Maybe it’s a good thing there was no Internet back when we were applying to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; we were spared the Workshop’s buzz-killing disclaimer currently on its Web site concerning what can or can’t be taught or learned there. Would we have been so enthusiastic, so positively gleeful about our bright prospects and what the future held when we got those acceptance letters if we’d read that the folks at the Workshop itself agreed "in part with the popular insistence that writing cannot be taught"?

[Jacqueline Dougan Jackson’s Stories from the Round Barn and More Stories from the Round Barn (1997 and 2002, Northwestern University Press) were drawn from a much larger project, a third-person memoir and history of a Wisconsin dairy farm, and of dairy farming in America from about 1900 until about 1970.

June 1944: Desert Birth

My father, Yoshizo Yoshimura, born in Salt Lake City, was twenty-six at the time of my birth. My mother, Sachie, twenty-three, was born in Portland, Oregon. Both were American citizens, Japanese Americans—now confined to a camp in the California desert, Manzanar Relocation Center, surrounded by barbed wire and machine-gun turrets.

“. . . as if by emptying it could be filled,

or filled, emptied . . .”

—Catherine Barnett, “River”

An Open Letter Concerning the Evaluation by

Colleges and Universities of

Publishing by Creative Writers

The following began, quite literally, as the text of a letter, written to a former student of mine, a poet, essayist and critic, who was going through the tenure and promotion process in an American university.