These questions have been tackled ably elsewhere, by scholars such as D.G. Dowling is intrigued by the contradictions generated under Engle’s stewardship, which he traces through the Workshop’s later decades: How can writing be both pathbreaking and popular? Does institutional orthodoxy stifle innovation? How can one be a “man of letters” and a “man of business,” as Engle aimed to be? The goal for students in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is and has always been to publish. The poet Paul Engle, who took over the directorship of the Workshop in 1941, emphasized professional development over more than two decades at the helm, he worked tirelessly to secure prize money and corporate sponsorship for individual students and for the program as a whole. He shows too how deeply entwined the Workshop and the publishing industry have been since the 1940s-it is no accident that so many books reviewed in The New York Times bear the imprimatur of Iowa. The impact is certainly profound: In 15 brief biographies, Dowling demonstrates how many of the twentieth century’s most celebrated American authors shaped this institutional setting and were shaped by it. That, according to the introduction, is to examine “the impact of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on literary culture and the publishing industry” by narrating the careers of important contemporary authors who taught or studied there under a series of distinctive directors, from its founding to the present. Dowling’s new book, A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “They seemed to think that free booty was part of their compensation package.”Įxposing sexism is not the stated purpose of David O. “The teachers were completely fucked up,” the writer Sandra Cisneros said of her time there in the late 1970s. (“What? You mean you don’t fuck?”) There were sexual solicitations, quid pro quo exchanges, and drunken brawls, often over a woman. The poet John Berryman groped a student in the back seat of a car, en route to a party, and then balked when she tried to brush him off. A sample of incidents from the Workshop’s illustrious, 83-year history: In the 1960s, the writer Kurt Vonnegut, then a faculty member, suggested to a new hire that the latter avoid seducing undergrads, but he implied that grad students were fair game he also admitted to having “interfer with a student’s clothing,” to use his words. Tolentino’s reporting suggested that Ellis’s alleged behavior was especially distressing to students at Iowa because it recalled stories about other poets and teachers at the Workshop over the years. But some of these accomplished teachers are the very same people who harass, intimidate, and shun.
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