Charles Wright recalls his time in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the book A Community of Writers:

Stories. Many Stories. Some repeatable, some not. Nights at Kenney’s Tavern. The Famous Pig Roast at Nick Crome’s farm when Don organized a high-jumping contest over the pig still on the pit, the coals still glowing. Couples straying impassioned burgeoning spring leaves and long grasses of the adjoining fields […] Later, knife-throwing contest in Al Lee’s apartment […]

Charles Wright recalls his time in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in an interview in Yale Daily News:

I just showed up having gotten into the [University of Iowa] English department, so my name was down, but I never sent in a manuscript. If I had, I would never have gotten in. So I just signed up for the classes and went to the first workshop. Kept doing that for two years. That’s it. It turned out that I told them that I’ve never gotten in — which didn’t surprise the teachers at all— but each one thought the other one let me in. It was very laissez-faire in those days. Not as structured as it is now. I had more fun in Iowa City than in any other place I’ve ever had in America. I really liked Iowa a lot.

I was twenty six in 1961 when I arrived, and had never written a proper poem in my life. The workshop itself was housed in a group of Quonset huts left over from the time of World War II—there is a parking lot, without plaque, I might add, where they used to be. I was very lucky in having some wonderful classmates who taught me what and how to read, and what and how to write. Mark Strand, primarily, and Al Lee and William Brown. Neither Brown nor Lee write any more, but they were extremely talented and helped me enormously in the early days. Strand still does. Donald Justice was our teacher and controlled the entire technical and moral fiber of the workshop. He was exemplary in all ways. I probably learned more from him than anyone else who ever went through his classes. I was absorbent and soaked up whatever spilled out in the classrooms, in the bars after classes, in the offices, everywhere.

Charles Wright recalls his time in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the book A Community of Writers:

Monday afternoons, workshop over, a group would walk from the Quonset hut to the Student Union. To the Ping-Pong room. Don, Mark, Marvin Bell, Bill Brady, Al Lee, Wm Brown, myself, and sometimes others. This was when I first got the notion that Don’s fierce intensity was not limited to things ethereal. Did we play vigorous Ping-Pong, or what? Mark was a good player; I was all right, a journeyman; Bill Brady was all right. But Don was very good. I couldn’t beat him. Mark may have a couple times; and Marvin, who was also a good player.