Episode Description:
Say the World: an International Writing Podcast is made by the International Writing Program. The hosts are IWP Director Christopher Merrill, most recently the author of ON THE ROAD TO LVIV (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) and IWP Communications Coordinator Mike Meginnis, most recently the author of DROWNING PRACTICE (Ecco, 2022). Additional research, transcription, and other support provided by Research Assistant Derick Edgren Otero.
IWP programming is primarily funded by the University of Iowa and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) at the U.S. Department of State, with additional funding provided by organizations like the Doris Duke Foundation, as well as donors like you. If you’d like to donate to the IWP, go to donate.givetoiowa.org.
Learn more about the IWP at iwp.uiowa.edu.
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Episode Transcript:
Mike Meginnis:
Welcome to Episode Zero of Say The World: An International Writing Podcast. I'm Mike Meginnis, Communications Coordinator at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and most recently, the author of the novel Drowning Practice.
Christopher Merrill:
And I'm Christopher Merrill, Director of the International Writing Program, and most recently, the author of a book-length poem, On the Road to Lviv.
MM:
We're doing this episode here, this is Episode Zero. This is before episodes. We're not going to count this in the future. This is in your imagination, essentially, is what I'm telling you. I'm asking you to sort of pretend in the future that this didn't happen. But we want to give you a sort of a preview of—do a sort of soft launch—for the biweekly podcast that we're going to be starting soon. We're going to be sharing episodes every two weeks featuring a literary conversation with a really interesting, talented writer. At the outset, we're going to be focusing on interviews with participants in our 2023 Fall Residency, and we'll probably gradually spiral out from there as we find new opportunities to talk to interesting people. But for today, we want to say a quick hello, introduce ourselves a little and encourage you to subscribe to this feed. That's really the important thing. Even more important than the pretending that you didn't hear this, it is important that you subscribe to the feed, so you don't miss the official launch episode when it comes out. And you want to tell your friends and family. That said, we want to give you a little bit of an introduction to the International Writing Program and what we do here. So, I've been at the IWP for eighteen months. A long time! Chris, how long would you say you've been here, a little bit longer than me?
CM:
Just a little. I came in 2000. And in the twenty-three years since, we have developed in lots of different ways. So that, on balance, what we do has not changed in these twenty-three years, which is to say, to connect writers from around the world with other writers and reading audiences and students. The means of communicating that, of carrying that out, has changed. For example, this podcast. I would not have been able to even imagine what a podcast was back in 2000, when much of what we were doing was on paper.
MM:
Yeah, it's really interesting. Looking back at some of the older documents where, you know, these days when I put together our annual report, it's sort of this glossy magazine-looking thing with different sections really clearly subdivided, tons of graphics, links that go to videos that we live-streamed on YouTube, all sorts of different stuff. And then you look back at the older things, and it kind of looks like a letter.
CM:
Precisely what it was. And it's on a sort of yellowing paper right now. Sometimes we can go back to the days of typewritten, on a manual typewriter, letters of introduction, annual reports, and memos about what was next coming down the pike for the IWP, as we like to call the International Writing Program.
MM:
Typewriters, you know, I learned to write on a word processor, a Brother word processor that I got from my parents. It has the kind of monitor that had room for about eight lines of text. And then it had a keyboard attached to it. And the only software on it was the word processing software. But it was about like four times the size of any kind of acceptable laptop that you'd have today. And I kept it under my bed when I wasn't using it.
CM:
Well, what our listeners can't see: I'm showing to Mike my two forefingers, [which] are permanently bent because I grew up in an age of writing poems first on a pad of paper, but in time, I would type it up on a very old manual typewriter that demanded all the strength in those two fingers to make something come to life if, indeed, it did come to life.
MM:
So what you're telling me is that when one writes poetry, hunting and pecking is the preferred technique. Only those two fingers are needed.
CM:
Yeah, and there's a lot more emphasis on the hunting than on the pecking.
MM:
(Laugh) Just poised right over the E letter. Is this the key I want to press next?
CM:
And then, what, how to strikethrough and—Oh, in those days we lived on whiteout.
MM:
Yeah, my mom tells me, she's a little bit younger than you but not not much, that when she was in grade school, she had to justify her paragraphs, typewritten, by hand, manually. It wouldn't do it for her. She just had to justify the paragraphs herself. Yep.
CM:
Yeah, well, there was a little bell at the end of the, when you came to the right-hand margin, that would signal, send you back to the next slide. And it also reminds me of a wonderful poem by the late Philip Levine, who talked about how his cat would sit by his side. And when the line got too long, the cat would bat his hand. And that was his version of prosody. The art and science of meter and meter-making arguments and free verse and all the musical accoutrements that make a poem possible.
MM:
These are the kinds of conversations that, in the future, you will be permitted to acknowledge you heard. And we'll be having them with all sorts of folks. But could you tell me a little bit more about the International Writing Program, maybe a little bit more about what it has been, about what it is now, and what we do.
CM:
Right. Well, the IWP grew out of the very famous Writers Workshop here at the University of Iowa, which Paul Engle directed for almost a quarter of a century. And upon his retirement, he and his soon-to-be second wife, the Chinese novelist Nieh Hualing Engle, hit upon the idea of creating an International Writing Program, drawing distinguished poets, writers, playwrights, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, screenwriters, the whole range of literary discourse around the world, to the International Writing Program, for what was at first about a nine-month long residency. That came to an end rather quickly, partly because it's just too cold for a lot of writers coming from around the world to spend a winter in Iowa City, and partly for financial reasons. And now, we're down to about an eleven-week residency, the main elements of which are the urge for writers to do research and to write new work. We also have a large number of readings, panel discussions, class visits, ways to engage with writers here and abroad.
MM:
Every time you say that thing about the residency starting out at nine months? You know, a chill goes down my spine. That was, that was not at all happening when you got here, right?
CM:
No, no, no.
MM:
You were here well after that era. It sounds terrifying.
CM:
Yeah, well, it probably was terrifying to those who were making the journey from all corners of the earth. But the fact is that Paul and Hualing were superb hosts. And they would have the writers over for dinner pretty frequently, and what happens in these kinds of situations, a group dynamic develops. The writers are all living, in our time, in the Iowa House Hotel on campus. So there's a lot of downtime they spend together. And while the most important thing, I tell them, is to make sure they're writing from the day they get here so that they won't use up the whole residency attending literary events or parties or what have you, but to get down to work. And while that's the most important thing, maybe the most instructive thing will be those conversations they have, after readings, before a panel, late at night when they've solved a writing problem and find themselves exhilarated and want to share the good news with somebody who's had an equally bad day at the type—at his or her laptop.
MM:
Yeah, every residency is different. I can speak on this with authority, because I've now seen too. So I know that while there are commonalities, and there are sort of stable points of reference, there is also, there's always a lot of surprises. The world unfortunately continues to turn and and sometimes it goes in some rough directions. And that can really inform the sort of the character of the conversations that people are having. But I mean, that's sort of—that's the necessary work and experience, right, to have those sometimes uncomfortable interactions.
CM:
For sure. In 2001, for example, in the first week of the residency, we had a fabulous Palestinian poet in residence named Ghassan Zaqtan. He was the co-founder and co-director of the House of Poetry in Ramallah on the West Bank. The Israeli Defense Forces pulled up in front of the building and leveled it, claiming that it was a house of propaganda. The first person to come to offer his condolences was the fabulous Israeli writer Etgar Keret. And over the course of that residency, it was fascinating to me to see the interaction between the two of them, such that at one point they conducted on a Sunday morning, for most of the rest of the writers, what became a quite illuminating and very reasonable sober-minded conversation about the political differences between the Palestinian people and the Israelis. Never raising their voices. Of course, when that attack happened in the first week of the residency, I thought, well, that's going to dominate the residency. And a week later, we had 9/11. And because we often have many Muslim writers in residence, one could imagine the ways in which fault lines would be created. And that's something that happens in many residencies. But it also becomes an occasion for writer-to-writer exchanges, such that a larger vision of these most elemental problems can be discovered.
MM:
I mean, that's, that's really the pitch for this podcast. I think that's why this is worth your time, is that we are having conversations with people who have had experiences that we haven't had, that you haven't had, that are coming from all sorts of backgrounds and are working together, though, in the field of writing of literature.
CM:
And I like to say I have the most interesting job in the world, because I have the opportunity, on an hourly basis, to find out how very little I know about the world. Because writers coming from different parts of the planet—this year, thirty-four writers from more than thirty countries, in some ways, are representative of a literary tradition about which I may know very little, if none at all, each with their own situations at home to deal with—political, social, cultural, aesthetic. And from that we gain a larger vision of the world, which is always useful.
MM:
Yeah, no, the number one reason that I will probably be here a decade from now is that in all the places that I've worked, there, there is simply no point of comparison for the amount of learning that is possible for me to do here on a day-to-day basis. Do I always have the energy to do the learning that I should do on a given date? No. But sometimes I do. And when I do, it's great.
CM:
Yeah, well, in that way, we teach a class, which is essentially a showcase for the writers called International Literature Today. And I say to the students on the first day: I really don't know what's going to happen in this class, because the class depends on writers making presentations in English, which may be their second, third, or even fourth language. So, I say to the students: this will be a class in you listening really closely. And, out of that listening, you will get new ideas about what writing can be.
MM:
And that is the exact same thing that we're hopefully going to do here.
CM:
Exactly.
MM:
All right. Well, again, please subscribe to this feed, so you don't miss our next episode, which is going to feature a conversation with the Japanese poet, Yasuhiro Yotsumoto. He had a really wonderful presence. And it was great to interview him first. That was the most reassuring interview we could have started with. It made me feel like the whole experience was going to work, and the whole concept of this podcast was going to be a good one. We're gonna post future episodes on a bi-weekly schedule, although you know, if it takes off, if you do some skullduggery and give us a few additional subscribers, we might be able to do more, justify carving out more time for it. So please, again, help spread the word. Share it with your friends, and let us know what you think about this and future episodes. Our social media information, website, other details, are in the show notes.
CM:
As we like to say in the IWP, "Only connect!" That was E.M. Forster's advice to young novelists. But, in fact, it applies to the whole spectrum of activities in the IWP. We want to connect writers to readers to editors to agents, and in this case, to a listening audience. So, connect with us.
