by Anonymous

[Editor’s note: the following post is by a former MFA instructor who did not wish to be identified.]

Recently, there was a bit of an internet dust-up over an essay at The Stranger by a former MFA instructor. In “Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One,” Ryan Boudinot unleashed a scathing indictment of the creative writing MFA industry. Despite the furor over the piece, its illumination of the problems with the overproliferation of MFA programs — that there are too many programs with no standards, and that this is adding to the student debt crisis and fattening school’s coffers at the expense of students and teachers — is important, and worth examining further.

Without a doubt, Boudinot’s essay has its problems. It’s smug and occasionally tone-deaf, and a line about a student’s childhood abuse memoir, while clearly meant to be hyperbolic, was in poor taste. But the blunt quality of the piece unfortunately overshadowed some salient, hard-hitting real talk about the MFA industry, and the blowback attacked his more inflammatory remarks while neatly avoiding the substance of his essay.

The result was slew of similarly smug, moralizing blog posts, comments, Facebook threads, and tweets, where people wagged their fingers at Boudinot and lectured a whole lot of nonsense, including that all graduate-level teachers should encourage a love of reading in their students and be willing to teach them self-reflection and self-discipline, as if they were young children instead of people in a master’s program receiving the highest degree in their field. (Author Nick Mamatas rightly took one of these posts to task for its mealy-mouthed equivocating.)

You don’t need an MFA to write. Unlike practicing medicine or law, there is no degree whose successful completion stands between you and your craft. You can write to your heart’s content in private, sell short stories to magazines, publish a book, publish fifty books, all without an MFA.

So why are MFAs useful? Strictly speaking, there are two potential benefits that are unique to MFAs: having a (university) teaching credential, and having funded time to focus on your craft. The latter only applies to funded programs, of course, so when it comes to unfunded programs, the only real potential benefit is the ability to teach at the college level — which, given the glut of MFA graduates and the trend away from hiring tenure-track faculty, becomes a dicey proposition at best.

You’ll notice I didn’t include “getting feedback on your work” or “a writing community” in that list. That’s because these things are available many places outside of the MFA framework. You can join a writing group in your community or online, you can hire someone for a private consultation, you can have a writing buddy, you can attend local readings and literary events, you can take any number of workshops or seminars, go to writing festivals, and so on. I similarly did not include “having a credential” as a benefit, because having spoken to editors and agents about this issue, it’s clear that the surfeit of MFA programs has resulted in MFAs being completely worthless as a credential (with the exception of a few select top programs like Iowa, UT-Austin, and Michigan). The reasoning seems to be that if anyone can get one, what does it say if you have one? Not much.

People have been criticizing Boudinot for suggesting that talent is “born,” not made. His point, however blunted by his rhetoric, is fundamentally true: there are some for whom written expression and the gifts of narrative come naturally, and others for whom it does not. For some reason it has become taboo to suggest that people might not be able to do whatever it is they set their mind to. A diet of inspirational narratives in which all it takes is a dream and a montage to reach your loftiest ambitions has clouded common sense. We’ve managed to confuse the fact that a good writer could be anyone with the idea that anyone could be a good writer. (Hat-tip to Pixar’s Ratatouille for that profound lesson.) Case in point: I myself enjoy singing, and frequently fantasize about singing for large audiences (and in musicals, and in nightclubs — you get the idea). But even if I practiced for eight hours every day, there would be limitations to what I could ultimately do, because I simply don’t have the gift of song. Years of singing for pleasure has yielded some minor improvement in the quality of my voice, but that’s all. And there’s nothing wrong with this, no moral judgment attached to it. But if I wanted to be a professional singer more than anything in the world, I’d eventually have to come to terms with the fact that that would never happen. That would be painful, but that wouldn’t make it any less true. To say otherwise would be intellectually dishonest.

So who benefits from MFAs? People sneer about their function — “You can’t teach good writing!” is a refrain uttered often enough — but that’s not what they’re for, is it? They’re meant to take people with nuggets of potential — gifts that already exist, but need nurturing — and bring them into contact with talented writers and teachers, and other students who are roughly around their level, so that they might all potentially advance together, and learn from and alongside each other. (And if the program is funded, give them a bit of a break from the demands of full-time work so that they might refocus their energies.)

It is, of course, impossible to know who will be “the real deal” from an application, and even harder to guess who will be successful in the long run. (And what does success mean? Critical acclaim? Aesthetic longevity? Money?) There are writers who attend the most prestigious MFA programs who never write again. There are people without MFAs whose fiction will be taught for hundreds of years. There are people who have very comfortable, mid-level writing careers, some with MFAs, some without. There are people who shun the idea of writing as an art form, write commercial books, and become millionaires. There are people who do the same, self-publish their e-book, sell four copies, and never try again.

And admitting someone to an MFA program is never an exact science. In a way, you’re trying to gauge someone’s potential energy. Do they already have something going for their work, that they would they benefit from a focused, intensive program in which aesthetic questions are being asked, artistic goals are being set, and pointed critique is being offered? When reading applications, programs are looking for students who already have something going for their work. Maybe they write unnervingly unsettling worlds, or lucid prose, or masterful characterizations, or can weave a tight, juggernaut of a plot. (Or, ideally, can do many of these at once.) Whatever it is, it catches the reader’s attention. Anyone who has read magazine slush piles knows what it’s like to slog through writing with no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever for hours until stumbling upon exciting and wonderful and real.

In an MFA program with standards — and by that I simply an MFA program that selects what it believes to be the best candidates from a pool of applicants — you end up with a group of writers who, for better or worse, rose to the top of that pool. When a program offers funding — that is, when the school believes enough in its program to provide tuition remission, and fellowships/TAships — the applicant pool increases and the quality of the resulting class will be, generally, higher. Even given aesthetic biases, variations in taste, etc., you end up with a class of writers of a certain potential caliber. In these programs, the gap between students with the lowest and highest potential energy is fairly narrow. Again, what they will do with their careers is unknown — everything from discipline to market forces to sheer dumb luck could affect the overall outcome of their writing lives — but they’re all on a similar playing field. This isn’t everything, of course, because program directors aren’t psychic and writers all levels of talent can be terrible workshop participants, but it is something.

But there’s another breed of MFA program out there, proliferating constantly. These programs have nearly 100% admittance rates, fund zero percent of their students, collect outrageously high tuition, and often pay their instructors very little. And because there are so many people (rightly or wrongly) clamoring for MFAs, they have no incentive for standards, either — no incentive to reject any person, no matter how badly they write. One person’s money is as green as the next, after all. If you’ve received an undergraduate degree and can type on a computer, you’re in.

That sentence requires careful observation, so I’ll write again, and expand on it a little: If you’ve received an undergraduate degree and can type on a computer, you can be admitted to a master’s degree program in creative writing with no other qualifications. Unlike, say, a terminal degree in physics, where a student would have to display not just adequacy in basic math but singular skills when it came to their particular subdiscipline of physics, an MFA applicant applying to one of these programs does not have to demonstrate any proficiency in their “field” beyond being able to put words onto a page. That this is a statement that can be written truthfully is astonishing, damning, and depressing.

In this scenario, a talented applicant who has been diligently improving her craft for a decade can be admitted alongside a person who doesn’t believe in negative feedback, has only read four books in his entire life, and doesn’t have a clear sense of how a comma works, how to write a character, or how a plot is constructed. (There is no shame in not knowing these things, of course, but there’s also a place where they shouldn’t be, and that’s the terminal degree in the field.) And so in these programs, the gap between the students with the lowest and highest potential energy is massive.

There are several problems with this setup. First, it makes teaching wildly difficult. How can an instructor, no matter how compassionate or gifted, have a unified conversation with the class about aesthetics or craft when there are students who can barely process or discuss the assigned texts or workshop stories?

As for the students who shouldn’t have been admitted in the first place: MFA programs are two years long, three at the most. If they enter below the standard of where a master’s student should be, the entire two years will be spent catching up to, at best, where they should have been when they entered — and then the program is over and they’re several years out of the job market, possibly in a hole of student debt, and sporting a functionally useless degree. And then what?

Last, if you’re a writer attending classes with a random mishmash of people who fall into the above category, some of whom refuse to read, others who are using the classes as a very expensive form of therapy, and so on, how useful will they be to you? When talented students get caught up in these programs — by accident, or because of its proximity to where they live, or any other reason — their time is cheapened and made infinitely harder by classmates who don’t have the wherewithal to provide valuable critique, or who is being taught by an underpaid teacher stretched thin by too many classes and too many energy-sucking students. And so that program has benefitted no one, except the university, which is making a tremendous amount of money. (There are almost three hundred MFA programs currently open in the US alone, with more cropping up all the time. Here’s your reason why.)

It seems unfair to excoriate people like Boudinot for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, when the problem should be traced back to its source: the schools who treat MFA programs like cash cows, admitting as many students as they can cram into their classrooms or foist onto their online instructors, with no consideration for the damage being done to the students who should be, and want to be, in an MFA program. These schools do a disservice to their students — both the prepared and unprepared — their instructors, and the academic standards they supposedly value. They should be ashamed of themselves and shuttered for fraud. The problem isn’t the MFA itself — it’s the overabundance of programs that act like for-profit online universities — taking advantage of desperate people who don’t know any better.

(This is not to say that there aren’t problems with privilege, institutional prejudices, and aesthetic biases in MFA programs. There are, absolutely. But you combat those biases with diversifying your faculty and application readers, and providing funding so students can afford to attend, not simply opening up more and more MFA programs until everyone who has the passing notion to be a professional writer can sign up.)

It’s true that in his essay, Boudinot seems to conflate “serious” reading with a specific kind of serious reading (people have pointed out that his worship-worthy suggestions are a very particular brand of white dude literature), but his point is still valid: part of being a writer is aggressively shaping your own canon. That canon can contain whatever you want it to, but you have to be willing to expand it, to receive suggestions, to read new work and offer more specific observations than “I didn’t like this” or “It confused me.” You have to open to reading whatever is handed to or suggested to you, and articulate how you think it succeeds or fails. That’s how you grow as a reader and writer.

And to suggest that instructors at the graduate school level should be required to coddle their students, beg them to read and do their assignments, and prod them into meeting deadlines is ludicrous. As someone who has previously taught at one of the latter types of MFA programs, I can say that they’re littered with students who can’t do the work and students who won’t do the work. And therein lies the source of Boudinot’s frustration, and the frustration of grad-level creative writing instructors everywhere, who need the employment but can’t speak up about these frustrations until the school is in their rearview mirror.

If you don’t like expanding your reading tastes (or reading, period), if you can’t meet deadlines, if you have no desire to receive feedback from other people, if you have no interest in improving your work, if you just want an echo chamber instead of a critique, if you aren’t interested in questions of craft, if you think writing is a get-rich-quick scheme and are looking to write the next [insert blockbuster here], if you can’t handle rejection or criticism, if you have no desire to revise, and if you’re not comfortable with the idea that some stuff you write will never see the light of day, then don’t get an MFA. You don’t belong there. (Also, all of these qualities will make being a writer very difficult.) It is a waste of your time and money, and the time of your instructor, and your classmates who have potential and who care about their classes.

Just because you can get an MFA, doesn’t mean you should.

When I was getting my MFA in 2007, I found myself enrolled in a teaching practicum designed to help me and other prospective MFAs and PhDs on fellowship learn the basics of teaching freshman composition. One day in class, a fellow student raised his hand in response to a question the instructor had asked about the best ways to get students thinking and writing in an exploratory manner and said: “Well, does it matter? They don’t have anything interesting to say anyway.” The comment, deployed with smugness and free-floating antagonism, struck me as terribly depressing. At the time, I was not a newbie in the classroom — I had taught creative writing and English in various forms for roughly 3 years — but neither had I approached the Irish-coffee-sipping, annotating-with-expletives stage in my career that is prevalent in so many satires and, sadly, real life episodes of veteran teacher-hood. Eight years of adjuncting later — first in New York, then Boston and now New Orleans — in which I have taught everything from Sophomore English and Business Writing to Introduction to Creative Writing at the secondary, undergraduate, and non-traditional levels, that throwaway comment still tears at my nerves.

While the gap between college freshman and creative writing MFA students is considerable, novelist and erstwhile-teacher Ryan Boudinot exhibits a similar brand of contempt in his feature for The Stranger: “Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach In One,” which caused much strenuous debate among book people on the internet this week. That said, I did find myself laughing (darkly) a couple of times over the course of reading Boudinot’s article and some of his points are incredibly valid — especially what he says about the importance of “woodshedding” as an aspiring writer on which he, wisely, ends his screed: “That’s why I advise anyone serious about writing books to spend at least a few years keeping it secret. If you’re able to continue writing while embracing the assumption that no one will ever read your work, it will reward you in ways you never imagined.”

Sound advice.

Moreover, I would imagine that Boudinot intends his article to come as a refreshing breeze of truth-to-power in the swamp of glad-handing and back-pattery which is our present literary moment; that he is bringing the antics of Daniel Tosh and/or Bill Mahr to the book-world at long last; and that by “shooting from the hip” and “telling it like it is” when it comes to the MFA-circuit he is giving vent to the prevailing dissatisfactions of his colleagues.

Fair enough.

I am somewhat of a crank myself, especially in the glow of my computer screen. A good diatribe can be good for the soul whose compass is, by and large, decency pointing. Mark Twain, Edmund Wilson and Edgar Allan Poe were all of them fantastic at it.

What I did, however, find pernicious and inconsistent in Boudinot’s article are the assertions he makes that degrade his “hardworking, thoughtful” former students and by extension the teacher-student contract at large, while severely limiting the breadth of the greater literary community.

Before he is even properly out of the gate, Boudinot writes: “The vast majority of my students were hardworking, thoughtful people devoted to improving their craft despite having nothing interesting to express and no interesting way to express it.” Then, under the first section heading of his article? listicle? essay? blog post? rant? titled, “Writers are born with talent,” he goes on to say: “Either you have a propensity for creative expression or you don’t… It’s simply that all writers are not born equal. The MFA student who is the Real Deal is exceedingly rare, and nothing excites a faculty advisor more than discovering one. I can count my Real Deal students on one hand, with fingers to spare.”

Well, fine. Apart from the murkiness of defining true “talent” and what Boudinot calls the “Real Deal,” not to mention the self-importance of the notion that “faculty advisors” like Boudinot are there to “discover” talent as opposed to, say, nourishing it in their students — in a contradictory turn, Boudinot titles a later section heading, “You don’t need my help to get published” — it’s unclear at whom the campaign is directed.

If directed at students, well, then that’s a shame. There is probably one, if not multiple of Boudinot’s former students out there somewhere hanging their heads in embarrassment and self-loathing for allowing themselves to be taken in by him on the basis of collegiality and mutual respect.

If directed at writers, well, then we can take it. Nothing worse has been said about us in Goodreads reviews or, for that matter, writing workshops. And very few writers or readers have been laboring under the delusion all their lives that a story by Joyce Carol Oates (hardworking, committed) is equal to one by Flannery O’Connor (talented, revelatory).

And if directed at MFA programs themselves, well, then good luck. While stating that you cannot teach someone to become a good writer is not unreasonable in and of itself, it is by no means prohibitive of trying and is, furthermore, predicated on a few things you cannot reasonably assume about people obtaining an MFA: 1. That all of them enter into a program to become famous writers. 2. That pointing out such a fallacy is going to effectively discourage anyone from obtaining such a degree. 3. That there are no other tangible benefits to getting an MFA — a graduate degree in the study and practice of literature — apart from pursuing ever-elusive “Real-Deal-ness” and the skillset that will enable you to write that singular story, or poem, or essay which will enable you, in turn, to become a working writer with a publication bio.

Did I get an MFA in fiction?

I did.

Am I still paying loans?

You bet.

Do the collective profits I’ve made from now two books of fiction and a slew of publications amount to an infinitesimal fraction of what I spent on said degree?

On Garth Risk Hallberg’s advance, I declare it.

And yet even if I had never been published — even if I had never been told by my wonderful and nurturing professors that I possessed a drip of “talent” — even if I had “woodshedded” every last bit of the Cormac-McCarthy-redolent juvenilia I produced in the course of 4 workshops and 3 post-curricular faculty advisements — even then, I still would’ve happily not attended my MFA graduation ceremony feeling privileged and enriched to have had the luxury of devoting myself with boozy asceticism to two years of living and breathing my craft. (It may be unfair of me to assume that Boudinot is one of those writers for whom the process of sitting down in his pajamas to commune with the denizens of imagined worlds is an inexorable agony he would not wish on anyone.)

Yet here’s the crux with Boudinot’s article. He doesn’t take aim with precision enough and he isn’t assertive enough in his ribbing; he’s not going to take down the MFA blimp or else, if he is, he won’t come out and say it. Flippantly proclaimeth he: “Here are some of the things I learned from these experiences.” His words are contemptuous and harmful, I think, because they take no proper shape. They are interested in “woodshedding,” in Boudinot’s terms, his students, the MFA system, bad writing, among a host of other fears, yet nothing emerges from that conflagration redemptive or otherwise. Clickbait accomplished.

I subtitled this piece “A Rebuttal of Sorts” because you can’t argue against a non-argument. Boudinot’s freeform mean-spiritedness does nothing but make bookish people feel crappy.

Case in point the subject heading: “No one cares about your problems if you’re a shitty writer” — one in which section Boudinot states, “Just because you were abused as a child does not make your inability to stick with the same verb tense for more than two sentences any more bearable. In fact, having to slog through 500 pages of your error-riddled student memoir makes me wish you had suffered more” — and then, with un-self-conscious irony, “It’s not important that people think you’re smart.”

Another of Boudinot’s maxims: “If you aren’t a serious reader, don’t expect anyone to read what you write.” In this section, after citing an incident in which Boudinot assigns an especially thirsty “Real Deal[er]” “three big novels for the period between semesters” “almost as a joke” — he chooses David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon with a dash of Roberto Bolano, though what these authors’ most tumescent works are liable to teach a fiction MFA about crafting a competent short story, the understandable standby of such programs, is unclear — Boudinot says that, “Students who claimed to enjoy ‘all sorts’ of books were invariably the ones with the most limited taste. One student, upon reading The Great Gatsby (for the first time! Yes, a graduate student!), told me she preferred to read books ‘that don’t make me work so hard to understand the words.’ I almost quit my job on the spot.”

The Anglo-centrism and fuddy-duddy-ness of this statement withstanding — has any one ever lapsed into premature brain-death from not having read The Great Gatsby, one of the most overrated “classics” I can think of? — Boudinot’s assertions here smack of superciliousness and vainglory. Just what is he railing against in this passage? The decline of American culture at large? Writers just getting their sea legs as readers? The students who looked up to him in the low-residency MFA Program in which he was teaching at the time, whose Fitzgerald-deprived coarseness threatened to unseat the cradle of his art?

West-Eggers, clearly, every one.

Which brings me to what, as a reader and writer, I suspected the gist of this piece really was. By launching jibes at incurious readers and talentless writers Boudinot seems to be distancing himself from the notion of writer-as-vocation, a phenomenon for which the proliferation of MFA Programs feasibly could be held to account. The logic goes that if you can go to school to learn, say, how to weld or salvage dive, then you can also go to school to become proficient in creative writing, which Boudinot sees as an insult to the vaunted craft and moreover futile, “Real Deal[ers]” excepted.

Because Boudinot’s craft is exalted, elusive — a proving ground for real-ass minds. Fake-ass ones need not apply.

Yet by viewing writing as a craft that chances are you’ll fail to learn, Boudinot is doing something as damaging to education as he believes is being done to the craft of writing. Namely, he is doing what I have seen done by dozens of parents of students at the private schools where I’ve taught and by dozens of students once they arrive at undergraduate institutions: viewing education as a means to an end instead of a valuable end itself. Boudinot seems to think about MFA Programs: if you won’t emerge from one a successful working writer, why bother?

What he doesn’t realize is that by making writing and writing know-how into instruments that fail he is pushing them further into the vocational camp, and further away from the profound alchemical mystery he makes them out to be. And in the end, is that such a bad thing? If writing is in its essence a deep-sounding of human experience in all its variety, unreality and inconsistency then why would we not want to deepen the pool of those who would practice it to people who, yes, haven’t read The Great Gatsby, to people who start writing later in life, to people with chaotic day-to-day lives who could use some advice from experienced writers on how to make room for the practice they love, to people who don’t have the verve of Colson Whitehead but find their voice in Larry Brown?

No matter which way you decide to look at it, writing in its earliest stage takes the form of an apprenticeship, learned and rehearsed. Whether this apprenticeship takes place between the writer and her dog-eared copy of Beloved, and the writer and the MFA professor she pays to read and comment on her work makes little difference. Apprenticeships leads over time to vocations and vocations, worked hard at, amount to a life.

MFA Programs and the teaching of writing make a sacred space for such practices in a culture that decreasingly values words, stories and the exactitude of nuanced thought. They are not a long con on the part of universities, as Boudinot implies, but an opportunity for people with stories to tell to see those stories and the making of them through the lens of craft and sustained practice. If the writer so wishes, they’re there for a price, even if the results never make it to print.

The professor who would come to be my mentor in the MFA Program I attended began our first workshop together in a way I will never forget. He told us to view workshop and the greater program of which we were part not as something medicinal, engineered to intravenously alter our creations into some predetermined shape, but rather as one of “the last great collective art forms,” whereby the writing professor along with twelve fellow writers around a table rethink and refigure a story together.

“In this way,” he said, “we are writing as one.”

I do believe those were his words.

If I’d been raised with any sort of religion, Spock would have been my family’s patron saint of the dictionary. Sticking a grade-schooler in front of Star Trek might lead to a brief obsession with spandex, but with me it also meant absorbing tons of non-grade school words. From “purview” to “enmity” to “geneticist” to plain-old “stoic,” the scholarly verbal style of Mr. Spock made my child-self even more bookish than I already was. But my connection with Spock went beyond words. Because while Leonard Nimoy’s performance as Spock did make me love books differently, he also taught me about the inherent coolness of being your own brand of brainy outsider.

Leonard Nimoy’s recent passing has made a lot of us nostalgic about his impact on pop culture and all of our lives, specifically. In competition with all of television ever, the various Star Treks have the monopoly on smarty-pants, bookish characters, and among those characters, none were more intelligent or more sophisticated than Mr. Spock. Spock is regarded as the great brainy scientific guy of his universe, but really, the character is a little more nuanced than just being “the smart one.” Instead, Spock is the representative outsider in a universe of outsiders. If Star Trek was long regarded as something only for nerds (outsiders) then Spock was the Trekkie who lived in Star Trek, often mocked by his friends and colleagues for his inherent “otherness.” Nimoy’s portrayal of this kind of outsider appealed not just to “geeks,” but people of mixed ethnic heritage, too. His hopeful commiseration with a biracial young fan back in 1968, recently resurfaced, illustrating just how much people benefited from Spock for identification and comfort.

In the narrative of Star Trek, Spock is a biologically half-human/half Vulcan among people who are full-on humans. In this fictional future, Spock’s status as an officer in Star Fleet is eschewed by his dad because it breaks with Vulcan tradition; father Sarek wanted Spock to go to the Vulcan Science Academy. If you’re a kid who’s ever told your parents you want to be a writer instead of having a “real career,” you know what this is like. By being an actual space-alien who is both alien to humans and sort of looked-down on by his own people, Spock rocks the whole Groucho Marx-not-being-part-of-a-club-that-would-have-him-as-a-member-thing really hard.

And yet, the writing on Star Trek was better than you can believe. Mr. Spock could easily have been reduced to comic relief; a fish-out-of-space-water played for laughs. True, in some of the 60’s Star Trek’s most wha-wha moments, the crew of the Enterprise laughs heartily at how much Spock “doesn’t get it.”But those stumbles are trumped by the fact that Spock is so much more well-read than Captain Kirk, Bones, Scotty, and even the guy named Chekov. Here’s a guy who can quote from any philosophic text and most of the western canon literally without blinking an eye (though occasionally arching an eyebrow). The half-alien among a group of smart humans knows more about “their” books than anyone else. Spock has read Dickens and likes him. He’s brushed up on his Shakespeare and insinuates that he is the literary (and maybe biological) decedent of Sherlock Holmes. If you were in the minority of being bookish growing up, it was pretty easy to locate yourself in Mr. Spock.

But Spock was the beginning of Geek Chic, which means Spock’s brand of bookish hipsterdom isn’t arch despite all the eyebrow arching. Though you could call Spock a sexier Sherlock Holmes from Outer Space that would be doing him a disservice because he’s more of an original character than that. He’s stoic and detached from his emotions partially because he’s born that way, but partially because it’s the only way he can figure out how to function. As a little kid, I was teased a lot for having a dorky gait, nerdy clothes or nerdy interests. Both laughably and painfully, I can remember confronting playground bullies by telling them that throwing rocks or dirt clods at me wasn’t “logical.” This paraphrasing of Spock’s favorite subject — logic — is an obvious defense mechanism as a little kid. If you pretend not to have feelings (like Spock does), you can’t get those feelings hurt. Spock isn’t a cool nerd because he’s affecting anything at all. He’s a cool nerd because he’s so obviously fucked up, but doesn’t really give a shit what you think of him. He does this because — for the most part — he’s totally in control of his emotions.

This is why the best Star Trek episodes deal with Spock totally losing it.

Whether it’s his hormonal breakdown in “Amok Time,” clashing with his father in “Journey to Babel,” or his noble sacrifice in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Spock is best liked by audiences when he’s being forced to deal with the kind of stuff brainy artists try to control: raw feelings which can’t be explained or contained. When I was in fourth grade I proudly said my favorite book (like of ALL time) was a Star Trek novel called Yesterday’s Son, written by the wonderful writer A.C. Crispin. In it, Crispin postulates that Spock has an illegitimate son living in the ancient past of a slightly barbaric planet. When reunited, Spock and his son “Zar” (cool name!) do not get along. As a fourth grader, this novel blew my mind because I had no idea who I was supposed to side with. (I was also fuzzy on how Spock could have a kid he didn’t know about, but whatever…) Why was my nerdy hero Spock being saddled with responsibilities of adulthood? At this point, I thought his primary job was to zip around space with his best friend Captain Kirk, what was the deal with all the soul searching? Perhaps there was more too storytelling than big adventures. Spock and Star Trek made me wonder if all of this was just a little more real than I’d previously assumed. After this, one of my earliest short story attempts was straight-up Star Trek fan fiction. In it, a 10-year-old boy (guess where I got that idea) was imbued with Spock’s “katra” (his soul.) In Star Trek III, Spock’s katra actually rattles around in the head of his good friend Dr. McCoy, so I figured someone like me could probably get Spock’s soul, too. If a 5th grader was harboring Spock’s soul, would anyone really know? How could you prove it? Or, more interestingly, how could anyone prove that I wasn’t Spock?

In one of his last interviews with Hero Complex for the LA Times late last year, Leonard Nimoy noted that from an early point, he realized that the character of Spock had a fantastic “interior life.” This strikes me as being 100% correct and exactly what is so compelling about the way Nimoy conceived of and created this fictional person. If you were so full of passion, but you didn’t really know what to do with it, you might come across as stoic, too. Among my writer-friends, I notice I’m one of the more loud-mouthed ones at the party, but among non-writers, I’ve become more tight-lipped as I’ve grown older. More stoic. More Vulcan. My emotions, I find, have a place in my writing, but sometimes incorporating them healthily into my life is hard. Nobody struggled with this more than Mr. Spock.

I think most writers (and other artists) are all more like Vulcans than we care to admit. We aren’t inherently cold and emotionless, but instead, compartmentalized with our feelings. In the fictional history of Star Trek, the Vulcan race was once even more violent than the human race, before everybody got their act together. Meaning, Spock is suppressing and controlling all sorts of inherently destructive impulses. But he channels that (healthily or not) into his work. This vortex of chaos keeps him going, which is why we love him. Our interior lives are often a vortex — and sometimes that vortex is Star Trek style, like the creature who can drive you insane if you look directly at it in the episode “In Truth is There No Beauty?”. This alien thing — a Medusan — supposedly makes you insane because it contains too much truth. We never saw much of Spock’s creative output (a song played on the Vulcan harp here and there) but as a prose writer, I think Spock would have been uniquely equipped to handle the kind of too-close-too-home action that being a writer requires. After all, he looked into the vortex of that Medusan truth monster and lived to tell the tale.

Ultimately, Spock’s interior life and personal conflicts exist because we believe Spock exists. Meaning, had Leonard Nimoy played his character with an ounce of sarcasm, the complexity and identification many of us had with this character would not have materialized. Spock wasn’t just a metaphor for our interior lives, he was a real person. We will all miss Leonard Nimoy. He was a fantastic writer, director, husband, father, philanthropist, and of course, actor. But in rendering the paradoxically confused confidence of Spock, he made many of us Stark Trek fans into artists, thinkers, and writers. Which if you allow yourself to consider for one second, is totally and completely, fascinating.