Workshop still thriving after 75 years

By Iowa City Press-Citizen

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The 75-year legacy of the Iowa Writers' Workshop always has had less to do with any of the brick-and-mortar sites that have housed the workshop at the University of Iowa, and everything to do with the communal benefits of having so many great writers and poets co-existing in one small city.

But the workshop's continued success depends on more than its ability to keep attracting so many writers to the same place at the same time. It also depends on the workshop learning to adapt its traditional model to stay relevant in an era of new media, communication and artistic models.

If you were to visit the workshop's current home in the 154-year-old Dey House, you not only would find an impressive library collection of more than 3,500 books written by workshop graduates, you'd also see a series of wooden mailboxes in which students and professors leave the hardcopy printouts of the stories and poems they'll soon be critiquing viciously over classroom tables.

You might think that recent technological advances would make these mailboxes obsolete. After all, it would be much easier to have the workshop participants simply email copies of their manuscripts and have their peers and professors Skype in their constructive, critical and sometimes downright snarky comments.

But that freedom also risks un-tethering the Iowa Writers' Workshop from our UNESCO-designated City of Literature. And, rightly or wrongly, it's feared to be a step toward having the workshop lose its allure as the center of a thriving, real-life community of writers.

The Workshop does have an extended virtual presence, of course:

-Its website (www.uiowa.edu) includes all the information that anyone needs to apply.

-The events it sponsors are a major component of the Writing University website (http://writinguniversity.uiowa.edu).

-And workshop graduates blogged from this weekend's reunion on the Huffington Post, GreenerPenny.com, the Paris Review, asaltyblog, wewantedtobewriters.com and other sites.

Those sites, however, serve primarily as marketing tools for the workshop - or as a means of maintaining literary relationships initially formed face-to-face at the workshop. The 21st-century technological advances have yet to trickle down into the way the workshop teaches good writing - which still is done by having students sit together in a room and discuss a story or poem they have read on a paper copy that they pulled from those wooden mailboxes in the Dey House.

If the workshop were to make its teaching method more virtual, in fact, it could be placing its own brand at risk. Last year, the workshop received 1,600 applications for its 25 fiction writing and 25 poetry slots. If it were no longer to insist that students be here in body as well as in spirit, it could no longer boast of the community of local writers that has been the program's biggest selling point.

The worries about brand-dilution are all the more valid given how the workshop has been spending the past three-quarters of a century franchising itself throughout the nation and globe. Workshop graduates have gone on to develop hundreds of graduate and undergraduate workshop programs in other schools. The expansion of those programs is why Iowa continues to receive so many applications, but each new program also becomes a potential competitor against Iowa.

Not everyone is a fan of the workshop, of course. Some high-profile graduates say that their time in the workshop taught them “how not to be a writer.” Other critics denounce the entire enterprise as a grand pyramid scheme in which the academic writing programs churn far more graduating writers than the academy can absorb.

But the Iowa City area has benefited greatly over the past 75 years from the mix of writers and poets who have arrived in town with dreams of becoming the next Paul Engle or Paul Harding. And the workshop's local presence has allowed for the development of other programs and projects that expand its influence far beyond the 50 new MFA students enrolled each year - from the International Writing Program, to the Summer Writing Program, to the Iowa Young Writers' Studio, to Live from Prairie Lights, to a host of other workshop-community collaborations.

We're glad the workshop is going strong after 75 years, and we're glad to have a front-row seat for watching how it evolves over the next century.

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