Brother, Can You Spare a Metaphor?

I flew to Chicago this past week for the yearly conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, or AWP as everyone calls it.

AWP is an annual writing conference I've attended off and on for 25 years.  My first one was in 1984 in Savannah, and there were 1,500 writers there. The past two years, New York and Chicago, the throng of poets, fiction writers and essayists has topped 8,000.
 
In 1967 when AWP was formed it had only 13 member institutions. Today it has over 400.  In 1984 when I first attended the Savannah AWP conference there were 31 schools nationwide offering an MFA, the most common terminal degree for those who hope to teach creative writing. Today there are well over a hundred.

Even Spartanburg's liberal arts colleges have added to this growth in creative writing. In 1988 when I arrived at Wofford there was one creative writing course divided over two semesters. Today, there are eight courses available at the college. Choosing among those courses a student can either create a concentration within the English major, or construct a free-standing minor.

Over at Converse College they've added an MFA degree in creative writing, and it will offer its first courses in June.

What accounts for this phenomenal growth of something-the specialized academic side of creative writing-that most people aren't even aware exists?

I like to think it might be mystical, that as the stock market spurred economic growth from triple digits in the 1970s to 14,000 in this decade, all over America the creative spirit swelled ever upward as well. Call it a sort of sympathetic shadow economy of creativity.

I like to imagine that over the past 30 years deep inside average Americans, poems and stories and personal essays were being born, growing in value, and paying spiritual dividends through their very presence in the society.

In my metaphor the creative writing programs are like Smith Barney offices popping up all over- institutional supply following creative demand.

Will a great crash of creative sprit follow as real markets decline world-wide? Have creative writers lost 30 percent of their stored wealth of metaphors, similes, plots, and imagined scenes since the economy drove off the cliff in October?
 
Judging from Chicago, I don't think so. I looked for signs of recession or depression as I wandered the crowded exhibition halls and conference rooms and found few.

Listening to the readings, there was plenty of depression, but poets have always used a drop in the spirit to make lyrical music. One of my teachers once explained all poems say the same thing: "My heart aches."

Economic metaphors are fun but not accurate when mapping creativity. Art does not follow economic models. Poems do not follow the laws of supply and demand. People make art whether others want it or not in "the marketplace."

Even during the Great Depression great literature flowed forth. Some of my favorite poems and stories came out of the 1930s-Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley.

At next year's AWP conference in Denver we'll see what the impact of the economic downturn turns out to be on creative writing programs. I don't think there will be poets selling pencils on the Denver streets. Will it be tough on us all? Yes. Will art get through these hard times? No doubt.

So sure, all across America there are frozen job searches and cancelled reading series, but all week in Chicago it seemed to be business as usual in the imagination, the real home of literature.