Summer in Iowa?!
University of Iowa has the oldest and most prestigious creative writing program in America -- the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop. U. of Iowa has over 40 Pulitzer prizes attributed to graduates and faculty according to Wikipedia. On a whim, I applied to an 8-week summer program put on by their Workshop and taught by their regular faculty. Their application process was so easy that I had no excuse not to apply: one brief sheet of information, 3 short stories, no application fee. I just picked three of my stories and sent them in. Then I sort of forgot about it because I've had a lot of Iowa Workshop grads as teachers and with only one exception (who now heads the creative writing program at Harvard), they all detested genre. And of course, what else would I write? I applied anyway, perhaps in defiance of their snooty attitude. The literary community doesn't hesitate to claim someone like Cormac McCarthy (_No Country for Old Men_, _The Road_) as one of their own. If it's superbly written genre, then they'll sometimes relabel it as literary. McCarthy won the Pulitzer for _The Road_ which is about a man and his son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world ruled by roving bands of cannibals. How much more genre can it get? The book is awesome, by the way, and the movie is scheduled to come out late this year. McCarthy is my hero. He's managed to have his stories win an Academy award for best picture, be on Oprah's book list, be a best seller, win a Pulitzer and still write about people trapped in a basement while cannibals eat them piece by piece at their leisure. How cool is that?
Anyway. They accepted me.
Maybe this is my shot at becoming the next McCarthy! Or maybe they didn't fully understand that I'd be writing in-your-face genre ... :-)
Susan Ee
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