Write On Campus
columbia mfa students talk about their prose
T he entire graduate writing program at Columbia is tucked away on the fourth floor of Dodge. The 70-or-so students in each graduating class take all of their classes here, but it’s easy to miss the department if you aren’t one of them. This is too bad—Zadie Smith, here last weekend, and Gary Shteyngart, who teaches a weekly workshop, are among the literary luminaries who have been known to pop in for a talk or to offer instruction. A few second-year mfa students preparing to write their graduate theses sat down with The Eye to discuss their work and writing as a craft. Though their responses varied as widely as the differences in their style—Columbia isn’t turning out cookie cutter writers—almost all of them agreed on the basic difficulty of talking about their prose. After all, for students developing writers’ instincts, the problem with giving interviews is that the editing is out of your hands. But no matter how these up-and-coming talents write their own futures, keep your eye peeled for their work next time you’re browsing at the Strand.
Adam Wilson
One of Adam Wilson’s stories opens with two people in bed, with possibly the first literary use of a lobster as an erotic toy. Like most of the other mfa students, Wilson was attracted to the idea of pursuing a formal graduate program for the discipline it imposes, but also for the community of like-minded students and prestigious faculty. He has found that the intimacy and intensity of the Columbia workshops make him tougher on his own writing—he laughs as he recounts something one of his professors once wrote on one of his papers: “I’d kick my own ass if I wrote this line.” When asked where he gets ideas, he deadpans, “My shrink asks me that question all the time,” before explaining that he often thinks of an opening line first and develops a story from there. He tries to be particularly precise about the voice of a piece, because anything that rings false has the potential to derail the entire work. Parts of his dialogue come from his habit of eavesdropping. “I really like the way teenagers and drug addicts speak,” he says. He’s also intrigued by what is not said in a conversation—the ideas and emotions that speakers aren’t able to express with words. “I’m interested in the language people create when they don’t have the language to say what they want,” he says.
Caroline Seklir
The only native New Yorker who spoke with The Eye, Caroline Seklir does not dismiss the romantic idea of the city as a mecca for writers. “I think something New York teaches you about writing is that there are endless ways to talk, to be,” she says. But the piece she’s been working on lately takes place in a small town far north of Manhattan. Seklir admits that in the past she wrote mostly about what she knew, like the old cliché. Finding it claustrophobic, she made a radical shift toward writing about experiences she’s never had. She has now found a natural middle ground between the two extremes. Seklir decided to get the mfa in part so she could teach, because she appreciates the difficulty of getting fiction published and wants to keep a second career option open. Seklir has always been surrounded by books—her mother is a librarian—so she takes it for granted that elements of books she’s read occasionally surface in her stories. She gets excited while talking about her first exposure to her favorite writers. Of reading Nabokov she says, “I thought, ‘God, I never thought about stories being that way.’”
Frank Winslow
When asked why he decided to get an mfa, Franklin Winslow’s first response is, “I have birds in my head?” He explains that for him, attaining the degree is like the development of a set of skills in any craft—something that has real value for him because it can never be lost or stolen. One of his stories is a surreal black comedy about a woman who finds herself in a tumultuous relationship with Water—the element, that is, not a last name. The piece reflects a method he’s currently using to start writing, inspired by the Russian Futurists, which involves letting the form of a story shape its content. When he doesn’t like what he’s writing, it gets altered or set aside, but as he sees it, “Nothing is ever finished. The most I can ask of a piece is its greatest possible balance.” Winslow draws inspiration for tone and plot from impressions he’s stored of the places he knows well, such as “San Diego’s biker culture ... and Arkansas’ backwoods’ drawl.” He thinks his best work is informed by an amalgamation of these impressions and material from books that he’s read and absorbed. And as for the city he currently calls home, he says, “New York strikes me as our global print capitol, which makes it a great place to be excited about writing. It gets in your blood.”
Lincoln Michel
Lincoln Michel is working towards writing a novel for two reasons: he considers it more challenging than a short story collection, but also, as he puts bluntly, “shorter stuff doesn’t sell.” He admits to feeling insecure about his future prospects for supporting himself in a world where writing lacks some of the cultural importance it once had. “Books aren’t icons. I think that in the past, books had this real effect.” He points out that short fiction no longer appears in most major newspapers and magazines, with the exception of the New Yorker, which nearly always publishes pieces by seasoned writers. In fact, he says, “I don’t know too many writers who think that their writing is important” on a cultural level, the way that film and visual art students often view their work. But he finds some comfort in an emerging trend toward more recognition of the increasingly complex work writers do for mass entertainment series, like the oft-cited Sopranos and The Wire. He says, “I don’t really think people value Macgyver, or whatever, like they do the Sopranos.” In any event, he adds wryly, he can always write for the Simpsons if nothing else pans out.
Belinda McKeon
Belinda McKeon came to Manhattan from Dublin, seeking time to devote to her novel and a certain “structure and focus” she couldn’t find while writing on her own. She enjoys the mfa program, where “writing is very obviously and very consciously the main thing in your life, and where you are ... expected to take the work of writing seriously and where you are surrounded by people who do the same thing.” This has helped make writing the focal point of her life, for now. Having distance from her native country also makes it easier for her to write about it—her current novel is set in rural Ireland. She says that usually, she sits down to write without any starting point in mind. Her approach is simply “to face up to the blank screen and once I can do that, it begins to come.” Belinda is eloquent when asked about the power of writing. “Literature has the power to entertain, to move, to inspire ... to make sense of the difficult and the incomprehensible,” she says, “and to take our experiences of language and the world and ourselves to a different level.” \\\