Clark Blaise discusses the topic of writing and political commitment with four 1991 International Writing Program participants. Jan Vodnanský speaks of his experience as a cabaret performer under communist rule, and suggests that censorship...
Matthew Pearl reads from his novel The Dante Club. Pearl details the history of the actual Dante Club formed in Boston in the 1860’s. The club included such famous members as Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James Russell Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth...
Clark Blaise begins the discussion by giving a brief overview of protest novels and the importance of this type of literature throughout the world. Tibor Fischer talks of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 in which his first novel Under the Frog is...
Christopher Merrill introduces the topic. Festus Iyayi talks about the repression of writers by the state and cites Sweden as a good example of the state letting authors writing what they want. He believes writers do not exist separately from the...
Kuamvi Mawulé Kuakuvi and Lilia Momplé interview each other. Momplé says that she always knew one day she would write because of the stories her grandmother told her when she was a child. Momplé says that these stories, as well as the landscape...
Each of the authors speak of the short story and what it stands to them and how the short story is viewed in their respective countries. Martin Roper sees short story as training ground for the novelist. He speaks eloquently on how he views the...
Several IWP participants in 1983 discuss contemporary American poetry as a panel in 1983. Those on the panel are not clearly identified but the discussion still succeeds in gauging American poetry's role in society in the early 1980s. The topic...
John Bowe reads from "Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy."
Bowe, an award-winning journalist, exposes the outsourcing, corporate chicanery, immigration fraud and sleights of hand that allow forced...
Kyoko Yoshida tackles the topic of fantasy and reality through identifying "disorientalism" in four parts, taking his audience on a journey that beings with a story by Edgar Allen Poe and ends with Coleridge pursuing the real, rebuilt, Xanadu....
Bi Feiyu does not believe fantasy and reality are two concepts that must always balance each other; instead, he prefers to work with the "realistic spirit," describing that idea as "love, love with wings." Ashur Etwebi reflects on the topic by...
"Shimada Masahiko traces all experiences back to the brain, including hysteria, neurosis, and relief that comes through receiving the word as medicine. Michal Hvorecký discusses the topic through two Czech writers, Dominik Tatarka and Egon Bondy,...
Leopoldo Brizuela says the way his imagination works is "not on reality itself, but on representation of reality: moreover, not on the words or images that represent reality, but on their silences, on their voids." Jeong Han-Yong applies the topic...
Matthew Davis reads from his travel memoir "When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter's Tale" as part of the PrairieInsight program.
At age 23, Davis moved to a remote Mongolian village to teach English. There he was caught in a downward spiral of...
Barbara Babcock gives a brief talk on the topic of her book, Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz. Clara Foltz was the first woman admitted to the California Bar. Famous in her time as a public intellectual, leader of the women's movement, and...
Clark Blaise introduces the topic and the writers. Kang In-ae says that because she is a children's writer some didn't believe she would be admitted to the International Writing Program. In-ae observes that literary publics in Korea and the United...
Author Amy Stewart discusses her nonfiction work, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms. Stewart, an avid gardener, notes that she first became interested in earthworms during a move when she discovered the species of...
A member of the faculty at the University of Iowa since 1974, Rex Honey is Professor of Geography and International Studies. He currently directs the Crossing Borders Program, an interdisciplinary program to help doctoral students broaden their...
Peter Nazareth interviews Hungarian authors, Pal Bekes and Kornel Hamvai. Bekes discusses living in a cellar in 1956 and experience he used for his play entitled “Cellar Play,” about refuges that have been hiding so long they are unable to find...
Contents: Acceptance of invitation to conference, Mar. 2, 1959; Approval of grade 4 report topic, Mar. 21, 1955; Approval to not do grade 4 report and take executive training seminars, Oct. 31, 1955; Approval to take executive training seminars and...
Chris Mattison, a graduate student of the University of Iowa, interviews Aleksei Varlamov. Mattison translated Varlamov's short story “Maurish and the Great Steppe” about a young man in a Russian army detachment in the steppes of central Asia...