It’s on this putative objectivity, in all its insidious allure, that M.F.A. When we identify talent, we say that we’ve found “the real deal,” a flimsy idiom for a solid belief-that, although talent as an entity may be undefinable, it’s still provable. The question instead is a screamed “Yes, but how?” The question isn’t whether you should cultivate knowledge or voice. It’s the first and last dicta, however, that have proved the most influential, not through their utility but through their confounding simplicity. Of this trinity, only the second speaks explicitly to craft and seems readily practicable. Write what you know show, don’t tell find your voice. With this professionalization-indeed, institutionalization-of a nation’s art form, three injunctions popularized by the M.F.A. In his fundamental study, “ The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing,” Mark McGurl detailed how, in postwar America, anointing and cultivating literary talent became the purview of creative-writing programs and how, in turn, certain modes of writing came to be privileged above others. It’s something that can’t be defined, only recognized-an irreducible and unteachable entity, like charisma or humor, and its confirmation all the more coveted for being so. Talent is like obscenity: you know it when you see it. “Loudermilk” and “Bunny,” set in versions of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Brown, constitute institutional critique or autofiction.
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