Writing students talk as they sit around a table in the coffee shop of a bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa, a favorite haunt of University of Iowa Writers' Workshop students.

Web posted on: Thursday, June 18, 1998 4:32:57 PM EDT

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) -- Allison Amend is sitting near the middle of a long, crowded table, trying not to be noticed. Her eyes look downward. Her smile is closed and private. She seems not to move at all, except for her hands, which press against each other or occasionally separate as she nervously twirls her hair.

Amend is a fiction writer at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and this afternoon one of her stories is being "workshopped," a process not unlike attending your own funeral. A dozen or so fellow students are discussing her work as if she were not there. Amend must help make that illusion possible.

"You're not supposed to talk," she said later. "And people don't look at you. It's a strange sensation."

More workshops, more writers

Make a list of your favorite contemporary American writers and chances are good at least some know exactly what Amend went through. If it didn't happen at Iowa, it happened at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan, Columbia University or any number of other schools.

In the past 50 years, the number of academic writing programs has grown from just a handful to more than 200. Workshop alumni include some of the most acclaimed writers to emerge in the past decade, including David Foster Wallace, Mona Simpson, Allan Gurganus and Rick Moody.

"Increasingly, the best writers are writers who have been in one," said C. Michael Curtis, a senior editor at Atlantic Monthly magazine, which has published many workshop graduates.

"It doesn't mean, I think, so much that the workshop generates the writer as that writers are increasingly drawn to them as a kind of apprenticeship period, a place where they can spend a couple of years improving their skills."

A Writers' Workshop student looks over a book case filled with the work of former students in Dey House on the University of Iowa campus,

Comments, criticism

Amend's story is called "Why Boys Bounce," and it begins like this: "Sydney woke up with a mouth full of carpet again, the third time this month, and wondered if this wasn't a sign from the Great Spirit that this affair was doomed to failure." Sydney is an English major turned cyberporn writer. Her affair is with a German named Georg, so restless that he bounces even in sleep, pushing Sydney out of her bed and, more and more, out of his life.

"Are they good people?" asks the workshop teacher, author Barry Hannah. "Do interesting things happen?" For the most part, students don't think so. "Why is she with him?" wonders one student, Judith Mitchell. "I understand desperation, but this guy is such a jerk."

Others complain that the characters don't change, that their motivation is unclear, that events seem contrived. At the same time, they credit Amend for her wit and imagination and her ability with words.

"I thought the comments were pretty fair," she said. "But I thought people were closed to the type of character I created -- a woman who didn't want to be alone. People were saying, 'Why is she with him?'

"So in that case, I didn't feel I needed to make any changes. But I did agree there needed to be more motivation, more expectation.

"I'm still working on it," Amend said. "That's the most difficult part. You get such a barrage of opinions and you have to not listen to half of them. I don't have a good sense yet of who to listen to."

Trends in literature

There have been two major trends in American literature since the end of World War II. One is that literature has declined as an influence on American culture. The other is that writing programs have increased as an influence on American literature. Many wonder how much the latter trend has to do with the former.

The debate divides three ways. Some, a small number, argue that workshops have taken writing out of society and into the classroom, turning out bland, self-absorbed writers who themselves become teachers of bland, self-absorbed writers.

Others say workshops don't make a lot of difference, that good writers remain good and bad writers remain bad. Still others say workshops have helped literature by giving thousands both the time to write and the chance to work with experienced authors.

But whatever workshops have or haven't done, their rise says something about what has happened to literature. One reason so many established writers become teachers is that few can live solely from selling their books. One reason so many young writers join workshops is that few live in places where books are talked about.

"It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there," said author Ethan Canin, a former Iowa student who will return this fall as a faculty member.

"Books were king, but now movies are king and books are sort of ignored. So now there's no sense of a welcoming community where you live. So you search out your own little island."

Writers' Workshop director Frank Conroy

Smalltown Paris?

These days, "islands" for literature are usually college towns. Iowa City is one of them. Like many graduate writing programs, Iowa's lasts two years.

About 50 students are accepted here annually -- 25 for fiction, 25 for poetry -- and at least 20 times that number are turned down. Although grades and test scores are requested on applications, manuscripts are virtually the sole criteria for admission.

Founded in the 1930s, the Iowa workshop is the oldest and most prestigious academic writing program in the country. Iowa's students have included Flannery O'Connor, John Irving, Raymond Carver and Jane Smiley. Carver, Philip Roth and John Cheever are among those who have taught here.

Current faculty includes Frank Conroy, the Iowa workshop's director and author of "Stop-Time," his acclaimed autobiography; Pulitzer Prize winners Jorie Graham and James McPherson; and the novelist Marilynne Robinson. Hannah, whose fiction includes "Ray" and "Airships," and John Casey, author of the novels "Spartina" and "An American Romance," are among the visiting faculty members.

There are many workshop legends, among them the story of Carver and Cheever bumping into each other at a liquor store. What helps make that a legend is how long ago it feels. Students now are hardly teetotalers -- some still make quick work of a pitcher of beer -- but they live more moderately, more studiously, interested in the drama of writing rather than in the drama of the writer's life.

"There is a reluctance to buy into the paradigm of the gonzo artist," said one student, Mark Baechtel. "We're asking, 'Do you need to be wracked with existential misery to create legitimate art?'"

"I went to a party recently that some of the students gave," said Casey, an Iowa student in the mid-1960s, "and I sat around, trying to keep quiet for the first hour. And finally some of them said to me, 'What was it like 30 years ago'? And I started telling a few things that happened and I realized that was a complete mistake. They just sort of hung their heads and said, 'God, we're so dull.'"

Seeking: One agent

On bulletin boards at Iowa, it is common to find announcements about an upcoming visit from a literary agent. If the Iowa workshop is an island, then agents can be likened to ships calling the writers back to the mainland. They're reminders that the time spent here is temporary, that students eventually must wonder, and worry, about the market.

The relationship between writing programs and publishers works on a couple of levels. Colleges like to see alumni get published because it makes the school more appealing to future writers. At the same time, teachers worry about students who arrive looking to make connections.

"Getting published comes up embarrassingly often," said novelist Lamar Herrin, who teaches fiction at Cornell University. "It's a distraction if you're just trying to work with the art of the story and then you have agents coming around. It makes students start thinking, 'My publication.' 'My profession.'"

At Iowa, publication is a kind of taboo, although some agents will break it. Baechtel recalled a talk given by New York agent Jane Dystel, a "hard-edged, almost cynical talk," telling students nonfiction sells better than fiction, that they should write about people in their 30s and that they should ease up on "rites of passage" stories.

"People heard that with varying degrees of cynicism," Baechtel said. "You come out of that shrugging your shoulders, saying, 'Well, I have to write what I write.'"

"I get a little bit of that at all the workshops," said Dystel, whose clients include the literary writers Gus Lee and Lorene Cary. "That's fine. They don't have to listen to me. You only have to listen to me if you want to get published."

A student looks over her edited manuscript

After the workshops

Most students now graduating from college are entering the best job market in recent memory, but for writers it might as well be a recession. Only a small percentage are likely to publish a book and those who do will be lucky to publish many more than that. It's best not to think about the chances of writing full time.

If recent history holds up, some students will end up teaching, others will have spouses support them, and others will work part-time. Many will probably write free-lance reviews and magazine articles. Some will get into editing or will use what they learned to work for corporations.

But it has always taken nerve, a timeless arrogance for anybody to commit themselves to writing. The nice thing about the students in Iowa is their insistence that they have something to say, no matter the odds against it being heard.

On a financial aid application, Mitchell was asked what she planned to do after she graduated. Her answer was one word: write.

Copyright 1998   The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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