Cleveland’s Literary Godfather Steps Down
A Conversation with Creative Writing Dr. Neal Chandler

For the past 19 years, meeting Dr. Neal Chandler has been something of a rite of passage for local aspiring authors. You confess to someone—a bookstore employee, a co-worker, a librarian—that you’re a writer, and he or she says knowingly, “Oh, then you have to meet Neal.” So you go down to Cleveland State University and take the oh-so-slow elevator to the 18th floor of Rhodes Tower to the English Department.

Once there, you find yourself in the presence of a tall, bearded, slightly stooped man who may be the only Mormon magical realism writer you’re likely to encounter outside of Utah. And then you’re sucked in. Perhaps you decide to start attending the weekly Public Fiction workshop or you attend the annual Imagination Writers’ Conference. Maybe you go whole hog and sign up for the creative writing program at Cleveland State.

This rite of passage is about to end, however, as Chandler is retiring from Cleveland State this year—just as soon as he hosts the last Imagination Conference. He’ll be passing the reins of CSU’s creative writing program and the conference to Imad Rahman, who comes to CSU from the University of Kansas. Cool Cleveland contributor Susan Petrone sat down with Chandler last week to talk about his time at Cleveland State, writing programs, and the Imagination Conference.

Cool Cleveland: How did a German scholar end up running a creative writing program?

Dr. Neal Chandler: At Lake Erie College, I seemed to be the only faculty member who was publishing creative work, so the English department was after me to teach the fiction workshop. I resisted for a long time but finally agreed to try. I was afraid I’d have to teach talent. Wrong. Students who sign up for creative writing read. They already have a relationship to language and they show up in class and do their homework—and then redo it—with a passion I wasn’t used to. When CSU advertised the Program Coordinator’s job, I thought it would be a chance to focus on my writing. Wrong again. But I liked the work and loved the teaching.

Where did the impetus for the Imagination Conference come from?

The creative writing faculty wanted me to devise some kind of summer programming, so with the help of Karen Joy Fowler, who was Writer-in-Residence at CSU in the Spring of 1990, I came up with The Imagination Writers’ Workshop and Conference.

Where is Karen Joy Fowler this year?

Virtually every year since 1991, Karen has come back to teach and co-direct Imagination, though that became more difficult as she became more famous and was ever more in demand. I had told her that 2007 would be our last Imagination before turning the conference over to a new director. Wrong yet again, but meanwhile she had committed to teach at Indiana University’s summer writers’ conference in Bloomington this year. She was born in Bloomington and had a very happy childhood there, which she has written about. So this summer she is going home.

How did you go about planning the first conference?

I planned the first conference with a lot of help. I was very new to “creative writing,” so I relied on my colleagues and on Karen to put me in contact with good faculty. The hardest part was figuring out a design that would give all participants direct, intense working time with all of the members of the faculty. And we have stuck with that design. It’s the most popular feature of Imagination.

Some things are easier, but not much. As writers’ conferences have become popular and sprung up in many places, competition for good faculty has grown, especially when you have to work within a given budget and are concerned with diversity. Moreover, the conference has grown and become much more complicated. We now offer playwriting and creative nonfiction in addition to fiction and poetry. We offer the workshop not-for-credit but now also offer undergraduate and two varieties of graduate credit. This means we have to work with three sets of registrars. We’ve developed a series of partnerships in the university and in the community and a set of associated events, all of which must be coordinated and funded.

And of course, the funding picture for this highly subsidized conference is always shifting and demanding new energy and attention. In addition, we’ve run a series of weekend workshops for beginning writers during the academic year, and we recently launched a whole new summer workshop for high school writers, called Imagination High. That’s been enormously successful but is no less complicated, involving a complex faculty arrangement, funding strategy, and several new partnerships.

Writing programs, especially MFA programs, take a lot of flack. Some people think they're a waste of time and that you can't "teach" someone how to write. Others think that writing programs are just there to suck the lifeblood, creativity, and imagination out of aspiring writers. There's also the impression that you have to get an MFA to get published and that graduates of the "best" programs have a better chance of getting published? What are your thoughts on the usefulness of creative writing programs?

All this carping over Creative Writing programs is, first of all, a kind of romantic grumpiness. Since Kant and the German Idealists, and cheered on by romantic poets, people have wanted to believe that great literary talent is a matter of genius, something un-teachable that grows independently in unheated garrets in London’s East End or Soho or Haight-Ashbury. We don’t impose this lonely genius requirement on musicians or painters, all of whom are allowed to go to school to learn the craft from masters and to test the ambitions of their art. And probably this grumpiness was inevitable because of the flat-out success of creative writing programs, which have proliferated and are thriving across the country despite the fact that there is no job market. People want to write, and they want to write better. And creative writing programs make very little in the way of promises. The first words out of my mouth to anyone who wants to enter a creative writing program are: “Don’t quit your day job.”

As for the charge that creative writing programs produce cookie cutter hacks. There is probably some degree of truth to this, just as programs in math or in engineering produce any number of people who are merely good or competent at what they do. One of the smartest people I know left a top-level program in physics when he realized he wasn’t going to be one of the five or six people who set the direction for physics in the 21st century. He wasn’t brilliant enough, so he quit physics to learn a trade. He’s now a cardiologist in Chicago and makes more money in a year than you or I will see in twenty. He would rather have been a great physicist, but he’s never once suggested to me that we ought to shut down the country’s proliferating physics programs because they produce mostly hacks.

The best answer I’ve seen to this silly charge was given by Kathy Kisner in response to a tedious attack article written by Janice Harada (sp?), who used to be book review editor at the Plain Dealer. I wish I still had the article, but in a word she said, “well that’s silly, isn’t it?” And then she listed a dozen or more fiction writers who are among the most original and inventive, least predictable talents in American writing, people like Lorrie Moore, David Foster Wallace, Tobias Wolfe, Antonya Nelson, and T.C. Boyle, pointing out that they all had come through creative writing programs.

Academic creative writing is a sinecure, a haven and opportunity with serious support in which you can try to be one of the five or six writers who will set the direction for fiction or nonfiction or poetry or playwriting in the 21st century, or you can settle for something less. Nobody is making false promises, but no one here believes you need a lonely garret in Soho and a bottle of cheap vodka to release true literary genius. Even Goethe in the 18th century recognized that that very attractive notion was romantic blather.

Do you need an MFA/MA in order to get published?

If you are in a very good program, your teachers will likely have better contacts to agents and editors than teachers in a less famous or prestigious program, but all the contacts in the world can’t make your book great or even make it sell.

Does Imad Rahman have any idea what he's gotten himself into?

Of course not!

The Imagination Conference runs from July 8-13 at Trinity Commons. Parties interested in participating should act fast; the registration deadline is this Friday, June 20. For more information, call 687-2532 or visit http://www.csuohio.edu/imagination'''.

Interview and Photo by Cool Cleveland contributor Susan Petrone susanATtheinkcasino.com
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