The quickest and most effective way to horrify MFA students is by telling them the truth about my MFA thesis: it took me two years to write and ten years to revise. I get it. No one wants to hear that kinda math. I know I didn’t. When I was a MFA student, I was writing 4-10 hours every single day because I was delusional, ambitious, stubborn, & industrious like that. I knew that MFA programs outside of Bama (one of the only 4-year MFA programs) groomed you to write short story collections. This is, of course, by design: short stories are the easiest things to workshop because they require no contextualization, no previous knowledge of the book’s macrostructure or motifs or repeat offenders. You can—and are encouraged to—treat the short story/CNF on its own merits and not worry about anything else. For workshopping novel chapters and CNF manuscripts, that can be disastrous, especially when workshop critics ask for things that the novel is already doing, just not necessarily in that particular chapter. But I didn’t wanna write another short story collection, not just because agents’ faces start to twitch when you try to tell them about it, but also because I’d always suspected that I was probably more of a novelist at heart. I just wrote short stories for literary journals.
As many of you know, I’m hella ambitious to a fault, I kinda do whatever the fuck I want with the structure of my writing, my work ethic is second to none, I have too much energy, I love my characters too much, & I don’t like being told I can’t do something. Yo, I can admit it! So, what I wanted to do during my MFA was write an ambitious and complicated novel about six different characters whose paths intersected on the New York subway during the North American blackout in 2003. I knew from the beginning that they would all be BIPOC/mixed-race characters. After working with the brilliant Sunyoung Lee, the publisher at Kaya Books, for a couple of years so we could submit Amnesia to the board (which rejected both drafts both times like the motherfuckers they are), I decided that a 400- or 500-page novel was probably too much to rewrite and revise, so I snipped two characters from the novel and turned their epic flame out into a self-contained novella called The Laws of Rhetoric & Drowning. Now, in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t publish with Kaya. It’s a terrific press and they publish great books, including translated work, but I just don’t see their books in the places I’d want my books to appear. That’s why 7.13 Books was a better fit for this novel because it’s plugged into the literary fiction small press market and it publishes just a ton of dope writers, many of them women and BIPOC. Even better, the more books I’ve read from my press mates, the more honored I am to share a catalog with them.
Even so, there are a number of things in retrospect I wish I’d known back then as a never-take-no-for-an-answer MFA student who was burning the midnight oil every weekend to work on my novel instead of socializing or getting silly-drunk with the other writers in my program, many of whom I liked and am still friends with. Here are some of them:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Mixtape by Jackson Bliss | ジャクソンのミクステープ to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.