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Apr 4
Five Easy Questions, Tom Kealey, Part Two
Over the last few days, I've corresponded with Tom Kealey, the award-winning short story writer and and Stanford University creative writing professor who literally wrote the book about creative writing MFA programs.  It's been a great conversation, and I've decided to divide the interview into a few parts so you don't get overwhelmed by too many new links. 

Writers like Kealey are rare: one foot in academia, one foot in the digital publishing world, and another foot miraculously analyzing creative writing programs around the country.  I knew he had to participate in
my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions.   In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog:
What's your impression of your creative writing MFA colleagues--are they exploring the Internet in interesting ways?  Are creative writing MFA professors thinking about using the Internet?  Why or why not?

Tom Kealey:
I could definitely answer this question better in about six months. Adam Johnson and I are designing a new class at Stanford University called New Media Writing. What is it? Well, that’s a good question. New media writing (also known as multimedia or hypertext) is any kind of writing that needs media in order to work. In other words: if you simply printed the work out, it wouldn’t work.



This can take many forms. Sometimes it’s a “wiki,” like
Wikipedia, where the readers of a site also become the contributors to a site. It could be a story where you’ve got a minor character, and then there’s a hyperlink on that name, and it takes you to a whole new story about that minor character that informs the primary story.

New media can also use images of art and photography, and even streaming video and audio. I can explain the concept in this very basic way, but beyond that I’m confused just like most people. I’m going to be researching it this summer. I’ll let you know what I find.

You know, I told one of my writing mentors about this and he said: “Good lord, that’ll be the end of us.” But I don’t think this move to the Internet will mean the demise of books. There’s nothing quite like a book. You get to carry it around, you don’t have to reboot it, and you can actually give it to someone, and it means something.

I’m like: “Jason, check out this novel I just read. Here, take it,” and that means a lot more than simply saying “Hey Jason, I’m going to upload this file to you.” The book has survived for a long time, and it will continue to do so. There’s something intimate about our relationship to books. We don’t have that same intimacy with computers, and I don’t think we ever will.

Okay, straying back to the subject. There are three MFA programs out there teaching New Media Writing or something similar. (University of California-Riverside is one that comes to mind; School of the Arts, Chicago and Brown University are the others). It’s a field that will continue to grow, but I think it will be incorporated into fiction, nonfiction, poetry etc., rather than overtaking them.


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