Gail Godwin recalls her first time as a student in the English-Philosophy Building (home of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the time) on the University of Iowa campus:

‘So? What do I risk? Obscurity?’ This riposte, which a fiction workshop student flung back at her peers after their critique of her story in the spring of 1967, just after I arrived in Iowa City, reverberated through the fourth-floor halls of EPB and was quoted with awe and respect by her colleagues.

Gail Godwin on an incident at the Iowa River during her time in Iowa City:

“I’m sure I would have written it in my journal […] but that particular journal was thrown into the Iowa River by a jealous boyfriend determined to destroy everything that came before him.”

Godwin arrives in Iowa City to study at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. There, taught by Kurt Vonnegut and José Donoso, building friendships with Jane Barnes, John Casey, David Plimpton, and John Irving, Gail Godwin finally achieves her dream—and a published novelist is born.

Godwin describes class with Vonnegut in her memoir Publishing: A Writers Memoir.:

“In [Vonnegut’s] workshop sessions, things always seemed a little looser, a little kinder, a little funnier. In May 1967 he would leave Iowa on a Guggenheim grant to do research in Dresden for Slaughterhouse-Five, his novel in progress, but all that spring I chugged along in creative bliss. A writer I had admired had given me the go-ahead. I wrote into the late night and early morning in my Iowa City rooms across the street from the jail…”

While at the University of Iowa, Godwin’s dissertation became her first novel, The Perfectionists. You can find the copy of this thesis in the University of Iowa Special Collections.