In one of my first undergraduate writing workshops, our professor informed us that she was only interested in “normal” fiction. When we asked her to specify, her response boiled down to “no orcs.”
I have deep sympathy for my professors’ fears of receiving massive sci-fi epics for workshop. In a time when Game of Thrones was reaching peak popularity and many of us had entered undergraduate writing programs with dreams of being the next Neil Gaiman, it feels like a legitimate concern, in retrospect.
But we were also children of catastrophe, a generation whose parents pulled us out of first-grade classrooms on September 11, 2001 and who entered adulthood facing bleaker economic prospects than the last generation. In other words, we had grown up with a cascading series of “new norms.” Reality felt pliable to us. Impossible things happened every day.
In a traditional MFA program, character-driven realism is often favored over the muddy waters of reality-bending. But it is time for the MFA to catch up with the new literary landscape, in which masters like
