Chasing Kim L.

Micah Cash's Extremely Literary and Gorgeous anti-MFA Piece

Dear Republic,

It’s Sunday and, in the Republic of Letters, that’s the sacred day set aside for asking for money. So give! Splurge! Go crazy! YOLO! (Does anybody say ‘YOLO’ anymore?) In the past week, we have killed God, mocked the Chicago Sun-Times, covered Tony Tulathimutte, worldbuilding, the entire cast of LitStack, heaved every question we could think of at Brandon Taylor, and had the internet’s only piece on William Dean Howells. All of this is being done on a shoestring, but in this economy even shoestrings get expensive. So give. Дай. Geben. Donnez. Vous ne serez pas toujours jeunes. (It’ll probably come back around to you anyway whenever you write a piece.)

The deadline is fast approaching for the Commencement contest. Write what you want to tell your 22-year-old self that your actual Commencement speaker maybe didn’t cover the first time around. Send to republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com with “Commencement” in the subject line.

And now without further ado, The Republic of Letters will return to its happy place — shitting on MFAs. Which Micah Cash does in an unusually graceful and heartbreaking way.

-ROL

CHASING KIM L.

It was my custom to vet the fellow members of my writing workshop. You could find out a lot on the internet. I liked to enter the semester knowing who had previously worked as a management consultant, who wrote milquetoast op-eds for their college paper, and who might have the gift. In late summer, between my first and second year of grad school, I greedily clicked the roster in my inbox. While the rest of the entries had two or even three full names, the last name on the list was simply “Kim L.” With nothing else to go on, Google search proved futile; Kim is one of the most common family names in Korea. All I could do was imagine what kind of girl offers only an initial to the registrar.

On the gleaming September afternoon of our opening class, I arrived early, securing a seat next to the ancient air conditioner. I scoured the faces for a possible Kim L., but all the women matched pictures from my sleuthing. Half the class arrived in a pack just before the hour, including our professor, Josh Thomas (so commonly referred to by both names that we didn’t know what to call him in person), a once-cult figure of experimental fiction who now wrote conventional stories of domestic dread. I recognized him from his debut book jacket; since then, he’d lost some weight and all his hair. He poured a dark liquid from his thermos into a mug adorned with our school’s weighty insignia, then began taking roll. When he called Kim L., there was a stale pause until a petite hand raised from the folds of an oversized black sweatshirt. The person inside pushed their inky black bangs aside, revealing a round, pale face and bloodshot eyes. I was twenty-three at the time, younger than Kim L., but I remember thinking he looked like a scared boy.

Kim is my last name, he said.

Right, sorry about that, said the professor; I just read what they give me. What should we call you, then?

L., he said quietly, his eyes again hidden behind a thick shock of hair and his robust hood.

L., okay, lovely. Welcome!

The professor was obviously uncomfortable but, like me, assumed a cultural barrier and hardly wished to start the year off with a faux pas.

After a short speech on workshop decorum, our professor asked each of us to share our names, how we came to writing, and one of our favorite authors. When it came around to L., he said that before writing, he had been a violinist and a classically trained painter. I used to think writing had little to offer as an art form, he said; in the world of Debussy and Kandinsky, literature was a worthless academic exercise, or worse, IP for a streaming conglomerate. His cheeks reddened again, and he seemed agitated by the room’s stunned response. But then I read Knausgaard and Cusk, he continued. I found it amazing that they came to their form independently, separated by the North Sea, yet simultaneously, like Newton and Leibniz discovering the calculus. These novels of radical honesty changed my life, L. said. In fifty years, everyone will write like them.

Our professor let his surprise slip for half a second before taking a labored gulp from his mug, thanking L., and moving on to the next student. I didn’t agree with L., but I admired his nerve; at least his answer was more interesting than my spiel about Don DeLillo and the American sentence. With a single declaration, my conception of L. flipped, and I felt I knew more about him than I’d learned from any of my classmates’ extensive online data. In workshop terms, his answer revealed that he had a voice, a point of view, something to say. He had style. I intended to introduce myself after class, but the exit was blocked by a group exchanging contact information and making vague plans, including the three eager beavers who’d volunteered to submit stories for the following week’s workshop. I raced down the stairs and through the lobby, only to watch L.’s black sweatshirt exit the School of the Arts and disappear into the quad, a renegade amongst the masses.

For our second class, L. sat in the back corner and didn’t speak for three hours. I felt his silence was not entirely due to shyness. The three submissions were boring and inartful, even by student standards. In truth, there wasn’t much to say about them, but I wasn’t as principled as L.; I couldn’t risk my participation credit. The next week was the same. While my classmates offered thinly veiled suggestions designed to appeal to general audiences and publishing agents, I tried not to stare at the hunched figure in the black sweatshirt, his bangs obscuring his forehead completely, his hands wan and dewy. It takes incredible restraint to remain silent for three hours in a room with other people. At that moment, it seemed the ultimate virtue of a writer. Perhaps I was cynical, given the quality of our classmates’ work so far. For their part, they appeared content to ignore L.’s existence entirely. It was stuffy in that fourth-floor classroom, and I continued to claim my seat by the window (which remained stubbornly shut, its seam caked by decades of dust), while L. sat closest to the door, never removing his sweatshirt, always the last to arrive and first to leave.

The following week, the first submission was by a girl named Lucy from rural Virginia. Her story was strange and thrillingly lyrical; in my opinion, the best of all of us by a wide margin. To my disbelief, L. raised his hand immediately. His voice was louder than I remembered, confident and shrill. He heaped praise on Lucy’s radical transparency and the bravery it took to invent a form of her own. Then he went on, losing self-consciousness and speaking as fast as he could think, freely associating. He referenced Nietzsche and chaos theory, the victory of Freud over Jung in the public imagination, the poverty of modern cinema, and the purity of text without image. It didn’t totally make sense; some people gazed busily at their laps, others openly rolled their eyes. L.’s offense was not only discussing Lucy’s work in the realm of ideas (rather than beta-testing a consumer product), but worse, admitting the obvious: Lucy’s work was superior to the others. He had broken a cardinal rule of workshop and the sociable literary world writ large — the insistence that as long as you called yourself a writer and forked over tuition, your work had inherent, coequal artistic merit — and thereby thrust a miasma of insecurity and tension into the classroom dynamic. Eventually, the professor interrupted to suggest the discussion had become overly theoretical.

My story was next up for critique. It was dime-store DeLillo, a young sportswriter dream-walking through a depleted Upper West Side. Once again, L. raised his hand. The critique was more balanced than it had been for Lucy. He approved of the close perspective and the specificity of certain details. He said the success of my story depended on the narrator’s willingness to abdicate his self-regard, to relinquish narrative control and risk ridicule. For now, it was clear to him that I was holding back, unwilling to stand naked in front of the reader.

Later in my critique, a classmate called my protagonist pretentious. L.’s hand shot up again, eyes burning behind his hair. Isn’t pretension required, he said, if we’re trying to create works of art? Even the professor managed a pained smile. We ran out of time for the third submission, so I couldn’t know for sure if L. only spoke for submissions he deemed worthy, or if the professor had warned him about his participation grade, or if he just felt like talking that day. His submission, and his feedback letter to me (another part of our grade), were due by midnight.

Afterwards, I joined most of the class at the bar. The others didn’t share my fascination with L.; they simply hated him. Evidently, he had offended several of my classmates with his feedback letters. He’d told a former Facebook employee that he ought to give up writing rather than continuing to punch out Raymond Chandler facsimiles, and recommended a quiet girl from Jaffna apply her talents to the young adult genre. Of course, the victims had already forwarded the overly critical critiques to our professor. Teetering on my barstool, I responded with the required concern, but as I looked at my fellow writers, with the harsh light reflecting off their hard kombuchas, I saw whiny, striving careerists who wouldn’t know a good sentence if it crawled into bed with them. I didn’t tell my classmates what I really thought in their feedback letters. Nobody did; that was part of what you paid for. Except for L. He seemed to like your story, someone snickered.

That night, it was quiet in my basement bedroom besides the patter of rain against the dimpled window. I opened my computer to find an email from L. to our class chain, nothing but an attachment. L.’s submission, untitled and two pages under the minimum, was a cold first-person account of a young man traveling from Seoul to visit his elderly parents in the rural countryside. The story took the form of monologues recited to the narrator, themselves containing nested parables remembered by the family’s ancestors. Several phrases struck me so soundly that they still present themselves in my mind to this day. “The mountains framed the lake,” L.’s narrator said when he finally left the putrid home of his convalescent parents, “I heard the sound of the drums, and the feeling of life ahead of me.” Contemplating his father’s wish that he return to the country and start a family, he tries to imagine becoming a father, what it might be like to “live in the sound of children.” I finished the story convinced once and for all of L.’s mysterious brilliance. He still hadn’t sent me a critique letter, though I obsessively refreshed my inbox.

L. showed up late to his own workshop, taking his corner seat and removing a slim bottle of orange juice from his bulging backpack. The professor summarized his story and opened a few questions for discussion. People criticized the lack of plot events, the unrealistic monologues, the overly formal tone, and the cold emotional distance of the narration. L. was not paying attention. He sipped his orange juice without furnishing a laptop or a notepad, and then, when the juice was finished, he fixed his gaze on the movie poster hung on the facing wall: Salma Hayek in a red bikini, advertising a blockbuster produced by an alumnus of our institution’s esteemed screenwriting track. L. looked bored and slightly annoyed throughout the discussion, which was typically vapid and aimed at impressing our professor, yet more personal, envious, and vicious than usual. By the end of the hour, the room was a charged and uncomfortable environment. I spoke only once, mentioning the nice image of the mountains and the pros and cons of paraphrased speech. Mostly I stared at my notepad and fondled my pen under the table; the air conditioning had broken, and at one point in the passive-aggressive discussion, the one true adult in our class, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Storm, stood up, pried opened the fourth-floor window and stuck his face in the breeze. At the end of class, L. escaped before even our professor could catch him to set a time for the standard post-workshop meeting, and I was once again left standing at the bottom of the stairs, holding the printed letter I’d tweaked for hours that morning, watching his black sweatshirt recede and then vanish.

The next day, a cohort of university employees, including residence hall staff and food service workers, went on strike over the university’s failure to provide clear overtime rules, sexual harassment protections, and supplementary medical coverage. The strikers were soon joined by the PhD and work-study union, bringing hundreds of strikers and organizers to the main quad where they handed out crackers, juice, and informational pamphlets. Messages of solidarity soon poured into my cohort’s group chats and email chains. Several of my classmates with significant followings posted about the strike on social media, between their usual stream of lifestyle writing content. The writing program informed us that classes would remain in session, since the School of the Arts did not have PhD programs and the maintenance staff were contract workers, not university employees. Our professor emailed separately, asking us to message him individually if we were uncomfortable attending class under the circumstances. Vocal members of the group chat suggested switching to virtual class. This way, I supposed, we could support the striking workers by showing the university that residence, food service, and even janitorial services were unnecessary for our continuing education. Hearing our concerns but not wanting to disrupt the in-person community we were building, our professor decided we’d meet in his living room, only five minutes from campus but independent from university resources.

I passed the picketers in front of the campus gates as I walked toward the apartment of our distinguished teacher, whose incomprehensible first novel was hailed as “the most audacious literary debut in decades.” Everyone was jittery around his long dining table, sneaking glances at the bookshelves overflowing with galleys and tasteful décor. L. wasn’t there, and to begin the class, our professor informed us that L. would no longer be joining us; a pattern of behavior had demonstrated his unwillingness to be a constructive member of our workshop, both in class, through feedback letters, and in their one-on-one meeting. I was desperate to know more. Given the droll sensibility of his fiction, it wouldn’t surprise me if, like L., my professor considered us all talentless frauds, the spoiled progeny of the meritocracy.

The rest of the class was noticeably unburdened by L.’s banishment. The bad vibes were gone, they kept saying. Couldn’t you just feel the energy shift? Well, yes. The workshop was back to normal, free of all tension and artistry. I wished I could have seen L.’s reaction to our professor’s domestic reality, the bow-tied doormen in the lobby, the elaborate tilework in the kitchen. We went on discussing that week’s submission, a story from the perspective of a man pretending to be a cat, crawling around naked and defecating in a plastic box, sleeping curled up at the foot of his roommate’s bed.

That evening, I emailed L., composing and deleting the message several times until I found the right tone:

Hi L.,

Josh said you won’t be returning to class. I hope everything is okay, and that you keep writing. For what it’s worth, I admire your honesty on and off the page. If you ever want to talk, exchange work, or whatever, you know how to reach me.

His response arrived at 5:30 a.m. Had he just slept, or was he about to? I’ve since lost the email, locked out of the university server, but I remember the font was small and nonstandard:

Thank you. Your sympathy is rare, and along with self-awareness, vital for the artist. I do not like giving up. This experience has been very painful for me, and maybe that is a good thing.

Please give my regards to Josh and the class :)

That was the last I saw or heard from Kim L.

Several Circles, Vasily Kandinsky (1926)

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There has been considerable discourse lately about Substack as the vanguard of American letters. Bold declarations by a few prominent literary Substackers, coinciding with the timely launches of their own novels and online publications (hosted on Substack), espouse a view something like this: just when literary culture was pronounced dead for the umpteenth time, ransacked by monopoly capitalism, declining literacy, and generative artificial intelligence, here comes Substack to revive the last gasp of our ancient tradition!

Here I am obliged to mention a few facts: Substack is a privately owned algorithmic social media platform whose primary public investor is Andreessen Horowitz, the largest venture capital fund in the world by assets under management, whose other positions include Bored Ape NFTs, disgraced WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s real-estate startup, Open AI, and a $400 million commitment toward Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Crass material analysis aside, there is something deeper that has bothered me about the credulous adoption of Substack as not merely “a new economic engine for culture,” as they put it on their home page, but also the future of writing. Watching literary luminaries and acquaintances migrate from Twitter to Substack as their playground for relentless self-promotion and internecine debates, I realized that for many of us who love reading and writing, to paraphrase Mark Fisher, it is easier to imagine the end of literature than the end of social media platforms.

And as I tried to figure out what that means, I kept coming back to Kim L.

The eager volunteers in my workshop were aspiring participants in a social media to Big Publishing pipeline that required constant maintenance of public image/personal branding and constant “uplifting” of adjacent writers and their public images/personal brands. Those who didn’t participate in this parasocial economy were immediately suspect, as was their work. The self-congratulatory, tension-free vibes of the workshop produced the same flattening as posting: a cat video, a wildfire, a new matcha spot, a message of solidarity with the workers of the world, all of it equally valid, so long as the right people were seeing it.

The literary Substackers, it is safe to say, see themselves in direct opposition to this worldview. They are, by and large, good writers, as well as great journalists, critics, theater directors, and students of literature. The successful MFA-industrial complex writers are mostly white and Asian women, while the successful Substack writers are mostly white men. They are anti-social media (until Substack released “Notes”), anti-commercialism (besides constant direct appeals to subscribe), anti-establishment (except the old establishment, those dudes rocked). They like Freud and Nietzsche. If they heard my story, they’d identify with Kim L. “In fifty years, everyone will write like them.”

But finally, as my inbox was bombarded with the same dozen writers reviewing each others’ books and then reviewing each others’ reviews of each others’ books, lining up to defend the platform where they suddenly found themselves as important, in-demand figures, manufacturing shibboleths in real time, I decided the two groups are remarkably similar: just swap out Instagram for Substack, Big Five for small presses, and woke for post-woke. The common thread is a self-conscious yet nearly religious devotion to selling yourself.

Everybody loves a community in which they are popular. This is part of the essential logic of social media. If you are so popular that followers are paying you for the privilege of reading your thoughts, so popular that your personal brand becomes a key node for parasocial climbing, it may warp your view of the true nature and value of your community.

Several of my classmates now have book deals, some of which were described as “major” in press releases. Kim L. does not, as far as I know, though I look for his name every time I’m in a bookstore. Neither does Lucy. As for me, well…

If I were as honest and principled as Kim L., I’d shout from the rooftops that marketing and self-promotion are a sin against literature. Every time I’m forced to do it, I feel complicit and debased. I’d yell that the platforms will not save us; they will only make money for a chosen few who best adapt their writing style to the demands of their tech-bro overlords and the algorithmically shaped preferences of their premium subscribers (in an MFA they call it an “audience”).

One of the aforementioned prominent literary Substackers coined the term “neo-Romantic” to describe the in-group of fiction writers on this platform. Let me be clear: there is nothing romantic or Romantic about Substack; absolutely nothing. It is a convenient social media platform whose purpose is to make money for its investors, most of whom would not blink before scraping the platform’s content as training data for their more important investments in AI consumer products.

Substack may be great for freelance journalists, personal essayists, and enthusiastic hobbyists. It may be the new place to launch an obscure magazine. It may rival BookTok. It may accelerate the day when every writer is their own boss and their own employee, not to mention agent, editor, publisher, marketer, and spokesperson, a conglomerate of one, human capital ruthlessly exploiting their selfsame labor. It may be irrelevant in 5 years (none of my high school students have heard of it, including the readers). It may be purchased by Elon Musk tomorrow.

Sometimes, when the whole situation tests my capacity for despair, I think of my heroes: Don DeLillo, Donna Tartt, and Paul Beatty (just to name the living ones). None of them has a Substack. I’d like to think none of them has ever uttered the ugly name. The house of literature has many doors, so the saying goes, and I choose to chase their example, just as I’m still chasing the black sweatshirt of Kim L.

All names and a few details have been changed, and the emails are reproduced from memory.

Micah Cash

is a high school speech & debate teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His writing has appeared in Forever Magazine, Aesthetica Magazine, The Village Voice, and elsewhere.