George Saunders Offers Words of Wisdom to Guide MFAs in Their Unwritten Futures

When friends, extended family, or even strangers hear that you’re an English or—God forbid—a creative writing major, their usual response is sympathetic: “good luck,” occasionally coupled with the offer of a couch to sleep on in 10 years, when they assume you’ll be out of work and/or writing the next Great American Novel. No, the future does not look promising for aspiring writers, particularly at a time when book sales and readership rates are plummeting. Perhaps to counter the mood of such trends, the Writing Center offers a creative-writing lecture series in which established authors such as James Wood, Jorie Graham, and, most recently, short-story writer George Saunders offer insight to their success.

Last week’s completely unpublicized lecture took place Thursday night in the Graduate Student Lounge, where a packed crowd of MFA writing students awaited the arrival of arguably the most successful author of this year’s series. New Yorker darling George Saunders is the author of five books, MFA professor at Syracuse University, and recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. His writing presents a darkly unsettling vision of the future, yet, as MFA writing student Isaac Aronson said, a vision “believable at some level because we realize we are living in it.”

The theme of Saunders’ theme was progress—through the MFA program, through the process of writing a story, and through a challenging career. His fast-paced, energetic, and bluntly honest speech, augmented by the oddly fitting inspirational music filtering in from Low Plaza, was met with frequent applause and uproarious laughter from the audience. Yet beneath his hilarious anecdotes and one-liners was a serious message about the integrity of writing. “Because we’re part of a tradition that’s not really respected by our culture,” he said, “we’re making up a little [MFA] shed for our guild. In the shed, we’re in a bleak state of materialist decadence at the moment.” Saunders continually stressed the disproportionately large effect of culture on writers, a stark contrast to the tragically small effect of writers on culture. He admitted that writing, and even the MFA program, has become an economic construct. But, he asserted: “We should remember that our country is floundering. Why? Partly because we [authors] are not being allowed into it.”

While his lecture lacked the whimsical absurdity of his short stories, it shared the same tragicomic tone. Saunders acknowledged the uncertain future for aspiring writers, yet his particular brand of humor is drawn from that same future. At one point, he remarked: “The scariest thing about our profession is at the end of it, in 20 years, what will you know? You’ll know how to service your own talent. That’s it. And even that will be unstable. You’ll learn to juggle, on ice-skates, on a sheet of ice, on a cruise ship that’s either sinking or on dry land.” If his success is any indication, then maybe being a creative writing major with an uncertain future is not such a bad thing after all—especially if that future includes learning how to juggle on ice-skates and crashing on free couches.