The phrase keeps coming back. In American bookstores, just read the back cover of recent publications to notice it: "So-and-so lives and teaches in Iowa City", "Unetelle graduated from the Iowa Writers’Workshop" … So of Louisa Hall, whose novel Trinity has just been published in French by Gallimard. Or Garth Greenwell, who is enjoying success in the United States with his second book, cleanness (which will be released in August at Grasset).
Iowa City, therefore. Where the inaugural fiasco of the Democratic primaries just took place, where the cornfields stretch as far as the eye can see. A small town of 67,000 people, more than 1,600 kilometers from Manhattan and its publishing houses. And yet, on Iowa Avenue, the main artery of the center, accumulate plaques in homage to the great American authors who passed by, from Kurt Vonnegut to Flannery O’Connor, from John Irving to Tennessee Williams.
Here, nearly one in two residents is a student: 30,000 enrolled at the local university. But it is to a tiny handful of creative minds that the city of the Midwest owes its fame, to the point of having been baptized "City of literature" by Unesco in 2008. An activity whose nerve center is a green house and white colonial style. "Writers’Workshop Dey House," says a sign at the entrance.
Here, twenty-five aspiring novelists, twenty young poets and twenty-one teachers (nearly half of whom are visiting for a semester, but who have all published works praised by critics) meet several times a week .
Seventeen Pulitzer Awards
This is the most influential and famous writing studio in the United States. For eighty-four years, talents have been cuddled at the Iowa Writers’Workshop as in a star nursery. John Irving, T. C. Boyle and Raymond Carver studied there, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Chabon and Philip Roth taught there.
Since its inception, "Program" graduates, as it is called here, have won seventeen Pulitzer Prizes, and their illustrious coterie is constantly featured in the literary pages of major American newspapers. Going to Iowa is a rare privilege that promises a novice writer.
On a cold January day, the writer Garth Greenwell, whose book What is yours was translated into French by Rivages in 2018, gave us an appointment ten minutes from Dey House, in his favorite cafe. It’s nine o'clock in the morning, and customers of all ages read old horny volumes, pencil in hand, or type in inspired tones on their laptop keyboards.
