This month's issue of Poets and Writers Magazine marks the twentieth anniversary of its publication. To celebrate the occasion the magazine did a special feature that asked thirteen prominent authors, editors, and publishers to share their thoughts on how writing and the publishing industry has changed over the last twenty years and perhaps give some predictions on where they thought it was going to go in the next twenty years.
Most of them were less than optimistic. Many sighted the statistical data pointing to the fact that less and less people are reading these days. David Kipen, the literature director for the National Endowment for the Arts, said, "If you're simply a reader, this is good news. The secret self-congratulatory thrill you get from feeling like the last intellectual in a world of philistines is closer than ever to becoming literally true. If you're an American with hopes for a decent future, alas, the news is less than good. And if, like me, you actually published a book this year, boy, are you screwed."
Personally I think Mr. Kipen exaggerates his point to the extreme. Just because there's a dip in national readership doesn't mean we're about to enter the new dark ages of humanity. But the point is still valid--why aren't people reading as much anymore? I know everyone has some immediate gut reactions to this question, and many of those feelings were likely reflected in the sentiments of the people writing for this feature. Some are nostalgic for the days of independent bookstores in the age of massive chain bookstores like Borders and Barnes and Noble. Others feel technology is to blame. "My instinct is that every time someone stares at a BlackBerry or the computer screen at the office, the species' predilection for the quietly absorbing words on the printed page leaks away a little," says Franklin Dennis, the publicity director for the Feminist Press at the City University of New York.
The biggest culprit, however, was (or was made out to be) the massive increase in Master of Fine Arts programs for creative writing. In the past twenty years they've more than doubled in this country, and many of the people on the panel for commenting for this feature article pointed the finger at them for creating a generation of writers who don't read. This concept astounds me. How do writers think they can be good writers (or even a decent ones) unless they read? Nonetheless it's apparently true, and as a result there's now a huge supply of written material in the form of stories, poems, and creative nonfiction with an increasingly shrinking demand in the form of magazines, literary journals, and a book-buying audience.
Of course this is merely a generalization. I'm sure there are many people who have gone through MFA programs and still read a tremendous amount of books. The fact that anybody does that and becomes only a prolific writer and not a prolific reader as well strikes me as beyond weird. When I started writing I started reading a lot more simply out of curiosity of what kind of stuff other writers were producing. To me it seems only natural.
What I did like about this feature was that all of the people on the panel resisted the urge to blame (or at least explicitly blame) the younger generation (especially kids my age and below) for growing up as non-readers. This is a very tempting way to support the idea that all humanity is going down the tubes because kids simply don't read anymore. It's also completely false. While I have lots of friends who admit to not being avid readers, there are plenty more who do. And yet I have read more than my share fair of articles that persist in trying to prove this claim.
If we're going to blame MFA programs, I think it's only fair that we should charge the learning institutions below them as well. Nobody goes through high school a voracious reader and then upon entering college says, "Screw that! I'm in college now!" English is a very subjective topic to teach, and a lot of times I think teachers are given far too much leeway in how they teach English to high school students. My English professor the other day said that one of his favorite books is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and noted that often times high school kids have a bad experience with it because teachers don't expose them to it properly and end up hating it. I agree with him wholeheartedly agree with him on that--I had an English teacher who assigned Heart of Darkness roughly six days before my high school graduation, and any thought that anyone was actually going to read it, let alone understand it, was sheer fantasy.
If I may be so bold as to draw a broad-based conclusion about the younger generation, I would say that I believe kids these days are not inherently, by nature, non-readers. They simply haven't been exposed to something they'd like to read. Most of the kids in my old English classes used websites like Sparknotes or GradeSaver, which provide extensive summaries of a book's plot, characters, and main themes, to get through stuff like Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein, but almost everybody read The Great Gatsby. It's language structure is much closer to modern English and the plot is nowhere near as convoluted. Why isn't stuff like The Great Gatsby taught more in English classes? In my entire time in high school almost all of the readings assigned were classical pieces of literature. Contemporary fiction and poetry were virtually nonexistent in the curriculum. As a result there were many kids who thought all books were boring and uninteresting, who grew up unaware that there was stuff out there that they might actually enjoy reading!
This was readily apparent to me when my book on my experiences in high school came out. A lot of kids told me it was the first book they had actually read from cover to cover. Many more told me it was the first book they read just for the fun of it. Some told me they didn't know you were even allowed to swear in a book. So I raise the question again--why aren't more contemporary pieces of literature taught in school? And when I say "contemporary literature" I mean something that's been published in the last one hundred years other than Amy Tan and Tim O'Brien. Those two (usually one or the other for most people but sometimes both) have been excessively over-taught as it is.
None of this is to say we shouldn't teach the classics--by all means we should. But we should teach them so kids actually understand what's going on in them, so they don't (as my English professor said) have bad experiences with them. When I was in high school I was thrown a lot of material that was never fully explained or even discussed, and then I was on my own when it came to taking the tests and writing the papers about them. And while this manner of "teaching" might not necessarily be rampant in our schools or (hopefully) even commonplace, you'd be surprised how many teachers have this as their modus operandi.
Technology gets blamed plenty as well, but if there's no love of reading cultivated in the younger generation, why would you expect them to look to books for entertainment? I think that most kids, when presented with something they would enjoy reading, will read. Just because I'm on a laptop for upwards of three or four hours a day doesn't mean I'm not going to read.
Having said all this, not everyone on the panel for Poets and Writers was all doom and gloom. Don Lee, the editor of Ploughshares, said the increase in MFA programs meant that "there are more and more writers out there with competent skills." He added, "We're seeing richer, more inventive, distinctive stories and poems." The executive director of the Academy of American Poets, Tree Swenson, was also positive about the outlook of reading in the future. "The growth of interest in poetry.... has been enormous. The expansion has been buoyed by the huge increase in the number of MFA programs, a vibrant community of literary magazines and small presses, the success of National Poetry Month, and other factors."
I think the next twenty years will see plenty more writers and readers, in spite of the ominous signs of a decreasing national readership. It's going to take a lot of effort to cultivate that kind of readership, especially in the younger generation, but it's far from impossible. If anything, with the increase in the number of people interested in writing it's more than likely to happen.