by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, writer, editor and MFA student Jia Tolentino tells us more about what it’s like to be a college writing instructor.

How will I live without typing words like “pls use spell check” & “pls don’t use ‘cock’ in that context” & “is the narrator a ghost or what

 — @jiatolentino

Jia! So what happened here?

I teach introductory creative writing at the University of Michigan, and I’d just finished this agonizingly detailed response letter to the 20th student story I’d graded in the last three weeks, and then I was printing out all this stuff at once and catching snippets of these sentences in my feedback that were just totally insane, about ghost cocks and specific apocalypse plausibility and whether or not so-and-so would have randomized her email before putting a thing on Casual Encounters, and all of a sudden I was just like, what am I doing? WHAT AM I DOING RIGHT NOW?

I mean, I like teaching, and I particularly like teaching creative writing because there’s no real end-game or (as far as I’m concerned) entrenched pedagogy — one of my favorite jobs ever was teaching poetry to third-graders in Houston, because we just played around and mapped out Fugees songs and they wrote better stuff than I do now. And I take the job seriously, and I am the beneficiary of a lot of absolutely killer workshops, and I place a lot of value on a Real Talk classroom where students can discuss what we love without anyone getting precious or fussy about it. But occasionally this year it has appeared to me that my Real Talk:Coddle ratio is just inherently fucked by the fact that I’m teaching an introductory undergrad creative writing course within a framework where the students are privileged and perhaps overly accustomed to taking themselves seriously, and the instructors are MFA students who most always have something to gain by continuing to prop up the frame.

How will I even know I’m alive when I finish this MFA program & no longer spend 5000 words weekly critiquing undergraduate short fiction

— Jia Tolentino (@jiatolentino) February 25, 2014

You mentioned a few of your more noteworthy editing comments in that tweet. Are there any other especially good ones that you could share? And what is the strangest or most ridiculous story you’ve had to assess as a college writing instructor?

The hardest thing in creative writing classes, especially the intro ones, is when people bring their personal lives into their stories and make one impossible to critique without involving the other. (This is of course a problem at every level: Directionless people write directionless stories, misogynist writers have misogynist books, my characters tend to hide their emotions and process life changes through sex. Cool!) I am filled with dread when I read student stories where the author has placed something that is clearly very immediate and personal on the page for their sleepy peers to be like “But how could he not know she was cheating on him if it was with his roommate” or “I just didn’t understand why the girl didn’t go to the police.” People just really want to process their worst shit through writing, and stuff can get way too real.

But I am basically impossible to make uncomfortable, and so the only thing that really feels ridiculous to me is when people are rude. Last semester when I was teaching plain old composition, I got a couple of emails that were like “Hey Gia, I’d like to give you some feedback on your feedback! I really don’t feel like you did enough to reward me for my efforts, which were undeniably stellar.” I drafted and deleted so many gif emails to that kid. I also got a “research paper” about how the space program was defunded because of Obamacare and lax border control. That was, oh my God. Like, please don’t talk to me that way about space.

Lesson learned (if any)?

I should not, in retrospect, have titled my comp class “Cool Story Bro” last semester. At this point way too many parts of my life have started off as jokes and then become seamlessly entrenched in the real. I think I got a dozen bros in there who were expecting something different from what they got. For example, this little piece of feedback I got in my end-of-semester evaluations:

I didn’t say the word “feminist” once in that class. But I always push back on social issues. I’d never allow a student to get away with referring to a female character as a “whore” in a story or saying he won’t read female authors because they write about “women’s issues” (both of which have happened multiple times). Same with girls who talk about how much they hate girls, or kids who whisper the word “black” as if it’s disrespectful. The whole point of fiction, this fundamentally democratic medium, is to tap into the big well of common human instinct, to really get in there on how everyone sucks and is lovely simultaneously and in very similar ways.

Just one more thing.

Without that tweet, I’d never have this to love and cherish forever:

Matthew J.X. Malady is a writer and editor in New York.

★ The bright, brittle morning gradually lost its only attractive aspect, so that having waited to face the cold meant facing it without any redeeming aspects. The intense sun faded to a white blur under clouds, over a late day devoid of highlight and shadow. Drafts came up under the bottom of the parka, carelessly thrown on without an underjacket. The sidewalk merchandise table had a full row of green ball caps, while the only green knit hat in sight was on the head form modeling it.

Rob Lowe turns 50 today which doesn’t seem right because The Eighties was like 35 years ago and he was a pretty big deal back then. I don’t know. It says 50, that’s what I’m going with. Who even understands how time works anymore, everything is a mystery, one moment you’re young and then you close your eyes for a second and open them to see Death standing in the doorway with an impatient air, happy birthday Rob Lowe.

Look at them go! Get that food, bears!

“Silver Oak is the wine that’s sexy to hate.”

This was not what I was expecting, but I like it. A lot. [Via]

“All of the German [re-enactment] groups in Minnesota have a Christmas party because we don’t typically have events going on in the winter. It’s just like any club that has a party. Because they dress up like Germans from World War II, it’s cool to go to a German restaurant, eat German food, and drink German beer.”
 — Most of the time I feel like the quote is enough but in this case I am pretty insistent that you should click through.

“The last time I saw that kind of energy was Keith Haring or Jean-Michel. It was so intense. I don’t even think he was on drugs.”

by Abe Sauer

Click for large version.

It is once again time for the NCAA “March Madness” basketball tournament. The eventual champions will get to bask in the national spotlight. And sure, winning a basketball title is worth bragging about — but we all know the real champion is the institution of higher education that can charge the most tuition and still have enough students to keep its rejection letter printer warm. It’s The Awl’s annual NCAA bracket by tuition, using the college information resource Peterson’s. (Where available, in-state tuition was used.) Since we first began March Madne$$ in 2009, the winning tuition has risen from $38,622 to $47,290.

Let’s take a closer look.

What a finale! If you thought American had an inferiority complex before… well, it seems there is one more thing it can’t seem to do as well as its Washington D.C. peers.

Congratulations to George Washington, with annual tuition of 47,290 George Washingtons, or about the cost of four years at either the University of Wisconsin-Madison or UCLA. Or 27 years of tuition at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the bracketed school with the lowest annual tuition — just $1,714. Update: Peterson’s is way off for UMass; real numbers put North Carolina Central University into the win, with a tuition of $3,455.

Previously:
• 2013 March Tuition Madne$$ Champ Bucknell ($45,132)
• 2012 March Tuition Madne$$ Champ Georgetown ($40,920)
• 2010 March Tuition Madne$$ Champ Richmond ($40,010)
• 2009 March Tuition Madne$$ Champ Wake Forest ($38,622)

(A final reminder about copyrights. )

Abe Sauer’s latest book is the north woods parody “Goodnight Loon.” He is also the author of the book “How to be: North Dakota — A Guide to the Plains” Email him at abesauer @ gmail.com.

EPHEMERAL FORMS CAN HAVE LASTING IMPACT SO DON’T SNAPCHAT YOUR FRIENDS NAKED PICTURES OF YOURSELF

— Jenny Holzer, Mom (@JennyHolzerMom) March 17, 2014

Guess who’s back?