I had a nightmare, and then it showed up in print

File the following under: Terrifying in its filaments of truth.  An article in the current Mother Jones, "The Death of Fiction?," may not introduce anything we haven't contemplated already, but it brings some unsettling truths into sharp focus. Ted Genoways (editor of Virginia Quarterly Review) writes of the unsustainability or even death of a certain way of literary life. Here's a sampling: 

[caption id="attachment_1040" align="alignright" width="220" caption="What are we all doing, anyway?"][/caption]

Back in the 1930s, magazines like the Yale Review or VQR saw maybe 500 submissions in a year; today, we receive more like 15,000. This is due partly to a shift in our culture from a society that believed in hierarchy to one that believes in a level playing field. This is good—to a point. The reality is that not everyone can be a doctor, not everyone can be a professional athlete, and not everyone can be a writer. You may be a precious snowflake, but if you can't express your individuality in sterling prose, I don't want to read about it. 

But in academia, supply is decoupled from demand. 

Okay, there's a lot there. But let's start with the last sentence. We see the "decoupling" every year when we do our literary editors panel at the Tattered Cover. (Save the date: April 24, 10 AM, Tattered Cover LoDo.)  Subscriptions often comprise at most 1/100th of the number of submissions.  More often it's less than that. This is particularly staggering when you consider this: 

Graduates of creative writing programs were multiplying like tribbles. Last summer, Louis Menand tabulated that there were 822 creative writing programs. Consider this for a moment: If those programs admit even 5 to 10 new students per year, then they will cumulatively produce some 60,000 new writers in the coming decade. Yet the average literary magazine now prints fewer than 1,500 copies. In short, no one is reading all this newly produced literature—not even the writers themselves. And with that in mind, writers have become less and less interested in reaching out to readers—and less and less encouraged by their teachers to try. 

I may be wrong, but I don't see 60,000 academic jobs opening up in the coming decade, nor do I see even 1/10000th of these newly minted MFAs getting book deals that can sustain them financially over the long haul. The academic circuit may be alive and well, but, as a friend said to me last night on the phone: Now they want teaching applicants to have at least two published books. Put that up against the tens of thousands trying to get books (that who's reading?) published. My friend's no slouch, either, a former Stegner and NEA fellow published in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and VQR, among other places. He's teaching one adjunct class at our alma mater. So a career path for writers, as Genoways says, appears more open than it really is. 

Now let's assume some of this is just a generational tendency to see the apocalypse around the corner. That might be inevitable--change, especially at the rate we experience it, can summon our inner catastrophic thinker. With online mags and new models of publishing coming at us in waves (iPad and Kindle Books at the forefront, doing in some cases the NY Publisher Bypass), many of us are holding onto anything we can find for stability. But there's not much to grab onto anymore.  

One of the reasons we started Lighthouse almost 14 years ago is because, if it matters to you, there has to be a sustainable way to integrate writing into your life. Perhaps it's our thinking about what writing is or does that will ultimately evolve. We can't expect it to give us everything, but we can and must give it everything we've got. Writing for most writers may never be a career in a financial sense, but in equipping us to really see the world, to probe it for its secrets, writing can be a way of life.  

Oh, and just for good karma, let's make it a point to subscribe to some literary journals... 

--AED