In 2009 I started teaching an intro to creative writing class as part of my graduate student fellowship. The class itself meets an undergraduate writing requirement and it’s one of the more popular courses on campus, offering around twenty sections a semester that often fill to near capacity (17 students). Very few of the students enrolled have any intention of becoming writers. The syllabus is given to me by the department, but how I teach and grade is up to me. I’ve always enjoyed teaching the course, and still do as an adjunct, now teaching two sections.
After teaching my first semester in fall 2009, it struck me how similar many of my student’s fiction stories were. As a nation, we were in the deepest part of the recession, if not by the numbers, then at least emotionally. But this fact didn’t seem to affect the stories handed in weekly by my students. The young women often wrote about powerful women, whose character flaw was that they were too powerful. They had everything: high-rise apartments with the finest furniture (described in excruciating and boring detail), luxury cars (make, model, color, always given) that were law/med/business school presents. They had everything but love, blaming their success on their dating woes. Or they wrote about successful moms who feel unappreciated as they manage jobs and family while still sending their children to college. The young men in the class wrote stories featuring grizzled leading roles, who were often detectives or police officers, quick to fight, quicker to woo the ladies. Or their main characters were young business professionals battling their bosses, or worse, their fathers. Not all the stories were written in these modes. I read a lot of genre fiction, stories about lost dogs, first loves, problems with college roommates (write what you know), but none of these were memorable.
Now, in spring 2011, the tone of the stories I’ve read is noticeably different. Still present the lost dogs and first loves, but gone are the tall, powerful business women, apartments with Central Park views, and Beamers in the garage. The students in my class now look to a more mysterious future full of uncertainty, and this plays significantly in their work. The most striking example of this came in a short story beautifully imagined, if a bit poorly rendered. (I find this to be the case quite often; the most imaginative of my students struggle with getting their ideas down in clear prose, those with a firm grasp of grammar and sentence structure would fail the course if I docked points for boringness.) The main character of this particular story was a young man who had graduated from college with a degree in chemistry, but worked as a service clerk. He suffers the ridicule of his friends and family, and finally leaves the world behind by turning himself into water molecules while taking a shower, becoming part of the water cycle.
Most of my students that first semester were upperclassmen and had gone through all of high school and most of college during the economic boom, and didn’t have much exposure to economic downturn. I’m guessing that it was still abstract for them. The financial indices tumbling into the negative, while captivating for some us, were just numbers on the screen. (Their parents, I’m sure, were much more worried.) Plus, these were smart kids. They weren’t writers or poets, but many had successfully applied to med school or grad school, or had jobs lined up after graduation. They were going to be doctors or engineers. Now, though, we can’t go a week without reading about college grads having trouble finding jobs and moving back in with their parents. My students are still sharp. Through networking (a practice I was unfamiliar with in the academic environment before arriving here) many have found some type of employment. The underclassmen do seem more apprehensive. They don’t write about success, but rather being tricked or misled, and rarely write outside of their own experience, dwelling on the nostalgic moments of childhood.
I don’t want to say the shift in tone is solely due to economic downturn and recession, and I don’t have the Marxist chops or the economic knowledge to prove any type of cause and effect. I do believe that art responds to the culture and era in which it is produced. And these young people are writing at time when they likely won’t do as well as their parents, something that has never before now been true for any of us.
