At Writers Workshop, Peer Pressure Is a Good Thing

For someone undergoing her baptism of fire, Aimee Bender doesn’t look nervous.

The weekly graduate fiction writing workshop at UC Irvine is in progress, and Bender, a 26-year-old from San Francisco, is having one of her short stories critiqued for the first time.

She listens intently as 11 fellow writers, seated at pushed-together conference tables, take turns holding forth in a sort of literary round robin:

The combination of “being plain and somewhat fanciful in style” works well, says one.

The transition of one character seemed too abrupt, says another.

“There’s a part there in the first couple of paragraphs,” says yet another, “where she says, ‘My hands are the hands of an elephant.’ Well, an elephant has no hands. . . .”

With that, the room breaks up, no one laughing harder than Bender.

The weekly sessions are the heart of what has become an elite proving ground for young writers.

“It’s a supportive community,” explains fall fiction workshop leader Judith Grossman, an associate professor of English. “It’s that, and it gives every writer a bunch of really sharp readers. . . . If you can get your stuff past them, then you have a good chance of getting attention from editors and readers beyond that.”

UCI’s graduate writing workshop is considered among the best in the country; many deem it second only to the University of Iowa’s. But even as its reputation grows, the UCI program is in transition.

Geoffrey Wolff, a nationally recognized novelist and nonfiction writer, is the new director. He recently arrived from Brandeis University to succeed Thomas Keneally, the author of “Schindler’s List,” who has returned to his native Australia after four years in Irvine.

“My responsibility here is really to make certain the program stays as good as it is,” Wolff says. But, just as he settles in, a university search committee is seeking a replacement for Grossman.

After three years of bicoastal commuting during school breaks, she is going back to Baltimore, where her husband teaches at Johns Hopkins University. Grossman, whom Wolff describes as “the best friend this program can conceivably have,” will leave reluctantly.

“These are clearly the best young student writers I’ve ever had or hope to have--that’s unqualified,” she says.

Wolff echoes her remarks.

“I just don’t think there’s any better,” he says. “The students speak for themselves with what they’ve done.”

Wolff knew about the UCI writing program long before he considered joining it.

“A dear friend of mine, Richard Ford, went here and has followed it very carefully,” he says.

Ford, masters of fine arts degree, class of 1970, is an award-winning novelist and short story writer--one of a number of accomplished authors who have passed through the program.

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Among the dozen alumni who have seen their MFA theses wind up on bookstore shelves in the 1990s are Louis B. Jones (“Ordinary Money”), Varley O’Connor (“Like China”), Lane Von Herzen (“Copper Crown”), Marti Leimbach (“Dying Young”) and Whitney Otto (“How to Make an American Quilt”).

The most recent addition to the list is Leonard Chang, a 1993 graduate whose thesis novel, “The Fruit ‘n’ Food,” about the life in and around a Korean-run convenience store in New York City, will be published soon.

Novelists Oakley Hall and the late Donald Heiney are credited with building the fiction workshop to its current status as a place where students turn out “literary” fiction. They were the graduate fiction program’s guiding lights for more than two decades before retiring in the early ‘90s.

One book, though, in Heiney’s words, “changed everything.”

Michael Chabon’s “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” which the then-23-year-old graduate workshop student sold to William Morrow even before it was approved as his thesis in 1987, brought the program national visibility virtually overnight.

The buzz over the coming-of-age novel was generated as much by Chabon’s literary skill as by his $150,000 advance--a princely sum for a first novel, particularly one considered a serious work of literature.

In the wake of Chabon’s high-profile success, applications to the program doubled. Each year since, more than 200 writers have applied for the six first-year openings.

Students are selected on the basis of short stories or sample chapters of their novels. Although the program’s emphasis remains on producing “literary” works, as opposed to genre fiction, Wolff and Grossman say they’re open to all types of writing.

“When we narrow it down to six applicants, they’ll be the six best writers we can find,” Wolff says.

The writing students are typically in their late 20s. “We want them to see something of the world, to do something,” he says.

During their two years in the program, the graduate students go through six writing workshops as well as take courses offered by the English department. In exchange for teaching a freshman composition course in the first year and an introductory creative-writing workshop in the second, they receive tuition and financial support. The monthly stipend, which covers living expenses, frees them up to write.

What makes UCI’s program the best, Wolff believes, is its small size--only 12 fiction students, or about one-fourth the enrollment of the Iowa workshop--and the “absolutely first-rate English department and comparative literature program” that offer a powerful theoretical base.

But ultimately, Wolff says, it comes back to the individuals in the workshop--and what they give one another.

“These programs live and die by the students,” he says. “That’s what it comes down to: to teach one another.”

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The weekly workshop--with its freewheeling criticism--is obviously fraught with peril for writers.

“Bad will can be catastrophic, indifference can be catastrophic,” Wolff says. “But, as time has passed, ugly experiences in workshops have become rare. These students are very hip to how it works, and they’re hip to the golden rule on that one: They understand that what goes around, comes around.”

The “golden rule,” Wolff says, is not really about being sweet.

“It’s being thoughtful in the sense, really, of being reflective, meditative, careful with the work. It’s the sense that it doesn’t do anyone any good to say, ‘I hated it.’ And it doesn’t do anyone any good to say, ‘I loved it. I couldn’t put the darn thing down.’ You really have to explain how it was to read the book. The most useful way to do that is to find what in the piece of work the reader most admired in order to hold the rest of it to that standard.”

But no matter how it is couched, some students have been crushed by criticism.

In Jervey Tervalon’s case, however, negative comments worked in his favor. The 1992 program alumnus remembers being so angered by some remarks--the dialogue of the black characters in his New Orleans-set novel was not authentic, classmates said--that he gave himself the “personal challenge to prove them wrong.”

Tervalon, the only African American in the workshop at the time, abandoned his New Orleans novel and began another so filled with the dialogue of young black Americans that it would “blow them away.”

The result was “Understand This,” his 1994 work set in South-Central Los Angeles, where Tervalon had taught high school English.

“I owe the workshop the book because they provided a hostile-enough audience in the beginning to keep me on my toes to make me do the best writing I could do,” says Tervalon, 36.

Now living in Pasadena and writing a new novel, he remains a firm believer in the workshop experience. What he least enjoyed about it, he says, was its lack of diversity.

“I don’t necessarily mean racial diversity, but class diversity would be exciting,” says Tervalon, whose UCI workshop included a Latina and two Korean Americans.

“Sure, there were some people who came from working-class backgrounds, but they were far outnumbered by people who had graduated from Ivy League schools or came from a background of money.”

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Most writers who apply to the program have a common goal: to see their work published.

The door to publication is sometimes opened at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Oakley Hall’s annual conference where writers meet literary agents and editors.

That’s where Tervalon met the agent who sold “Understand This,” thus adding his name to the list of UCI successes.

But Otto, who followed up the best-selling “How to Make an American Quilt” with “Now You See Her” in 1994 and is working on a new novel, says such success stories lead to a misconception about what writing programs in general, and UCI in particular, can do.

“It’s that if you get into UCI’s program you’ll be published upon graduation. That happens to some, but not to the majority,” says Otto, 40, who lives in Portland, Ore.

Michael Chabon, now 32 and working on his third novel at his home in Hancock Park, says the realization of just how rare it is for an MFA thesis to be published “can be a very sobering experience.”

He recalls visiting the campus library after arriving at UCI and seeing a shelf full of bound MFA theses--”year after year of novels and short story collections that everyone had worked as hard as they could on: There they were languishing, with a name here or there that might stick out, a Richard Ford or a Pat Geary.”

Of course, Chabon says, not every MFA student winds up trying to get published.

“It’s not like all the sperm swimming toward the egg and only one gets in,” he says. “I think a lot of people get through with the program and have their thesis and say, ‘Now I know I don’t want to be a writer.’ Which is kind of a valuable function for a writing program.”

Wolff agrees.

“Some people say, ‘This is too hard,’ or ‘I want more guarantees: I want to know more about what my life is going to be like than [writing] makes possible,’ and so that’s a hard lesson, but it isn’t a shameful thing to conclude,” he says.

“Anyone who teaches writing has been in that place and knows how exposed and difficult and terrifying it can be.”

And even those students who are fortunate enough to see their work published may not be able to support a writing life.

“Sure, publication is good, but I haven’t made a great deal of money off of it,” says Jay Gummerman, 38, of San Clemente, whose 1988 MFA thesis--a collection of short stories titled “We Find Ourselves in Moontown”--was published a year later.

He earned $25,000 off the hardback and paperback sales of the critically acclaimed collection. And he received a $25,000 advance for the hardback sale of his second book, “Chez Chance.” Gummerman, who teaches composition classes part time at UCI, says that doesn’t amount to much when you divide it over six years. Without income from his wife’s full-time job, he says, “I certainly wouldn’t have any time to write.”

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In fact, with the notable expectations of Chabon and Otto, Gummerman says, most former UCI graduate students whom he knows have to teach or hold down other jobs.

While the dream of financial success eludes many, most who continue writing after UCI do so for the same reason they did before UCI. They simply must do it.

“Most people who make the decision to write realize coming in that it’s not something you’re going to make a lot of money at, so there’s something else that is driving them, some artistic impulse, something that needs to be expressed,” Gummerman says.

And for those such as first-year student Bender, the UCI program provides the perfect opportunity.

“I’m writing every day, which I haven’t done before,” says Bender, who taught elementary school for three years after receiving an English degree from UC San Diego.

Bender hopes that by the time she graduates, she’ll have written enough stories to have a collection.

“With the program, it’s like you’re given a little bit of a doorway for two years,” she says. “You get to kind of relax and take yourself seriously as a writer.”