Iowa Writer's Workshop

>>8813640
Flannery O'conner came from there, and Carver went there briefly.

>>8813640
>Is it actually good or am I just in an echo chamber here?

Guess It depends on your perspective. But yes, Iowa is considered by all of academia to be the best/most prestigious creative writing program in America for whatever that is worth.

I'm highly skeptical of the writer's workshop/MFA system in America in general and I think contemporary American fiction is in a pretty bad place. I'm willing to wage that in Iowa as anywhere you're going to find the same shitty uninteresting MFA students writing shitty uninteresting crap in a shitty, easily imitateable style about shitty solipsistic nonsense where nothing happens.

>>8813870
>But yes, Iowa is considered by all of academia to be the best/most prestigious creative writing program in America for whatever that is worth.

Huh. Do you think that's based on the history of writers it's produced, or a current sentiment of recent batches?

The fact is I live in a detached bungalow and pay rent so low that I almost feel bad for the landlord. My cute half-Russian girlfriend lives here with me and we both study literature at Iowa State, me having earned a three-year paid scholarship in the MFA program and her earning a degree to teach elementary school. I mean I come on this board and see people from Estonia, from New York and from places where their lives for whatever reason, usually economic and romantic, are so depressing that it makes me almost bad for them. I'm almost done editing a 67k word novel a year early, meaning that once its's published by Coffee House Press next Winter I'll have an entire year to promote it and to otherwise spend my time here in Iowa City writing short stories for the weekly class and just enjoying my life. Do you even comprehend the notion of enjoying your life any more kiddo? I thought not. There are people on this board working thirty, forty sometimes fifty hours a week while harboring ambitions of "making it" in literature. Meanwhile I spend my days waking at ten am, eating warm muffins and drinking cups of black coffee on the small wooden red-and-white oilcloth-covered table with my cute, Amelie-esque girlfriend who sits grinning and sipping her cinnamon tea as we discuss our plans for the week or some aspect of our course the other person expresses an interest in learning more about. I own a second-hand Volvo which looks beat up in a way that suggests the exact kind of poverty I'm looking to associate with my "brand" (every contemporary writer needs a brand) and I use it to drive to the library each day where I sit in a thick flannel shirt and sit at a table illuminated by a horizontal rectangular lamp while propping up my forehead with fingers placed to project my studiousness and complexity to others, only to drive home in the evening feeling a calm ease towards my life and walking up the three concrete steps and stepping through the screen door and then the wooden front door to find my qt gf baking in the kitchen with an apron on and a little flour on her cheeks which I rub off as she grins and asks me about my day. What do you have in your life that equates to this? Huh? I'm waiting for an answer...That's what I thought. Literary fame will be mine before the year is through. Meanwhile the rest of your year, and the rest of your life after that, will consist of a slow decline towards an obscure death remarked upon by nobody. I am literally and unironically eating a warm McDonalds cheesburger as I type this, the onions and mustard and tomato ketchup causing me to experience an overwhelming rush of pleasure as I continue to chew and swallow and digest my second meal of the day after a breakfast cooked by an individual to whom I am the love of their life.

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>>8815939
lol. Thanks for clueing me in to that pasta. If only Iowa State was anywhere close to Iowa City

>>8813870
What's an example of the shitty, solipsistic crap?

>>8816581
lol rekt

>>8817112
>>8817112
We the Animals by Justin Torres

>>8817131
I liked that as a coming of age story desu