in an mfa program (in my mfa program, at least, but i imagine it’s true of any of them), they’ll tell you, repeatedly, that there’s no writer that’s not also a reader. ‘tell’ isn’t quite accurate, though– it’s probably more accurately categorized as a reminder, really, as this is not some top secret piece of insider information. regardless, they say it a lot. writers are readers.

it makes sense, and there aren’t any good arguments to be made against it. if you read, you get ideas, inspiration, motivation, etc. if you don’t, then you don’t. the more you read, the more you will have to say, and the more sophisticated ideas you’ll be able to try out in order to communicate those ideas.

i don’t read much.

my students (mostly first-year composition students) love it when i say that. and it’s not even that i don’t enjoy reading, because i do. i just don’t do it very often. i used to think that this was a relatively recent development, like i used to read voraciously when i was young, but if i really think about it i’ve never been any kind of stereotypical ‘reader.’ i did read a lot when i was little, but it wasn’t great literature, even by the standards of being a little kid or a teenager. when i was little, i read MAD Magazine like crazy, i read plenty of Hardy Boys books, some scattered other stuff and, like, lots of TV Guide. i never even read the Lord of the Rings books, i never read the Chronicles of Narnia books, none of that stuff. the closest i came was reading parodies of them in MAD.

i was pretty obsessed with MAD, though. my grandma would take me grocery shopping with her, and i would get every new issue, every new useless special issue, just anything they had. i don’t even remember where they came from, but there also were all these shitty MAD paperbacks at my grandparents’ house that i also devoured. due to these old paperbacks and the special issues (which just reprinted material from old issues). because of MAD‘s habit of reprinting all their old shit and selling it again, i had a pretty good working knowledge of culture and politics from the 1960s and 70s, and i was always the first person in my group of friends to recognize a joke about Ralph Nader or Henry Kissinger. i hated ‘The Lighter Side of…,’ and i loved anything by Don Martin. my favorite things were the advertising parodies, but there was nothing, in any issue, i didn’t read over and over (including ‘The Lighter Side of…’). actually, the first things i ever wrote were attempts to create my own MAD-style articles, featuring my own scathing cultural critiques and artless homophobia, such as a feature depicting celebrity license plates that included one aimed at Arsenio Hall which read “IMGAY4EDDIE” (in reference to his close friendship with Eddie Murphy). we really do gain inspiration from what we read.

if i keep this in mind, maybe i’m as much of a ‘reader’ now as i ever was. i spend tons of time on the internet, reading blogs, message boards, social media, etc., which technically is reading. i’m not sure that this is much better or worse than MAD Magazine. except that now i’m sophisticated enough to make my own jokes about Henry Kissinger (Dick Cheney? John Bolton? Brett Kavanaugh?) and, hopefully, any lingering homophobia is much more thoughtful and inclusive.