I was transported back to the year
I spent in Iowa City by the experience of reading John McNally’s hilarious
satire of the writing workshop life, After the Workshop. Among McNally’s targets are writer’s envy and
block, drinking, and posing. He gives
his characters invented names, but the reader will feel he recognizes a few of
them from life, and this, of course, is a guilty pleasure. But the setting is “real,” the real Iowa
City, its bookstores and bars, which I know, and its Olympian workshop, of
which I know only the myth to which McNally’s portrait adds.
One
time my wife and I were at Prairie Lights, one of the great independent
bookstores in the country, when we saw that one of my favorite writers was
going to be reading that very night. We
had our oldest son with us, third grade at the time, and somehow bribed him
into attending. On the way up the stairs
to where the reading space was I ran into an old friend from graduate school (I
won’t identify him by either name or genre, but this is otherwise not
intentionally fictional). This was at
least ten years since I had last seen him and we were now many miles from Utah
where we had been students together.
Things were already going bad for him before we all left Utah. He married, and divorced in a matter of weeks
during grad school. He suffered dire health
problems that required a kidney transplant, but promised no guarantees.. I
never knew who actually graduated and who didn’t; it was hard to tell, there
were so many steps in the process. And I
didn’t ask now.
He
continued to tell me tales of woe, not in a self-pitying way but more in a
this-was-what-has-happened way. In
truth, he didn’t seem like the same person at all. I remember him cashing his student loan and
hopping on his motorcycle and making a beeline to Wendover, Nevada to play
blackjack with every last cent. I
remember his work appearing in prominent literary magazines. His gorgeous wife
of a few weeks. Now he was living in
some small town, sleeping on a couch in his mother’s basement. He had completely abandoned writing. Words, he said, don’t make sense to me any
more.
I
was depressed by this chance encounter and mystified at what I might do to help
him, not that he was asking.
He
went to the reading, too. For some
reason, the writer was not happy to be reading.
She was almost hostile, particularly in the question and answer session
after the reading. The whole night was
depressing, and, after that, I never saw, nor heard of, my friend again. And seeing the writer in person poisoned her
work for me and I haven’t returned to it.
One time I was watching my youngest
kid playing on the playground that is right down town in Iowa City. I noticed that the adult sitting next to me
was a writer I admired who taught in the Workshop,. I introduced myself, told him I admired his
work. We chatted, watching the kids. In the end we agreed that he should come
visit at the campus where I taught , a small state school across the
Mississippi in Illinois, two and a half hours away. We set it up.
He
arrived late, but happy. We went out to
eat where he ordered an enormous steak, easily the most enormous steak I had
ever seen, and he insisted on leisurely eating every bite. We were late to the reading. Halfway through the piece he was reading he
grew unaccountably bored with the story, stopped abruptly, and said something
like, “Let’s just talk.” It was very strange.
And after that night I never saw him again either.
I was in a restaurant downtown,
waiting to rendezvous with my wife midday while our kids were in school. She was in graduate school and I was commuting
back and forth between Macomb and Iowa City.
It was hectic time. I don’t
recall the name of the place, down on Linn St on the south end of
downtown. It had large plate windows
facing the street. I noticed Frank Conroy, the director of the Writers Workshop
at a window table. He left the
restaurant before the woman he had been eating with. From the sidewalk he stopped in front of the
window where his friend was still seated and kissed the glass, passionately, in
front of her face. Then he walked off,
smiling, scarf trailing in the breeze.
I never saw him again either, but that was because he passed away not
long after. His writing, I am happy to
report, is as lovely as was the man himself.
