Too much of a good thing

A couple years ago I went to a remote mountain valley for six weeks to work on a novel. To cut costs I got a "half work, half pay" package whereby I spent three hours every morning in the kitchen chopping vegetables and other prep work. For a ten-day period in the middle of May the quartermaster decided to use up the dozens of cases of apples that had been in cold storage all winter, so every day I spent at least 90 minutes chopping apples. We had apple pie, applesauce, apple cider, apple bread, apple cookies, apple soup and just about anything else you could do with an apple.

And they were damn good apples, too. That fresh-pressed apple cider was about the best thing I ever tasted. Still, we were all kind of glad when the apples were used up.

In a fascinating article in the June Poets and Writers, Copper Canyon Press marketing director Joseph Bednarik talks about a glut of literature:

In a statistical mood, I once estimated how many "good poems" were being produced by recent graduates of MFA programs. Keeping all estimates conservative, I figured there had to be at least 450 poets graduating nationwide each year. If each MFA graduate wrote just one good poem a year for ten years, at the end of a decade we would have 24,750 good poems—not to mention 4,500 degree-bearing poets, each of whom was required to write a book-length manuscript in order to graduate.

Bednarik goes on to add fiction writers to the army of scribblers, and asks, "Where is the readership to support this prodigious output?"

His conclusion: If you're a writer and you want your work to have an audience some day, better get off the internet and start reading. And something to love: "Every MFA program should require all potential graduates to convert at least one eight-year-old into a passionate reader."

writing, reading, MFA programs