Bravo on your recent recognition in the reputable pages of the Atlantic Monthly magazine—your MFA program being named one of the five most innovative in the country and your doctoral program in creative writing one of the overall best. Bravo.
Recognition has its benefits. Not only does it instill pride in existing talent, but recognition also attracts more, better talent to itself—like a basketball team that makes it to March Madness. And so, again: bravo. It’s all gain.
The victory, however, is not yet complete. Not if you all, as the author of the Atlantic Monthly article in which UNLV is praised writes, “have the presumed goal of training soon-to-be-published writers.” And furthermore, not if, as UNLV President David Ashley said in his inaugural speech, and as you all have implied, “We will become the cultural heart of the city we call home.”
Because culture cannot abound, let alone proliferate, if it does not produce. Just as flora need not just absorb nutrients to survive, but also give them off to perpetuate life, so must culture and its avatars. It cannot merely suck up the sunlight and water: it must produce, too.
What I’m talking about here is writers and writing. The article in the Atlantic Monthly is titled “Where Great Writers Are Made.” Are our writing programs at UNLV producing great writers? Great writing?
At UNLV we have two other nationally recognized programs, Harrah’s College of Hotel Administration and the Boyd School of Law, and we expect—anticipate—trust—them to yield first-rate hotel managers who practice profitable hospitality and stellar lawyers who practice useful law. How much more should the English department demand of itself, embedded here in a city so thirsty for arts and letters and the broader notion of culture of which it is part and parcel?
We are not producing the type of work which advances culture in the city, neither in the form of poetry and fiction nor essays and journalism, despite the environment conducive to maturation in which the UNLV students are studying (provided that writing can be taught—which, of course, is not only a huge but also a precarious assumption). Edward Delaney, researcher and author of the Atlantic Monthly article, doesn’t indicate hearing much about the programs’ alumni.
“Mostly I heard about the nature of the program itself,” he says.
You offer graduate English students a fine staff, composed of experienced and acclaimed writers—the poets Aliki Barnstone and Claudia Keelan, the novelists Richard Wiley and Douglas Unger. The Black Mountain Institute has lured the visits of masterful writers such as Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott and Tim O’Brien. And the university has managed to separate itself from the nation’s other 300 or so graduate writing programs by placing an international emphasis on its own, collaborating with the Peace Corps by which it sends pupils abroad for two years, a mission meant to broaden the context of their writing.
In fact, you all at UNLV are lauded in the Atlantic for just that: your doctorate program, estimable; and the MFA program, innovative. Yet, as we all know, esteem and innovation have never themselves alone produced anything great. Only when embodied and applied by individuals have they made a difference.
And so, the question is, are the individuals enrolled and graduating from our programs absorbing these rich elements and converting them into something notable—stories or poems or essays or even articles of merit? Where are the individual writers cropping out of the university whose writing attracts people to, encourages them toward, culture?
The truth is, it only takes one individual, one Wole Soyinka or even Anthony Zuiker (who dropped out of UNLV’s film school), whose work leads readers toward the culture we seek, and thus garners greater glory to the university’s writing programs.
The University of Iowa is the obvious example. Its MFA program has its own library with its own case of some 3,000 books published by its alumni since its incipience in 1936, writers such as UNLV professors Wiley, Unger and Keelan.
“I think, as a relatively young program, UNLV has set these possibilities into motion,” Delaney says.
Culture has always been a worthy cause. UNLV must nourish it. Otherwise, the writing programs and their awards will be self-serving, like the impossible plant that sucks up all the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere and grows large and beautiful but expels no oxygen in return.
What we need now is not more recognition but, rather, good writers and great writing to emerge from the university. For, if it does not sprout from there, from where will it come?