Iowa's Literary Mecca

It only takes a few steps along the downtown streets of Iowa City, Iowa, to find evidence of the city’s love of literature. The sidewalks on Iowa Avenue feature bronze panels bearing quotations from writers ranging from Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams to W.P. Kinsella and Gail Godwin. The "Literary Walk" honors 49 authors who have a connection to this university town in eastern Iowa, and is a testament to how the people of Iowa City (pop. 62,220) treasure the writers in their midst.

The city has become one of the nation’s literary meccas because of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the nation’s oldest and most respected program for creative writing. Based in an 1857 Victorian-style house overlooking the Iowa River, the workshop is a two-year graduate program at the University of Iowa that nurtures the next generation of fiction writers and poets.

"Iowa City is a place that respects writers and literature," says Frank Conroy, director of the Writers’ Workshop and author of books that include Body and Soul and Stop-Time. "There are people in town, for example, who can point out the house where Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote Slaughterhouse-Five. People here don’t think you’re odd because you’re a writer."

The workshop was founded in 1936 as the first creative writing degree program in the nation, pioneering a model that other universities now follow. Its graduates include four U.S. poet laureates, a dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, and a host of writers who have won National Book Awards and other major literary prizes, such as Flannery O’Connor, Wallace Stegner, John Irving, Rita Dove, T.C. Boyle and Mark Strand. The workshop’s contributions to the nation’s cultural life were honored in 2003 when it was awarded a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the first medal ever given to a university.

Each year about 50 students are admitted to the workshop on the basis of an original manuscript. More than 1,000 aspiring writers apply annually, but only 25 fiction and 25 poetry students are accepted to the program, which costs about $4,500 a year. Upon completion of coursework and a creative thesis—a novel, book of poetry or collection of stories—students are awarded a master of fine arts in English degree.

The heart of the workshop experience is the chance to have their writing critiqued by fellow students and faculty, which include respected writers such as Marilyn Robinson, James Galvin, James Alan McPherson, Mark Levine, and Ethan Canin, along with frequent visiting teachers that have included Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, Jane Smiley and Philip Roth.

"You can’t teach people writing, but you can give people the space and time to develop their own writing and introduce them to other writers who can inspire them," says poetry professor Cole Swensen. "We also try to help students hone their sense of intuition for what works, which is an essential part of being a writer."

The workshop is just one of several highly regarded writing programs at the University of Iowa. The campus holds the International Writing Program (a residency program that attracts authors from around the world), the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and a writing program in literary nonfiction.

Iowa City also is home to Prairie Lights, one of the nation’s finest independent bookstores and a frequent sponsor of readings by touring authors, and several cozy coffeehouses and used bookstores that contribute to the literary setting. Overheard conversations are as likely to be about a just-published novel as the latest gridiron achievements of the Iowa Hawkeyes.

"Iowa City is a phenomenal place to be a writer," says Austin Bunn, a first-year student in fiction from Brooklyn, N.Y. "I love the slower pace of life here and the fact I have this incredible community of fellow writers to respond to my work."

Lori Erickson is a freelance writer in Iowa City.

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