There were other small acts of feminist resistance. Bored listening to yet another “older male,” Smiley passed a piece of work in progress to a female friend, who read it in the middle of workshop and gave Smiley the encouragement she needed to keep going. Cisneros defied the advice of Donald Justice, her adviser, and continued work on what would become The House on Mango Street. In the 1970s, women founded a women-only restaurant-cum-library-cum-gathering place called Grace and Rubies. (Boyle wrote a satirical story about it; the story was published in Penthouse, and when the women came under pressure to admit men to their space, it closed in 1978.) Slowly, effortfully, the Workshop became a more diverse and more welcoming space.
Years later, Cisneros reflected on her experience at the Workshop. “Iowa was an experience where I found out what I wasn’t,” she said, “where I discovered my otherness, and pulled myself away from who I was studying with and the kind of poetry I was reading to declare myself and what I was. It made me very uncomfortable.” Now a successful writer, she wanted to create a more collaborative workshop experience, something like the “kitchen-table community” her friend Harjo once described. In 1995, she founded the Macondo Writers Workshop. She held the first sessions around her dining room table. Later, the members drafted a “Compassionate Code of Conduct.” Cisneros believes that a teacher should be supportive, not sadistic, and that writers should think about how they’re contributing to the world. “Macondo is a workshop that gathers writers who are generous, compassionate, and believe their writing can make nonviolent social change,” she explained. “In other words, the opposite of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.”
To be sure, there are many writers who found themselves at Iowa who felt nurtured, and whose writing was transformed. Dowling describes the careers of plenty of Workshop writers who responded positively to Iowa, whether as students or teachers: W.D. Snodgrass, Marilynne Robinson, Ayana Mathis. He also suggests that the writer Lan Samantha Chang, who took over the Workshop’s directorship from the stern and uncompromising Frank Conroy 14 years ago, has impelled a “progressive cultural shift.” Her appointment, Dowling argues, signaled “a sea change in the gender and ethnic politics of the program,” and it showed how Conroy, who directed the Workshop from 1987 to 2005, simply extended “the patriarchal dominance of the Engle era.” Dowling characterizes Chang as a “compassionate” and “inclusive” leader, and he notes that under her directorship, the Workshop has recruited more students of color. In stark contrast with the program’s early years, Iowa today, like other American universities, has implemented sexual harassment policies, and teachers there undergo sexual harassment training.
