Special KT, I know you're a real person, and I wish you well. Here's the best advice I can give you.
1. Do whatever it takes to get WLS to pay what they owe you. Bug the bejeezus out of them until they give you checks that don't bounce.
WLS clients aren't assets, because WLS burns them. The only two assets WLS have are their well-honed scam business model, and their trained, reliable employees like you. Has it been clear to you that you and others like you are the ones doing all the work? Do you realize that WLS has been charging its clients $90.00 for the assessments for which they've paid you $7.50? You've been a real money maker for them.
If they can't afford to pay you, or they don't care about retaining your services, either their business is collapsing, or they're planning to abandon it. Either way, you need to get your last paychecks from them.
Do not be tempted to go into the business of selling $90.00 assessments directly to wanna-be writers. For one thing, you won't have the benefit of Robert Fletcher's business front end, which is a highly refined intake scoop for suckers. For another, doing that is like setting out to be a glamorous, highly selective, and well-paid courtesan: that may be what you imagine doing, but it's not where you'll wind up.
2. Look for a new job. If you really want to work in publishing, you need to move to New York. There are very few real publishing jobs in the Chicago area, and you're not in line for any of them. Your best move would be to get a job in a bookstore. That'll be worth a hundred times more in NYC publishing than your experience with WLS.
3. Honestly, pinky swear and hope to die: don't call yourself an editor when you're looking for a job, because you aren't one. With your background, any job you can get as an "editor" will be one you don't want. You're getting a BFA in creative writing, you've had some experience
critiquing other students, and you've worked for WLS. That makes you an editor like someone who can drive nails is a carpenter.
If you really want to be an editor, you're going to have to take an entry-level job at a trade publishing house and learn from scratch. You're also going to have to unlearn a lot of what you think you know.
I'm not trying to be mean. At the moment, there is not a particle of mean in me. I do know what I'm talking about, and I'm trying to give you the best and truest advice I can. The fact is, you have some bad news coming to you. You can reject it, or you can listen and adjust your course and get on with your life.
4. Here's the hard part: having a history of working in a bookstore is also going to be worth more than that BFA you're scheduled to get. I'm truly sorry.
Creative writing programs have been popping up all over the American academic scene like moth eggs hatching in woollens in the spring. They're popular, they're cheap to administer and staff, and most people can't tell whether the instructors have any idea what they're talking about.
All of these programs have been turning out hundreds of graduates with BFAs and MFAs. An impressive number of those graduates can't write for beans, which means they can't support themselves or pay off their student loans by practicing their trade. This leaves them two options. One is to get a job doing clerical, sales, fast-food, or computer maintenance work. The other is to wedge themselves into an opening in the teaching/grant-getting/workshopping universe. They're joined in this by journalists who've been set at liberty by the ongoing collapse of the newspaper industry. Together, they help turn out yet more BFAs and MFAs.
I've looked at the list of
full-time faculty members in your fiction-writing program. Roughly half of them have near-zero commercial publication credits, and many of those who have published commercially are journalists. The
department chair has no history of commercial publication, unless you count instructional materials for wanna-be writers, which no one does. Five of the people on that list, including the department chair, describe themselves as having novels in progress (some of which appear to have been in progress for a long time), but have no published novels. That's something I'd expect to see in the students, not the teaching staff. One instructor says she's finished a book, but (a.) it's journalism or near-journalism, and (b.) she self-published it through BookSurge.
One full-time faculty member, Shawn Shiflett, is the nephew of the husband-and-wife team of professors who appear to be the real powers in the department. His only novel, published by Akashic, got one of the
worst PW reviews I've seen in a while. More than one of the Amazon reader reviews accuses Shiflett of giving his students extra credit for posting good reviews of his book. I have no idea whether that's true. However, I strongly suspect that Shiflett paid for the review he got from
The Joy of Publishing Writer's Service, an entity which makes a habit of giving four- and five-star reviews to books published by the likes of Dorrance and Publish America.
(Note:
Akashic is a tiny, scrappy, upfront "urban publisher" that's happy to publish strange or irregular material as long as the author understands that they aren't going to sell many copies. It's a figleaf away from self-publication, but it is a real operation. A lot of novels by Columbia College faculty get published by Akashic.)
Three of the full-time faculty members got their Bachelors' or Masters' degrees from the Columbia College writing program. Almost all of them list publication credits from
Sport Literate, Private Arts, or
f Magazine, which are so closely tied to the Columbia College writing program that I'm tempted to refer to them as the department's clubzines. In general, publications of that sort, wherever they originate, are best understood to be academic fanzines: they don't pay their own way, they don't pay their contributors, and they're read by a relatively small sub-universe of enthusiasts who tend to know one another, and who write and publish their own fanzines for circulation within the group. A few --
TriQuarterly, f.i. -- are more like semiprozines.
A point in CC's favor:
Phyllis Eisenstein is part-time faculty there.
Instruction is built around the Story Workshop Method (R). This was
invented by professor emeritus
John Schultz. He also runs the
Story Workshop Institute:
The Story Workshop Institute is an independent educational and professional trade association, organized specifically to train and provide certification for teachers in the use of the Story Workshop approach, to promote the use of Story Workshop approaches, and to conduct Story Workshop programs for education and business. ... The Story Workshop Institute is a not-for-profit corporation under the laws of the State of Illinois.
How many schools use the Story Workshop Institute's training and certification program?
Check it out. The independence of the Story Workshop Institute may be one of the most striking pieces of fiction produced by the Columbia College writing program. I could of course be wrong, but it does look like the department is running a round-robin self-accreditation system.
I'm not saying the Story Workshop Method is bad. It looks more like a good
writing exercise than an overall system. Also, if you check out John Schultz's own material,
here and
here -- Amazon will let you read the frontmatter of his teaching manual -- it looks like it's more oriented toward nonfiction than fiction. Which stands to reason; John Schultz writes nonfiction. For writing fiction, if used all by itself, it strikes me as a recipe for generating interesting but unfinished stories.
I'm probably being too critical. I'm sure Columbia College teaches its students a great many worthwhile things about writing. But overall, what I'm seeing there is to commercially publishing fiction as home cooking is to running a chain of restaurants. If you want to be a professional editor, you still have a long way to go.
Anyway.
I truly am sorry. This has got to feel like Jacob finding out he has to work another seven years to get the sister he wants, or Parsifal being told he has to go back and do the whole quest over again. I'm not happy with what I'm telling you, but it does conform to reality as I know it, and I've worked in publishing a long time.
Truth is better, even when it hurts. One of the things we've observed over our years as scamhunting irregulars is the ever-increasing tendency of publishing scams to duplicate all the forms of real publishing without ever touching the real industry. It's like they're made out of fairy gold, and we're cold iron.
You've seen something of Robert Fletcher's scams for writers. What he's done to you is a scam as well, and he's not the first to do it. There've been a number of operations that have sold high-priced editing and editorial assessments to writers, and at the same time have sold underpaid would-be editors on the idea that they're getting hands-on experience and training.
There's more than one catch in that arrangement. First, the clientele has no idea what real editing looks like. The editors could get away with doing almost anything to them. You don't learn editing that way. Second, huge parts of an editor's job are missing from that arrangement. To go back to the cooking analogy, home cooking will teach you about ingredients, but it won't teach you about portion control, supplier relationships, or menu pricing strategies. Third, you're getting inapplicable experience. Scammers will take on anyone, no matter how bad they are. Most of what they handle is stuff you'd never lay hands on at a professional publishing house, except to put it into a return envelope accompanied by a polite rejection note. Fourth, the places where you want to work will not recognize what you've been doing as experience.
This forum sees a lot of writers who've been rooked. That's how some of the regulars first came here. Trust me on this one: our sympathy is vast.
