Eleventh Draft, The [Hardcover]

For The Eleventh Draft, Frank Conroy solicited essays about writing from 23 fiction writers--all of them one-time Iowa Writers' Workshop students or faculty members. "My instructions to them," says Conroy, "were deliberately vague.... Leaving it open seemed to me to heighten the chances of getting the strongest and least predictable work." Conroy guessed right. Beyond the shared sentiment that writing is hard work, there is, blessedly, no common thread here. For T. Coraghessan Boyle, writing is an addiction as powerful as "putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm." James Hynes claims that writing takes such a toll that "just writing this essay is probably as bad for me as a pack of cigarettes." And Barry Hannah describes writers as "not always the most vital people in the room, but often nearer ghouls sniffing at the trough of other living blood." In the book's most pessimistic piece, Doris Grumbach maligns word processors for destroying the richness of the English language, megabestsellers for the decimation of forests, and the notion of writer-as-celebrity (lionization, she says, does not advance one's writing).

Most of this book's contributors aim, often by way of story, to get at the mysterious heart of the fiction writer's experience. Fred G. Leebron recalls the moment he realized that the characters take the author by the hand, and not vice versa. Elizabeth McCracken confesses to having no inner or outer life, but to stealing all her material from her family. And Scott Spencer underscores the courage needed to create fiction. "A writer who will not risk hurting someone's feelings," he says, "is finally no more effective than a firefighter who will not smash in windows." --Jane Steinberg

Pity the poor writer anthologized alongside Barry Hannah. There is much to commend in the 22 other contributions to this collection by writers who've taught at Iowa, including Margot Livesey, Francine Prose, James McPherson and Deborah Eisenberg. But few write such startling sentences as this whiplash-inducing hairpin turn from "Mr. Brain, He Want a Song," a meditation on the writing process: "Mr. Brain, he sick of sickness. He want a song, Jack. May I suggest that writing itself is freedom from consciousness as much as stimulant to it." Other highlights include Doris Grumbach's charming, if curmudgeonly, essays on her own beginnings as a writer and as a teacher, and grumblings about the publishing industry and celebrity authors: "It might help the level of prose if they would stop 'appearing' and performing and become the private persons their craft requires them to be." Scott Spencer expresses disappointment with his students' carefulness, their fear of embarrassing themselves. A writer unwilling to express potentially risky and humiliating and hurtful truths, he warns, "is finally no more effective than a firefighter who will not smash in windows." A few of these essays stray into dry, vague disquisitions on the act of writing, highlighting the shortcomings of any such book: the process of writing is nearly always less interesting than what the process produces. Still, a compelling account of a writer's thinking, such as Abraham Verghese's eloquent and heartfelt "Cowpaths," drawing elegant connections between his work as a physician and his work as a writer, is a fine addition to any canon of literature. Never pompous, never dull, he closes his essay with the plainest, most inarguable truth: "That is why I write: because I still find comfort in words, because I find safety in the structures one can build from words, and because it is only by writing that I discover exactly what it is I am thinking." (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

These complementary titles offer a range of writing from and about the influential Iowa Writers' Workshop, the first creative writing program in the country. Conroy, the current director of the workshop, asked former students and faculty to write about writing. Chris Offutt, supplying the title, writes that each of his stories results from "ten or eleven drafts over a two-year period." Physician Abraham Verghese notes that schools of medicine and writing both use the same aphorism: "God is in the details." Marilynne Robinson accepts a canon of literature that is regarded as a treasure by a population but objects to "treating such works as categorically different from anything we ourselves can aspire to." In The Workshop, Grimes, a novelist and graduate of the workshop, selected 43 stories, recollections, and essays by participants and organized them by decade. "The book," he writes, "can be read sequentially, as a narrative about the workshop" or as an anthology. Selections include pieces by Wallace Stegner (1930s), Jayne Anne Phillips (1970s), Ethan Canin (1980s), Charles D'Ambrosio (1990s), and many others. Both titles will be of interest to academic libraries, particularly those whose institutions support creative writing programs.ANancy Patterson Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, NC
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Twenty-five Iowa Writers Workshop professors and graduates eloquently discuss why and how they write fiction. As editor Conroythe workshop's fifth director, a former director of the NEA literature program, and a celebrated author of books like Body and Soul (1993)remarks in his introduction, writing comes fairly easily but gets harder. Many writers echo this perspiration after inspiration, including Ethan Canin, who learns to compose with ``a narrowed concentration''; Francine Prose, who stresses details in making fiction real; and Chris Offutt, who notes the rewriting inherent in the title, ``the eleventh draft.'' Offutt only stumbled into writing when a librarian he'd asked for a baseball book produced The Catcher in the Rye. If one thinks writing is a hedonistic pursuit for gifted storytellers, Jayne Anne Phillips admits that ``writers hate to write.'' She compares the phases of writing to different kinds of marriages. Is creative writing self-therapy? Elizabeth McCracken observes that ``writing fiction is like calling up a radio psychologist and saying, `Doctor, I have this friend, with this problem.' '' Less facetious is T. Coraghessan Boyle, who considers writing a ``preemptive strike against your own weakness.'' Deborah Eisenberg writes ``because I can't do anything else.'' Similar self-deprecating humor is employed by William Lashner, who reports he signed up for a creative-writing course from a TV ad and that he has the dog's and the writer's pathetic need for approval.'' Fred G. Lebron points out that readers and writers suspend disbelief in ``acts of faith along the path to knowledge.'' Also waxing theological, Susan Power understands the writer as a deity who gives life to her characters yet lets them exercise free will and make their own mistakes. Sadly, these gems about writing will perhaps be less appreciated by nonwriters. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"The selections in The Eleventh Draft provide unparalleled insights into the writing process. Some are impassioned, some cool, all are eloquent and lucid. This is a book anyone interested in the creative process should own." -- Robert Stone

"Twenty-three writers who share one thing here open their lives to you, writing about what they have pinned all their hopes to and for which they have given everything. What they share is the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the most famous writing school in the world.

"To Iowa come teachers like Vonnegut, John Cheever, and Phillip Roth. From it come writers like John Irving, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Ethan Canin. Read this book and you will understand why." -- James Salter

"My instructions to them were deliberately vague--they were to write about writing, any aspect or approach that caught their fancy. Leaving it open seemed to me to heighten the chances of getting the strongest and least predictable work. And so it was. They came at it from different angles, using different techniques, and each piece is unique. Perhaps the only common tacit assumption is that writing is difficult."-- From the Introduction by Frank Conroy

Since its inception in 1936, the Iowa Writers' Workshop has been perched atop the creative writing landscape, producing some of the greatest writers of the century. Though no one claims that writing can be taught--the Workshop itself professes no method--there is no disputing the success of the program and its celebrated attendees. Of the 20 Pulitzers awarded for fiction and poetry in the ‘90s, nine have gone to University of Iowa graduates.

For The Eleventh Draft, present-day director Frank Conroy invited 23 former professors and students of the Iowa Writers' Workshop to pen essays on their craft. As he hints in his Introduction, he was looking for an eclecticism, and The Eleventh Draft is nothing if not diverse. Some pieces are deeply personal; others might have been scripted for the first day of class. They are sometimes prescriptive, often contradictory, but always eloquent and provocative.

The Eleventh Draftis an invaluable resource for aspiring and established writers, for lovers of literature, and for anyone intrigued by the writing process or the Workshop itself. If you have doubts, open this anthology and, as Conroy advises, "Listen up."

Frank Conroy, the former director of the literature program at the National Endowment for the Arts, became the fifth director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1987. He is the author of three books: Stop Time, nominated for the National Book Award; Midair; and Body & Soul. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa, with his wife, Maggie, and his son, Tim.