NEWSLETTER

Iowa Writer's Workshop superstar Kurt vonnegut, Jr. in the cinematic classic Back to School.

If you want to write highbrow fiction today, you’ve probably at least considered getting a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Even though they are about the most impractical graduate degree you could ever have, MFAs are growing in popularity. Fewer and fewer people read any fiction that isn’t about sexy vampires, but more and more people are willing to pay to learn how to write it, and universities have realized that there’s money to be made. There are currently over 100 MFA programs in the United States, most of which have sprung up in the past few decades. The result of this massive growth is that the American literary scene has become intertwined with the MFA system. Writers of literary fiction can't earn a decent living from their books, so they teach in MFA programs to pay the bills and so the cycle continues on indefinitely.

The University of Iowa was the first to offer a graduate degree in creative writing, in 1936. Graduates of what came to be called the Iowa Writer’s Workshop spread the teaching technique that was developed there around the country. Most writing programs today are run on this “workshop” model, and Iowa's program itself is still the gold standard.

The Iowa model is pretty simple. There’s a workshop held once a week where writers sit around a table and critique their fellow students’ work. Students are usually encouraged to attend some other seminars, but basically they have two years with no other responsibilities than to write and think critically about other people’s writing.

We wanted to find out what it was like on the inside, so we talked to some newly minted MFAs and a couple old-timers. Here’s what they each had to say.

MFAs on... Why They Applied

Sarah Balcomb, Columbia University School of the Arts, 2005: The driving force for me to apply to Columbia was that I was about to turn 30. I was assessing my life and I didn't want to hit 30 without some sort of advanced degree. So I went and spent a shitload of money for not as much reward as I was looking for. I thought I would get out and have an agent and a two-book deal and suddenly be working as a writer, but that only happened for one person in my class.

Chris Ofutt, Iowa Writer’s Workshop, 1990: I was 29, living in New York City and running a secondhand shop. I got mugged, and then I got married and moved back to Kentucky, where I had grown up. That didn’t really work out, and my wife suggested that I apply to get an MFA. I'd always written, but I had never sent anything out, or taken a class, or really shown it to anyone. I didn't even know that you could get a degree in writing. But I was too old to join the Army, and the Peace Corps didn't want me, so I applied to a bunch of schools. At the time, all of the schools cost 20 bucks to apply to, but Iowa only cost 10. That's why I included it, because it seemed like a bargain. I had no idea it was a fancy school. When I got the letter saying you can come here, I called to make sure it wasn't a mistake. I just couldn't believe that anybody would want me.

Tom Spanbauer, Columbia University School of the Arts, 1986: In 1982, I was living in New York City. I was 33 years old, and a waiter at a fancy restaurant, making quite a bit of money and writing a little on the side. I always told everybody that I was a writer, but I was doing way too many drugs and drinking and staying up way too late to be a good writer. Through a series of synchronistic things, I ended up getting accepted to the Columbia MFA program. I was now paying $25,000 for an education, so I figured I’d better get serious.

MFAs on... Their Teachers

Mark Dintentfass, Iowa Writer’s Workshop, 1968: Richard Yates, who wrote Revolutionary Road, was my teacher for my first year. He was pretty straitlaced, aside from his drinking problem; pretty old-fashioned in his values. He was very, very generous with writers whom he liked, and he was very adept at pointing out what was good. We would have these individual conferences, and I remember bringing him three stories. He said, "This one is crap and this one is crap, but this one—this is what you should be doing." The first two were pretentious and full of too much graduate school, which can be deadly for a writer. The third one was just a little modest story about Brooklyn when I was a kid and making model airplanes. I thought it was almost too easy to do that. But he convinced me that that was good writing, because the people were real and it wasn’t about ideas, it was about people.

In my second year, Yates left, and I had workshop with Vance Bourjaily, who at that time was probably the most famous writer there. At this point his reputation has kind of gone… somewhere. But back then his books were bestsellers. Ernest Hemingway had praised him as the best young writer of his generation in 1948, and that had really got his career off the ground.

The Iowa program was split into fiction writers and poets—there was very little interaction between the two. Vance had the idea of a class where we would all read each other’s stuff. It was an experiment that didn’t work out very well. Fiction in those days had to be readable. You had to tell a story. Poetry, even in those days—and I think it’s gotten worse now—was about words for their own sake. When poetry was being discussed, the fiction writers would sort of sit there and not really be able to respond to it. And when fiction was being discussed, the poetry writers just didn’t seem interested. They were very snobbish—they thought poetry was a higher calling than fiction, I suspect. On top of that, Vance Bourjaily wasn’t nearly as good a teacher as Dick Yates had been, and so the experiment didn’t work.

Tom Spanbauer: What was really important for me was running into Gordon Lish. He took my head out of theory and put my nose into my sentences, really changed everything. I learned the theory of hydrology from the other courses, and then I got a plumbing degree from Lish—how to fix your pipes. Still, I’m as happy to have gotten away from him as I was to have found him. He’s a pill, a problem guy. But he gave me the permission to treat my prose like I was treating my poetry.

Lish’s workshop met once a week, and there were maybe 120 people in his class. Instead of being theoretical, it was all, What does this sentence sound like? How to create a voice, and to get authority of voice by “saying it wrong”—what he called “burnt tongue.” It’s a way of writing as if you were speaking, of making your prose sound raw or strange or off or wrong or weird. Basically of fucking up your syntax.

In Lish’s class, you read aloud. You started your piece, and if he didn’t like a sentence he stopped you and criticized you and you couldn’t read any more. So he would follow your first sentence, how it moved to the second sentence, how it moved to the third sentence, and as soon as any sentence didn’t work, you had to shut up and he would criticize you. It was tough going to his class. There was a lot of tension in the room, because of his personality. He had no qualms making you feel like a fool. “Oh, no, no, that’s enough, you’re way off line there, next!”

There were these two women who were very good friends, and for six weeks he would say “Oh, Mary, Mary, you’re really, really great, that’s a great story, you’re fantastic." And then he’d turn to Mary’s friend Joan right next to her and say, “Joan, what’s wrong with you? How come you’re not writing like Mary?” Then, halfway through the semester, Joan would start reading and he’d say “Oh, Joan, Joan, Joan, fantastic,” and, “Mary, you’re losing your grip.” People wanted to throw themselves out the window. It was just sick, sick shit. So I got myself out of there.

Who knows why he acted that way? There’s all kinds of ways that people try to figure Lish out. My feeling is he just wanted that control. Threatening to take away his approval was a way of having a hold on people. You’re a writer and coming up in the world, and here’s this guy who calls himself Captain Fiction. He was Raymond Carver’s editor—everybody wanted to be Raymond Carver at the time—he had been the fiction editor at Esquire, he was an editor at Knopf, he had his own literary magazine, The Quarterly. And so here was this guy who was, like, It, and you got to meet him. Wow, he’s talking to me, he’s going to read my stuff. Wow, he’s commenting on my stuff, wow he likes me! Uh oh… now he doesn’t like me… You know? It’s just natural.

He did have a magnetism though, and a lot of power. He told me that he was going to publish my first book, Faraway Places. He called me up on the phone, and he knew I was gay, so he made a big deal of himself being in the bathtub. Like, “I am in the bathtub naked, Tom, talking to you, and I am going to buy your book.” It was pretty icky. “We’re going to publish this fucker, Spanbauer, we’re going to publish this fucker. I’ve really got a hard-on for ya.” He’s a culprit and a manipulator.

I know it sounds like all I’m doing is dissing Lish. He’s a prick for sure, but he did something very particular for me. He gave me the permission to do something that I wouldn’t have got from anywhere else, and I have to be thankful for him.

Chris Offut: My teachers were Frank Conroy, James Salter, and James Allen McPherson. It’s hard to compare their styles of teaching. McPherson's was like a Zen approach: He'd look into a story to see what's underneath the plot, and then what's underneath that. McPherson once told me, “Write from within, for without.” I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. It was like a koan. But I finally realized, you write from within yourself, with the foreknowledge that there are apprehenders of the work who are outside of yourself.

Frank Conroy's was the opposite approach, in a way. It was all centered on the surface. Sentence by sentence, the right word, the right sentence—everything needed to be clear. It had to have meaning, no tricks, no gimmicks, no shortcuts.

And Salter's was a completely different approach. It was one of the few times that Salter has ever taught, and I was lucky enough to be one of his students. It was phenomenal. There was a sense that anything he said was advice from a master. He would zero in on small things, say a piece of description, and talk about why it was helpful or why it wasn't. For example, he would show that maybe there’s a way to describe a single feature in a person that would conjure up the entire individual. I had never even thought about. Some people would start at the head and go to the toes in their description. But his idea was that you didn't need to do that. So, these three guys were very influential for me. Later, when I was a teacher at Iowa, I tried to emulate them as best I could. I wanted to be the teacher that, 20 years later, there would be anecdotes like this about.

Sarah Balcomb: I took one class that was about the teaching of writing, about the MFA programs themselves. There were all these comments by writers who had taught in the Columbia program saying that they were afraid to give negative feedback to people who were spending all this money on their education. Once you’ve read that statement, you can never read a positive comment without thinking, “Oh, they’re just saying that because I’m paying money.”


CONTINUED
WORKSHOP WORKSHOP | 1 | 2 |

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