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If you ever find yourself lacking inspiration, or filled with anxiety and dread over your place in the cosmos, stare at the image above. It’s from Cassini’s cameras in 2013 as it passed through Saturn. That brightest little dot is Earth. That insignificant spot holds the entirety of your life and our entire species, every page you’ve written or failed to write. In the immortal words of Carl Sagan: “Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

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A Better Fictional Character

Since enrolling in the MFA program at Texas State University, one of the ways in which my feelings about fiction have changed the most has to do with character. In my undergraduate writing workshops we talked a lot about sympathetic characters. The consensus was that if a character wasn’t sympathetic, the story was dead. Of course, there are innumerable ways to build a reader’s sympathy for a character:      - the character just wants something really bad      - maybe the character is really good at something      - maybe the character works really hard      - maybe the character can’t catch a break      - maybe we empathize with their struggle. But I’ve come to realize in the last three years that, all in all, characters don’t need to be sympathetic. They need to be specific, built from the ground up, rather than the top down.

To my mind, the worst characters are ones that are clearly pawns pushing a writer’s social or political agenda. Almost as bad as that are upstanding characters with no flaws, who never say the wrong thing.

There’s an edict about stand-up comedy that I think applies to fiction: if you’re not offending anyone, you’re not going far enough, and if you’re offending everyone, you’re just an asshole. It’s pretty clear to me that most good books are unsettling and disturbing. It’s also clear that there are several terrible books that are unsettling and disturbing just for the sake of being unsettling and disturbing. Good books that are unsettling and disturbing are good because we are all deeply flawed, complex people, so elucidating these flaws and complexities in fiction is paramount in achieving verisimilitude.

I believe that almost everyone on this planet could be a morally reprehensible, antagonistic character in a novel. Imagine there actually was a God and God was a writer and God wrote novels in which God, the novelist, extrapolates from our lives only our most egregious moral failures. He populates the novel with only these incidents and we all end up looking like absolute monsters, or maybe not monsters, maybe just humans. I don’t have much patience for fiction that doesn’t explore characters’ dark sides or moral failures. I don’t care for characters who aren’t deeply, deeply flawed, like all of us.

I think the increased attention we pay to political correctness is an overwhelmingly positive thing for society. Every single person on this planet deserves dignity and respect and the freedom to explore their humanity in any way they want, and it’s important to recognize the power that words have to dehumanize and relegate large swaths of society to second class citizenship or worse. That said, the tendency toward political correctness in fiction often results from a failure of nerve on the part of the writer. One could even make the argument that overt political correctness in fiction stems from a lack of empathy and understanding, more so than increased empathy and understanding. There’s a line toward the end of George Saunders’ brilliant short story “Tenth of December” that speaks to what I’m getting at:

He heard her in the entryway. Mol, Molly, oh boy. When they were first married they used to fight. Say the most insane things. Afterward, sometimes there would be tears. Tears in bed? And then they would—Molly pressing her hot wet face against his hot wet face. They were sorry, they were saying sorry with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he’d ever—

There are a number of things I love about this passage. First and foremost, I appreciate the sentiment, the idea that if you can accept a person for their flaws, your actually becoming a more compassionate person, your love for that person is growing, expanding outward to “encompass whatever new flawed thing.” I believe this sentiment can, and should, be applied to fiction. If a writer doesn’t allow their characters to be flawed, if a writer is afraid of writing characters who sometimes say and do the wrong thing, who sometimes say and do some pretty heinous things, they’re not actually doing a thorough job of exploring that characters’ humanity. They’re limiting their characters’ humanity and limiting their own compassion for their characters by expecting them to behave like moral beacons. Jeff Karr is recent Texas State MFA graduate.

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2018 Graudation

Oh how the years seem to fade away like an unstoppable millstone. Last Thursday, the Texas State class of 2018 graduated with their MFAs, hoping to pen the next great novel or poem, inspire and shape tomorrow’s future through teaching, or apply brilliantly their learned skills to another facet of life. The summer beckons us, full of book and writing clubs, books read while curled up on a porch lit by golden hour glows, and also catching up on sleep on those same porches.  While humming the melody of Vitamin C’s “Graduation Song (Friends Forever) as we watch our friends leave might bring us down, take heart embracing the changes and mold them into the best.

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Writing Up the Walls

There’s a lyric in Kanye West’s “Touch The Sky” that perfectly captures the essence of my first year in Texas State’s MFA Program. In the lyric, Kanye recounts a moment in his life before he was famous, “[b]efore anybody wanted K. West beats,” where he’d have frequent nervous breakdowns when weighing the level of talent of his contemporaries against his own. I remember listening to “Touch The Sky” somewhere near the end of my first semester in the program and getting chills. 

“This is exactly what I’m going through,” I said to myself, and it was true. 

The first panic attack I’d ever had in my life happened on the first day of class, in my first workshop. I wasn’t even the one being workshopped, but I was paralyzed by anxiety. The praise I had prepared for the piece was shallow in comparison to those of my classmates, and when it came time for suggestions or criticism, I could only say, “This piece feels finished.” Before saying any of that, though, I had a panic attack and felt the vocal floor beneath me fall out mid-sentence like in Looney Tunes when Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff but only falls when he realizes there’s no ground beneath him. To put it bluntly, my first year in Texas State’s MFA program was a much-needed deconstruction of ego and intuition—only, I didn’t know it then.

Writing with depression is pretty much the same as doing anything with depression—procrastination, a fear of failure, an ability to keenly see exactly what it is you need to do and how to get there, but being unable to find the motivation and spiraling because that lack of motivation feels inherently, morally bankrupt. However, the benefit of it, if you can call it that, is that writing is a solitary art. You don’t have to perform for anyone or play a role, and failing to produce work on any given day, while devastating, doesn’t let anyone else down, doesn’t affect anyone else. 

I think the solitary nature of writing is a big part of why I’m a writer, and for a longtime, it served me well. I breezed through my late teens and early twenties by folding inside of myself. My depression was manageable as long as I could set aside time to embrace it in my own way, shut out the world, tell friends that I couldn’t hang out because I was busy honing my craft. It was masking the problem, but it didn’t feel like artifice or avoidance. It felt like actualization. If I hadn’t gotten into an MFA program, it probably would have continued this way, but I might not be as strong of a writer as I am today.

In some ways, the MFA feels at odds with what it means to be a writer. There’s a huge emphasis on community and comradery, while at the end of the day, you still have to go home alone, do the thing alone, regardless of how many readers or writer buddies you have. I have to admit, when I entered the program, I resented this. For someone like me, it was horrifying. Because of how insulated I had made myself, I was the best writer I knew, and being confronted with the fact that there were plenty of writers better than me, sitting right next to me in class, was a hard pill to swallow. 

I had panic attacks at pretty much every turn in my first year in the program—paper due dates, workshop days, nights at the bar with classmates. I was absolutely certain that I had been accepted into the program by mistake or because of some aspect of my background—anything but my writing. What’s funny, though, is that the cause of this distress (this emphasis on community) was also, in some way, the thing that helped me get through it. The Zoloft also helped, I’m sure, but that’s a different blog for a different time.

It was certain members of my cohort, Jeff Karr, Luke Helm, Caroline DeBruhl, who, through their openness about their own experiences with depression and anxiety, helped me feel a little less alone. The more I pushed myself to embrace the community (as best as I could, in my own way), the more I started to understand that them being better than me, having more talent than me, having read more books than me, was exactly what I needed if I wanted to become a better writer. It may sound strange, but I needed to feel inadequate because it meant I had so much more to learn. I sat down, was humbled, and came out better because of it. 

If I had one thing to say to someone entering the program dealing with depression and anxiety (I know they are separate things, but in my experience, one begets the other, a snake eating its own tail) it would be simply: embrace it. Run headfirst into every social interaction, masters class, Q and A, and MFA reading, even if its terrifying, even if you’re worried others will find you out, will discover you’re not the greatest writer on the planet, because it just means there’s a better you out there, waiting. Daniel Cervantes is fiction writer born and raised in Houston, Texas, now in his third year in Texas State University's MFA Program for Creative Writing. He loves basketball, Haruki Murakami, and smoking too many cigarettes.

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What happens to Tony?

Our newest Front Porch Journal issue is out. Have you seen it yet? Surely you’ve read by now “THE DAY OF THE PARTY” by Thomas Cardamone and found out what happens to Tony?  “Tony, your polar bear, who is marooned on a white felt ice floe in a veritable sea of navy blue lambswool. Things are looking pretty grim for Tony: Won’t he ever make landfall?” Click here to find out!

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Front Porch Journal Issue 38 is now live! Check out poetry, fiction, reviews, and interviews. It is a smaller issue than typical because we have extra exciting news for you: We’re revamping and re-branding our journal this Summer! The revamp will include a new name, an updated website, an easier submission system, and cash-prize contests. It’s an exciting time for our journal and we can’t wait to enter this new chapter with our readers. We will still take submissions through this time of transition so please do submit for us!

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Religion in Fiction

I can think of very few workshop stories I’ve read (or written) during my time here at Texas State in which a character’s religion was explicitly stated, much less explored with any kind of earnestness. There’s something odd about that. If one was to take a trip around the world, stop at a hundred different establishments at random, and conduct a poll: How many people here consider religion to be, in one way or another, a defining aspect of their lives? 

I suspect a majority of hands would go up. And even those who leave their hands down would have to agree that the world we live in is shaped in large part by religious practices and spiritual beliefs past and present. Why then is religion so often absent from MFA student fiction? I have two theories, and I’ll keep my evidence centered on my own writing.

1) It’s scary.

Whether I like it or not, that tired old adage of “write what you know” has burrowed its way into my psyche and rears its ugly head anytime I try to write outside my own lived experience. The problem is I want to write about deranged cowboys and wannabe polar explorers and my life just isn’t that interesting. So I give myself some leeway and that maxim gives way to the set of guiding questions that pop up in every workshop class: Does this character seem alive? Are they represented authentically? But there are certain aspects of human identity that beg a much more important, more complex question: Do I have the right to write this story? 

Because the history of religion and the history of persecution cannot be uncoupled from each other, a character’s set of religious beliefs often feels like one such aspect. The question of a writer’s right is tangled up with privilege and history and forces a careful self-examination that is a terrifying thing to confront outside the safety of one’s writing desk. Thinking about my own characters, I’ve either given them roughly the same religious background as myself or avoided it altogether. Perhaps I’ve taken the easy way out, the way that circumvents the need for deep research and a necessary look in the mirror.

2) It feels potentially didactic.

I’ve learned the hard way that nothing makes a story more boring, more uninspiring, than a bald-faced lesson. It can sometimes feel like the very mention of God or any kind of spiritual practice will cast an entire story into a binary moralistic universe of right vs. wrong. That’s of course not true. There are so many great writers—Tobias Wolff and Flannery O’Connor are the first to come to my mind—who can present their typically Judeo-Christian characters with moral dilemmas and ultimately land on an ending that yields far more questions than definitive answers. It’s a really hard thing to pull off, though. And I suspect that mastering a story that explores religious themes and doesn’t come off as didactic takes a writer who is at a mature, non-dualistic stage of their own spirituality.

What I find interesting is that the workshop environment can often encourage a moralistic approach to critique even when religion isn’t part of the equation. One of my stories has a protagonist with (to my mind, anyway) abhorrent views about himself and the society around him. One piece of criticism that I received is that the story doesn’t condemn him enough because nothing bad ultimately happens to him. I have written roughly the same criticism to another writer before. The implication is that in literature good things should happen to good people and bad things should happen to bad people. That particular story of mine was flawed in many ways, but I’m not sure if the occurrence of bad things is the best way to separate my views as the writer from the views of the character. Whether a story is overtly religious or not, I think it’s important for us to move away from that binary model because unfortunately, in the real world, good things happen to bad people all the time. Just look at our current president.

For my next story, I want to try something new. For each of my characters, I’m going to sketch out their religious background, whatever that may mean, before I write the story. What do they believe? What do they fear? What brings them joy? What happens in their quiet, solitary moments? What, if anything, is their model for how other people should be treated?

How could the answers to these questions not affect who they are now? Eddie Mathis is a public school teacher and MFA fiction candidate at Texas State University. His stories have been published or are forthcoming in Adelaide Magazine and The Tishman Review.

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Congratulations to our very own MFA candidate, Claudia Delfina Cardona, and  professor of creative writing, Naomi Shihab Nye. Both of them are featured in the latest release of The Current, San Antonio's award-winning media news company. Click the link for the full story and explore all the wonderful poets.

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My Failed Novel

A few months ago I submitted, for the second time, a chunk of what I now like to call My Failed Novel to workshop. This, I’ve recently learned, is often frowned upon—as an MFA candidate, we are expected to produce and submit new work rather than subject our peers to the same old stories over and over again—but I figured as long as the draft had changed substantially, it wouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately, I am not one of those glorious people who learn from a mistake after the first go around. No, I will repeat a mistake a good three times before analyzing the problem and making a conscious effort to avoid cannonballing into round four. I joke about it, but I’m not proud of my tendency to ignore the obvious. How did the second workshop of My Failed Novel go? About the same as the first workshop. Not great (hence the incredibly original title). The second draft contained a lot of the same issues that existed within the first. Pastor Harry used the wrong spiritual lingo, the members of the church were not characters but caricatures, and certain aspects of the religious space were, overall, a hard buy. Despite all of this, I remained oblivious to the root of my novel’s apparent failure. It wasn’t that I thought I didn’t need to fix these issues or that I didn’t trust my readers. I had simply disregarded an important and painfully obvious fact: I was writing about a world I did not know, that of the mega church, of organized religion.

Some background: I am the spawn of a catholic mother and culturally Muslim, unreligious father. We attend church on Easter Sunday and pray before family dinners, but this is the extent of my religious upbringing. There is a Bible gathering dust somewhere in the depths of my childhood closet that I’ve never opened, and what I do know of its contents was gathered from an “Intro to Mythology” course I took during my junior year of college. So why had I decided to satirize the already self-satirizing mega church and create a protagonist who criticizes Christianity for a couple of vague, unexplored reasons when I don’t know the first thing about the subject? Beats me. I hadn’t done all the research and even if I had, well, Flannery O’ Connor wrote it best: “The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.”

This isn’t to say that, as a writer, you shouldn’t attempt to write something you haven’t experienced yourself or something you know little about without thorough research. There are no set rules for how to write a story. Part of the magic of writing fiction is having the freedom to create, to engage your imagination in such a way as to make the unreal real. 

In the case of My Failed Novel, I’ve learned that religion is currently not what I should, need, or want to be writing about. If I can’t pinpoint the importance of my novel about a judgmental janitor’s experience working at a bizarre mega-church, then nobody will. So, what have I learned about myself as a writer now that I am finally aware of these self-enforced limitations I’ve so poorly articulated in this long-winded blog post, you ask? If I don’t feel the absolute need to write a certain story, I shouldn’t write it. Instead of writing about something of which I have only a vague understanding, perhaps I should write about what I do know. Last, if I really want to write about a topic I am unfamiliar with, I need to do the goddamn research. Natalia Mujadzic is a first-year MFA student at Texas State University.

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Cyrus Cassells Reading Today

Beloved MFA poetry professor, Cyrus Cassells, is reading from his newly published book, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, today at Bookwoman in Austin, Texas, at 7:00. Join us in celebrating his work!

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National Poetry Writing Month

It’s April! Which means scores of writers dealing with allergi--we mean writing poems! Are you game to write on a poetry prompt each day of April? No matter if they come out long or short, bad or great, the important part is to touch your pen to the page. Today’s interesting prompt comes from The Odyssey Online: 1. Go to your Facebook and make a poem out of the first status you see in your newsfeed.

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Fall 2018 Registering

For the existing and incoming Texas State MFA students who are registering for classes today, we hope to see you in the Front Porch class next Fall! Helping edit, run, and plan a literary magazine is invaluable to writers wishing to crack into the publishing and editing worlds 

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Martin Espada at Texas State Today and Tomorrow

Acclaimed social poet, Martin Espada, will be performing a reading open to the public today and tomorrow. Come see him today at the Witliff collection at 3:30 PM and Friday at the Katherine Anne Porter house at 7:30 PM

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We each have words that are living, breathing, beings that exude from our hearts and bleed across a canvas, which represents our most intimate emotions, and we do this because if we did not write, we could not live. -  Tyler Anzan Cota

 Happy World Poetry Day to Each of You!🙏🏻🌼

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San Marcos Poetry Slam

This last year a new (and the only!) spoken word poetry organization in the area, Modern Muse, was created. You may not know it, but Modern Muse is linked with the Texas State MFA program.  We hope to see you out for our team slam this Sunday as we feature the nationally renowned poet, Chibbi. Signup is open to the public every week so  come speak your truth, whether you’re new or a veteran poet. Entry and competing is free so come down and experience the best of what San Marcos has to offer.

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Spring Break Prompt

(Art by Duncan Roberts)  It’s spring break for us here at Texas State, and while many of us are foregoing our writing skins for a little relaxation, some are utilizing the time to continue their writing. We’d like you to mull over the following prompt in your free time: Write a poem or story about a secret you have that you feel no one else can relate to.  Once you write it, we imagine you’ll be surprised how much either a release it is, or how much others empathize.

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Happy International Women’s Day! Explore in the video above the amazing life of the revolutionary Emma Goldman, from the 19th and 20th century. She was arrested countless times for giving out free birth control, convincing men to not sign up for the draft, and telling unemployed workers if they were denied work and food to take it from the rich. Her life was devoted to freedom, liberty, and equality in the full meanings of each of those words and making sure all those around her knew of her fire.