The Three Things I Learned From Janet Desaulniers

A Too-Short Thank You To A Retiring Mentor

Point At The Shipwreck || Embrace The Obscure and The Erratic || Metaphor Is Dead

A wonderful mentor of mine, Janet Desaulniers, is retiring from the faculty of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago this year. Janet was brought in twenty-one (maybe twenty-two?) years ago to be the first chair of the writing program, recruiting many of the department’s outstanding writing faculty — Rosellen Brown and Jesse Ball among others. But I want to make this post about Janet and I also want to make it short, and to do both is difficult.

MFA Fiction, Poetry, and Non-Fiction programs are often maligned, fairly and unfairly, but an MFA program at an Art School must have different understanding of itself than one at Michigan or Brown. Janet gave our program its identity, its self-understanding.

I remember I walked in, wanting to write a commercial book, openly stating, like an idiot, that I’d love to see a book of mine in an airport someday. Meanwhile, a guy in our class was writing asemantically — this means writing without meaning i.e. mark-making. I thought Janet was insufficiently hard on him for his chicken-scratch on paper. Tell him to write! With meaning! But Janet understood that developing a truly original voice often requires rebuilding the meaning of words from the ground up, in this guy’s case, from even below the foundations of letters!

Under Janet’s tutelage, I came to understand that the art-teacher’s role extends past hierarchical dispensing of technical knowledge. The gift with the longest value is often exposure to a certain ‘quality of mind.’

At Iowa, Janet was initially savaged by a faculty that delighted in cruelty. “This is how talented writers waste their lives,” a professor said. (FNewsmagazine.)

But that was before the New Yorker put a stamp on a story. Everything changed, and Janet became a star. This is possibly why they’re always interested in the work itself, and aren’t unduly bothered with reception, insisting always that the culture will catch up. Janet’s wonderful collection of stories, What You’ve Been Missing, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and are amongst the best I’ve ever read and I often study them sentence by sentence, sometimes word by word. (Not quite at the asemantic, mark-making level though. I reserve that for Japanese.)

Janet writes stories that “land like a shovel to the face.”

Janet says more smart things per minute than any human being I’ve ever encountered. But I want to quickly (quickly!) write about Three Principles that I have tried to lay claim to:

1) Point At The Shipwreck

The full idea is captured in “All You Have To Do Is Point At The Shipwreck.”

Some writers, myself included, feel we can’t write about certain things because we don’t know enough. While a certain degree of humility is good, of course, this line of thinking can easily become solipsistic. Janet’s words here are intended as permission to free one’s self from “knowing anything” or “saying anything” — writing needn’t always be like a college paper; it doesn’t have to make an argument. It can be enough to see something and say, ‘Look!’

2) Embrace The Obscure and The Erratic —

The full idea is “Embrace The Obscure and The Erratic — they supply the dynamics of association”

Sometimes, there is a tendency in some writers (certainly in myself) to erase the truly offbeat things that the subconscious throws up. Why? Because I’m trying to appeal to an amorphous, large group of readers and I’m worried that some will be alienated? Constantly, writers vanillaize their own work. This is an injunction to not only resist the impulse but to see the obscure and erratic as doing powerful work for you.

3) Metaphor is Dead

This is too profound an insight for a quick paragraph. But suffice to say that a changing world calls for a changing literature. That’s not to say that Robert Burns saying, “My love is like a red, red rose” in 1794 is no longer true. But in a fragmented world, one-to-one mapping is insufficient. ‘A’ does not correspond only to ‘B’. There are multitudes. Perhaps one day I’ll go further into this.

I owe Janet an incalculable debt for their material support and quality of mind. I will forever be an acolyte. My entire writing pedagogy - Mess-making: The Fragmentary Model of Writing (which you can see here in video form if you like) is derived from Janet.

I never thought of myself as an acolyte. But I’ve heard the good word and now I travel and preach it. Enjoy your retirement, Janet. We’ll carry your ideas forward.

MISSY Pre-Order Information:

Apologies if you have already pre-ordered my book. Some people have mentioned having a hard time pre-ordering my book. The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. Amazon US does not currently support my book because the US rights remain on submission.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.