Iowa Writers’ Workshop students remember the late, great Frank Conroy, longtime director of the Workshop, at Eyeshot, the online lit mag of current Workshop-ee Lee Klein.
Here’s just one of the many thoughtful postings:
I was in Frank Conroy’s workshop this semester, his last. When it was finally my turn to submit a story, I anticipated the workshop with the same mix of excitement and dread you might bring to your first rollercoaster ride, or your first acid trip. This would be a rite of passage, one of those tales I told and retold until everyone I knew was sick of hearing about it: The Time Frank Conroy Told Me How I Got It All Wrong.
Now, I have a different story to tell for the rest of my life. In this one, Frank gets sick and has to stop teaching, and I never get to hear what he thought of that story. Sometimes I imagine it was my writing that caused his turn for the worse – that what I’d put down on the page was such an affront to literature that he quite literally couldn’t take it. This time, holding the story at arm’s length or tossing it across the table just wasn’t enough. Instead he’d stay home, give up.
Of course that’s ridiculous, and I know it’s not true. Frank never gave up on any of our stories. He never stopped expecting us to do our best work, and he never hid his disappointment when our attempts came up short. Sometimes he hurt people’s feelings. Sometimes he yelled, or pounded a fist on the table. Sometimes people got angry. The owner of the Foxhead should probably have given him a commission for all the drinks sold on Tuesday nights to workshoppers seeking balm for their wounds. But Frank wasn’t hard on us because he hated us, or wanted to hurt our feelings. Frank was hard on us because he knew the world would be even harder. Because writing is difficult work. Because he knew that gussying up his criticism in layers of pretty bullshit wouldn’t be doing us any great favor.
So thanks, Frank, for the tough love.