University of Iowa - Hawkeye Yearbook (Iowa City, IA)

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l There is an old saw among writers, usually quoted at the expense of those eager young students who congregate at the feet of visiting poets and novelists, that goes like this: Writing can't be taught, it can only be learned. Meaning that anyone who is on the level about writing should be home banging away on the typewriter instead of sitting around waiting for pearls of wisdom to drop from the guru of his Choice. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that the oldest and most distinguished creative-writing pro- gram in the land - one that has offered as teachers such literary luminaries as Philip Roth, Nelson Algren, Vance Bourjaily, Robert Penn Warren, Wil- liam Dickey, and Robert Lowell - is operated by and large on just that pragmatic principle. As George Starbuck, poet and former director of the University of Iowa's Program in Creative Writing here, explains it, If we were running a factory where we cut students to some mold that pleased us, it would be easier. But that's not what we're doing. We're here to open the sensibilities of young writers to dozens of new approaches. We want them to be as different as they can possibly be from their teachers and from each other. Toward this end, the Iowa Writers Workshop - as it is most often called f offers what conceivably could be the most loosely structured program given for academic credit at any American university. The Master of Fine Arts degree is awarded to a candidate who successfully completes 48 semester hours of work in the program, half of which will be writing courses taken in the workshop. He must also complete a thesis, which will consist of a creative work of a substantial and publishable length - a novel or a collection of short stories or poems. Such a creative thesis may also be written for a Doctor of Philosophy degree, but the Ph.D. candidate must also take addi- tional courses in the university's regular English department. In effect, what this means for the typical Master of Fine Arts candidate is that he will probably have no more than two classes a week, one of them a work- shop course in which teacher and fellow students 204 Writers Workshop will criticize his work and the other a reading-and- discussion course over which one of the writer-fac- ulty members will preside. And the rest of the week, if he is smart, he will spend writing, writing, writing. That's just it, says one student. It's totally dif- ferent from the sort of educational experience most students have had before. The school part of it - that is, the instructional thing -is practically nonexistent. You've got freedom to do what you want here - read, write, or stay drunk. But if you're smart and get seri- ous about it, then you get to work. I put in my time in the attic every day at the typewriter. That's where I do my learning. The student, who gave his parents' address to the university as his permanent address, has had his grades sent there semester after semester. I have no idea what my marks are, he says. I just never bothered to ask. But the university lets me keep com- ing back, though, so it must be okay. The many other students at the workshop like this one are not really indifferent to the academic side of their studies. They have simply put it in perspec- tive. Eyen oneboflthe teachers, Marvin Bell, whose collection A Probable Volume of Dreams won the 1969 Lamont poetry prize, concedes that the class- roomsessions are no more than an excuse for offering academic credit. As for the teaching, says Mr. Bell, the real work goes on over coffee and beer and not in the classes. I sit talking for hours first with one student and then with another. It's emotionally exhausting, really, because everything is voluntary and personal. But it has to be. How can you be impersonal about a poem? The students value this sort of personal encounter, for nearly all of them were drawn to Iowa in the first place in order to have the chance to study with a particular novelist or poet. But once there, they grad- ually discover that it is the total experience that matters. This may mean the semi-rural Iowa City en- vironment for some, the state-uniyersity ambience for others, but for all it will certainly include the other workshop students. Most come from smaller colleges and universities, where they enjoyed prestige as the most promising

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Robert Ray Election '70 came alive during the fall semester for 168 U of I students enrolled in Politics '70. Politicos state and local made campus appearances and class members - many of them already active in political party activities - drilled the noted visitors with ques- tions. Politics '70 became reality at the suggestion of the University administration after the..Board of Regents refused to allow students time off from classes to work in the campaign flurry. The course received extensive mention in the news media when guest speakers used the engagements as opportunities to kick around various political foot- balls. Prof. Kenneth F. Millsap, who had charge of the course, said he hoped the class provided students a chance to get a first-hand profile of the candidates, to study the issues important in the campaign, and to analyze issues and candidates. The candidates who appeared included Gov. Rob- ert Ray, a Republican, and his opponents, former Democratic Gov. Robert Fulton and Robert Dilley, the American Independent Party's candidate: incum- bent Republican First District Congressman Fred Schwengel and his opponent, Democrat Edward Mez- vinsky. Neither Lt. Gov. Roger Iepsen, a Republican, nor his opponent, Mrs. Fred lMinettel Doderer, a Democrat, could attend the class before the elec- tion, although both made post-campaign appearances. Other guests included county, district and state party committee chairmen and chairwomen. The election, of course, was the climax of the course, Millsap said, and there was a little let- down afterward. Millsap lectured the first hour of each two-hour session before the election, and the visiting candi- dates spoke during the second hour. Millsap touched on issues pertinent to the cam- paigns in which the visiting office-seekers were embroiled. Following the election, he turned to dom- inant national issues including poverty, the cities, 'civil rights and liberties, and violence. Q Politics '70 203

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writers - sometimes the only ones. At Iowa they, find themselves dropped into a ready-made peer group, forced to compete for the praise and recogni- tion that they had before come to expect as their due. Some fold. But in time the real writers learn to cope with an atmosphere described by one of the students as positively Byzantine with its intrigues and all. And how do they cope? They do their work. As early as the 1920's the university catalog indi- cated that creative work would be acceptable as the- sis material, and in 1932 Paul Engle submitted his book of poems, Worn Earth, as his Master of Arts thesis. Eleven years later the same Paul Engle took over the first Iowa Writers Workshop and gradually established it as an entity separate from the univer- sity's English department. During the war there were as few as 12 in the program. Today, by accepting about one applicant in four, registration is held down to about 160. That's quantity. What about quality? Very good indeed. The late Flannery O'Connor, novelist and short-storywriter, is probably the most eminent of the workshop's graduates. Tennessee Williams was a student here too, when the program was combined with the university's Playwrights Workshop, and the story they tell is that he submitted an early draft of The Glass Menagerie as his MFA thesis - only to have it rejected. Other notable workshop graduates would include novelist R. V. Cassill, who for years taught in the Paul Engle workshop and recently moved on to teach a similar program at Brown, National Book Award winner Richard Kim, and prize-winning poets W. D. Snod- grass and William Stafford. But name-dropping does not give an accurate pic- ture of the program's achievement and is probably unfair to those left off the list. Paul Engle emphasizes that what the workshop does best is get people to write and continue writing. They're always asking about results, he says. I remember dropping a three-foot stack of books on a dean's desk just to show him some results. I could have shown him more if I could have carried more. I've got three full shelves 'pf books by former workshop students at home. Anyone who doesn't write here then, it's his own fault, a young workshop poet says. They don't really 'teach' you to write, but they do give you the opportunity. Ultimately, all they can do is make it possible to learn - and that's alot. Although none quite comes up to this student's accolade, the Iowa Program in Creative Writing has received plenty of plaudits in the past. One of its most enthusiastic boosters is Rust Hills, fiction editor of Esquire, who has said that in the literary world, Iowa means the university's Writer's Work- shop. As for the question of whether or not creative writing can be taught, the easy answer is, 'Yes, of course it can. They've been doing it at Iowa for 25 years' SZ freprinted from The National Observerj I I I Writers Workshop 205