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.
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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