An Iowa Recollection

Luke Wallin

Having devoted my energies to Philosophy until the age of 26, I began suddenly and passionately to write fiction. Stories of my Mississippi childhood and youth came pouring out every midnight, though I was supposed to be in the home stretch of an Iowa Philosophy Ph.D. My friend Sena Naslund read the stories, encouraged me, and passed them to William Price Fox. Before I knew it I’d been accepted into the Workshop.

After the rigidities of Philosophy, the Workshop felt wide open and wild. Seymour Krimm praised student work so experimental it included handwriting over the margins of a story’s pages. Bill Fox inspired extreme plots and scenes with his novel-in-progress about two Southern women performing topless gospel. Richard Yates spoke each week about a classic American novelist, choosing his words so carefully, with such love for tradition, that he filled me with respect and gratitude. And Barry Goldensohn’s poetics deepened my grasp of what a single line, even a single word, might do.

These teachers made indelible impressions, each one contributing to a rich whole. Of course nobody loves being a student, and the role was especially confusing in those days of the Vietnam War, the Kent State shootings, the Civil Rights Movement and political assassinations. Nightly campus demonstrations against the war sometimes spilled over into violence against town businesses, as if imperialism equaled the most humble local capitalism; to me the world was drifting without reason.

By contrast with these upheavals, my home revealed another side of Iowa, for I had bought David Milch’s farmhouse south of Iowa City. Here among the Amish, beneath Muscadine-draped Walnut trees and rolling cornfields, my family and I rode horses alongside our dogs and a pet raccoon. Late at night, with the ground frozen deep and the wind howling, I continued writing my stories, feeling for true voice, working in a race to graduate.

Like many people who earn an MFA, I left stung by so many encounters with teachers and their acolytes. Did workshops really need to be quite so brutal? As I moved to New York City I knew it would take years to digest and work through that turbulent time, and to decide what Iowa meant to me. Determined to preserve the sense of intellectual excitement, I was shocked to learn how difficult this could be. Iowa City had been a cauldron, where first-rate minds appeared constantly in the brew. In New York they were spread out, self-protected, hard to find. I joined a community of songwriters which, intense and competitive, matched my need for the standard Iowa had set. And later, in my own workshops, I attempted greater kindness for each student, along with honesty about the work. Iowa was a concentrated dream that personalized ideas, editing, and the distances between teachers and students. It remains clear and present, long after the night of that time has passed.