One night there was a big reading in Iowa City by John Irving, the author of The Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp. The famous novelist’s real purpose in town was to watch an NCAA wrestling tournament. But Irving went to a student party, where the apprentice writers put out some chips and beer in a dirty apartment and, out of intimidation, were slow to approach him. Verghese introduced himself to the author, who, as it happened, was researching a novel called A Son of the Circus, a story about a doctor trying to find his way in India. Verghese had found a mentor, and a friendship took root.

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…”

John Irving remembers his time in Iowa, in the collection Trying to Save Piggy Sneed:

Andre Dubus and James Crumley were also students at the Writers’ Workshop then. I remember a picnic at Vance Bourjaily’s farm, where a friendly pie-fight ensued; Dubus or Crumley, bare-chested and reasonably hairy, was struck in the chest by a Boston cream pie. Who threw the pie, and why, escapes my ever-failing memory–I swear I didn’t do it.

In this video, Glenn Schaeffer reads an excerpt for the book “We Wanted to be Writers” in which John Irving discusses his writing method.

In this video, Glenn Schaeffer reads an excerpt for the book “We Wanted to be Writers” in which John Irving discusses his time in Iowa City.

In the John Irving novel Water Method Man, the main character, a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature at The University of Iowa, lives at 918 Iowa Avenue and sells football pennants. The wounded hero, carrying a dead duck, looks “across the river, on the bank that looks like an Army barracks — stacked with the war-built Quonset huts, now called Married Student Housing.”

In John Irving’s The World According to Garp, T.S. Garp writes about a visiting professor looking out of his office window in the English-Philosophy Building (EPB). Garp’s father-in-law “had been a two-time Big Ten wrestling champion at the University of Iowa.”

In the John Irving novel ‘Water Method Man’, the main character, a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature at The University of Iowa, lives at 918 Iowa Avenue and sells football pennants. The wounded hero, carrying a dead duck, looks ‘across the river, on the bank that looks like an Army barracks — stacked with the war-built Quonset huts, now called Married Student Housing.’

In John Irving’s ‘The World According to Garp’, T.S. Garp writes about a visiting professor looking out of his office window in what might be the English-Philosophy Building in a university town. Garp’s father-in-law ‘had been a two-time Big Ten wrestling champion at the University of Iowa.’

John Irving’s plaque on the Iowa Avenue Literary Walk reads: “To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.”

The event was originally scheduled to take place in the Van Allen Lecture Hall on the UI campus, but due to the overflow crowd and potential fire hazard, the event was moved to another venue a minute before the 8:15 pm start time. The announcement prompted Irving aficionados to take to the streets of Iowa City and head toward the Pappajohn Business Building with the hope of commandeering a seat for the legendary alumni writer. The mass exodus of people momentarily shut down traffic on Dubuque Street as the literary mob, undeterred by the threat of jaywalking charges, blindly marched across one of the main downtown arteries.

Kurt Vonnegut’s workshop was very popular and well attended. From it, many notable authors emerged such as John Irving (‘The World According to Garp’), Gail Godwin (‘The Old Woman’), John Casey (‘An American Romance’), Nick Meyer (‘The Seven Percent Solution’).