MC: What do you think about the proliferation of MFA programs in America?

GD: My instinctive English reaction is that they’re stupid.  But the fact of the matter is that since the Second World War, ninety percent of the great writing in English has been done by American writers who have gone through MFA-like programs.  It’s worked. 

MC: With all the nonfiction MFA’s, is there a danger that what you say has happened to the novel will happen to the essay?  Will the great flexibility of the essay be canonized?

GD: It’s possible.  But out of that will come some really really exceptional people who wouldn’t have had the chance to publish otherwise.  You only need a very very small number of good books to render it a great year.

MC: What are you going to teach in Iowa this fall?

GD: In addition to a workshop, a reading course with slightly unusual non-fiction books that I like and that I think other people might also like. I’m quite drawn to these types of books that I’m absolutely incapable of reading.  It took me ten years to start reading Richard Rhodes’ Atomic Bomb book. It took me twenty years to get around to reading Executioner’s Song.  But the thing is it takes no longer to read a thousand page book than a four hundred page book, because you do that thing where you read it every time you’ve got twenty minutes on the Tube. So I’ll be teaching History of Bombing, by Sven Lindquist.  A Kapuscinski book. Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, by Rebecca West. David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film, which is one of the great books of our time—one of the Titanic books.

MC: It looks like a bathroom book.

GD:  It’s great. No sane person would write all that.