Flying Elephants
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Anna Akhmatova
14 min read
The article quotes her poem from Requiem extensively. Understanding her life under Soviet terror, her literary significance, and the context of Requiem would deeply enrich the reader's appreciation of why Saunders chose this particular passage about bearing witness through art.
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Great Purge
16 min read
The Akhmatova poem references 'the Yezhov terror' - the period of mass Soviet repression. Understanding this historical context illuminates why her simple answer 'I can' to the question of describing such horror was so powerful, and connects to Saunders' broader point about artists bearing witness to dark times.
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Sherwood Anderson
13 min read
Saunders mentions studying Anderson's 'Paper Pills' (from Winesburg, Ohio) as an example of literature that remains powerful over a century later. Understanding Anderson's influence on American short fiction and his modernist techniques would help readers appreciate the 'long arc' of literary work Saunders discusses.
Q.
Thank you for all that you do with Story Club and literature, Mr. Saunders! I am a new paid subscriber, and I must say Story Club has been such a reassuring source of comfort in the current climate. Speaking of comfort and the current climate, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on writing in this day and age; pardon me if the question becomes too loaded or existential. As a final-year MFA student, I’m very aware that I have to face the “real world” after graduating, and in that world, I won’t be cocooned in institutional support to produce fiction. Increasingly, both on the domestic and foreign policy fonts, the “real world” seems scary, especially as someone who’s an international student from the “third world”. Amid all this turmoil, how must one stay committed to their art? I have often asked this question to my fiction professors and they told me one principle of living is to embrace uncertainty. I am curious to know what you have to say to a 23-year-old who’s trying hard to be a serious writer.
A.
What a beautiful question and thanks for asking it.
I want to try to answer on two levels.
First, regarding that withdrawal of institutional support – I sometimes joke that the world would prefer that a young writer stop writing. So, part of the artistic journey is to learn how to be a fierce protector of one’s art, despite those pressures.
I always advise my third-year students, who are about to re-enter the world, to take an afternoon alone and do some serious thinking about what they’ve learned during the three years of our program. What do they actually need, to be creative? How many hours a day? What conditions have produced their best work? Are there any myths (about process or approach) that they are ready to reject, given their experience of having been a full-time creative person for the last three years?
I ask them to take a good, honest look at their nervous systems and patterns of work and rest, and all of that, and think about how, practically, to design a life that will continue to support their work.
In my case, I have a high metabolism and lots of drive, and had found, during the MFA years, that I actually did better with short bursts of focused writing time. I also found that,
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