A Chicagoan in Iowa City
Anderson, who’s 54, was proud to report a 3.93 cum in the graduate courses that are leading him to an MA in writing. “They have a lot of writing programs here,” Anderson told us. “The Writers’ Workshop is totally fiction–prose and poetry. Mine is essay writing and nonfiction prose”–he’s concluded that nonfiction is what he’s best at. “The advantage of mine,” he went on, “is that you can take lots of other courses. I wanted to go into other areas and break out of some of the molds that I had gotten into, so I’ve taken things like the art of the Japanese cinema and video art.
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“I came probably as much for the place as the university,” he said. “It’s very much a town for writers. It’s to writing, in a way, what Second City is to comedy, with new ones coming up and old ones coming back to give readings. A real community. You read the New Yorker with special interest because every couple of weeks somebody has a short story or a poem. John Irving used to play volleyball and give a big party every May in the house Kurt Vonnegut used to live in. . . . Jorie Graham, who’s a poet here, just won a MacArthur Foundation grant . . . ”
Anderson spent a year working for Bernie Sahlins at Second City and then went back to journalism. He joined the Sun-Times in time to cover the west-side riot in the spring of ’68 and the Democratic convention in late summer. He was in Hubert Humphrey’s Hilton suite when Humphrey clinched the nomination.
The mother lode is a journal, now 600 pages long, that Molly Ramanujan makes every student keep. “You write in it every day,” Anderson said. “It’s conversations and observations, memories and associations, and that’s the basic material I write from. The whole idea of the Clothesline School is that you build stories out of individual pieces of material. It’s like a clothesline. And when you string them all together they become stories.”
“The French have this whole theory of balances,” he elaborated. “The French invented the weekend, J.J. Rousseau did, and the idea was you enjoyed Paris when you went to New Buffalo–whatever their equivalent of New Buffalo is. Iowa City and Chicago are sort of in tandem.
The Plainfield tornado hit Tuesday afternoon and the Wednesday-morning papers were brimming with news of the disaster. But this was no one-day story. Given a day to sort out the calamity and meditate on it, what continuing coverage would the Tribune and Sun-Times provide?
