Raymond Carver came to Iowa City as a poetry student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the fall of 1963, but stayed only until the end of that school year. Next, he was appointed lecturer in the Workshop in the fall of 1974. Due to financial troubles at the time, Carver kept his previous position at University of California Santa Barbara and commuted by air between the two places.

In 1978, Carver received a Guggenheim fellowship and came to teach in Iowa City from March through June. Donald Justice, a poet professor at the workshop, and 1980 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, remembers that during that stay Carver and Maryann house-sat for them while Justice and his wife were away for more than a month.

“[Carver] was a student in the poetry workshop I was teaching. In the early seventies […] he came back to teach fiction here. I’d see him around the offices quite a bit. Our paths crossed mostly in socializing, at parties.” – Donald Justice