“It was the myth of fingerprints
I’ve seen them all and man
They’re all the same”

from Paul Simon’s “The Myth of Fingerprints”

One of my primary tasks these days is reading MFA applications, a Himalayan mountain of them. We have close to 400, possibly more. For six places in the fiction program! Needless to say, the task is daunting, often tiring and boring, and also hugely fascinating.

When you read so much fiction you begin to see trends. There are stories about growing up gay in a Christian family. There are the stories about being an immigrant, about domestic abuse, about drugs and addiction, about love gone wrong. Every once in a while a story startles you with the precision of its language, the words it uses to describe rebellion, or jealousy, or how it feels to be dumped. That is what we look for, the unique fingerprint, and finding it is thrilling, it gets you in the gut.

But the aggregate speaks not to the unique, but to sameness, and the sameness of these expressions sometimes culls up in me a kind of nihilism about the act of writing. What is the point?

On other days, the best days, I’m moved by what these applications reveal about the overwhelming human hunger to testify, to bear witness to our experiences, to share them with others. Some of these students are so committed to the writer’s calling they have given up remunerative careers; they are not just willing but eager to live the impecunious, solitary life of a writer.

Which scares me—and excites me. Because I know from my own experience that the mere act of testifying, joining that chorus of human beings committed to living the examined life, is by itself—whether you’re heard widely or not—deeply satisfying.

p.s. I know I have not been true to my vow to blog more frequently in 2011, but I’m working on it! I really will eventually figure out how to make it a priority!