Re-Working the Iowa Writers’ Workshop

In the eighty-plus years since its founding the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (IWW) at the University of Iowa has become an iconic brand synonymous with elite talent. More than a thousand would-be graduate students apply to the program each year in the belief that an acceptance offers a fast-track to a career in writing, much as a degree from the Harvard Business School is presumed to be a pipeline to Wall Street.

Two recent books by writer-professors with Iowa pedigrees endeavor to trace the history of what is arguably North American graduate education’s most elite brand—as iconic as Harvard Law or Yale Divinity. In Workshops of Empire Eric Bennett, associate professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island, offers an appealing and accessible historiography of the IWW’s rise to national and international prominence, while I’ll Tell you Mine: Thirty Years of Essays from the Iowa Nonfiction Program, edited by Hope Edelman and Robin Hemley, anthologizes the work of eighteen essayists who graduated from the famed graduate program between approximately 1986 and 2013. While the former amounts to a work of scholarly literary history, and the latter a collection of belletristic creative nonfiction essays, both books (and especially Edelman’s and Hemley’s) serve to bolster the brand without problematizing its preeminence.

Beyond Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, the history of graduate creative writing programs has received scant attention among hidebound historians. Perhaps the old baked-in bias and irrational bugaboo—that creative writing is not itself a scholarship of discovery—partially explains the inattention, though a second possible explanation presents itself: elite brands often discourage close critical reading in an attempt to guard and/or mystify the special recipes by which they have become so successful. Where America’s most iconic brands are concerned, anything but glossy coffee-table treatments and slickly sanitized corporate or institutional histories replete with pretty pictures rep-resent a potential expose. Exposes, in turn, risk negatively affecting public perceptions of value while becoming an existential threat to the brand’s preeminence overall. Often only those safely within the fold are granted privileged access to the materials they need to effectively record a brand’s history. Such may be the case with Workshops of Empires and I’ll Tell You Mine, as Bennett and Hemley are both graduates of the workshop, while Hemley is a long-time professor in it.

Bennett’s aim in Workshops of Empire is not editorial, or exposé, however. Instead, as he characterizes it in his introduction, the method is “primarily intellectual historical rather than . . . theoretical” (13) as he offers historical case studies not just of former IWW poet-director Paul Engle but also Wallace Stegner at Stanford University graduate writers’ workshop (note: Stegner and Stanford receive remarkably short shrift here). Bennett seeks to provide “a deeper knowledge of the history of creative writing programs that might give creative writers more to go on” (13). And yet in targeting such a narrow audience, and underselling the potential value of his work to kindred humanities disciplines [“To historians of the Cold War, little of what is contained in Workshops of Empire will come as a surprise,” the author admits (14)]. Bennett needlessly limits his appeal and misunderstands the breadth of his would-be audience. To his manuscript’s detriment he yields to that pervasive brand of apology and sheepishness common among creative writers attempting pure scholarship.

In totality Workshops feels like the work of a talented creative writer-scholar uniquely enthused by the liminal space between intellectual and literary history; even Bennett’s publishers seem at pains to accurately categorize the book, miscasting it as “American Studies/Literary Criticism” in the book’s back-jacket shelving category. Like a gifted graduate...