Rick Harsch on the I.W.W.

Enjoy Rick Harsch on Iowa's Frank Conroy, Marilynne Robinson, and James Alan McPherson.

we're not all Jenny Zhang's parents, but

"[My father] sure as hell was not jumping with joy and support when I said I wanted to be a writer. My mother cried for weeks and threatened to tell Stanford I was a convicted criminal so they would revoke my admission if I didn’t promise that I would not try to be a writer. I didn’t promise and my mother never made good on hers. They were scared for me. . ."

~~from "They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don't Exist" by Jenny Zhang

How Iowa Flattened Literature

I'm so tired I can't even remember if I've read the entire article, but I did reflect a bit on the following two quotations from it:

"If your central motive as a writer is to put across ideas," the writer Steve Almond says, "write an essay."

I found this interesting because one reason I enjoyed Almond's excellent lead-off story from the Richard Russo 2010 Best of American Short Stories is that it does have ideas we can play with. They relate to the analyst v. analyzed, caution v. risk, card games and gambling, and fathers and sons among other things. I also appreciated the ideas in Almond's intro to the story, about the link between autobiography and fiction. Of course, "Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched" has many other things going for it, such as strong flow, timing, and characterization. Anyway, I do like novels with ideas, if not precisely of ideas, and for me that's partly what I get out of Voltaire, Nabokov, Pynchon, Dostoyevsky, and others.

And then "How Iowa Flattened Literature," in a quotation taken out of context, makes Frank Conroy sound like the kind of teacher I hope I never become. Similar to John Gardner, Conroy is a man intent on validating realism at the expense of the experimental, postmodern, or other unusually good stuff, and it sounds like he would steer his students away from emulating some of the greatest American fiction.

When I was at Iowa, Frank Conroy, Engle’s longest-running successor, did not name the acceptable categories. Instead, he shot down projects by shooting down their influences. He loathed Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, Barthelme. He had a thing against J.D. Salinger that was hard to explain. To go anywhere near Melville or Nabokov was to ingest the fatal microbes of the obnoxious. Of David Foster Wallace he growled, with a wave of his hand, "He has his thing that he does."

I've never felt a lasting need to uphold one kind of literature at the expense of another, but I hope if I'm ever accused of having "a thing" that I do, it means I've sold some books and not that I've done the unconscionable "thing" of 2014, namely criticizing another writer on my blog. Ugh!

Literature, that almost dead cult from which there's never any escape, while we're all stuck in sentence fragments, desperately waiting for James Patterson to send cash to keep us afloat.

(By the way, DFW is the only writer mentioned in the second quotation that I've never read although I've never finished anything by Gaddis. I love at least one novel or story by all the others.)

Iowa Writers' Workshop

"How Iowa Flattened Literature" has been around the interwebs recently, about the CIA and the workshop, and in fine blogging fashion, I've only skimmed parts of it so far. Nevertheless here are more than ten things, mainly books and writers, I think of when free-associating about the Iowa Writers' Workshop:

1) The Stone Reader a documentary about a forgotten Iowa writer that the director determines to find

2) The Same River Twice by Chris Offutt

3) After the Workshop by John McNally

4) Fred Exley at Iowa in Pages from a Cold Island

5) drinking stories about Raymond Carver and John Cheever at Iowa

6) stories I've assigned by Bharati Mukherjee, Nam Le, and Sana Krasikov

7) John Gardner and T.C. Boyle, wildly successful, prolific novelists with PhDs from Iowa (if I'm not mistaken, Gardner was one of America's first PhDs in creative writing although this is perplexing as I've always been under the impression Iowa does not offer such a degree)

8) John Irving, one of my father's favorites

9) Kurt Vonnegut, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, Richard Yates and other literary greats who passed through Iowa

10) my rejection in '93 or '94; in retrospect, I'm sure it was a weak application (no publications, undergrad workshops, or thorough references, and a hurried seven semesters of college; my creative writing sample was likely somewhat experimental and weird)

11) need to get to work but plan to add hyperlinks and Jesus' Son, Joy Williams, and others

12) shouldn't forget Alexander Chee

13) Henry Israeli, Philly poet and publisher of Saturnalia Press

14) Jayne Anne Phillips, kind enough to answer my questions about her "Home"

15) for posterity's sake, of course, it's worth noting that none of the writers listed above are at my level, so to speak, and particularly not in the categories of sloth, fatigue, generalized failure, and penchant for procrastination (and for all their sakes, I hope they are also weaker than me in neuroses, doubt, angst, and occasional chest pain). ps--and it goes without writing, until I do, that I'm also better at my patented process for blog of editing, publishing, and then editing again. and again. . .

*#12 once included Steve Almond, but in a local library on 6/26/14, while reading from one of his nonfiction titles, I chanced upon his insistence that he attended the MFA at UNC-Greensboro. . . no doubt, another reason Almond has felt awkward and out of place with all the other nuts.