In Which I Repost an E-Mail. Or: A Lame Excuse for a Blog Post

An e-mail thread was going around the graduate student list-serv about teaching creative writing, and the issue of whether or not people allowed students to write “genre” was raised.  Here is, I think, an excellent argument as to why someone does not allow their students to submit genre stories:

Science Fiction Vs. Literature

I think a lot about the troubled reltionship between science fiction and literature – at least in part because I consider myself a science fiction writer, and I’m getting my second creative writing degree.  I also know I’m not the only one.

So allow me to address the argument, on one side, that science fiction should be accepted as literature (or is better than literature due to the freedom the authors have with ideas), and, on the other side, the argument that science fiction can’t be literature.

Resume vs. Accessibility

I attended a panel at AWP in Denver last week where the founding editors of Failbetter, Guernica, Blackbird, and Drunken Boat talked about their journals and the place and function of online literary journals in the wide world o’ writing.  They made the point that anything published online is available to anyone with an internet connection (and some of these websites see 50,000 hits a month), while a story or poem published in a print journal is available to subscribers (for many literary journals, well under 5,000 people) and anyone who cares to go to a library that holds a subscription.  Also, a website’s archives are persistent, while a magazine can sell out all its back issues.

Just for the sake of example: Matthew Derby published stories from his excellent collection Super Flat Times in both Failbetter and 3rd Bed.  You can read the story from Failbetter any time you want, while to read the 3rd Bed story you either have to buy the collection or shell out six bucks plus S&H for the back issue.  The closest I can get to an issue of 3rd Bed from the Utah library system is “The Andy Griffith Show, the 3rd season.”

Oh, and 3rd Bed folded in 2006; they lasted six years to Failbetter’s ten-and-counting.  Take that, people who call internet journals transient!