse not to try to give a helpful critique.

• What kind of style does the author have? It's probably not the same as yours. Don't try to make their style into something it isn't. Try to disregard your preference for well-polished gleaming Fitzgerald-esque prose to acknowledge that the author writes in a grittier style. How does that style work with the story's or essay's theme? (See next item.) Keep the style in mind when you suggest that a certain word choice might be infelicitous or if a sentence my be restructured.

• If it's a creative essay, is there a central idea you can describe after reading it? If it's a short story, is there a theme? If you're in graduate school, you should know all about theses and themes now -- more often than not, in literature classes you are writing essays with a theses about other writers' themes. The work you produce and that your fellow students produce should stand up to the same kind of critical scrutiny. Don't write an academic essay about your fellow students' work, but use the skills you have to work out the thesis or theme and determine if the story or essay is clear enough and supporting it. Or is the piece too on-the-nose, laying out and underlying its thesis or theme in a way that is unsubtle and repetitive? As you can see from the length of what I've written about this question, this is an element I think is very important and that was my favorite part of giving critiques. You have to ask the author, "What are you trying to say?" and help them make their statement more clearly or with more nuance.

When you write your critique and when you contribute to the critique discussion in class, be sure to include what your interpretation of tone, style, audience, and theme are. If you can't answer these questions after reading a piece a couple of times, that's probably a problem with the piece itself. Note to the author what gave you trouble in determining what kind of story or essay the piece is supposed to be.

For fiction and a lot of kinds of creative nonfiction, there are elements besides style and theme that make up a piece: plot, characters and dialogue, and setting.

• Plot is my particular weakness, and supposedly one of MFA writers in general, who don't tend to write outside-conflict kind of stories. Look for a central conflict in the same way you would look for a theme. Is it too subtle? Too obvious? Is it resolved too easily? Not well enough? Did you get a sense of tension and resolution as you read it? If so, there's probably a plot. If not, there probably isn't. How can the conflict be brought out?

• Characters and dialogue are an area where writers can get a little self-indulgent. We talk about our characters like real people sometimes and can get pretty attached to them. This might make for a tendency to dwell too much on certain minutiae of their personalities or to have dialogue that was fun to write but does little to contribute to the story. Or sometimes a character is so clear to the author that s/he doesn't make that character living enough to the reader. Characters and dialogue, like theme, can also be too on-the-nose. If a character's emotional arc is too neat, and characters always say exactly what they are thinking, there will be no tension in the story. (I don't need to really get into simple stuff like writing naturalistic dialogue and avoiding "As you know, Bob" exposition, right?)

• Setting is not given as much importance as it used to in fiction, I think. You get the whole layouts of villages and particular farms in George Eliot or Thomas Hardy novels, but I think the contemporary tendency in non-genre fiction is for a certain generic quality to setting, like a really simple stage where the audience fills in the details or where the details of a room don't matter so much. However, you should still get a sense that the characters in a story occupy a space that has boundaries and a few characteristics, and they should interact with that space.

The guidelines for giving critiques are pretty straightforward, and the first one shouldn't even have to be articulated, but nevertheless:

• Don't be mean. Did you think the story was terrible? Like, really, really awful? Try to tell the author that it just wasn't working for you and why. Just saying that it sucks or was bad or marking up the story with a whole lot of red ink is not helpful.

• Don't be a bore. This refers to the in-class critique session especially. If you've made your point, don't keep repeating it. If someone disagrees with your interpretation or take on a story, you can reply to them, but don't keep on going on with it after that. The critique session is about someone's story, not about your prowess as a literary critic -- put your ego aside for the sake of your classmate's writing.

• Don't dominate. This is kind of the same as the last one. A critique session is for open, fluid discussion, not for you to pontificate about what you think. Give other people a chance to talk and be respectful while they give their opinions.

I often thought during grad school that giving critiques was as helpful, if not moreso, to my own writing than to the people whom I was critiquing, just as I feel studying literature makes me a better writer. When you seek out the problem spots in other people's writing, unless you're hopelessly arrogant, it makes you more attuned to the problems in your own writing. You can begin to apply your critiquing eye to your own work, and it will only benefit from that attention.

Originally published at Jennifer de Guzman.

It's been challenging getting to know and work with the girls in the Girl Start after school program, but just when I'm getting to the point where they hug me when they see me and I don't feel shy reprimanding them if I have to, the program is over -- next week is the last week of the program. I've been there only two months, with a long break in the middle because of my jury duty, but the girls have made progress. The first-grader I worked with from the beginning can read a lot more on her own than she used to be able to.

And there are really cute moments. A few weeks ago, the girls were learning a Langston Hughes poem. I read it with a couple of the girls, and then pointed out the title. "You see that? It's called 'Youth' -- that means it's about you," I said. And one of the little girls looked astounded. "It's about me?!" she said, with a big smile. And last week, one of the girls treated me and a group of other girls to a dramatic reading of If You Give a Pig a Pancake that was very funny.

Oh, if only they would listen if you tell them not to run in the halls and could take a trip to the bathroom without making a scene!

I'm not sure what volunteer work there will be in the summer, but if any of you Bay Area women are looking to do something rewarding with your time, Girl Start East Bay has a lot of things going for it. (There are equivalent programs for men to volunteer working with boys, but I'm not sure what organizations they are.)

As I mentioned in my last post about getting my MFA in creative writing at San Jose State University, one of the draws for me was the literature units requirement. Of 48 units required for graduation, only 15 must be workshop units. The balance of workshop and literature classes varies from program to program (Iowa's is about half and half and Columbia's is 21 of 60 total units -- these are probably regarded as the most prestigious programs), but even if they take up a smaller percentage of your units than other courses, the workshops are often the most important aspect of being an MFA grad student. They are where you most closely and personally interact with your fellow students and where you develop the most as a writer -- not so much in your skill, though good critiques will help you a bit with that, but in your attitude. Both receiving and giving critiques teach you to keep your ego in check and understand your writing better.

So what is an MFA writing workshop like? I'll give you my experiences, and I'll bet they're pretty similar to writing workshops around the country. I'll concentrate on being on the receiving end of critiques first.

Receiving Critiques

Typically, in a workshop, two or three writers turn in a piece for critique at a time. When you're up for critique, you might read a portion of your piece (or the whole thing), but after that, you are expected to be silent until everyone is done discussing your work, except if you are explicitly asked a question for clarification reasons. Desks or tables are arranged so that everyone faces each other.

Be Prepared for:

• The phrase "I have a problem with..." This, for some reason, is the go-to euphemism for "I didn't like..." of MFA students. I suppose because "like" is so subjective, but a problem, well, you don't want anyone to have a problem with your work, right? Take it for what it is -- something subjective that may or may not be backed up with good reasoning and taste.


• Contradictory advice. The problems people have with your work may be directly at odds with each other. Some may like the first-person narrator; others may find the voice unnatural. They might argue with each other. Again, listen for your fellow students' reasons for their opinions that help you decide which advice is best for your work.


• People who absolutely don't "get" what you write. They might not understand or agree with your aesthetic goals -- which is a fancy way of saying that your writing just isn't their kind of thing. This will always happen, but if you realize that there's just a disconnect between your style and someone's taste, not necessarily a matter of quality, then you can learn what's useful and what you have to politely disregard. Don't fall into the trap, however, of thinking that whenever someone doesn't like something you wrote it's because they don't "get" your work.


• People who want to rewrite your stories. Sometimes they will want you to change the plot. Sometimes they want your prose to be more like their prose. In one of my workshops, a very nice woman crossed out several sentences of my stories and rewrote them in a style completely at odds with the rest of the stories. Why? I don't know. I considered whether my writing style wasn't cutting it and needed to be changed up to achieve the effect I wanted, decided, No, it does not, and learned how to ignore stuff like this. It's still kind of irritating when I think about it, but, really, it shouldn't be.


• Retaliation -- or at least someone being irritated with you. This is related to interpersonal politics in workshops, and the best way to avoid it is to give honest, helpful and not-overly critical critiques. (I'll cover that in my next post). Keeping your trap shut about critiques also helps. After my first critique session as an MFA student, I wrote in my blog that I was confused about the contradictory advice I had received and, in the end, had to decide to go with my best instincts and understanding of my writing and not try to please everyone. I remember being surprised by the barely-restrained hostility someone responded to my suggestions during a critique session and then in the line notes of the a critique I received from the same person after that, and it came to light in a note at the end: Someone had told this student about the post in a way that cast me in an ungrateful "too good for you losers" light; this person had thought I was singling them out, which was not the case at all. I wrote an email, pointed the person to the post in question, and cleared it up. I still don't know who was talking shit about me, but I don't care at this point. What I learned from this is to never, ever, ever write or speak publicly about being frustrated with the workshop process while you're still a student. I'm not a student anymore, though.


• People you just don't like. As I mentioned, you're interacting closely with people in workshops, and personalities are inevitably going to clash. Don't let the fact that you don't like someone affect how you value their suggestions. They might have good writing insight that's completely separate from their unattractive (to you) personality.

How does dealing with this help you understand your writing better? You have to learn to separate what constitutes personal preference on the part of your critiquers from quality issues in your writing. And, most importantly, you have to learn when and how to stick to your guns -- and how to do it without being arrogant. When you have to articulate to yourself why you've made the choices you've made -- why you structured a story a certain way, why you used this word instead of that one -- then your writing improves, and facing suggestions for changes makes you consider if the changes would have merit (depending on your goals and style). Whether you choose to implement the suggestions or not, this process makes you critically consider your own writing, which makes you understand it better.

I find it helpful to remember that when it comes to my writing, I am in a position of power. It is my writing, and it will always be my choice about how to change it. It is arrogant to advertise this position of power by making it known how unhelpful critiques might have been -- so undertake receiving and considering critiques and editing your work humbly and quietly.

I'll write about giving critiques next time!

Originally published at Jennifer de Guzman.

I was doing a little "research" for a Father's Day "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" column, and when you have a dad like mine (he had his own kung fu school for a while, and one of my favorite things is a picture of him breaking a cinderblock with his fist), that "research" means watching old kung fu movies on YouTube. And that kind of research leads inevitably to this, from the 1978 classic Eagle's Claw:

That's sort exactly what I need in my life right now -- so much so that I learned to make animated gifs from YouTube videos just so I could post this. It's a skill that will no doubt come in handy should I want to waste time in the future.

I think I remember watching this movie with my dad. There's a scene were the Praying Mantis sifu, a classic kung fu movie villain with long white hair and beard, is meditating on a bed of nails, and it is very familiar to me. It's probable I did see this with him -- we watched kung fu movies together a lot when I was little, and this would have been one I liked, since it has a couple of women who show off kung fu moves while wearing pretty outfits.

Originally published at Jennifer de Guzman.

I'm excited about the new movie about Hypatia of Alexandria, Agora, starring Rachel Weisz and directed by Alejandro Amenabar. Here's the teaser trailer (if you can't see it, here's the link):



The brief scene with what looks like Hypatia teaching is lovely -- it reminds me of a J.W. Waterhouse painting. Also seen -- the Pharos lighthouse, Christian mobs, female librarians scrambling to save the scrolls in the Library of Alexanria (which produces a visceral reaction in me -- the idea of all the knowledge and literature lost made me cry when I first learned about it), and the toppling of a statue of Serapis (a syncretic god used by the Ptolemaic dynasty to unite disparate religious groups in Egypt).

Hypatia was the last head librarian of the Library of Alexandria, and the apocryphal story is that her father raised her to be the perfect human being -- physically and intellectually. The IMDB listing for the movie calls her an atheist, but she was a Neoplatonist. In that philosophy God becomes a singular concept, which I find a bit similar to the tao of Taosim or what atheists like me half-jokingly invoke as "the Universe." However, Neoplatonism allows for the existence of many gods and the belief in an immortal soul. So it's not atheism as we would think of it at all. It actually is compatible with religious pluralism -- but not so much with any religions that claim to be the one and only true religion. And thus the problem when Christianity came to Alexandria.

Though, interestingly, the Gospel of John begins in a clearly Platonist way: "In the beginning was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." And Hebrews 9:23-24 is even more blatantly Platonist in its understanding of Christ as one who communes on our behalf with the ideal world, of which our world is only a shadow: "Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf."

I'm interested in seeing how the movie treats this subject. The meaning I would take from a story like the destruction of classical Alexandria is that there are certain absolute stances that are incompatible with peaceful multicultural existence. It's also a shame that the religious motivation for her murder has overshadowed the accomplishments of Hypatia's life -- she's become a symbol, and I hope the excellent Rachel Weisz will make her a woman.

Originally published at Jennifer de Guzman.

In the post-apocalyptic world after Judgment Day:

Los Angeles is a barren wasteland.

San Francisco is home to evil technology and an apocalypse standard-issue ruined Golden Gate Bridge.

Women wear skin-tight jeans and have luxurious, full-bodied hair and perfect teeth.

But Bryce Dallas Howard is bogarting a stash of lip gloss and blush.

Everything is REALLY LOUD.

John Connor has a podcast.

And something so awesome happens that I involuntarily exclaimed, "WHOA!"

No doubt we'll all enjoy this soon, now that SkyNet has been launched.

Originally published at Jennifer de Guzman.

Check out Tobias Wolff rocking out to John Darnielle singing his much-beloved Mountain Goats song "Woke Up New." Via GalleyCat, where there's a brief disussion of song lyrics as literature. "What have song writers learned from regular writers?" it asks, but when it comes to song writers like John Darnielle, I think there is a great deal "regular writers" can learn from them. A song like "Woke Up New" distills a moment and a barrage of emotions into something compelling and touching. I suppose there is a kind of John-Cheever-like profound simplicity that is both specific and general enough for the listener to empathize. Songs are often inspirations for me when I write, whether it's just a matter of mood or more explicit appropriation. Of the latter is my story "Minx Mouse Monster," inspired by the Rasputina song "The New Zero" and "Fancy Dress," the comics story I collaborated on with Brian Belew, written for Image Comics' Put the Book Back on the Shelf: A Belle and Sebastian Anthology. The story is based on the song, "The Model," and it was a challenge to take all the images packed into it (read the lyrics at B&S's website here). I tried to follow a thread of narrative in the song, while working in references to other parts of the song in the background imagery (including the harpsichord of the instrumentation). How successful was I? You tell me. You can read the whole story at my Scribd page. If you look, you can find a negative review by Douglas Wolk at Salon.com; my biggest quibble with it is that he doesn't get that people are wearing masks because "a fancy dress," as it's called in the song, is what you call a masquerade party in the UK and Ireland. As I saw it, the song is about the identities we put on that keep people from knowing the self that we are to ourselves. Brian and I have another story based on a song coming out in an Image Comics anthology, This Is a Souvenir, the Songs of Spearmint and Shirley Lee. The song is called "A Leopard" and is about lost childhood. [amazonshowcase_d6495ce991596a55b3f034888af60ea0]

Originally published at Jennifer de Guzman.

Ladies and gentlemen, we must discuss the most important question to arise from the new Star Trek movie:


Why is Spock so ridiculously hot?

Personally, I'm working with the theory that having (usually) superbly controlled emotions roiling beneath the surface is unfathomably sexy. A logical facade, in this sense, is no different from Byronic brooding. Why, ladies, why, will we always swoon for that?

There's also the matter of Spock's gigantic mind. Blogs and Twitter feeds (and everyone's pants) are abuzz with mad Spock crushes, and it's just more confirmation that, right now, an intellect is the ultimate in hot.

Or maybe it's the sideburns.

And now for some under-the-cut talk with spoilers.
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I have a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from San Jose State University. It's a relatively new program, as far as MFA programs go, and I debated with myself for a while before deciding on an MFA instead of an MA. A desire to focus on my own creative work was foremost in the decision, and that the degree is terminal, theoretically qualifying the holder to teach at the university level, also played a part.

The latter part was rendered moot, though, because I didn't do any graduate or teaching assistant work while I was getting my degree. Without any teaching experience, I'm unlikely to be considered for a teaching position, especially with English departments reducing their staffs. But that's all right because at some point during the three-year program, I decided I don't want to teach. I have a job in a creative field already, I reasoned, one that enables me to work on my writing while doing something related to my education, and, despite the recent setback of having my hours reduced, I still think it was sound reasoning. But what about the MFA itself? Was it worth getting? Was the SJSU program a good one? Let's talk about that.

The Program SJSU's creative writing MFA program is somewhat rare in that it requires students to complete workshops in both a primary and secondary genre (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or scriptwriting) and also to complete a good number of literature courses. It's 48 units total, 9 in your primary genre (mine was fiction) and 6 in your secondary (mine was nonfiction), 6 units of professional development (a "Materials and Methods" class and an independent professional experience project). I often tell people I have an MFA in creative writing and literature because of this -- the program requires more literary units than workshop ones. This, for me, was an attraction; I am devoted to literature and I wanted to study it at a graduate level. My

Experience in the Program

The Good

Literature Courses Except for one notable exception, these were well-structured, challenging, and free from bullshit. The professors at SJSU tend to stay away from theory-heavy treatments of literature, with concentration more on formal, philosophical, and historical elements. The university's Steinbeck Center proved very valuable as I labored on a paper on The Pastures of Heaven and Professor Krishnaswamy's Globalization and Literature seminar offered an opportunity to study contemporary works of literature.

Nonfiction Workshop I like writing assignments in workshops, and Professor Cathleen Miller gives good assignments that help you develop your craft. I had the most fun in her workshops, too, thanks in no small part to my friends Gary and Nigel.

Lurie Professors An endowment to the university allows the English department to hire a well-known writer every Spring semester. The writer teaches an undergraduate course and a graduate workshop. I was lucky enough as an undergrad to take courses from former California Poet Laureate Al Young (he called me a "quintessential Californian") and Simon Winchester, whose reporter's sensibility helped me streamline not just my writing but my thinking as well. As a graduate, I took a fiction workshop from the late James D. Houston, whose wisdom and experience gave me an example to emulate. Other Lurie professors have included Ursula K. LeGuin and ZZ Packer.

Center for Literary Arts The CLA has brought in some great writers for on campus literary events -- most notably for me, Neil Gaiman and Salman Rushdie. It's inspiring to hear writers speak about writing when you're concentrating on the development of your own craft.

The Students I met a lot of great people who are also wonderful writers while in the MFA program. It's nice to be around people for whom writing is a given and who don't struggle to come with writerly topics of conversation with you, awkwardly asking, "So... where do you get your ideas?"

The Not-So-Good

No Consistent Guidance for My Primary Genre I must stress that this is something that is no longer the case in the program. Unfortunately, though, for those of us in the program at the time, the fiction professor left after my first semester, so I didn't have a consistent guide in my primary genre. My other professors were not lacking, but I wanted something of a part-time mentor for my fiction, and I did not get one. Politics I wrote a little bit about this in my last post.University departments are full of personal politics, and I learned very quickly to shrug off stuff like reported conversations with the program director about me. (For example,I hadn't taken any creative writing classes as an undergraduate at SJSU, and, as reported to me, the program director said this explained why "no one had ever heard of" me.)

That Myth and Symbolism Seminar It seems a little harsh to single out one seminar as a bad point, I know, but I was so unhappy with this course. It had no defining structure, meandering discussions, and absolutely de-motivated me. It's like it sucked all the academic ability I have in me right the hell out of my brain and body. I got my worst grade in any college course I've ever taken in this class, a B-, and it was totally my fault because I couldn't be bothered to do the uninspiring weekly homework assignments. It was just dead awful.

That Ouroboros Feeling In graduate school, specifically in a field like literature or creative writing, it seems that professors can often fall into the trap of thinking that their role is to create people who will eventually perform their role who will eventually teach their students to perform their role, and so on. Which is not really an outlandish attitude to have, but sometimes it can be a little inflexible, especially considering that an MFA degree is a professional degree, with the goal of producing people who are practicing artists or work professionally in a creative field. Which I totally do. But I was not allowed to use my job for my professional work units -- I did a one-day comics writing workshop instead.

People Asking Me, "So What Are You Going to Do Now?" This isn't the fault of the MFA program; it's just a common pitfall of getting a graduate degree, I suppose. My answer is usually "I'm already doing it." Seriously, everyone. Stop asking me this.

My column is due today, and my mind is just spinning out air trying to figure out what to write it on. I remembered that there had been some comics talk at the academic site The Valve, so I went there to check it out. Unfortunately, it just got me kind of annoyed because it seems their attempts at discussion have turned into what every comics discussion turns into: My ego totally has a bigger boner than your ego. And I use this coarse metaphor because it also bugs me that The Valve's contributors are all men, and the one contributor who seems to take academic criticism of comics seriously only seems to write about superhero comics.

So there went that idea.

It got me thinking on two really disparate fronts, though -- first on my academic experiences as someone who works in the comics industry, and then on how a reduction in physical but also mental presence in that industry has made me care a little less about it lately. Perhaps I'm being too honest, or too public with that honesty, about the latter, but, really, it has gotten me thinking. Woody Allen's quip that "80% of success is just showing up" is more than just a quip when viewed from this perspective. Mere presence is enough to induce giving a damn a lot of the time, and when your presence is reduced, you might just start giving a darn instead. And if you don't care a damn lot, you're not going to succeed.

So you have to do what you do when you're feeling down and fighting it -- you have to not give in to the apathy and make yourself care, remind yourself of the benefits of giving a damn and, thus, succeeding. But then you say, "But I gave a damn before and look where it got me," and then you just lie down and contemplate Matthew Arnold poetry and Morrissey songs, and let your mind wander back to revising your novel, which you do give a damn about right now. And come Monday, you'll give a damn about comics again, too -- it's just that these Thursdays and Fridays are hard sometimes, and without something like deciding someone's fate at the hands of the criminal justice system to occupy your mind and make you feel like you're doing something, you get gloomy.

Oh, and about my academic experiences. They were funny. The creative writing department head had gotten it in his head that it was my life's ambition to write comics, and, according to some people, would speak of me dismissively because of it. (Of course, it never has been my life's ambition to write comics, though I do write them sometimes, but I was pre-judged because of my job.) In his Materials and Methods of Literary Production course, he encouraged me to do a conference-style paper on comics instead of Swinburne, so I gave my class a reading of I Feel Sick about the artist as central object in an artistic work, and got questions about why the word "fuck" was in the comic so much. That paper is not terribly academic, more creative essay than formal, but that's why I went for an MFA and not an MA. In a workshop on travel writing, I did a presentation on the comics form being an ideal form for travel narrative, and I still think that. The Center for Literary Arts once asked for feedback about graphic novelists that might be invited for on-campus events; at the time, Blankets was big, so I suggested Craig Thompson. The head of the CLA wrote back and asked what I thought about Matt Groening. He's funny, I said, but not exactly a graphic novelist. I did not hear back again.

And, there, I've put off writing my column for a few more minutes.

Originally published at Jennifer de Guzman.

It's hard to concentrate on revising my novel when there are things that I need to do at work that are using up my mind space. I need to write a press release for Zeke Deadwood, finish laying out the Gargoyles Volume 2 cover, get back on track with putting up the Byron and Serenity Rose web comics, post some reviews and news on the blog, answer some email I forgot to reply to yesterday, finish getting through January's submissions, send Fat Chunk Volume 2 and Captain Blood #1 to the printer, and send out review copies of Rex Libris Volume 2.

I'm going to have just be more nose-to-the-grindstone. It was easy enough working three days a week when we had so few books coming out, but now, thought the schedule is still reduced, there is a lot more to do than there was at the very beginning of the year. I also lost a week because of being on a jury, and it's set me back some.