In this Washington Post article about Abraham Verghese, they describe his first year in Iowa:

He arrived in Iowa City in 1990 not knowing what to expect. He carried his briefcase to his first workshop meeting, then sat quietly as his work-boots-and-jeans-wearing peers tossed around the names of writers he’d never heard of or didn’t know well. Barth! Babel! Cheever! Verghese wrote down the names and headed for the library, where he would check out armfuls of books “just to find out what the hell they were talking about.”