Locked in a Small-Town Cage with My Superheroes, and Having No Way to Get an MFA... (Memoir)
by Rick Rofihe
MFA or no MFA, it takes a lot of stamina to become, and then continue to be, a writer. As an MFA professor at Columbia, I envied the talents of some of the writing students; also their sophisticated backgrounds which gave them much grist for the things they were writing, whereas I grew up in a provincial town which at the time had no bookstore and no library—no library even at school. I listened to Superman on the radio, read Uncle Scrooge comic books, and then, when the time seemed right, I began writing a short story, and it was accepted at The New Yorker.
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Author's Note
My oldest memory: I was not quite 4 years old in the summer of 1954; just before a circus came to town, the main street was paved for the very first time, and when the circus elephants paraded by a day or two later, I guessed the paving was done for them -- so they wouldn't hurt their feet.
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This is interesting. In so few words you manage to bring out the contradictions of what it means to be a writer--it's up to the reader to decide whether it is the goal or the process that matters--envying students their background, the endless search--getting published in The New Yorker...if the envy were put after this fact, this would come across as something else. *
small town grist is better than what comes out of too many MFA mills.
I praised a man who is a poet for his stamina in literature and then yesterday a different man who is also a poet praised me for having stamina. Then I read the word here and saw where it is placed. This story elides development over time and ends with two miraculous (unlikely) events, the writing of the short story and its publication in the NYer. My own childhood offered libraries and training in art and the humanities that led to writing the M.F.A. way. So, how did it get lost (outside of academia) even as I stayed with writing? This paragraph has peripheral vision. *
Ha, cool little piece. There is no predetermined road to a good writer or story. *