The Program Era

A reader riffling through the pages of my book might be struck to see that a work of literary history has so many diagrams. What’s up with that? Don’t we go to literature to avoid things like diagrams? I would hope that the reader would find the diagrams intriguing, and see how they correspond to the more finely grained descriptions of writers and their works that make up the bulk of the book.

I have lots of favorite parts of the book, of course, but many readers have seemed particularly interested in my account of Ken Kesey. Who would have thought that one of the ultimate 1960s counterculture figures was also a creative writing program graduate? And who knew that his teacher was another important American writer, Wallace Stegner?

That these two men basically hated each other is fascinating, considering how productive and revealing their relationship turned out to be. And that they were, in turn, part of a much broader cultural context—not only Stanford University but the whole Bay Area just as it was beginning to convulse into “the sixties”—gives this part of the book a lot of energy.

It’s so easy to hate institutions. The very word has come to stand for something depressing and bad.

But institutions are the medium of collective human endeavor, and need to be protected from the corrosive myths of radical individualism that would tear them down.

I confess that I love the kind of institutions called schools, and want them to thrive. And it bothers me when they are understood merely as tools of oppression and standardization. Schools can certainly be that, but shuttering or defunding them is no solution to the problems they try to solve.

Better is to ask ourselves how schools can be made more responsive to our needs, including our need for creativity.

If my book can help us reach a more complex and sympathetic understanding of how schools have tried to enlist themselves in support of that ultimate form of individualism—creative writing—it will have done something worthwhile.