University of Iowa famed author Marilynne Robinson retiring — but not really

IOWA CITY - Today she directs Iowa's famed Writers' Workshop, but Lan Samantha Chang recalls being a student in the early 1990s and sitting around a table in the English-Philosophy Building as her instructor - Marilynne Robinson - spoke.

'I remember watching her start amazing sentences that were beautifully constructed and full of unexpected words,” Chang said. 'She made us watch them as if they were being drawn in the air in front of her - the beautiful shapes of her phrases.”

Inevitably, Chang said, Robinson 'would land her sentences.”

'She never trailed off in the middle of a statement,” Chang said. 'She always seemed to know where she was going, and her sentences had the most beautiful architecture of any speaker I've been with in a room.”

Such is the life of Robinson, who - like her sentences and writing - knows where she is going. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who's been called a friend by President Barack Obama and named to Time Magazine's list of 100 most influential people, is moving on from her post as professor of English and creative writing with the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop.

After 25 years with the program, Robinson's departure is being called a retirement.

But it's not really.

'She can't be here all the time anymore,” Chang said. 'But I don't really feel that she is going to disappear from our lives.”

The rise in popularity of Robinson's work, and the surge in demand for her words and participation at events around the globe, have made fulfilling her teaching duties more challenging.

'Being a professor requires that you be here,” Chang said. 'Her fame has made that very difficult.”

And then there are the characters blossoming in her mind - demanding to make their debut.

'That's another way I think she hasn't left us,” Chang said. 'One of the reasons she's retiring is to make time to write more fiction and essays. And I think we're all looking forward to seeing the next thing she does.”

From a hotel room in Chicago last week, Robinson told The Gazette her immediate plans include giving a series of lectures at the University of Cambridge in England that will amount to a book 'I've been wanting to write for a long time.” She also has a collection of essays scheduled for release in the fall.

'And I want to be working on fiction again,” she said. 'I've been away from that for too long.”

Robinson, who grew up in Idaho and earned a doctorate in English from the University of Washington in 1977, wrote her first highly acclaimed novel in 1980 - 'Housekeeping.” A few years after Frank Conroy took over as director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he reached out to Robinson in hopes of landing her as a professor.

She declined, but a year later received a telegram from an administrator with the Iowa program. Robinson said she didn't know anyone sent telegrams anymore.

'It was very eye-catching,” she said. 'I was invited again, and this time I agreed to come for two years.”

Two turned into 25.

'It all worked out well, and I was very happy to continue to stay here,” Robinson said.

Many things make Iowa's program unique, she said, most notably the people.

'It was the first thing of its kind in the universe, and that means that over time it's developed a very strong history,” she said. 'There's a mystique that attracts very ambitious young writers.”

And teaching when morale is high and students are driven is special.

'We are very proud of it and very proud of its role in our culture,” Robinson said. 'We are very serious about making sure that it continues to have its place.”

During her tenure, Robinson taught hundreds of writers, including Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Harding. And she herself won a Pulitzer in 2005 for her novel, 'Gilead.” She was nominated for the fiction Pulitzer in 1982 for 'Housekeeping,” which won the PEN/Hemingway Award.

In 2008, Robinson published a companion novel to 'Gilead” – 'Home” - which received the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction in the United Kingdom. Her most recent novel, 'Lila,” debuted in 2014 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Robinson, who has integrated faith and thoughts on God throughout her work, also has earned national and international honors such as the National Humanities Medal in 2012, the Park Kyong-ni Prize in 2013, and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

Last year, during his eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney after a mass shooting at a South Carolina church, Obama quoted Robinson, calling her 'a friend of mine.”

'It was a complete surprise,” Robinson said of hearing that Obama had cited her. 'I was very touched by it. And the fact that he introduced the quote by saying that I was his friend really pleased me. That was really moving.”

Robinson in April was named among Time's 100 most influential people.

'She is concerned with how we should live, with the idea of the world as a sort of gift to us, which requires us to notice what we have been offered, and to study it, to appreciate it and to dramatize its textures and contours,” according to the magazine. In her teaching, Robinson said, most students come in with their own sort of genius and find faculty members who make especially good readers for them.

In her writing, Robinson said, she starts organically.

'I think about something, and then it comes into my mind as a sentence, and a couple sentences, and then as I start writing I find out that it wants to be written,” she said.

The characters who evolve 'become very real to me,” Robinson said.

'Fortunately, they don't interfere with my life on an ongoing basis,” she said. 'But they do become people that you remember very intensely.”

Director Chang, as one of Robinson's former students and a witness to her ongoing impact, said she inspires bigger thinking and questioning.

'Marilynne is extremely aware of the power of language - she wants all students to pay attention to the words they choose,” Chang said. 'She is aware of the power of consciousness in literary work and the way every part of a work is aware of the consciousness that created it.”

Her influence has shaped American literature 'in a profound and enormous way,” Chang said.

'She has inspired countless students to read and think about big questions,” she said. 'And for that - in that way - her gifts to those students are bottomless.” Even with her decision to leave the UI faculty, Robinson said she isn't saying goodbye to Iowa City, where she for years has worshipped and sometimes preached at the Congregational United Church of Christ.

'I will keep my house there,” she said. 'That will be my primary residence.”

Now officially professor emeritus, Robinson gave her last lecture a week ago. And it wasn't without emotion. But she's hanging on to the standing invitation to come back any time.

'I do keep that possibility open,” she said. 'I think I might miss teaching a great deal.”