Dubus writes about his stay in Iowa in his essay collection Broken Vessels: Essays.

These days I barely have the heart, the will, to do something as insignificant as writing fiction. I cannot write about something as trifling as my life at Iowa, where my first wife and I thought we were poor because we had four children and a twenty-four-hundred-dollar a year assistantship and surplus food every month and I sold blood for twenty-five dollars a pint every three months and earned a hundred dollars a month teaching the Britannica Schools Correspondence Course; in my final year Richard Braddock and Paul Engle gave me a thirty-six-hundred-dollar assistantship, and we were no longer eligible for surplus food.