My essay/review of We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop can now be found in the latest issue of Requited:
A frequent criticism of creative writing programs is that they focus too narrowly on established techniques supposedly constituting 'craft,' but if Gordon Mennenga is to be believed in this excerpt from We Wanted to Be Writers, very few concrete literary strategies were “taught” at all at the most famous such program, at least in the 1970s:
“The craft thing? I don’t think the topic ever came up, did it? At least not in the workshops I was in. You did your lump and threw it on the table. I was surprised we never picked out an element of 'craft' and looked at it, how metaphor was used in a story, for example. We never did exercises of any kind. I suppose it’s that way still…We didn’t get into why things are done a certain way, or talk about different styles, what styles are tolerated and what aren’t…why and how.”
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