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A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers' Workshop
A vibrant history of the renowned and often controversial Iowa Writers’ Workshop and its celebrated alumni and faculty
As the world’s preeminent creative writing program, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has produced an astonishing number of distinguished writers and poets since its establishment in 1936. Its alumni and faculty include twenty-eight Pulitzer Prize winners, six U.S. poet laureates, and numerous National Book Award winners. This volume follows the program from its rise to prominence in the early 1940s under director Paul Engle, who promoted the “workshop” method of classroom peer criticism.
Meant to simulate the rigors of editorial and critical scrutiny in the publishing industry, this educational style created an environment of both competition and community, cooperation and rivalry. Focusing on some of the exceptional authors who have participated in the program—such as Flannery O’Connor, Dylan Thomas, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Smiley, Sandra Cisneros, T. C. Boyle, and Marilynne Robinson—David Dowling examines how the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has shaped professional authorship, publishing industries, and the course of American literature.
As the world’s preeminent creative writing program, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has produced an astonishing number of distinguished writers and poets since its establishment in 1936. Its alumni and faculty include twenty-eight Pulitzer Prize winners, six U.S. poet laureates, and numerous National Book Award winners. This volume follows the program from its rise to prominence in the early 1940s under director Paul Engle, who promoted the “workshop” method of classroom peer criticism.
Meant to simulate the rigors of editorial and critical scrutiny in the publishing industry, this educational style created an environment of both competition and community, cooperation and rivalry. Focusing on some of the exceptional authors who have participated in the program—such as Flannery O’Connor, Dylan Thomas, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Smiley, Sandra Cisneros, T. C. Boyle, and Marilynne Robinson—David Dowling examines how the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has shaped professional authorship, publishing industries, and the course of American literature.
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Published May 28, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 9, 2020
A Delicate Aggression is a general history of the Iowa Writers' Workshop told through the experiences of some of its better-known students and faculty. The actual Workshop we know was established in 1941 by a poet and wayward clergyman named Paul Engle, who stumbled into teaching and was heavily influenced by Iowa English professor Wilbur Schramm's teaching method. Today it's arguably considered the world's finest institution teaching creative writing.
The title of the book gives a long way toward explaining the highly competitive environment of IWW. The teaching philosophy, as preached by Engle, was to dissect and offer criticism in open classroom forums the ongoing work of students, all of them enrolled and all embroiled in the contentious free for all. The criticism was expected to be unsparingly honest and humiliating if necessary, the classroom atmosphere intended to prepare writers for the intense pressures of the publishing world. This feisty analysis and discussion was meant to drive out bad writing habits rather than allowing time for developing good ones. The overall method was a competitiveness and harsh criticism which set students against each other rather than fostering cooperation and mutual support. One characteristic of the program is that it's always been less interested in intellectual insight than in competitiveness. Dominance is more important than technical development and ideas. It's a Darwinian system. Not all survive, but some thrive.
One who thrived is T. C. Boyle, one of the program's most successful students and a kind of poster boy for the IWW because of it. Like Robert Lowell, who used Iowa to stabilize his mental condition, Boyle used it to help rid himself of his heroin and quaalude addiction and unleash his creativity. His is only one of the stories here. Dowling's history of the school is told through chronological chapters which are each centered around a well-known writer or faculty member who passed through the IWW, nun-like Flannery O'Connor being the 1st and perhaps the most famous. But the stories of Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo are also here in a chapter focused on describing the sexual exploitation of female students common there, as well as some racial discrimination. Jane Smiley and Rita Dove each get a chapter. Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, and John Berryman are examples of distinguished faculty. So is Marilynne Robinson whose late chapter and mystical sensitivities kind of link with the chapter on O'Connor to form a frame. These are all successful writers, of course, and have in common their association with the IWW. But each experience Dowling relates is different, meant to reveal the many sides of the Workshop.
What's apparent in this parade of writers we admire is that IWW's program is enormously successful. Whether or not we agree that the discipline of hypercriticism is the best method, the Workshop does produce quality writers. This 79-year history Dowling tells makes interesting reading.
The title of the book gives a long way toward explaining the highly competitive environment of IWW. The teaching philosophy, as preached by Engle, was to dissect and offer criticism in open classroom forums the ongoing work of students, all of them enrolled and all embroiled in the contentious free for all. The criticism was expected to be unsparingly honest and humiliating if necessary, the classroom atmosphere intended to prepare writers for the intense pressures of the publishing world. This feisty analysis and discussion was meant to drive out bad writing habits rather than allowing time for developing good ones. The overall method was a competitiveness and harsh criticism which set students against each other rather than fostering cooperation and mutual support. One characteristic of the program is that it's always been less interested in intellectual insight than in competitiveness. Dominance is more important than technical development and ideas. It's a Darwinian system. Not all survive, but some thrive.
One who thrived is T. C. Boyle, one of the program's most successful students and a kind of poster boy for the IWW because of it. Like Robert Lowell, who used Iowa to stabilize his mental condition, Boyle used it to help rid himself of his heroin and quaalude addiction and unleash his creativity. His is only one of the stories here. Dowling's history of the school is told through chronological chapters which are each centered around a well-known writer or faculty member who passed through the IWW, nun-like Flannery O'Connor being the 1st and perhaps the most famous. But the stories of Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo are also here in a chapter focused on describing the sexual exploitation of female students common there, as well as some racial discrimination. Jane Smiley and Rita Dove each get a chapter. Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, and John Berryman are examples of distinguished faculty. So is Marilynne Robinson whose late chapter and mystical sensitivities kind of link with the chapter on O'Connor to form a frame. These are all successful writers, of course, and have in common their association with the IWW. But each experience Dowling relates is different, meant to reveal the many sides of the Workshop.
What's apparent in this parade of writers we admire is that IWW's program is enormously successful. Whether or not we agree that the discipline of hypercriticism is the best method, the Workshop does produce quality writers. This 79-year history Dowling tells makes interesting reading.
November 7, 2019
My interest waxed and waned while reading this. As other reviewers mentioned it was more of a collection of biographies about certain teachers and certain students at the Iowa Writers Workshop MFA in three different eras. I was originally hoping to learn more about the actual program, especially the modern era because my husband attended for fiction writing in the early 2000s, but it didn’t provide that. Nonetheless, I found the information about Paul Engle, Flannery O’Connor, and Marilynne Robinson very interesting. Engle created and managed to fund an amazing program and the author is confusingly kind of negative towards him. But overall, I’m glad I read this.
January 3, 2019
WOW. Wow wow wow. The tea this spills...as a fellow MFA, I thoroughly enjoyed this peek into Iowa. Although some of it surprised me, most did not. I think a lot of what is discussed in this book is unfortunately pretty commonplace in MFA programs of a certain type. Although I really loved this, I didn’t love how the chapters focused on well-known individuals. I felt like the reader lost something by that format; although my favorites were Joy Harjo and Sandra Cisneros. One gets the impression that the author, while writing widely on IWW, is also leaving a lot out - and boy, I can only imagine.
June 9, 2019
I found this such an interesting and entertaining read. It’s a meticulously researched history of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from its inception in 1936 to the present. It rose to prominence in the 1940s and has remained the world’s preeminent creative writing programme. A remarkable number of celebrated writers have been through its programme, from Flannery O’Connor to Jane Smiley, Dylan Thomas to Marilynne Robinson – the list goes on and on. The emphasis was always on peer criticism and it could be brutal at times, leading to many tears and tantrums and much rivalry. It doesn’t ever seem to have been in any way a nurturing process and some of the anecdotes left me feeling very uncomfortable. Commercial success was always a key aim and the conflict between the commercial and the purely literary is explored in some depth and makes for some very interesting reading. I thoroughly enjoyed all the anecdotes about the programme’s participants (even the ones that made me feel uncomfortable!) – a bit of literary gossip never goes amiss. It’s a truly engaging read and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the writing process, creative writing courses and programmes, creativity and the power of the marketplace.
January 30, 2020
An interesting read, but a very slow one and one that I feel wasn't terribly cohesive in the end. I do like that Dowling comes from outside the Workshop (I can throw a stone from my office - ok, fine, I would need a slingshot from the roof of my wing of the hospital - and hit Dey House across the river, so this is all very local to me) but the way he chose to spotlight particular individuals during different directors' tenures didn't give a good picture of the Workshop over time. Aside from a) the Workshop method is WOW, abusive and resistant to experimentation or change and b) it was a hella boys club plus booze, which I think most of us already knew. I think a reader would need to know about the history of the Workshop already to understand this book, so it isn't a good entry point.
There were also some obvious people missing (and I'm not sure if some authors declined to participate in the interviews). Alexander Chee has written about his time at IWW a bit so should have been a good inclusion during the Conroy era and if we're going to talk about IWW graduates who write successful popular novels with romantic elements, Elin Hilderbrand was suspiciously absent from this narrative, particularly when the last two chapters are about Anthony Swofford and Ayana Mathis.
There were also some obvious people missing (and I'm not sure if some authors declined to participate in the interviews). Alexander Chee has written about his time at IWW a bit so should have been a good inclusion during the Conroy era and if we're going to talk about IWW graduates who write successful popular novels with romantic elements, Elin Hilderbrand was suspiciously absent from this narrative, particularly when the last two chapters are about Anthony Swofford and Ayana Mathis.
June 25, 2021
I really appreciated how it functioned as a sort of biography of the major authors that went through the program.
I can’t believe Joy Harjo and Rita Dove were in the same classroom, both future US Poet Laureates! And they were silenced by all the “macho” boxing men in the cohort, when really they were going to change the world.
I honestly really enjoyed this book. I just can’t believe it took until the EPILOGUE to mention certain things.
I thought I knew everything about Iowa, but this book did a fantastic job of incorporating a variety of resources I had never heard of.
(But that Frank Conroy file sealed until 2024??? Can’t wait lol)
I can’t believe Joy Harjo and Rita Dove were in the same classroom, both future US Poet Laureates! And they were silenced by all the “macho” boxing men in the cohort, when really they were going to change the world.
I honestly really enjoyed this book. I just can’t believe it took until the EPILOGUE to mention certain things.
I thought I knew everything about Iowa, but this book did a fantastic job of incorporating a variety of resources I had never heard of.
(But that Frank Conroy file sealed until 2024??? Can’t wait lol)
August 19, 2019
Cannot finish. Or at least, I’ll need to have breaks between the fawning passages about male writers and academics, and the condescending ones about women writers and writers of color—here referred to as “ethnic writers.” You know, marginal writers like Flannery O’Connor and Sandra Cisneros. Gossipy as hell of course, which I signed on for, but sexist and retrograde and just generally unpleasant. I can’t believe this got published by Yale University Press!
May 6, 2019
I was expecting, well, you know, savagery and survival at the IWW. Most of this was biographical information on the chosen authors, and that's not what I signed up for. some of the subjective comments bothered me, but primarily the description (manufactured, of course - because who could know such details except the end result?) of Robert Shelley's last moments left me cringing.
I did appreciate that the author called William Dean Howells to mind, because, of course, he was the one who really started the conversation regarding the business of authorship (The Man Of Letters As A Man Of Business) quite some time ago. He only mentioned him once, though, and there were several points at which WDH could have been brought out again, highlighting this conflict.
read the introduction, the Flannery O'Connor chapter, and 316-348. otherwise, you're in for a lot more than IWW drama, and if you're specifically interested in any of the authors featured, you might be good with that.
I did appreciate that the author called William Dean Howells to mind, because, of course, he was the one who really started the conversation regarding the business of authorship (The Man Of Letters As A Man Of Business) quite some time ago. He only mentioned him once, though, and there were several points at which WDH could have been brought out again, highlighting this conflict.
read the introduction, the Flannery O'Connor chapter, and 316-348. otherwise, you're in for a lot more than IWW drama, and if you're specifically interested in any of the authors featured, you might be good with that.
January 4, 2026
The credibility of this book is seriously compromised by an amazing error of fact on page 133.
The author uses an essay by Philip Levine, "Mine Own John Berryman" (from The Bread of Time, Knopf, 1994) to describe the poet Robert Lowell. But everything Dowling quotes from this essay is what Levine said about John Berryman, not Lowell. E.g.:
Levine (Bread of Time, p. 8): “Lowell’s voice was never more than faintly audible and always encased in his curiously slothful accent, whereas Berryman articulated very precisely, in what appears to be an actor’s notion of Hotspur’s accent.”
Dowling (p. 133): “Levine recalled how Lowell read once ‘in what appeared to be an actor’s notion of Hotspur’s accent’...”
Dowling borrows Levine's entire paragraph comparing Lowell and Berryman, but assigns to Lowell all the behaviors of Berryman. I find this astonishing. Did this professor of journalism really fail to read his source? Is he a partisan for Lowell, disparaging Levine (who thought little of Lowell's teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop)?
I could not finish this book. How can one believe any of the author's research if he makes such errors?
The author uses an essay by Philip Levine, "Mine Own John Berryman" (from The Bread of Time, Knopf, 1994) to describe the poet Robert Lowell. But everything Dowling quotes from this essay is what Levine said about John Berryman, not Lowell. E.g.:
Levine (Bread of Time, p. 8): “Lowell’s voice was never more than faintly audible and always encased in his curiously slothful accent, whereas Berryman articulated very precisely, in what appears to be an actor’s notion of Hotspur’s accent.”
Dowling (p. 133): “Levine recalled how Lowell read once ‘in what appeared to be an actor’s notion of Hotspur’s accent’...”
Dowling borrows Levine's entire paragraph comparing Lowell and Berryman, but assigns to Lowell all the behaviors of Berryman. I find this astonishing. Did this professor of journalism really fail to read his source? Is he a partisan for Lowell, disparaging Levine (who thought little of Lowell's teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop)?
I could not finish this book. How can one believe any of the author's research if he makes such errors?
May 7, 2019
Skipped around in this book--read the Flannery O Connor chapter, then the Marilynne Robinson chapter, then the Joy Harjo and Sandra Cisneros one. Found it all pretty interesting, especially the beginning portion about Paul Engle and how he started the Workshop. Basically, the book makes me sorry someone I love went to the Workshop, but even sorrier for women who went there--what a cruel place. Worth reading if you're interested in the history of the teaching of writing.
September 15, 2019
Meh. Was not at all what I expected. Did not enjoy the misogyny and the almost biographical feeling of the features on various attendees.
October 25, 2020
There were super engaging parts of this book, but it did take me a year to finish. If you enjoy mini-biographies, this book is for you.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews