Beware the End of Art: The Millions Interviews Mark Slouka
Mark Slouka is an American writer who has published eight books, fiction and nonfiction, that have appeared in 16 languages. The son of Czech immigrants, Mark has two stories in Best American Short Stories, and three pieces in Best American Essays. Further credentials include Harpers, Ploughshares, the Paris Review, Granta, Guggenheim, the NEA, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. You get the idea.
The part you don’t yet get but will is that when a writer with this CV exchanges the security of the academy for the unfathomability of east-central Europe, it’s incumbent that the rest of us give serious consideration as to why. Mark recently gave me two solid days on Skype—Prague to Kyiv—making a strong case for the necessity of book learnin’ and more.
The Millions: So now that you’re retired from the MFA business and living in Prague, where is the good writing going to come from?
Mark Slouka: Thanks for that, but my guess is, pretty much where it’s always come from, which is to say, probably not an MFA program. Honestly, the MFA industry in America is a wonder to me: The less people read, the more they seem to want to write, and a whole lot of them think that dropping the big bucks on an MFA is the only way to do it. It can work for some. For others not so much.
TM: How so?
MS: Okay, for example, when I taught at Columbia, the bill for an MFA came to around 70,000 bucks and we offered precious little financial aid. There was one student sleeping in her car with her kid until I found out about it. What’s worse, I was on the acceptance committee—one of the people who had to call students to give them the good news. So, I make the call and somebody’s mom out in Ohio picks up and I can hear her whispering, “Oh, my God, it’s Columbia University!” Then the student gets on, her voice shaking, and I say “Congratulations, you’ve been accepted to the Columbia MFA program,” which is followed by much rejoicing. Then she musters up the courage to ask if there’s any financial aid and I say, “absolutely, we’re awarding you a $3,000 scholarship,” or whatever. To offset the blow—or sucker them in, in my opinion—we were supposed to tell prospective students that they could apply for a teaching fellowship in their second year, omitting the fact that only a small percentage of applicants actually got one. I felt like I was hustling sub-prime mortgages. To my credit, I always told them the odds of hitting the teaching jackpot were low, so if money was a concern and they had better offers, they should consider taking them.
TM: Okay, but for those who could afford it, the workshops were worth it, right?
MS: I don’t know, maybe. I had some amazing students, but the sad truth is that all too often the culture of the workshop can lead to a kind of “blind leading the blind” situation: As an instructor, you’re not really allowed to just lay out the problem and suggest solutions.
TM: Not allowed?
Let’s say, “discouraged.” After my first class at Columbia—I’d never taught writing before—‚a student came up to me and said, “Um, professor, I’m not sure you understand how it works around here.” And I said, “Probably not, what am I doing wrong?” And she explained that I wasn’t giving students enough time to frame the conversation themselves and I realized I was expected to step back and let them lead each other. Results were mixed. Sometimes a good student would take it in the right direction. Other times, someone would write, “Her tears fell like pebbles on an iron grate,” and I’d try to say something about what metaphors are supposed to accomplish only to get a chorus of, “But I that pebble thing!” But hey, lately I read a review by of , who singled out for praise the line, “The moon is a huge sanitary pad,” so what the
