I just got my cute little Iowa Writers' Workshop newsletter, which proved to me that they haven't yet crossed over to the digital age (I'm not lying when I say that's cute. Seriously), and scanned through it rather quickly. And previously, when people say they hated Iowa,

or hated whatever MFA program they've attended, I've wondered how. I've always thought that I was very happy to go be at Iowa. What I realized, flipping through these photos of people hugging and celebrating she who shall remain nameless [but tipped so many days

of my neutral experience over into a pretty rotten one], looking at the alumni update from a nasty former colleague I didn't even realize had attended the Workshop, is that I was happy to be there only because I steadfastly avoided the Workshop itself.

I just went to class and came home. I got to orientation the first day, noticed I was the only Black student out of 100 in a program, and felt instantly bamboozled. I listened to a few of the comments about why the Black people in my stories didn't talk like Black people,

sat silently as an entire class assumed Jack and Jill was a preschool, overheard someone saying "yeah, Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize, but is she really any good?" and knew by the end of the first month that I'd never go to John's, or the Foxhead

(I still don't even know where they are), or anywhere else my fellow Workshoppeteers were gathering, and that my closest friends would be elsewhere. (They were. I hung out mostly with med students. I dated a concert pianist. I went ice skating with people from church.

My absolute best friend in Iowa was someone I met at a Mensa meeting. I went back to NYC in the summers and partied with G-Hate.) I'd been told that the last Black student--who'd graduated a few years before me, because there used to always be gaps between Black students--

had been so miserable that he'd arranged to graduate in three semesters rather than four, and by the end of that first semester I wholly understood that man who I'd never met. But still, I wouldn't have said I was unhappy. I was a little older than the people all around me,

and I'd been tired of practicing law, and tired of living in NYC. If someone had said "hey come cut the heads off fish in Iowa City," I would've been happy to go. How lucky, I thought, that instead, I'd been admitted to the world's oldest most prestigious Creative Writing program

My experience was one of joy because I literally ushered the miserable part right out of my two years there. Was it wrong to do that? Might I be more connected to other writers in some way I don't even know about? Who knows. I would have been miserable. I wouldn't have stayed.

I might have gone back to NYC and kept making money.
But back to this newsletter. The photos, and some of the people in them, jogged a certain memory of misery that has coated my mind today. And it made me wonder, because White people hate their MFA programs, too--is this just

a weird thing we ask people to do? Here, take this thing you do in introverted privacy, and bring it out into the world with a bunch of people you barely know, so that it becomes a collective endeavor of often competitive hubris? Do painters hate their MFA programs, too?

Do actors? Do flautists? Should we all just apprentice with other artists in private or something? (Oh and Frank, and Jim, and all the rest of them. Good Lord, could a group of people be any more dismissive of women writers and writers of color?

I remember a painful meeting with Workshop faculty, wherein a group of us pointed out that Black and Latino writers never say they went there. "It's because they want to act like they sprung from the thigh of Zeus," one of the poetry faculty said. No. Nope, dude, that's not why.)