The Best Writing Workshop West of Iowa City : The UC Irvine Program Comes of Age

IT’S ANOTHER TUESDAY-afternoon meeting of the fiction-writing workshop at the University of California at Irvine, and 11 MFA candidates are engaged in one of their creative rituals: shredding a colleague’s prose. Today, Feb. 17, 1987, the colleague is 23-year-old Michael Chabon (SHAY-bun), whose Byron-esque curls and narrow, mobile face make him seem easily bruised. He leans back in his chair, one sneakered foot propped against the seminar table for balance, and chews on a fingernail while the other men and women in the room read in turn from one-page written critiques of Chabon’s novel, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”: “There are really two stories here, with no bridge . . . .” “The sexual-identity conflict is trivialized . . . .” “Everyone is attracted to the narrator, but why . . . ?”

Even as they ripped into him, some people worried that Chabon was taking it badly. “He was so quiet, he seemed about to cry,” remembers one student. “Michael looked stricken,” says another.

But in fact, Michael Chabon felt--as he puts it--”like the cat who swallowed the canary.”

A few days before, a respected New York literary agent had agreed to represent him; she was confident that “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” would sell. This was heady news for someone whose closest contact with publishing had been six rejection letters (from the New Yorker, Paris Review, even GQ). But Chabon didn’t want his fellow students to know that his novel was idling on the launching pad. Because it was what they all yearned for themselves, they might resent him. Besides, the agent could be wrong. “Pittsburgh” might not take off, and if everyone knew, it could be mortifying.

A month later, on March 19, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” was sold at auction by Mary Evans of the Virginia Barber Agency to William Morrow for, in first-novel terms, a small fortune: $155,000. Over the next three months, as Chabon struggled to “stay normal” and his colleagues tried to contain their dismay, Evans secured 10 foreign sales and a guaranteed six-figure film deal with director Alan Pakula that included a first-draft screenplay to be written by Chabon. And just last month a Chabon short story, “The Weekend Visitation,” was accepted for publication in the New Yorker.

The young sensation-to-be calls the events of the last few months “an embarrassment of good fortune.” He also says that there would have been no salable novel without the Irvine fiction workshop. “I might have written it,” he says over sushi in Newport Beach, “but I might have wandered down blind alleys for years. There’s no way that any of this would have happened without the program.”

Though it lacks the glitter quotient of some other graduate writing programs--most notably the oldest and most prestigious, the Iowa Writers Workshop in Iowa City--UC Irvine’s is consistently mentioned by cognoscenti as one of the top five or six workshops in the country. This month, Esquire magazine includes it on its literary-Establishment chart along with Iowa, Columbia, Stanford and the University of Houston. Jack Leggett, who directed the Iowa workshop for the last 16 years until his retirement this year, ranks Irvine No. 2, just behind Iowa. “Big cities don’t spawn influential writing programs,” Leggett says. “Chicago doesn’t have one, and though Columbia has lots of money and a good staff, students can be too easily distracted by the city to be fully absorbed in their work. Both Iowa’s and Irvine’s remoteness have worked to their advantage: You’re forced to build a community, to depend on each other, and to commit yourself to your work because there is nothing else.”

Students and faculty involved in graduate writing workshops generally agree on three criteria for judging a program’s worth: the amount of financial support offered, which both attracts better students and indicates the degree of the university’s commitment to the program; the caliber of its visiting writers, who take up residence on campus for a period of time to direct the workshop and advise students, and the success of alumni in getting their work published.

Iowa, whose program has four times as many students as Irvine’s, offers aid to only about half of them, while Irvine supports all of its workshop students. MFA candidates receive $1,100 a month to teach one undergraduate composition or creative-writing class per quarter. “Irvine is one of the few programs we lose students to,” Leggett says.

In recent years, visiting writers-in-residence at Irvine have included Robert Stone, Peter Matthiessen, P. D. James, William Wiser and Thomas Keneally. Shelby Hearon, a Southerner whose most recent novel is the highly touted “Five Hundred Scorpions,” did time at Irvine in 1987; in 1988, Mary Robison will take over after six years of full-time teaching at Harvard. Robison has never visited the campus and knows little about the program other than that “my buddy, Richard Ford, recommends it highly.” She left Harvard because she wanted more time to write, but has agreed to a few residencies--including Houston this fall and Irvine in the spring--”where the weather is nice and the money obscene.”

Irvine fiction-workshop alums have gone on to respectable--in a few cases formidable--literary successes. Richard Ford has established himself as one of the strongest voices of the New Fiction. Kem Nunn’s “Tapping the Source” was nominated for an American Book Award in 1984. Patricia Geary, James Brown and Carolyn Doty aren’t household names, but along with many other Irvine grads they’ve been quietly turning out well-regarded mid-list literary fiction. And now, of course, there is Michael Chabon--whose debut hardly promises to be quiet.

“Word gets out that Michael sold a novel and has a screenplay deal for a huge amount of money while still a student in the program,” says Shelby Hearon, “and suddenly applicants increase tenfold. Call it the sorority syndrome: If it sounds like you had the best pledges this year, you’ll attract more of them next year.”

Chabon’s success underscores a dilemma that the directors of the fiction workshop now face. Oakley Hall, author of 19 down-to-earth Western-flavored novels, and Don Heine, who has written 13 Nabokovian-styled fantasies under the nom de plume of MacDonald Harris, have co-directed the program almost since its inception 20 years ago. Both face retirement--Hall in three years, Heine in four--and they must not only go about replacing themselves but also must make decisions about the size of the program. Currently, there are 75 to 100 aspirants for six places each year (the workshop consists of 12 students, six first-year and six second-year). Because workshops must be limited in size in order to be effective, enrollment would have to double to add a second workshop, with a corresponding expansion in faculty.

“We’ve never tried to be visible before,” Hall says. “We’ve never taken out ads in the New York Review of Books to attract people to the program, as others have. But now we’re nearing a crossroads. Michael may push us through it faster than we’d planned.”

The city of Irvine seems an unlikely incubator for a burgeoning creative community. Creativity, after all, is born of chaos, and there is nothing so chaotic as even a gum wrapper to mar the industrial parks and greenbelts that define Irvine. Some homeowners associations have ruled that all buildings must be painted in earth tones, all lawns must be trimmed and garage doors may remain open for only a few hours each week. Irvine’s demographics are aggressively homogeneous: Seventy-three percent of the residents own their own homes, 88% of them are white and more than half of them make in excess of $40,000 per year.

Yet thanks to UCI’s graduate writing program, Irvine is emerging as an oasis of literary civilization amid the surf-’n’-mall culture of Orange County. “People come here from all over the country to be in the MFA program,” Hall says, “and they’re beguiled by Southern California. So after they get their degrees, they tend to take up residency here and look for jobs at the surrounding colleges, and the caliber of writing grows.”

HALL IS SITTING at a round table at Twohey’s (“Home of the ‘Little Stinko’ Burger”), an immaculate coffee shop near the UCI campus that in no way resembles a literary hangout. Yet here at this table, five published fiction writers compare William Shawn’s to Robert Gottlieb’s New Yorker and swap opinions about John Updike, Robert Stone and the state of contemporary fiction. Richard Ford, who has just completed a reading of a new short story in front of an overflow audience at UCI, reveals the secrets of Oakley Hall’s Bloody Mary (ketchup, horseradish, hot sauce) to his protege, second-year MFA student Jay Gummerman. Writer-in-residence Shelby Hearon and 1976 workshop grad Pat Geary, a novelist and Bunting Fellow at Harvard who has taken a year’s leave from her teaching post at the University of Louisiana to direct UCI’s undergraduate writing programs, talk about the escalating interest within the community in UCI’s literary activities.

“It used to be that you’d have to bang on faculty members’ doors and beg them to come to readings just to fill the space,” says Geary, who organizes the Tuesday-noon sessions and has lured authors such as Sue Miller and Phillip Lopate onto the campus this year to present their work. In the last decade, Geary says, the graduate writing program has been a magnet for the increasing number of fiction writers who have recently settled in the area. “They can count on us to supply at least one well-known writer-in-residence each year,” Geary says. They can also pay $15 and attend the Wednesday night “Business of Fiction” series, set up by Oakley Hall just this year, in which agents, publishers, Hollywood packagers and book and magazine fiction editors lecture in exchange for travel expenses and an honorarium. Even the local bookstores have begun to change character in keeping with the area’s raised cultural consciousness. “Fahrenheit 451 (in nearby Laguna Beach) used to be this hippie bookstore that specialized in Zap comics,” Geary says, “but it’s become more literary.”

Such signposts reflect not only the growing influence of Irvine’s writing program but also a national trend. Before the Iowa Writers Workshop was established 50 years ago, there was no creative option for students seeking a graduate degree. You earned your Ph.D. by writing a thesis on Chaucer or Melville, and then you hunkered down amid the ivy, turning out scholarly books of criticism to secure tenure. But today more than 150 graduate-level writing programs in the country offer the MA or MFA degree in exchange for a completed novel or book-length collection of short stories.

“If you want to be a cynic about this trend,” says novelist Frank Conroy, the new director of the Iowa workshop, “you can say it’s easier for a university to set up a writing program that looks good than to set up a scholastic one.”

There’s also the romantic element--”this really striking identification for students today with young first novelists,” says Shelby Hearon. Indeed, the under-30s who have crashed through the starting gate with their first novels, beginning with Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City” in 1982, have done for fiction in the ‘80s what Woodward and Bernstein did for journalism in the ‘70s. Students ogle Tama Janowitz in Rose’s Lime Juice ads and Mona Simpson’s fetching navel in the pages of People, and then they hear such first-generation lit-cult heroes as John Irving and Jayne Anne Phillips credit Iowa for giving them a running start. It’s hard not to conclude from it all that if you go to the right program and study with the right people, you too can get an ink-stained leg up on the other literary wanna-be’s and become a fiction star.

Yet no workshop, no matter how good or how intense, can guarantee stardom, let alone publication. You can’t be taught how to be an artist, how to create a beautiful image or a deeply felt character. “But you can teach the notion of what’s dead or alive,” says novelist Donald Barthelme, a director of the University of Houston’s graduate writing program. “You can teach them how to be critics of their own work.”

Students say that the real learning process occurs while dissecting someone else’s book in the workshop: The analysis drives you to a sense of your own voice and purpose. Workshops provide “a transition during that twilight period between dreaming about being a writer to actually being one,” says Jill Ciment, a recent UCI graduate whose first collection of short stories, “Small Claims,” has just been published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Most significantly, the workshop system can accelerate the publishing process. “You’ll learn a lot faster,” says Conroy, “than if you’re writing all alone and sending stories out and getting rejections and taking forever to put two and two together about how your writing affects other people.” Literary networking is one of the more obvious benefits of a good writing program, and the more connected the directors and visiting writers are to New York publishing, the tighter the strings can be pulled. Irvine is at a far psychic and geographic remove from that world, and neither Hall nor Heine approach the clout of guru Gordon Lish, who until recently taught a workshop at Columbia (now he conducts private classes in Manhattan) and is an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, the pre-eminent house of serious new fiction, giving him the singular ability to publish his own students. But both of Irvine’s workshop directors are represented by prominent New York agents and publishing houses, which means an inside track for favored students. It was Don Heine who personally Federal-Expressed Michael Chabon’s manuscript to the Virginia Barber Agency, which happens to be his own literary representative. And UCI’s workshop provides another umbilical cord to Manhattan publishing: The weeklong, highly regarded Squaw Valley Writers Conference, of which Hall is executive director, allows students the opportunity to study with a captive group of New York agents, editors and established writers.

“We pick students who are already pretty close to the professional level,” Hall says, “and then, ideally, one way or another, we will heroically carry them over the line.”

THERE ARE NO decadent cafes or smoky rathskellers dotting the UCI campus; the MFA candidates settle for the cheery, gringo-ized El Zocalo restaurant. Today, there’s an hour to kill between Oakley Hall’s plotting workshop (an elective course that most of them take) and tonight’s “Business of Fiction” lecture (by William Turnbull, publisher of San Francisco-area-based North Point Press). So six writers crowd around an El Zocalo table, pulling on Coronas and talking defensively about Michael Chabon.

The thing is, they like the guy-- sweet is the adjective of choice. They also think he’s got the goods--or, as one of them rhapsodizes, “the mojo hand.” But they can’t help feeling jealous and resentful about the yellow brick road opening up just for him, especially since Chabon is several years younger than almost everyone else. “There’s been a Richard Ford, and now there will be a Michael Chabon, and that means more talent will come into the program, and that’s good,” says Jack Lopez, 35, who, like Chabon, graduated in June, but unlike Chabon will have to face the Real World this summer without a lucrative book deal in hand. “But it’s hard not to think ‘How can I top this?’ ”

Louis B. Jones, 33, shared a beach house with Chabon until Chabon moved in with his fiancee, poet Lollie Groth, at the beginning of their second year. Jones has had a short story published and a screenplay optioned, but he’s been writing fiction for 12 years in the “classic impoverishment” that you’re supposed to suffer in the name of art. “Of course I envy Michael, because he hasn’t had to pay all the dues,” Jones says. “I wish that when I was his age, I’d been set up with all that money. But he’s a real writer. It would have gone down a lot harder if he weren’t.”

Everyone agrees: Chabon is smart, talented, serious about his work and so obsessed by literature that he’s read all seven volumes of Proust in the original French. (This story turns out to be apocryphal; Chabon says he did indeed read all of Proust, but only “Swann’s Way” in French.) His classmates vigorously denounce the inevitable comparisons of Chabon with last year’s sensation, Bret Easton (“Less Than Zero”) Ellis--both precocious first novelists in their early 20s, both writing about sexual ambiguity on the cusp of college graduation. Chabon, they insist, wrote a literary novel, not a life-style novel. “Michael has depth of language and complexity of thought,” says Jones. “He reads. He doesn’t just watch MTV and take notes at sick parties.”

It’s true that the careful reader of “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” will require a dictionary by his or her side to deal with the first-person narrator’s vocabulary: He thinks in words such as theophany , purdah , commoved and cirrate . You could also say that Chabon departs from the school of life-style writing derived from Ann Beattie and diligently followed by Brat Pack novelists (most of whom emerged from one Lish workshop or another), in which the brand-name contents of medicine chests and refrigerators are used to define character--but only in so far as Chabon’s brand names in “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” are, literally, more literary. Beginning with a precis from (naturally) Proust, Chabon name-drops, among others, Coleridge, Emma Bovary, Oscar Wilde, even Charles Bukowski.

Doug Stumpf, Chabon’s editor at William Morrow, maintains that neither the trendy subject matter--a rite-of-passage account of one summer in the life of a gangster’s sexually confused son--nor the author’s trendy age influenced the lavish amount of money, about 31 times the standard first-novel advance (Bret Ellis, for instance, got $5,000 for his two-years-ago success, “Zero”) that Morrow paid for “Pittsburgh.” Stumpf compares Chabon’s book not to Ellis, McInerney and Co. but to--surprise!--”A Catcher in the Rye,” to which “Less Than Zero,” “Bright Lights, Big City” and every other coming-of-age novel has been compared for the last 20 years.

“Michael isn’t concerned with portraying a moment in contemporary society but in getting deeply into his characters,” Stumpf says. “I bought it simply because I loved it and couldn’t put it down, and everyone at Morrow, including the president and the head of sales, backed me up.”

It’s a publishing-industry truism that it’s easier to get a lot of money for a first novel than for a second or third, because the first-time writer doesn’t have a history; no one can point to disappointing sales figures on his or her last book. Add to that the continuing hunger, ever since “Bright Lights, Big City,” for young, hip stylists writing topical fiction--a virtual checklist of Chabon’s attributes, Proust or no Proust--and it all begins to make dollars and sense. “There’s a kind of hysteria back here that attaches itself to Brat Pack literature,” says Jane Rosenman, an editor at Delacorte who specializes in contemporary fiction.

“There’s a lot of charm attached to youth,” says Wallace Stegner, who founded the Stanford writing program in 1946, “and many precocious young writers are getting published who might not if they were 10 years older.”

Once upon a time, the resume for American novelists from Hemingway to Dos Passos included a stint (preferably a dangerous one) at newspaper reporting. Now, the job that nascent fiction writers tend to hold down while honing their skills is more often an academic one, which may not yield quite the mother lode of experience that being a foreign correspondent would, but it does give you the summer off. The route to such an academic job is, of course, through a graduate-level writing program. And so writing programs multiply.

AS WORKSHOPS GO, there is relatively little blood splat tered on the walls of UCI’s Humanities Office Building 126. “There’s an esprit de corps here,” says Varley O’Connor, a first-year student, “that’s somehow enforced by the small size. There’s no anonymity, so if anyone is sniping, it’s very obvious. We operate more on a family model than a corporate one.”

Because the program is so small and the students so conversant with one another and their teachers, a certain amount of sibling rivalry (“Oakley, why does he always get to read first?”) is bound to develop. And when you have two leaders as contrary in personality and sensibility as Don Heine and Oakley Hall, some polarization is inevitable.

Hall is Mr. Congeniality, minimizing friction sometimes to the point of evasiveness. He leads his workshop as if he were hosting a cocktail party, allowing his guests the run of the place and only stepping in when someone needs directions to the powder room. “Oakley doesn’t want to inspire conflict among people who are trying to do their best,” says Richard Ford, who was an Oakley Person. “He appeals to you entirely through the agency of your best impulses.”

Heine, a gangly Europhile who often wears ascots, dominates his workshop, interrupting frequently when he feels a point needs more clarification than a student can supply, speaking in short, staccato bursts. He is considered more of a formalist than Hall, analyzing a story in terms of how it was made rather than what it’s about. “If you tended to be more experimental in your writing,” says Jill Ciment, who was a Don Person, “you’d swing to Don, who has a more ethereal bent on things--both in the way he criticizes and in his own work.”

Heine is said to be more intellectual and a more astute critic than Hall but lacking Hall’s charm and diplomacy. Heine is also less subtle than Hall when it comes to playing favorites, and his most recent golden boy has been Michael Chabon. Even before he sent Chabon’s manuscript off to his agent, Heine had nettled some of the workshop members by not allowing them to present their critiques of an earlier version of “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.” Heine said he didn’t want Chabon to get bogged down in details; the novel was fragile and close to completion and he wanted to protect it and its author. “Don’s action fostered a lot of hostility,” says Jay Gummerman. “When you can’t say what you want to, the next time you’re ready to pounce--which may be why everyone was so critical about Michael’s novel just before it was sold.”

“It’s harder to be a Don Person, because he’s so opinionated and mercurial,” says Michelle Latiolais, 31, one of the few MFA candidates to go through both the poetry and fiction workshops. “He makes you fight for what you want to write.” On her third day at Irvine, Latiolais had a confrontation with Heine. “He called me a dilettante for wanting to do both workshops. We had a screaming fight, and I walked out of his office in tears. Possibly out of sheer spite, I determined to do both.”

Yet what appears to be a healthy system of checks and balances has grown out of Hall and Heine’s opposing sensibilities, helping to keep artistic diversity and rebellion alive within the workshop. For the point of it all, finally, is not to learn how to take criticism, but to learn how to ignore it.

“No one helped Michael Chabon with the writing of his novel,” says Oakley Hall. “He paid very little attention to our opinions.”

During that final discussion of “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” a month before the book was sold and his career was launched, Chabon kept his guileless blue eyes fixed on each member of his jury as, one by one, they pronounced their sentences. When it was time for the usual 10-minute break, he said, with a droll edge to his voice, “I think I’ll go lie down and take a Valium.”

Though some students feared their comments had been too harsh, Michael Chabon had a hunch that he no longer needed to listen.