THE GROWING NUMBER of writing programmes and workshops available suggest many people want to write. But if you consider the number of people in such programmes and the amount of books published daily, it has to be wondered if all contemporary authors can produce is self-obsessed literature. How many stories, after all, are there to tell?
It's a question I considered while teaching at Vermont College's MFA in writing. During the past 25 years, the programme has produced award-winning writers who have published more than 400 books. Students and the faculty come from regional, minority, cross-cultural and international backgrounds. Their work represents a spectrum of styles.
Titles such as Liu Heng's The Obsessed; Han Shaogong's Homecoming?; Gao Xinjiang's Soul Mountain; Zhang Kangkang's The Invisible Companion and Liu Xinwu's Black Wall suggest an underlying political or social commentary. But what of Shanghai Baby, which is as self-obsessed as (if less comic than) Bridget Jones' Diary and which unapologetically apes western culture?
How to account for the obsessive emoting around bulimia, anorexia, teen and pre-teen angst, alcoholics, shopaholics and every '-ic' or addiction - all set against shopping centres, petrol-guzzling cars and suburban McMansions that four Chinese families could occupy with space to spare? Is the fat of the American land too fat to justify more self-obsessive writing?
At Vermont, Sybil Baker in her graduation lecture said that the time for change was now. In Writing Large: An Expatriate's Plea, Baker asks: 'How many of you despair about the state of America these days? ... And how many of you feel powerless to change any of this? And because of this powerlessness and despair, how many of you have fantasised - if even for a minute - about moving to Canada or some other enlightened country where you could write in peace?'
Hers is not the only voice to echo such sentiments. In thoughtful journals, US writers are recording discontent, in prose and poetry, about the state of the nation in the world.
Baker has lived for 10 years in South Korea, where she teaches English at Yonsei University. She says American writing has shifted from literature that engages in a 'conversation of ideas' to one that overly distances itself from intellectual articulation in favour of emotions. Her argument is to move beyond 'the private problems of self so that our short fiction speaks for ourselves, our nation and the world'.