In 1987, writer Wang Zengqi came to the University of Iowa in the United States and was invited to participate in a project called "Iowa International Writing Project". The leader of this project to promote the exchange of writers from all over the world, for the poets Paul Ingres and Nie Hualing, under their careful management, writers from Ireland, Poland, China, Spain, Switzerland, Iran, Poland and other countries have a face-to-face exchange of ideas, and thus formed a deep friendship.
The great writers we are familiar with, such as Mo Yan, Xiao Qian, Wang Anyi, Ding Ling, Su Tong, Yu Hua, A Cheng, Jiang Xun, Chen Yingzhen and others, were once members of the "Iowa International Writing Project". Later, When Nie Hualing and his wife visited China, Mr. Wang Zengqi, who loved and knew how to eat, was still in his home, and he warmly entertained them with authentic and delicious Yangzhou boiled dried silk and boiled melon peel.
The iowa international writing program participants are mostly well-known writers, at least emerging writing stars in the literary world, and for those who aspire to become writers, the University of Iowa has a platform tailored for them: the Iowa Writers Workshop, which teaches creative writing courses, together with the International Writing Program, forms the two core parts of Iowa's creative writing system.
Founded in 1936, the Iowa Writers Workshop has seen thousands of well-known writers go out of the country over the past eighty years, including 17 Pulitzer Prize winners, 6 American Poet Laureates, and countless other awards such as the National Book Award and the MacArthur Genius Award. Paul Angle, the founder of the International Writing Project we mentioned earlier, was one of the early students of the Iowa Writers Workshop, who was well-known in the poetry world and taught in the workshop after graduation for 25 years.
With such impressive results, the Iowa Writers Workshop has long been a well-known "golden signboard" in the creative writing world, with thousands of applicants every year squeezing their heads to have a place in it, full of expectations to accelerate their "writer's dream" through the workshop.
However, since its inception, the Iowa Writers Workshop has been accompanied by controversy, with some praising it as the cradle of "making writers" and others seeing it as nothing more than a factory for mass production of soulless, assemblyline "writing banality." People often argue around the question: Can creative writing be "taught"? Can writers be cultivated? What exactly can the workshop offer creators?
Two students who attended the Iowa Writers Workshop in the 1970s, Eric Olson and Glenn Schaever, skillfully combined original interviews, commentaries, anecdotes, and analysis in the form of interviews with teachers and students of that year, and wrote the book "We Want to Be Writers: The Life, Love, and Literary Road of the Iowa Writers Workshop", in which they showed readers the "true face" of the Iowa Writers Workshop as "insiders", about creative writing, inspiration sources, teaching models, teacher-student relationships, The content of classmate friendship and even life after graduation can be glimpsed from it.
Since its inception, the Iowa Writers Workshop has experienced two "golden periods" of rapid development: from 1941 to 1965 and from 1970 to 1987, the workshops were led by the poet Paul Angle and the novelist John Leggett, and behind the two rapid developments of the workshop, there are profound background factors of the times.
In the previous phase, with the end of World War II, the United States was faced with the question of how to resettle a large number of veterans and help them quickly adapt to civilian life, and the issue of education was particularly interesting. Under the U.S. Veterans' Rights Act of 1944, veterans who served more than 90 days in World War II received a special education grant. As a result, returning to campus for higher education, especially attending writing-related courses (the Iowa Writers Workshop was one of them), became the choice of a considerable number of soldiers. After all, first, the requirements for professional knowledge accumulation in writing courses are relatively low, and second, the experience of personally participating in the war has become valuable creative material.
In the 1960s and 1970s, in the context of the reform of the U.S. higher education system, universities offered creative writing programs that awarded degrees such as master of arts, and it became a common practice to enhance their academic image, and the earliest and most prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop was undoubtedly a leader in the field. During the same period, events such as the movement for equal rights among ethnic minorities and women, and the end of the Vietnam War attracted diverse applicants to the writer's workshop, bringing a new climate to development.
In their interviews with their classmates and teachers, Eric Olson and Glenn Schaever, the two authors of "We Want to Be Writers", are both students of the second "golden age" of the Iowa Writers Workshop, and it is not difficult to find that before enrolling, their professional backgrounds and life experiences are various, including housewives, waiters, rock musicians, refrigerator factory workers, doctors, photographers, secretaries, bartenders, and teachers, painters, poets and writers who have published some works.
Among them was a cadet named Alan Gerganus, a naval soldier who had originally served on the battleship YORKTOWN. Because most of his peers dropped out of high school and were not highly educated, Allen, who had excellent writing skills, began to work as a "ghostwriter", writing love letters to their lovers and wives in the tone of his companions, and even writing pornographic letters to a Filipino prostitute. This experience, which sounded absurd, made him deeply realize the great energy generated by writing, and it also became the exclusive material for future novels.
The inclusion of women, Native Americans, immigrants, and ethnic minority students in the Iowa Writers Workshop has made the voices of the original "unseen" and "neglected" groups gradually seen by the world through the form of words, further contributing to the diversity of American literature.
Jane Myris, who grew up immersed in the Girls' Series, was the editor of the women's column of St. Louis Universal Democrat. Another female student, Sandra Cisneros, was a Mexican-American, influenced by the family atmosphere, developing a keen interest in Mexican literature, art and politics, combined with her long-term interest in the survival of Latin American immigrants, which eventually prompted her to write such a popular masterpiece as "The Cottage on Mango Street".
Joy Hacho, a native of The Muskogian Indian and a longtime native of the Aboriginal community, had envisioned becoming a painter like his grandmother, but his obsession with words led him into a creative writing course.
As a platform to "produce" a large number of outstanding writers and poets, the Iowa Writers Workshop was already famous in the 1970s, and the competition among applicants was very fierce, and the thin letter that read "Dear Mr. /Ms. so-and-so, we are happy to tell you that you have been admitted to the creative class..." is the heart of many people with "writer's dream".
However, not everyone is enthusiastic about the Iowa Writing Workshop. In some people's minds, "writers can't teach", and the writing course offered by the Iowa Writers Workshop is not so much about "making writers" as it is about "producing mediocre talents". What it cultivates is a writer who "takes the middle way and avoids risks", writes things that are not like "word garbage", and as for awarding a master's degree in aesthetics after graduation, it is even more a "Ponzi scheme in academia", which will only attract young people who know nothing about real creation.
Jane Anne Phillips recalls her application to Iowa that the poets and Beat writers around her "dissuaded" her: the place was boring and academic, and "when you come out of Iowa, your nose will be misplaced."
In the face of questioning from the outside world, the Iowa Writers Workshop has responded: "We believe that writing cannot be taught, but writers can be encouraged to become talents." Paul Ingres also argues that writers are born, so Iowa "does not make writers, but guides writers who are possible in the future."
On a practical level, the Iowa Writers Workshop creates a "community" that encourages creativity and "abets perfection."
The two-year, workshop-style teaching model creates a "refuge from the real world", providing students with an immersive creative environment free from the daily trivialities and undisturbed by external distractions. In the classroom, well-known writers such as Paul Ingres, John Owen, Kurt Vonnegut, Henry Brumier, etc. are teachers who guide students to read and write in a discussional and critical way. In terms of teaching content, the so-called teaching of writing tips and shortcuts is only a trivial part of it, and more importantly, in the process of writing and discussion, everyone has been given the opportunity to fully excavate themselves and express themselves.
Specific to the individual, each student's harvest in the workshop is different. Chinese writer Li Yiyun believes that her greatest gain is not literary skills, but the experience of two Pulitzer Prize winners, Marilyn Robinson and James McPherson, leading them to read works such as "The Bible" and "One Thousand and One Nights" in class. She was greatly inspired by their "reading methods" and later continued into her own writing and teaching.
Gordon Mennenberga says that the experience of his stories being repeatedly discussed in class, and even sharply criticized, "can hone you into a writer with strong willpower." Eric Olson argues, "Iowa makes us more angular, and we not only get to know ourselves better, but we don't think we're who we are, and maybe for the first time we feel a bit like an authentic outsider, as all writers should be." ”
The benefit of the workshop is also that it gives young and outstanding writers time to live together and learn from each other.
During his time in Iowa, Gryny Lip schultz met friends such as Julie Mishkin, and they went out to party parties, camped in the snow, talked about poetry in front of the fire, and had a very happy time. Rosalyn Drexler also mentioned that Iowa students have built a special literary circle, and "everyone will be encouraged to write their dreams, share them with everyone, and experience what it's like to be a writer," and this atmosphere of mutual support is crucial.
In this regard, Wolff argues, "Workshops create the camaraderie of like-minded people, forming 'landscapes' that belong to writers through basic or advanced mechanisms." Cassirer, who entered the Iowa Writers Workshop in the 1940s, held a similar view, that there seemed to be a mechanism of creative writing teaching in Iowa, so that those with talent were subject to various rules, but as a platform with rich resources and opportunities, it could help students better discover and release themselves, tap into potential writing talents, and move toward a "path to infinity". The scholar McGill called it "individuation under the system."
In interviews with Eric Olson and Glenn Schaever, we hear fond memories of life in the Iowa period, but there are also a few different voices that deserve our attention.
"Lack of fairness" and "opaque information" are one of the phenomena that have been criticized. In the admission process, how the admission process is operated, what are the criteria for judging whether an applicant is suitable, whether to give the applicant financial support, etc., like a "black box", only a very small number of people know the secrets.
During the workshop, some teachers will give certain students "privileges". In activities such as reading sessions and other meetings with famous artists, it is inevitable that the people who preside over the workshop will have a difference in relatives when selecting invitees, which makes some students feel angry: we have paid the same tuition fees, why should we endure such differential treatment?
In the Iowa writers' workshops of the 1970s, there were also problems such as sexism and sexual harassment.
Joey Hay heard rumors that some female students were admitted because "they were selected by professors based on photographs."
Within the workshop, there is indeed a "predatory" atmosphere between professors and students: "writers having an affair" is taken for granted, and it is not uncommon for writers in teaching positions to sexually harass or discriminate against female students, or female students to use their beauty for "benefits".
The daily lives of Iowa's "would-be writers" have a "chaotic" side to it, with some of them obsessed with boxing, often drunk, and boasting that "writers should be like this": Look, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Richard Hugo... None of them are "solemn writers"! Eric Olson says:
"We believe Hemingway, Joyce and Pound did the same in Paris, our whole bodies and faces were sore with clean strikes, and the beer was clean, cool and authentic, like the streams of trout in Spain."
There are many more discussions about the "dark side" of the Iowa Writers Workshop, such as an overly strong and destructive "sense of competition", which leads some students to viciously attack each other, and some people leave a psychological shadow, and almost no longer write literature after graduation. For another example, although Iowa is known as the "City of Literature", compared with major cities such as New York and Los Angeles, the diversity of culture and community is still relatively lacking.
In addition, some teachers who hold teaching positions are excellent writers or editors, but they cannot become suitable teachers, and it is difficult for students to benefit from their teaching content. Gordon Leish was behind the fame of Carver and others, but his attitude toward students and their work was somewhat cynical, sometimes even vicious, and it is said that he once pinched the student's work with his thumb and fingertip in public, calling it, which can be imagined as a blow to the author.
Sandra Cisneros said she had "no good memories at all" during her time in Iowa because "there was a lack of respect there, no sense of honor." She showed the manuscript of "The Cottage on Mango Street" to her teacher, Don Justus, and all she got was a perfunctory comment of "Well, you know, these are not real poems." Fortunately, with the support of Bill Matthews, Dennis Mathis, Joey Harjo and other students, they try a new way of writing together, accept each other, and encourage each other.
With praise and criticism, the Iowa Writers Workshop has moved on in the midst of controversy. So, today, has the Iowa Writers Workshop and the "teaching creative writing" model it advocates really succeeded?
R.c. Miles points out in his book The Master's Teaching that the career success rate of creative graduates is about 1% compared to the 90% career success rate of medical school.
Although Miles did not give a precise definition of the term "professional success" and some people accused his estimates of being too pessimistic, judging from the post-graduation experiences of the two authors of "We Want to Be Writers" and their classmates, there are indeed not many people who can continue to write novels or poetry and become professional writers, and others have either become teachers, editors, TV producers, or have ventured into some professions that seem to have nothing to do with writing.
After leaving the Iowa Writers Workshop, Glenn Schaefer worked as a stockbroker, financial publicist, and later into the gambling industry, collecting art and recording television shows. Dennis Mathis was gifted with computer programming, drawing software, and so on, and when World Wide Web technology was still a new thing, he began to develop a website, joined a high-tech company in California, and obtained high equity options. Among their classmates, some became real estate lawyers and Zen priests.
Although not all of them have become "professional writers", for the students of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Iowa, writers, creative writing... These words have long penetrated into their blood, subtly affecting their work and life.
Glenn Schaefer has long been immersed in the business world, but he has not completely given up writing, in addition to co-authoring "We Are Writers" with Eric Olson, he also has "All The Luminous Things" and "The Divine Inspirer" on hand. In his spare time, Mathis assisted Sandra in editing book manuscripts, and after the collapse of the Internet bubble, editing books became his new professional identity.
From another point of view, the path to becoming a professional writer is much more difficult than ordinary people think, it requires talent and skill, but also requires perseverance and persistence.
The creative writing teaching model represented by the Iowa Writers Workshop is more to provide a platform, a channel, and a booster, and whether to take the road of professional writers is a personal choice under the comprehensive consideration of countless practical factors.
"We want to be a writer", a few words that seem to be light and fluttering, but in fact, the sense of weight is full, after all, writers and doctors, lawyers and other professions are different, only a few lucky people can write good works early, fame and fortune, and there are many "joggers", until several years after graduation, or even decades later, to write good works recognized by readers and the market. Therefore, the "1% career success rate" is not false.
Fortunately, as Bill Manhair said in the foreword, even though the career path chosen is very different, whether it becomes a writer or not, "no one has left the writing community" at present, and in this regard alone, the Iowa Writers Writing Workshop has been very successful.