USA: Writers; 4; The Iowa Workshop

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again about all the years they've been writing in these temporary barracks in iowa city iowa there's no telling how many millions of words have been set down in around these words that have been torn apart analyze examine and re form in this workshop arriving people who share and learn about the craft of writing from some of those people in america on the campus of the university of iowa under philip roth author of goodbye columbus under the poets robert lowell their ankle or under of the castle take me author of confessions of a spent you another kurt

vonnegut author of the cat's cradle of a study today that's mike and josh my darling your prize winning poet wd snodgrass i both studied and taught at the university of iowa writers' workshop richard carroll author of the bestseller the mortars and a logo certainly are really are students in the workshop techniques ideas and experiments and is one student said evelyn as much here in one year as could be learned ten years of solid writing books have been published by people a study that they are a workshop people whose imagination have been stimulated by there were a lot of their environment

do you do in a local gathering places they talk of hemingway after thomas my love their joints so lonely and low and like nearly everybody else of course to having their views of the mass media to help them keep up with the times this is an environmental of contact with life in many of its forms stimulating for the writer as often as in the light and the sensibility this is that's more jail a novelist and essayist has been described as an expressionist and the robotic is pro ose is rich in imagery it deals with a loss of individual dignity and chose a dostoyevsky and sense of inner psychological workings of the human personality it sounds like this i was always of pursed

in the worlds of your world and never found the one in which i could be wrong and i learned to make my own he teaches fiction of the auto workshop on the castle on the other hand the longs in the literary tradition moralistic control a short stories and novels have a meticulous craftsman ship which has been described as minor and he wrote this the eggs of every country were up in the early morning breeze and on their rippling feels critical the mysterious symbols of authority and fidelity stars christians kurds hammers and sickles around big beasts and the proud old glories of the forgotten wars from their steps over the national pavilions the elder marina lemon and skull opponents streamed out like dyes leaking into an oceanic current it was only the empty sky that watched as my god my god how the drones hundred pound blue caseloads top of the aisle were shop and we'll be

back next year i don't know where those words could teach song for the birds lost power of speech tonight the drunkard shrieks kissed him on both cheeks pelican in his stinking mess but moving poems from his live press bale and co director of the workshop the program in creative writing at the university of iowa better known as the writers' workshop has caused the university of iowa to be described by the saturday review as the most important campus in the american literary establishment that is the most important chapters much of the credit should go to all anglo professor of english and director of the

program in creative writing who founded the program at the university of iowa only four years ago today mr engel as with them more gently who is director of the program and fiction and the iowa writers' workshop and rv castle formally of the workshop and now a perdue and ten each of us has encountered the well meaning question can you really teach someone how to write fiction obviously each of us has given some sort of affirmative answer to that because we'd been trying to do it for so long but i suppose we then change your mind in the light of experience and the europeans i wondered how you'd answer that question today poll i'm sure that none of the blues that we can teach any person to write legal howard feel that a writer can be taught a few things you can be taught to become a better writer more quickly they employ what we do as

teachers as more important than i think in fact that has it seems to me that for this doomed to come out i work a lot of import learning they do is turning they do they get from one another in their informal sessions and the group discussions of manuscripts and things well as the beer tavern sessions and all i can share what we've done in our cities to create an atmosphere or a place in which a lot of young writers can come together and interact with older writer and it's it's not strictly speaking a teaching kind of function that i feel yes well we know that in times past to younger writers have learned from older more experienced ones in the case of people like ezra horn that it's hard editors and writers have valiantly coached young people who are trying to learn something about their craft was there was a question which logically falls the first one i mentioned is why is a desirable to work bring such a teaching relationship into a university rather

than leaving it in the publishing centers of the world that surely for certain writers universities might well be death but it's not for everyone you know the last thing and you said the young writer has always meant the older writer if you if because it has been guided and guiding where the teaching i suppose is what we do and a young writer in the country of the size of the united states needs a place to go off if it comes to our city he notes that he will meet with writers and that they will discuss his writing and in a sense right have the care available in advance is not left to chance what would happen if you go on that they really quiet environment of iowa survey and they on academic routine to which the student is somewhat exposed know was becoming

deathly for the writer well what do you do in a case like that i don't think we do anything i think as happens with every good education process the young writer is impelled to do something for himself and very often this will simply be get out of our city and are not going to go away harboring a certain resentment against get in the workshop and what goes on there but that's all right if you're going after assad and rebel against another one these up and rebel against the flow isn't it also fair to say that the relation of the teacher or the student in the workshop is is close enough so that though we were aware of temperamental and crucial problems as well as those of craft right and you know only unavoidable he reveals a man and soul in the kitchen of riding and we learn a great deal more by reading the stories and poems that's a teacher

justin learned by reading an essay on the french revolution about the individual and that often a man may actually feel i was it was too confining for him in particular if he doesn't have the taste to enjoy the extraordinary amount of music and painting but making theater the girl longer but as they communicate with them we have a value in the line these people a chance to find an identity this only be a teacher of writing is doing with grants from other teachers in the idea teachers a person rather than a subject the town he engages with me out immediate living problems of a writer's engaged with the same burden on trying to give them a discipline and a half and a background of three d in the traditional literature that let me go back a nearly solid fence but i think we're all agreeing to lavishly that teaching isn't important i think there is a good deal of teaching of

technique which we do which i would like to think is closer to the studio training that pairs of always gotten from now i'm an older more established veteran studio or sculptures of oregon i think we do a certain amount of that kind of studio teaching at iowa and we do it as hard as we can get some results with certain people will talk a lot about the value of the academic courses are the courses in reading the criticism of literature that go with me the time spent in actual writing prices are the voices i decided extremely important are technical things of them says that you can teach in fact we believe in the soul we actually have a correspondence course in which you don't need the students however their writing workshops exist with in a circle of supporting courses these courses are critical views of the development of the modern novel and the modern point there are courses in the intensive reading of a single

modern novelist or traditional novelist so that it seems to me that if ignorance is the great virtue in for a writer but earlier there might be such a thing as a burden of knowledge which would keep him not isolated from the tempo or in the spirit of his times is is that i think it actually does sometimes cheap reality at too great a distance and in this in one of the dangers of what we do nonetheless i consider the writers a very tough minded person or you would he's often we just want to be a writer you know and so he's not going to be killed by the m university anymore than he's going to be made a writer by letting the slums or going out to sea of a freighter eating

regularly is not going to kill him any more than going hungry is going to jamaican writer of mine that i can get very irritated by the use of the university as a general term as if all universities were the same and would affect people in exactly the same why it seems to me that yale is a very different place from berkeley which in terms very different place from bowdoin college in brunswick maine where i went to school university why was a very specific poison has the first of the natural setting there's some non academic learning that goes on for a metropolitan kid for example comes to our state and fight for the first time that one of our shotgun walk brown fields trash and thousands that company which they'd never do that and come out her through changing time here and universities which have followed one maybe hearing awful new courses in the whole question of the writer on campuses or on the web is being constantly agitated i suppose they both todd seminars

in contemporary fiction that go along with the sections and writing the group discussions that that we haven't stood manuscripts you find that there is a close connection between me and the discussions you have with your students in the jurors' seminar or the priest seminar but you teach and the discussions of their own work you get a vocabulary from the one another that carries over into the other this ever thought about saw don't have ready answer these thought that all my feeling is that there is an immediate carry over in particular for example students have been taught intensively for semester when satan all of remembrance of things past i'm actually convinced that a certain percentage will in the family semester

began introducing that sort of deliberate enriching recollection of experience which approves into their own stories i've found in talking individually with students and individual conferences that run the most valuable partners i could joe is a suggestion as to something they might go and rain now we've talked about the workshop method of individual conferences in and group discussions of student work now imagine for most people it's easier for them to grasp the kind of the value of that would come from individual conferences than it is to imagine the hurly burly and the new and take and the emergence for clarifications that come out of a group session on well i think to explain it you have to explain what we do well in advance the class we distribute a piece of stone work in the new

draft form so they've all read it before the class starts and when the class starts a discussion is perhaps all ready to go we're going to talk about a story called judas goat it's the story of hairy crab or a plumber son much burdened by the dependence on him of his widowed mother his aunt was pregnant wife and infant daughter perry says his life in terms of survival all these women are trying to question as they did his father and ended stanley and aging bachelor and crackle introduces family into the household to take the deal wonder what you think the thing the story of a well i think the story is about the way women want men to be a man a woman's terms terms which before they were accepted make men not man and all those in the room and he'd say music and write that sounds very

frank wess that is against it he's not considering that i think in nineteen eighty five but no you have to take the story in the terms that is presented here and i think it's presented from heroes of view and i think from that point of view that we have to say that these women are after him it's a story of of the chase and these women are r after his skin and he's trying to escape the best way that we can ratliff says he wasn't they outweigh the station and how the way that they can find

you got three of them that is his wife his mother in selling and make a little money on poor man's three of them in an orphanage to get pregnant again which she then then then i get your fault it's your fault you didn't really add it in particular like like huge growth of the stories a reading from not the mask on your view on the fate of those things to black and white for women a one side of a one man an artist that an old awful women have the same voice they thought they were out there and say harry you and gnocchi no more hair you got responsibilities you know and so i know how we know are you have what we live on but bailey let's won twelve walk on fusion

and that is an ad that the will of the men who have done the wild things and the week well this is the story of how his pointed to prosecute and harry goes out he goes to the employment office and oftentimes for something that happened there which is going to change his relationship with these women if it does agree with the story comes from a from what happened he runs into his character stanley and my impression was that you are going to learn something stephen teach him he's going to come back in some ways in the sentencing but instead what happens is he runs widow's their main street for reasons which are very unclear doesn't seem for weeks and weeks later seeks another strange idea comes into his head something about bringing his family in to the house and take his place are trading places dan this information overload this instantly very poor in terms of the stories and again being attacked on it is the story

of one short walk from one page on page six and it's the same it runs runs from him for the same reasons that the ferry running from from within when he understood for this man stanley favors like a favorite is like clubs to rain becomes devout it was all those suns an unending cycle of involvement and and this is this is the author's reason but there's a man who needs a job to stay away from the employment office for weeks to avoid a guy who nearly as delicious newspaper i think he senses more than that though immunity it's it's it's intuitive that well i think the main thing is giving minors especially humor is very like stories like i don't know it's meant to be taken completely delightful working out of politics then they say to make your viewpoint and he sees all when he balances all women together because we have this attitude and not

handled very well simply as amusing entertaining story and what that really meant to be the story struck me as the much more grim moment i thought that what was good about the story and then a one which a different view is that was not a kinetic story were given the conditions at the outset but his father had been hounded by these women these women were there together our hairy with russia and the fascination with stories that here is this one moment after his father's up or there might be a chance at her will do something but but the conditions are very clearly stated in and because it's the other so heavy against terry you are interested in seeing whether he will get out of that somehow and the ending of it because i didn't have anything too intellectual about it and i'm confused a little bit about the subtlety are some of the interpretations for instance i was not clear at all why carrie brownstein we're home alone some mills and then shipped over well i want to get back to the point of view of this story i think that it is to open the view of the person who is limited and

that any is today without all the way through i don't happen to agree when he actually says that he takes that that this is a reasonable reaction this man this man and somebody who has been cowed by women but at the same time he is a man with a responsibility and is afraid of that young voters millions of them both or are can say that the author of businesses between the author's to pointless and the characters of the army and start to feel awkward on iran i think he is his sound of these mega stories that it and the us ambassador we can argue about it without ways i have to it yet beyond completely one sided the oreo the us so i think it is and i said except that i don't think you can view it from that standpoint you can just a man's mind you have all this business what

you're doing this idea that it's a humorous or grandparents knew was a common story and comment annoys me the awesome five and this is a common story political around for monday because he doesn't he has a tremendous is responsible action he does it he said nothing about and that's where the story started as a stop for the us and this makes it gives the author a chestnut the judge to give you herring that were in them whether its explainers as comical overtime historic can you tell me how it's going to work that i've discussed families who is you know the home and i'm going to switch planes or something exactly what is going after what so it is a strange idea came in to harry's head and i have some among it doesn't

matter that it does matter is no conceivable way for this to occur and villagers discerning it's my right is an awkward any clearer what happened it has simply not credible fighting is very clear what's going to happen to all of these women have gone to all expensive wine this lavish dinner and repairing it for this man's coming in the house and then they take the widowed mother and when you are on the throne of the couch and set her up she's the get the ordinary office melodies bring into the house to the widowed mother and there's much for this area's maybe they understand more about this than even that he wrote to us in stanley a certain concern and interest in i think so yes here it will be better fed you got to get away from not from the landlady yeah really that meant getting somebody for his inability to cope with a situation and finally the way does coke with his is not really a

moral one since the reasons why yeah we have great compassion for her readers to this is really no other way he can do anything to listen online stanley is just a natural choice i think i disagree with the cast of irony that you would like to place on the story because i feel that the author is in command of the selection of detail and i felt that the details of kerry's arrival at his boarding house where stanley mayes and he is subjected to bowing down the what the landlady and moving she has this way as eddie taylor chosen by the author to illustrate this concept of man's position of relative to women develop fully dallas particular story is well suited to the celtic manor for john won't say when you have seen some

well what we try to do with the program in creative writing at the university of the aisle what we do or could not be done unless we kept the imagination central and unless he recruited a community possessed by an intense harder for the arts possessed the old fashioned the meaning of the word as if by a demon in the arts and there is no other way or neither

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