49. Paul Engle to Sinclair Lewis, 27 February 1951, PPE SCUI.
50. Paul Engle, Response to draft chapter, “Engle Workshop,” PPE SCUI.
51. Shirley Lim, “The Strangeness of Creative Writing: An Institutional History,” Pedagogy 3.2 (2003), 157.
52. Quoted in Ron McFarland, “An Apologia for Creative Writing,” College English 55 (1993), 28.
53. Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (St. Paul, Minn.: Gray Wolf, 1992), 2.
54. For a skeptical approach toward the enterprise, see Dana Goodyear, “The Moneyed Muse,” New Yorker, 19 February 2007, web.
55. Gioia, 13.
56. Edmund Skellings to Stephen Wilbers, 10 May 1976, RIWW SCUI.
57. All quotations in the paragraph are from Kiyohiro Miura, “ ‘I’ll Make Your Career,’ ” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 57, 59.
58. Dinger, 15.
59. Ellison’s point here has been underscored by recent theorists commenting on literature deliberately written for the masses, such as the serial fiction of the New York Ledger. Michael Denning’s suggestion that “questions about the sincerity of [popular literature’s] purported beliefs or the adequacy of their political proposals are less interesting than questions about the narrative embodiment of their political ideologies,” a point which, I would argue, equally applies to self-conscious attempts at serious literature for the elite market. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), 103.
60. PPE SCUI.
61. Loren Glass, “Middle Man: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” The Minnesota Review (Winter/Spring 2009), 2.
62. Lynn Neary, “In Elite MFA Programs, the Challenge of Writing While ‘Other,’ ” National Public Radio, 19 August 2014, web.
63. Junot Díaz, “MFA vs. POC,” New Yorker, 30 April 2014, 32.
64. Robert Sullivan, 2 February 1976, transcribed from audio cassette, RIWW SCUI.
65. Myers, 150.
66. Myers, 148–149.
67. Myers, 149.
68. Myers, 116.
69. Mearns’s Dewey-influenced goal for writing instruction was “always of self-expression as a means of personal growth” to permeate every aspect of the student’s life over and against mastering written expression in fiction, poetry, and drama. “The business of making professional poets” he disavowed entirely as “another matter—with which this writer has never had the least interest.” Hughes Mearns, Creative Power (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1929), 119–120.
70. Olsen and Schaeffer, 271. “The professional success rates for graduates in creative writing [based on the success rate for publication] is about one percent (compared with 90 percent for graduates of medical school),” according to Myers, 2.
71. Olsen and Schaeffer, 217–218.
72. Further signs of the difficulty of gaining entrance into the Workshop, even for a non-degree earning observer of a single class, appear in Frank Conroy’s rejection of University of Iowa public relations representative Winston Barclay’s offer “to sit in on one of the workshops for a semester” as a means of gaining a deeper understanding of the program to enhance future publicity. Winston Barclay to Frank Conroy, 26 February 1990, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Directors of other programs would have welcomed such an opportunity for free publicity. Conroy instead demurred, citing high standards for admission, emphasizing that the “people who didn’t make the cut include a medical doctor, numerous PhD’s, Magnas and Summas from the best universities in the country, widely published fiction writers, people with very strong recommendations from current and past visiting staff, etc.,” despite Barclay’s desire to observe in a temporary capacity rather than formally apply. After regaling him with such daunting odds for admission, Conroy suggested to Barclay, “you can of course apply,” an arch dismissal carrying considerable cruelty, especially since plenty of classroom space was available. The type of promotion Conroy did pursue was not free, as seen in his negotiations with private fund-raisers such as the Endowment Planning Group, who sent him an elaborate proposal for a campaign titled “The Plan,” a fifteen-page document sent via fax in 1990. In a letter to Michael Rea of the Dungannon Foundation, Conroy openly worried about accepting the offer because he was uncertain that the budget could withstand the high fees the private fund-raising consultant demanded. Roberta d’Estachio to Frank Conroy, 19 December 1990; Frank Conroy to Michael Rea, 14 December 1990, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
73. Olsen and Schaeffer, 61–62.
74. Olsen and Schaeffer, 60.
75. Paul Engle, ed., On Creative Writing (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1964), vii.
1. The Brilliant Misfit: Flannery O’Connor
1. Jean W. Cash, Flannery O’Connor: A Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 93.
2. Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters Edited and With an Introduction, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 176.
3. Hajime Noguchi, Criticism of Flannery O’Connor (Tokyo: Bunkashobouhakubunsha, 1985), 60–61.
4. Colman McCarthy, “The Servant of Literature in the Heart of Iowa: Paul Engle,” Washington Post, 27 March 1983.
5. Cash, 81.
6. Jean Wylder, “Flannery O’Connor: A Reminiscence and Some Letters,” North American Review 255.1 (Spring 1970), 60.
7. Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 120.
8. Cash, 81.
9. James B. Hall to Jean Wylder, 6 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
10. Gooch, 152.
11. Richard Gilman, “On Flannery O’Connor,” New York Review of Books, 21 August 1969, 25.
12. James B. Hall to Jean Wylder, 6 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
13. McCarthy.
14. Bob Fawcell, “William Porter’s Writing Center: From Pulp to Post,” Daily Iowan, 26 January 1946.
15. Barbara Spargo to Stephen Wilbers, 2 February 1976, RIWW SCUI.
16. Wylder, 58. Tom Grimes notes that the GI Education Bill “accounted for the high percentage of men participating in the Workshop’s early years,” which placed O’Connor in a tiny minority of “one of only three women in the Workshop in the late 1940s”; The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 36.
17. Barbara Spargo to Stephen Wilbers, 2 February 1976, RIWW SCUI.
18. Current Biography Yearbook: Who’s News and Why, 1942 (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1942), 249.
19. Grimes, 35.
20. Gooch, 122.
21. Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 127.
22. O’Connor, Mystery, 127.
23. Cash, 39.
24. Flannery O’Connor, Conversations, ed. Rosemary Magee (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 99.
25. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 192.
26. Gooch, 123.
27. Hank Messick to Stephen Wilbers, 26 March 1976, RIWW SCUI.
28. Paul Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught at University of Iowa Workshop,” Des Moines Sunday Register, 26 December 1947, 9E.
29. Wylder, 58.
30. Cash, 92.
31. Wylder, 58.
32. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 422.
33. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 74.
34. Paul Engle to Virgil Hancher, 31 October 1963, PPE SCUI.
35. Paul Engle, A Lucky American Childhood (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), xiii.
36. Engle, A Lucky American Childhood, 23–24.
37. Engle, A Lucky American Childhood, 35.
38. Ben Ray Redman, Review of Break the Heart’s Anger by Paul Engle, New
York Herald Tribune Books, 22 March 1936.
39. PPE SCUI.
40. Engle, A Lucky American Childhood, 27.
41. In his vision, literature became a mechanism for what Henry Jenkins calls convergence culture, which in Engle’s case marked the beginning of the current movement of literary culture into popular culture. The Workshop epitomizes an early embodiment of convergence culture, especially in the leveraging of diverse media merging at the intersection of technologies, industries, cultures, and audiences. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 14.
42. Engle’s process echoes what Jim Collins describes as the way “literary reading now comes with its own self-legitimating mythology that sanctifies the singularity of reading novels as an aesthetic experience, the way they used to be read, yet these same novels became global bestsellers only through the intervention of popular literary culture.” Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 225.
43. Cash, 81.
44. Gooch, 125–126.
45. Cash, 82.
46. Paul Engle, “Introduction” to Midland, manuscript draft, PPE SCUI.
47. See for example Mark McGurl’s claim that Engle’s sadism was a perfect match for O’Connor’s masochism in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). He argues that O’Connor was obsessed with “the necessary pleasures of the ‘discipline’ ” of writing, especially “the discipline of narrative form . . . as a masochistic aesthetics of institutionalization,” making “discipline itself a kind of religion” whereby institutions are reinforced by obedience to rules. Submitting to the authority of institutions such as Engle’s Workshop and the Catholic Church, he claims, provided O’Connor with “a source of great pleasure, aesthetic or otherwise.” McGurl, 135. The point is well taken, although it elides the very real stand O’Connor took against not only Engle’s editorial feedback, but also that of the editor he arranged to publish her first novel, Wise Blood. Further, her willingness to satirize her mentor’s zeal to market and advertise the program through business sponsorship also undermines this flat depiction of her as passively submitting to his will. The reality of their relationship was far more complex.
48. Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught.”
49. Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught.”
50. Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught.”
51. Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught.”
52. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 13.
53. Cash, 128.
54. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 14.
55. Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1946), ix.
56. O’Connor, Complete Stories, xi.
57. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 14.
58. Margaret Meaders, “Flannery O’Connor: Literary Witch,” Colorado Quarterly (Spring 1962), 384.
59. Gooch, 136–137.
60. Robie Macauley to Stephen Wilbers, 16 April 1976, RIWW SCUI.
61. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 45.
62. Flannery O’Connor to Paul Engle, 14 February 1955, PPE SCUI.
63. Flannery O’Connor to Paul Engle, 3 April 1960, PPE SCUI.
64. Flannery O’Connor to Paul Engle, 7 June 1961, PPE SCUI.
65. Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1949), 27.
66. O’Connor, Complete Stories, 132.
67. O’Connor, Wise Blood, 14.
68. O’Connor, Wise Blood, 15.
69. Wylder, 59.
2. The Star: W. D. Snodgrass
1. Donald J. Torchiana, “Heart’s Needle: Snodgrass Strides Through the Universe,” Northwestern Tri-Quarterly (Spring 1960), 18, RIWW SCUI.
2. Robert Bly, “When Literary Life Was Still Piled Up in a Few Places,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 39.
3. Peter Nelson quoted in Ed Dinger, ed., Seems Like Old Times (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 53.
4. Robert Dana, “De,” in The Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass: Everything Human, ed. Stephen Haven (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 293.
5. W. D. Snodgrass, After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches (Rochester, N.Y.: BOA Editions, 1999), 9.
6. J. D. McClatchy, “W. D. Snodgrass: The Mild, Reflective Art,” in The Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass: Everything Human, ed. Stephen Haven (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 118.
7. Dana, “De,” 296.
8. Donald Hall, “Seasoned Wood,” in The Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass: Everything Human, ed. Stephen Haven (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 285, 288.
9. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 130; James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Signet, 1991), 217.
10. Paul Engle, “The Writer and the Place,” in Midland (New York: Random House, 1961), xxv.
11. Suzanne McConnell quoted in Seems Like Old Times, ed. Ed Dinger (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 35.
12. R. W. Apple, “The Shaping of Writers on Campus” [reprint], Des Moines Register, 24 May 1963, 10.
13. Paul Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught at University of Iowa Workshop,” Des Moines Sunday Register, 26 December 1947, 9G.
14. W. D. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 39.
15. Tom Grimes, ed., The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 724.
16. Jean Wylder, “Flannery O’Connor,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 234.
17. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” 119–120.
18. Stephen Wilbers, The Iowa Writers’ Workshop: Origins, Emergence, and Growth (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1980), 94.
19. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” 125.
20. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” 125.
21. Robert Boyers and W. D. Snodgrass, “W. D. Snodgrass: An Interview,” Salmagundi 22–23 (Spring–Summer 1973): 165.
22. Boyers and Snodgrass, 165.
23. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” 131.
24. James B. Hall to Jean Wylder [n.d.], Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
25. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” 129.
26. William Stafford to Jean Wylder, 8 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
27. McClatchy, 117–118.
28. McClatchy, 114.
29. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” 133.
30. James B. Hall to Jean Wylder, 11 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
31. W. D. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle (New York: Knopf, 1959), 52, 54, Iowa Authors Collection, SCUI.
32. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle, 47; Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle [dust jacket], Iowa Authors Collection, SCUI.
33. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle, 47, Iowa Authors Collection, SCUI.
34. Snodgrass, After-Images, 194.
35. Richard Stern to Jean Wylder, 10 May 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
36. Morgan Gibson to Jean Wylder, 4 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
37. Snodgrass, After-Images, 194.
38. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle [dust jacket], Iowa Authors Collection, SCUI.
39. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle, 36–37, Iowa Authors Collection, SCUI.
40. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle, 34–35, Iowa Authors Collection, SCUI.
41. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle, 53, Iowa Writers Series, S
CUI; Torchiana, “Snodgrass Strides Through the Universe,” 18.
42. Ed Blaine to Stephen Wilbers, 14 June 1976, Stephen Wilbers Project, RIWW SCUI.
43. Ogden Plumb to Jean Wylder, 27 April 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
44. Lewis Turco, “The Iowa Workshop: An Assenting View,” Prairie Schooner (Spring 1965), 93–94, RIWW SCUI.
45. Marvin Bell, “He Made It Possible,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 74.
46. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” 123.
47. William Stafford to Jean Wylder, 8 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
48. James Sunwall to Jean Wylder, 11 January 1973, Jean Wylder Project, RIWW SCUI.
49. Dana, “De,” 293.
50. Dana, “De,” 292.
51. McClatchy, 118.
52. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle, 62.
A Delicate Aggression Page 49
