Audition of the storied writers

Author Richard Bausch sits at a small rectangular table facing four curved rows of chairs holding some of the best writing students and instructors in the country. It’s evening, and outside the frigid Iowa River flows through inky blackness as Bausch begins reading a short story about illness and death, bravery, and the thousand-cut pain of love splintering into nothingness.

This is not your usual job interview.

Bausch, an acclaimed short story writer and novelist, is one of four finalists for what could be the most prestigious writing job in the country: running the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

There’s more at stake than simply filling an academic bureaucrat’s chair. The first of its kind, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop created the template for teaching American graduate students to write by presenting their works-in-progress to small groups of peers, who then -- under the direction of a faculty member -- break out the long knives.

While critics say the workshop approach can create a sameness in style -- “assembly-line fiction,” in the words of one -- it’s hard to argue with Iowa’s success. Such icons of American letters as Flannery O’Connor, Jane Smiley, Wallace Stegner and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. have all studied or taught here. Eleven 6-foot-tall wooden bookcases lining current director Frank Conroy’s office hold nothing but books by workshop grads. Alumni have won 16 Pulitzer Prizes, several National Book and MacArthur Awards -- the “genius grants.” Three have recently served as U.S. poet laureates.

“Literary life is rife with turf wars, so the program has often been accused of promoting this or that aesthetic,” said Marvin Bell, who is retiring from the workshop this spring after 30 years of teaching poetry to such students as Sandra Cisneros, Rita Dove, John Irving and Denis Johnson. He said the critics tend to be people who were unsuccessful in the program, failed to win entry “or writers who had been part of workshops in other schools and couldn’t stomach the notion of such a good program ‘in the sticks.’ These charges are always uninformed.”

And there are many imitators. About 400 writing programs have opened since Iowa paved the way in 1936. California has about 40 writing programs, including one at UC Irvine, considered after Iowa to be among the best.

But this is where it began, roughly midway between Herbert Hoover’s birthplace in rural West Branch and the Amana Colonies, a 19th-century experiment in religious communism. With 100 students -- half are poets and half are fiction writers -- the Iowa workshop remains one of the nation’s largest and the program against which all others are measured.

“It has had a profound impact in part because so many skillful and well-known writers have been through the program and now are running other programs, or writing and making their influence felt in various ways in the literary world,” said C. Michael Curtis, a fiction editor at Atlantic Monthly. “It’s also created the model that so many other schools have sought to replicate, not, unfortunately, with very exact success.”

The director’s job is a rare opening. Conroy, only the fourth director in the program’s 70-year history, steps down this spring from the job he’s held for 18 years.

For the chance to succeed Conroy, the candidates are trekking here to the frozen Midwest for a couple of days of private talks with the faculty, to conduct workshops for students and to squeeze in a little socializing -- for Bausch, it was lunch with Ethan Canin and a dinner reception hosted by Marilynne Robinson, both highly regarded writers on the teaching staff.

But the public focal point of each candidate’s visit is the reading -- in essence, an open audition.

“This is how they introduce themselves to the students and faculty alike,” said Linda Maxson, dean of the College of Arts and Letters, which includes the workshop. “This is how one gets familiar with the writer. It’s a very good way for the students to interact with the candidates and it also makes the students a part of the process.”

The competition

The next reading is Thursday by Lan Samantha Chang, author of the short story collection “Hunger” and the recently released novel “Inheritance,” both dealing with the echoing effects of family history. Jim Shepard, whose eight novels blend history and fantasy, reads Feb. 28, followed March 7 by experimentalist Ben Marcus, author of the novel “Notable American Women” and the cult favorite “Age of Wire and String.”

Other than receiving critical acclaim for their works, the finalists have little in common. Bausch and Chang went through the Iowa workshop a generation apart. Bausch and Shepard, who studied writing at Brown University, are long-established writers; Chang and Marcus, also a Brown alum, belong to a new generation that began publishing in the early 1990s. All currently teach or lead other writing programs, Bausch at George Mason University, Chang at Harvard, Shepard at Williams College and Marcus at Columbia University.

After each reading, students can fill out response forms, which will become part of the material the university’s search committee will consider in deciding who gets a job -- a decision expected at semester’s end.

“The publicness of it is unusual,” Chang said by phone from Cambridge, Mass. “The itinerary is rather grueling. I’m looking at it, and there are so many events. But I get excited to think about the opportunity to go back and talk to students there and share how I feel about the workshop. It’s been a big part of my development as a writer.”

The workshop is split among permanent faculty -- four authors and five poets -- and a shifting roster of one-year appointments. The result mixes the institutional heft of the full-timers with the freshness of the visitors, blending the established with the new in the workshop’s home at Dey House, a rambling 1857 Victorian home atop a riverside bluff just north of downtown.

Conroy, who is battling colon cancer, declined to be interviewed. His students and colleagues describe him as a passionate articulator of what makes writing good -- and bad. While each instructor has his or her own style, Conroy has set the current tone of an uncompromising approach to honing the basic skills of the craft. “The primary thing to hope for is to make them write at the levels of their capabilities,” said Robinson, who joined the faculty in 1989, two years after Conroy took over.

It’s not always a pleasant experience -- particularly Conroy’s workshops.

“I think everybody’s sort of afraid to go in his workshop just because he has the reputation of being so cantankerous and so tough,” said second-year student Roderic Crooks, 31, of New York City. “But if you come here, you definitely want to go see the guy.... You understand what you’re signing up for. You knew how it was going to go down.”

Crooks took Conroy’s workshop last year.

“I put my story up, my first story, and he hated it,” Crooks said. “I was devastated. You come out of there and you just feel completely demoralized. He just crushes you, basically.”

Crooks offered two more stories for the workshop that semester and elicited similar responses. “By the end, I felt like I understood what he was saying, but he basically teaches through hazing,” Crooks said, laughing. “It was like kung fu master style, you know, when you get it wrong you get a spanking.”

Conroy’s successor will also become the symbolic head of the surprisingly vibrant literary scene here.

In coffee shops and bars, several of which hold open-mike reading nights, it’s common to overhear conversations about personal writing projects and new books, readings attended and friends’ literary ventures.

In Irvine, by contrast, the fiction program is all but invisible to the outside community, and the only independent bookstore within walking distance of campus is Whale of a Tale -- a children’s shop.

Tellingly, the University of Iowa’s Museum of Art is the first stop of a 10-city exhibit tour of the 120-foot scroll on which Jack Kerouac wrote “On the Road.”

Performance counts

Bausch’s reading, a dinnertime event on campus, attracted about 75 people -- mostly faculty and students -- and two hours later a similar-sized crowd turned out to listen to novelist and short story writer Pam Houston read at the Prairie Lights Bookstore, which hosts more than 300 readings a year -- many of them aired live on local public station WSUI-AM (910).

“It’s an amazing culture in this little town,” Robinson said. “If you’re a writer ... you can be very unself-conscious about it here. It’s not a role.”

But there’s still performance involved.

Bausch began his reading with jokes. One told of the time Eudora Welty was invited by a librarian “to come tell her stories to them in her own words.”

Then Bausch read his piece about “Byron the Lyron,” a gay man whose lover leaves him as his mother lies dying in a hospital. The story carries a sense of foreboding, mixing gallows humor and the awkwardness of witnessing such vital and emotional human events. Bausch didn’t mention the absent and ailing Conroy, but the symbols hung in the evening air, whispers of change to come and the uncertainties of the future.

At the end of the story, Byron, a photographer, is living alone in Rome, his late mother’s favorite city. “He still lives there,” Bausch read in a matter-of-fact Southern voice, the audience rapt at the end of the 40-minute reading. “Now and then, he walks out near sunset and takes pictures of the old part of the city, of the ancient buildings with their long histories, their brilliant complications, their tragedy and sorrow.”