USA: Writers; The Iowa Workshop

National Educational Television and Radio Center · June 12, 1966

Can writing be taught? In what sort of environment should it be taught? How does a writers' workshop help a writer fight out his ideas, techniques, and experiments? National Educational Television supplies some of the answers with a look at the University of Iowa's Program in Creative Writing, better known as the Writers' Workshop. More than 200 students every year attend the workshop. For over 25 years they have been doing so. There they are taught by such literary venerable as Philip Roth, Robert Lowell, Paul Engle, R.V. Cassill, Nelson Algren, Vance Bourjaily, and Kurt Vonnegut. Many of the teachers were once students at the Workshop. More than 100 books have been published by writers who have studied at the Iowa Workshop. One student says that more can be learned in one year at the Workshop than in ten years of solid writing. Esquire Magazine describes it as "the most important campus" in the American literary establishment. Now NET, in its new "USA: Writers" series focuses on the University of Iowa campus and the esteemed Workshop, as the episode describes it, "an environment of work, of play, of contact with life in many of its forms, stimulating to the writer as craftsman, as intellect, and as sensibility." The episode looks in at a typical classroom situation wherein one of the student's short stories are criticized by his fellow writers, and includes a conversation between writer-in-residence, Vance Bourjaily and R.V. Cassill with the Workshop's director, Paul Engle, on the subject of teaching students to write. USA Writers #4 - The Iowa Workshop is a production of National Educational Television. (Description adapted from documents in the NET Microfiche) USA: Writers is part of an assessment of the state of the literary arts in the United States, which concentrates on contemporary prose writers across many genres. The half-hour episodes that comprise the series were originally recorded on videotape.