Feeling illiterate? Get an MFA with me

What are we doing here? Who am I?

some useful books for intellectual context

The novel as a democratic art form is in a bad way. There are a lot of reasons for this: cultural, aesthetic, political, economic, technological. Take your pick, they’re all right.

I want to do what’s in my power to change that.

Mass literacy is one of the few unambiguous blessings of industrial society (Chapter XV for those interested). But new forms of media, new machines for the production of text, like LLMs, and dismal literacy outcomes in education mean we’re losing some of the benefits of a literate society. And it’s quite possible to be able to read words and sentences and to be unable to read paragraphs and books.

You see it on Twitter, you see it on Book Tok, you see it on YouTube (RIP Phonics), the readers who skip whole pages, who refuse to read long paragraphs, who dismiss works out of hand because of the content or because of the identities of authors and fans. There are the uncharitable readers too, people who are incapable of setting a work into context or identifying its intended audience. In short, people who cannot read a novel as a work of art.

That makes me very sad.

I started writing novels when I was fifteen. In the twelve years since, I have worked consistently on a series of projects, ranging from the very specific (an imitation of Victorian military history) to the blandly generic (wan little husks of autofiction, to borrow a phrase). Fiction writing has been the consistent companion of my life, and in the bleak periods I knew I was in trouble because my work became incoherent.

But I was never a very good English student. In high school and in college I got middling grades in the subject and I didn’t try very hard to understand the texts I loved. To this day, I remain unlettered and narrowly read compared to many other writers.

But in the last few years, I realized that writers need to understand how books work at a technical level if we are to advance and preserve our craft. The same is true for painters, sculptors, carpenters, filmmakers or any other skilled trade. We have to understand our history and our materials in order to advance collectively. That thought persuaded me to apply for an MFA, and in January I will start Bennington College’s Creative Writing MFA program.

One person’s education cannot strengthen the foundation of the fiction craft and one writer cannot summon a reading public into existence. What force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?

A literary education should be free, universally available and democratic—part of our trouble is that such an education is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. And a democratic society requires an educated and literate public. So I am launching this newsletter and accompanying social media accounts to take readers through my coursework.

I will review every book I read for Bennington on this newsletter, and I will publish versions of the critical work I am to complete for that program. I will publish essays discussing specific aspects of the writing craft and particular cultural phenomena. I hope that at the end of two years this newsletter can offer readers, particularly those who can read, but cannot read a novel as a work of art, a fairly comprehensive tool for literary self-education. I want someone who reads this whole project to learn as much about writing and literature as I do.

But that’s an ambitious goal. Really, if I get one other person to read one more book this project will be a success.

So what will you, my readers, get?

• A short (300 words at least) discussion of every book I read, including brief analyses of craft questions, style, content and historical context. I will read about 20 books a semester, roughly one a week or more. I may combine several book reviews into a single newsletter so as not to flood your inbox.

• A short or medium length essay (1,000 words at least) discussing specific topics in writing and in reading, including process, craft, how to identify context, how to identify audience, how to close read, how to take criticism etc. Some of these will approach theoretical problems related to literature rather than literature itself (AI as a tool of cultural senility, for example). I aim to publish one of these every 2-3 weeks, or twice a month, though a slower cadence may be necessary.

• Versions of my critical coursework essays edited for a broader audience, potentially including anonymized summaries of feedback on my works in an effort to demystify critical production.

• Reprints of any fiction I manage to get published, with the consent of the publishing entity and with brief explanations of craft decisions I made in writing and revising.

• Social media posts relating to or summarizing all of these things. You can find those posts at Nyecanham on TikTok and IG.

The above work will be free as long as I am gainfully employed elsewhere—my work as a business journalist subsidizes my literary pretensions. That may change out of necessity, but because the core of this project is a free, democratic, and replicable form of literary education I will keep the above categories free as long as it is economically possible.

However, I intend to offer paying subscribers (at the $5 monthly tier) a variety of other works including:

• Full-length critical and theoretical essays produced independent of my coursework.

• Poppier pieces on topics like ‘Red Flag’ books; literature and contemporary masculinities; the craft of writing battle scenes; and Stephen King, Emile Zola and reactionary realisms.

• Works on readers’ topics of choice, potentially. All readers will have the ability to vote in any polls or to suggest topics via email or comment.

The point of subscribing is not to gain access (it is likely that I will produce subscriber pieces only very rarely) but to partially compensate me for the labor of producing this newsletter and its associated social media.

But who will that money go to support? (Who am I?)

I assume most readers at this stage know who I am, but since I want this project to be legible to people who do not know me and will never know me, I’ll tell you a bit about myself.

My name is Nye Canham. In my day job, as of Nov. 2024, I write for a different publication. Some of that work is great and makes me proud. Some of it just pays the bills. Your support will make my fiction and critical work more practicable, and I have the vain hope that one day I may be able to make a living from that work.

I grew up in a New England union family. I was named for Nye Bevan, best known for creating the British National Health System, for opposing the U.K.’s support for Israel during the Suez Crisis, and for leading the left wing of the Labour party after the fall of the Attlee government. He was many other things: a lifelong servant of the working class, a self-taught intellectual, and a man who saw that a free society depended in part on the vibrancy and depth of its cultural life.

A name like that is a heavy burden, but it is an easy star to follow. I see myself in his broad political and intellectual tradition and I feel called to struggle on behalf of a society where normal people have the intellectual means to participate fully in all types of culture, where high and low mix naturally, and where all know that a country is only as rich as the poorest of its poor, only as free as its most wretched prisoners.

I said at the top of this piece that I wasn’t a very good English student. Some of that was due to personal laziness. But some of it was due to the political and social context in which I grew up. I was in elementary school when No Child Left Behind passed and in high school during the period of austerity following the Great Recession. Both eras saw a deliberate shift towards test taking (and ‘career readiness’) as the object of education, at least in underfunded inner-city schools, to the great detriment of actual learning.

The U.S. has an apartheid public school system. In rich counties, cities and suburbs the schools are often peerless, competitive in test scores with the best schools in other countries. Poor counties, poor cities and poor suburbs have bad schools and the private and charter school movements have leached many of the middle class students out of those public school systems.

Because of geography, this is often a racial apartheid as much as it is a class apartheid. This division is acute in New England where the end of county government means the suburbs do not subsidize the cities in any meaningful fashion. City schools lack funds, lack staff, lack the resources necessary to see to the needs of an impoverished student body. I grew up on the excluded side of American public education. I went to schools that didn’t have soap, that didn’t have books, that didn’t have proper scheduling. Schools where classrooms lacked heat in the winter and AC in the summer and where water damage left the floors peeling up and the acoustic tiles black with mold.

An environment like that is not conducive to literary learning. We didn’t learn how to identify parts of speech, how to track meter and emphasis, or how to diagram sentences. No one even tried to teach us, at least not until very late in high school. We had no formal instruction in grammar between about first grade and high school, if memory serves. A lot of my classmates never learned to read beyond an extremely rudimentary level. Some of them are in prison now. Some of them are dead.

I’m not foolish enough to believe that reading books or writing fiction would’ve changed their lives in specific, predictable ways. But I feel, with all my soul, the pain which comes from living as something other than a full citizen in a country that pretends to democracy. So this project grows out of that experience of collective exclusion, because no one should lack anything in a country this rich, least of all an education.

I don’t believe in the rule of technocracy or in the credentialism of American publishing and American journalism; those things are poison to a democratic republic. But a rejection of effort and difficulty is a rejection of art itself, as the proponents of vulgar market populism would do well to learn. And that too is incompatible with a democratic life and culture.

So let’s work together, reader. We have much to do.