Young people are more isolated from adults than they’ve ever been. Unless you’re an adult who is getting paid to somehow be involved with young people, chances are most adults have no contact with young people that they are not related to. And the isolation is kind of structural and it’s very deep and it’s very visible…. It’s not fucking rocket science– young people need a tremendous amount of support and they need a tremendous amount of conversation and people to listen to them.
- from The Panorama Book Review (which I received in December and am still reading.) Our communities are segregated not just by race and language, religion and politics, but very strictly by age and family situation. Diaz also discusses how literature in this country might change if older people and people with families were included in MFA programs.
I’m considering going back for an MFA. I’m probably not “older” enough at this point to fall into the category you’re discussing; if I went back this year I’d only have about 10 or so years on recent graduates continuing on for the MFA. And MFAs generally have older applicants fairly regularly too, right?
ANYWAY, the point is, I wonder if, assuming that I have a decade on my classmates, would I impart my experience and knowledge on them, or would they impress their youthfulness on me? Hopefully both?
And, more specifically to your point, I can’t remember the last time I had a conversation with a child.
He noted that most MFA students are between 23 and 27, so I think that young as you are you might feel quite mature. Hopefully your program would have a range of people and they would all inform each other. I was feeling especially the segregation when I was in Williamsburg this weekend and everyone in the bars and restaurants was also between 23 and 27and had gone, one fears, to the same colleges…. For some reason the diversity of New York means even more segregation- in a smaller city with fewer choices, citizens have to use the same bars, coffeeshops, and grocery stores. Not so NY. How about St. Louis?
interesting on the diversity/NY front! i never would have thought of it that way. we are literally drowning in all of our kids friends, they all have multiples and are all under 10. we are almost the only ones we know locally without kids, certainly within our closeknit group. so i feel i have a fair amount of kid contact/convos considering i don’t have kids. now that we are getting older, i guess our demographic is shifting. but we still live in a town with an OVERwhelming senior citizen population. wherever we go we bring the average age down and i that’s not a joke! the middle ones are working married peeps with kids and the few younger ones are out at bars (i assume).
interesting to think that perhaps we get more mixing up by being in a small town with such limited coffee shop choices
That’s exactly it— and of course it would be nice to have a few more peers, or more working artists etc. but the mix of ages is really beneficial. So, winter in the city, summer at the sea?