Longmont, Colorado, 2006
Recent Print Journalism Projects:
"Where Great Writers Are Made," The Atlantic Monthly, Summer Fiction Issue 2007
Excerpt:
"The Iowa Writers' Workshop lives in a Victorian house tucked in among fraternities at the north end of the University of Iowa campus, and from the back of which the Workshop's brand-new and clean-lined Glenn Schaeffer Library adjoins it, as a fashionable offspring might flank a more-elegantly dressed parent. In the Library's Frank Conroy Reading Room, which overlooks the gray waters of the Iowa River, there are 16 tall and glassed bookcases. Inside those rest volumes that have been published by graduate of the Workshop, which began in 1936. There are 2,831 books on those shelves. Upstairs in Dey House, in an unused office, there are nine more large boxes of alumni books for which there is no more room on the shelves. In a wire basket on the desk of program associate Connie And those are only the ones I know about, Brothers says.
As the best-known, most-established program in the country, one that began in the 1930s and for years was housed in Quonset huts, the books in that pantheon are both humbling and inspiring to the students in the program. "Most of us are still walking around still amazed we got in," says Drew Keenan, a 34-year-old former software engineer from San Francisco who gave that life up to spend the two years in Iowa's MFA program.
The students at Iowa, as with thousands enrolled in the exponentially growing number of graduate programs nationally, are infected with what the novelist Charles Baxter, who teaches in the University of Minnesota's MFA program, calls "a hyperfeverishness of ideas and the sense that if you don't get these ideas down, you just might die." For those students, who announce to the world in a time of declining readership of serious literature that they are writers, there is that whiff of hope set against deep odds, perhaps improved by passage through a so-called 'top program.'
Trying to assess graduate writing programs is something like rating the top ten party schools: You can count how many bottles go in, and how many empties go out, but you can't prove the party was fun. Determining the best writing programs is an alchemy of hearsay, tenuous connectors, certain measurable facts and whatever one’s predilections might be..."