Christopher Merrill stepping down after 25 years directing UI International Writing Program

IOWA CITY — At a pay phone 25 years ago in the exclusive picturesque Mount Athos in Greece — center of the Eastern Orthodox Church and home to 20-some monasteries and thousands of monks — a then-43-year-old Christopher Merrill took a moment from his spiritual journey and writing research to check in with his wife in Massachusetts.

“She said, ‘You got this strange message from Connie Brothers at the (Iowa) Writers' Workshop’,” Merrill said about the longtime program associate of the renowned University of Iowa workshop, which doles out among the most prestigious master of fine arts degrees in the world.

“My thought was maybe they're asking me to come and give a reading or teach for a semester or something,” said Merrill, who at the time was very happy in his post as William H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross. “But she was calling to say, ‘We’re doing this search and would I apply for this job?’”

The job was to revive and lead a then-struggling UI International Writing Program — founded 33 years earlier in 1967 by legendary Iowa Writers’ Workshop Director Paul Engle and wife Hualing Nieh Engle.

“I thought, well that sounds very interesting,” Merrill told The Gazette. “But it was really not on my radar at all.”

About to head into a nightlong vigil in a dark chapel for the Greek Orthodox Christmas, on the cusp of a new century in early 2000, Merrill now had plenty to occupy his mind.

“At Holy Cross, I had such a sweet deal,” Merrill said. “I didn't have to attend any meetings or serve on any committees. And I could teach whatever I wanted.”

Merrill was discussing a long-term arrangement with Holy Cross when he landed on the UI radar for IWP director — a job that admittedly aligned with the globe-trotting course his life had taken.

“I think it was because I wrote a book about soccer in the World Cup in Italy; and I spent all those years covering the wars and succession in the former Yugoslavia … and I was working on this book about Mount Athos in Greece when I was contacted,” Merrill said. “So my orientation, at least in my prose writing, was abroad.”

Even during his initial visit to Iowa City while under consideration for the job, Merrill had to get home in time to join a delegation to Cuba.

“I had done some cultural diplomacy missions for the State Department in the mid ‘90s,” he said. “So the job was to come here and rebuild the IWP, and I thought it just sounded very intriguing.”

‘I’m a bit tired’

In August 2000, Merrill officially swapped his cushy Holy Cross setup for the unfamiliar Iowa and the challenge of directing, or rather redirecting, the IWP into the globally-esteemed program it is today — having hosted, since its inception, more than 1,600 writers from more than 160 countries in its fall residency.

Merrill, in the years that followed, oversaw a variety of other innovative programs — like ones sending American writers abroad or bringing young writers to campus. He launched a digital learning effort disseminating course material and supporting exchanges that over time has amassed more than 50 free “massive open online courses” enrolling more than 95,000 people from 197 countries.

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He helped develop WhitmanWeb, a collaboration between the IWP and the Walt Whitman Archive, and the Walt Whitman “Song of Myself” massive open online course that’s been translated into 15 languages.

“From the beginning, our mission at the IWP was to connect,” Merrill said. “And so connecting on professional and personal levels with so many distinguished writers from around the world has really been one of the great joys of my life.”

But after a quarter century, Merrill — now 68 — is ready to hand over the reins to someone a little younger and more energetic.

“I'm a bit tired,” he said.

At the end of the year, Merrill will step down as IWP director and focus on writing and teaching as a member of the English Department faculty. Cate Dicharry, former executive associate director of operations for IWP, will take over in January.

“She knows the program from the inside and out and is younger and has a lot more energy than I,” Merrill said of Dicharry, department administrator for the Department of Cinematic Arts — who first arrived at UI in 2007 in the School of Art, Art History and Design and went on to work as youth programs coordinator for the IWP.

In 2019, Dicharry became director of the Writing and Humanities Program in the Carver College of Medicine — also serving as managing editor of The Examined Life Journal and director of The Examined Life Conference.

Her history with the program, Merrill said, suits her to “take up the reins with no pause.”

“It is impossible to overstate how enormous an honor it will be to serve as director of the International Writing Program,” Dicharry said. “Christopher Merrill has been such a remarkable, devoted steward and I am so grateful for his trust and support, and that of the Graduate College and the Office of the Provost.”

‘Build a bridge’

Merrill had begun talking about stepping down in summer 2024 — in the months leading up to the presidential election. The IWP’s collaboration with the U.S. Department of State, dating back 58 years, at that time afforded it nearly $1 million in grants.

“I knew that no matter who would win the election, after 25 years at the helm, we were going to need somebody young and energetic who could take the IWP for perhaps the next 25 years,” he said.

“It’s time for someone with new ideas, energy, and enthusiasm to move IWP forward.”

That sentiment became even more true when in February the U.S. Department of State — under the new Trump administration — terminated the IWP’s decades-long support from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, saying its grants “no longer effectuate agency priorities” or align with “national interest.”

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“I knew then that I would have to stay on for this, for one more residency, to try to figure out how to get the IWP oriented in a new direction given the fallout from the dissolution of our 58-year-long partnership with State Department,” he said. “In conversations with a longtime program officer, I concluded that we were not going to get back into the State Department during this administration.”

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Increasing philanthropic support of the IWP seemed integral to its new path forward, and Merrill in May secured a $250,000 donation from Hugh F. Culverhouse Jr. — a former U.S. attorney in Miami and son of a former Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner who’s become known for donating to programs affected by government spending cuts.

As part of his gift, Culverhouse challenged other IWP supporters to match his giving — urging the program itself to devise “creative programming that will ensure its survival in the absence of federal funds.”

“It was a specific challenge to match it in monetary terms and to build a bridge toward a new and more sustainable future,” Merrill said. “And I think that's what we've been doing ever since.”

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‘Our core mission’

With the giving and other ancillary support, the IWP managed to bring to Iowa City this fall a residency of 23 writers from countries like Spain, Kosovo, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. But it was forced to cancel its summer youth program, dissolve its exchange programming for American writers, end distance learning courses, and discontinue a mentorship program for displaced or sheltering writers.

The IWP also lost its primary recruitment mechanism for its fall residency.

“In addition to the loss of all the money from the State Department, which was a terrible thing for us, what might be a worse development coming out of that is to have all those writers nominated by diplomats and foreign service nationals, cultural specialists, all the U.S. embassies and consulates around the world,” he said. “Seventy percent of the 1,625 writers that we've hosted in the IWP came to us with federal support … So how do I identify those writers again?”

Merrill said he’s in the midst of putting together a proposal to recruit writers through the UNESCO Cities of Literature program — encompassing a network of 53 cities in 39 countries on six continents, covering a combined population of more than 26 million.

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“I'm glad we'll have that put together within the next few weeks, so when I hand the IWP off to Cate January 1, we have enough money in the bank for the next residency, and we likely will have a good, solid recruiting mechanism,” Merrill said — but suggested the IWP, like when he started, is facing another inflection point.

“We will be approaching things differently,” he said. “You could say we will have returned to our core mission of connecting writers through the fall residency and then, ideally, in other virtual ways.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com