The red-headed guy with the shipwrecked hair and a grease smudge on his T- shirt is circling the pool table picking off shots and taking quick drags off the cigarette he leaves burning on the rail. Nearby, a well-dressed young woman sits cross-legged atop a booth table, making mock ecstatic O’s with her lips when the butt end of the cue stick arcs her way. Then she howls along at the top of her lungs with Barry Manilow’s Mandy on the jukebox. “I’m standing on the edge of time, Mandy/You came and you gave without taking/and I sent you a-waaayy. …”

This is Wednesday night at the Foxhead, a homey little corner bar in Iowa City, Iowa, Athens of the Midwest, Writers’ Capital of the World. The Foxhead is a favorite hangout for students at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Tonight the poets are here with a couple of fiction writers of kindred spirit. Beer is flowing, pool balls are cracking, the music is blaring and la vie boheme energy is bouncing off the walls.

“When the poets get together, they want to swing,” says poet Marvin Bell, a teacher at the workshop. They are blowing off steam, which is what writers are wont to do after sedentary bouts of trying to set words right. Blowing off steam was what Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was doing when he walked backward down the streets of Iowa City or when, between pages — perhaps of Slaughterhouse Five — he would chin himself from a steam pipe in his office. This is what John Cheever and Raymond Carver did here when, against both their better judgments, they went off into the bars of Iowa City together and “drank the state dry,” recalls former workshop director John Leggett.

This also may have been what Nelson Algren was doing here when he is said to have lost so badly in poker games at poet Donald Justice’s house that he had to cancel a European trip with a girlfriend. Algren isn’t here to defend himself, but before he left, he lobbed a literary grenade at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where, according to Bell, he was as lousy at teaching as he was at poker.

Algren, the iconoclast and loner, blasted the workshop as “a group venture,” “a field trip in pleasant company,” “a sanctuary from those very pressures in which creativity is forged. …” He was an advocate of writers immersing themselves in life at its rawest depths; a go-bathe-your-feet-in- the-Ganges-like-Ginsburg-did philosophy. Never mind collegial Bloomsburys in which to nurture the muses. He even may have agreed with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said it was best to avoid the company of fellow writers altogether “because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.”

ACADEMIZATION CERTAIN

It was 1973 when Algren fired his salvo, a time when writers’ workshops were starting to pop up like Taco Bells across the American academic landscape. Iowa and 40 other universities and colleges now offer master of fine arts degrees, and there are more than 250 creative-writing programs at the graduate and undergraduate levels. The phenomenon has even spread to secondary schools. Thirty percent of American high schools now offer creative-writing programs, according to a recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts.

All this professionalization and career-laddering of writing, as well as Algren’s case for experience, are still issues in the American literary community. “Writers should stand alone like oaks rather than wired together in bales like sprigs of hay,” writes Mark Helprin in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 1988. “The drive (to write) must come from within, and the territory of operations must be uncharted; there is no teaching this.”

Some think the academization of writing was inevitable because musicians, painters and other artists have long had academic training and credentialing. Others say that nothing essential has changed. Poet Gerald Stern, who has taught at Iowa for six years, argues that what goes on there is essentially no different from how young poets have always learned their craft.

“It used to be that if you wanted to be a poet, you would go to London or Paris and hang out with older poets,” says Stern, who has been writing for 40 years. “That’s what these workshops emulate. There has always been a tradition where younger poets go to older poets to learn. What’s the difference whether it’s my living room or my office?”

Few dispute that universities, with their workshops, their writer-in- residence programs, their visiting professorships, fellowships, grants, conferences and printing presses, have become the institutional support base for much of contemporary American writing.

And few dispute the stellar literary presences who have come out of Iowa. For 52 years, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop has stood as the nonpareil writer’s program. Stanford, Johns Hopkins and Columbia are rivals — but distant ones — when it comes to prestige and influence in the literary publishing world.

“If I call someone and say I have a writer from the Iowa workshop, they perk up in 5 seconds,” says Gail Hochman, a literary agent at Brandt and Brandt in New York. “They don’t buy the book any faster if they don’t like the book. But Iowa makes them perk up. It’s a very solid credential.”

THE KNOWNS, UNKNOWNS

The list of students is long and illustrious: Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, John Irving, Raymond Carver, Philip Levine, W.D. Snodgrass, John Gardner, Jayne Anne Phillips, Gail Godwin, Donald Justice, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Jane Smiley, William Stafford, James Galvin, Richard Bausch, to name a few.

So, too, is the workshop’s roster of teachers, which has included Philip Roth, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Wallace Stegner, Galway Kinnell, John Hawkes, Leonard Michaels, John Crow Ransom, Dan Wakefield, Vance Bourjaily and Herbert Gold, as well as Cheever, Algren, Carver and Vonnegut. Thus the “Athens of the Midwest” and “Writer’s Capital of the World” sobriquets (there is also an International Writers’ program at the university). Some recent graduates of the 1980s also are beginning to make their marks: Ethan Kanin (Emperor of the Air), Pinckney Benedict (Town Smokes), Glen Savan (White Palace), Bob Shacochis (Easy in the Islands) and Richard Wiley (Soldiers in Hiding).

Today’s workshop students are mostly in their mid-20s, and although some have been published in national magazines, they are unknowns to the general reading public. For that matter, so were O’Connor, Vonnegut, Carver, Phillips, Boyle and others when they were at Iowa. But will lightning strike again? Will today’s students find firm, authoritative voices, clear vision and stirring content? Can Iowa deliver a few critically and commercially successful writers from current classes?

“You can’t tell when it will happen,” says Frank Conroy, who became workshop director a year ago and is the author of Stop-Time, a praised 1967 memoir of adolescence, and Midair, a 1985 collection of stories. “They would very much like us to tell them that, to have the power to tell them that. But we can’t do that.”

‘JESUS IN THE WILDERNESS’

University literature describes the workshop as “primarily a community of writers who want time to write while receiving academic credentials.” It does not claim it can teach anyone to write. Instead, it operates on the assumption that talent can be developed. In the process, a kind of validation takes place for the talented.

“The validation here is very important,” says novelist and short-story writer T. Coraghessan Boyle, who is teaching a fiction workshop at Iowa this semester and is a former student.

“It gave me confidence that Cheever, Irving, Bourjaily read something of mine and said, ‘Hey, you’re good,”‘ says Boyle, a tall, ethereal-looking man who wears a gold cuff on his left ear. “I didn’t need someone to sit on my shoulder and say, ‘Hey, change that ending.’ Just someone to say, ‘Hey, it’s good.”‘

Each fall up to 60 new students travel to Iowa to “go out like Jesus in the wilderness for two years and find out if they have it,” says Barbara Grossman, an editor at Crown Publishers and a 1975 workshop graduate.

Some uproot their working lives and go in debt to spend two years in Iowa City. “It’s a luxury most of us are going to have to pay for eventually,” says Max Phillips, a fiction writer who worked as a graphic artist in New York City.

Some were the cream of their undergraduate writing programs at Smith, Princeton, Harvard, Vassar, Brown, Sarah Lawrence and Johns Hopkins. Some already have published short stories and poetry, mostly in small-circulation literary magazines. Others are more tentative in their abilities. But all were judged talented enough to come. Only 1 in 10 applicants to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is accepted. Those who do are usually exultant.

“What a gift to get two years to work at what you’re doing and get better at it,” says Robin Beeman of Napa Valley in California. But then there is the frightening side of suddenly being freed of reasons not to write. “Suddenly, all the excuses are taken away, save for that dreadful blank piece of paper, and you’re asked to get on with it. That’s terrifying,” Phillips says.

THE FEAR; WHO’S HOT

The quality of work is the main criterion for acceptance. When Conroy reads through the stacks of fiction applicants, he looks for skill, energy and intelligence — qualities often found among talented applicants. Far less common, he says, is being able to “feel the pressure of the soul behind the work,” a quality that makes writing believable, and that, by example, comes through so clearly, he says, in the works of such literary greats as Dickens, Chekhov, Tolstoy and O’Neill.

Once accepted, students find that classroom work amounts to one workshop, one class and one seminar a week. All are in the late afternoon, leaving mornings and early afternoons free for writing and reading. Reading time is important. “To write well, you have to read,” Conroy says. “There’s just no way to get around it. It’s not like chess or music, where a genius can burst through. There are no idiot savants in writing.”

Students have a week to study the work sheets of a fellow student’s writing before it is critiqued in class. “I went through some natural fear when the first work sheet came out,” says Deborah Brass, a first-year poet from Goucher College in Maryland and she of the table top at the Foxhead. “I ran through it to place myself against who was good.”

The advance work sheets are a gauge of who’s hot at the workshop. “If someone is good, their stuff is taken off the table right away,” says Fred Leebron, 26, a second-year fiction writer from Johns Hopkins and a former Fulbright Fellow who teaches an undergraduate workshop at Iowa.

Most anyone at Iowa will say it is what goes on after class that really counts, the discussion evenings at the Foxhead or the Mill, another writers’ hangout, that reach an intimate dimension beyond what was said in class that day. Joined sometimes by workshop teachers, they talk of their writing and reading; they analyze, commiserate, inspire and then retreat to their rented rooms in graying frame houses on Iowa City’s side streets, yearning to set fresh words, vision and feeling to paper.

But it is the workshop sessions that are the crucibles of the program. In them, writers put forth rough work, often first drafts, frequently vulnerable. Sometimes the work is submitted with a pseudonym to facilitate criticism and ease what can become humiliation for the writer. But most often writers use their own names, come what may.

A STATE OF READINESS

Workshop teachers each have their own approach. James Alan McPherson, who wrote Hue and Cry, some of the finest short stories to come out of the late 1960s, and Elbow Room, a collection that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978, lets the students do most of the criticizing while he saves his comments for one- on-one counseling sessions in his office.

Poet-teacher Jorie Graham is constructive and keenly analytical in her class. She sees a big part of her role as protecting breakthroughs, that point at which writers clarify their voices, perfect their concepts, stir their peers. Individual breakthroughs for Graham are like the rising tide that lifts all boats.

“There’s that feeling of having to try harder because somebody else around you is making a breakthrough,” says Graham, one of eight teachers on the workshop staff. She tells the story of a student who came to her brandishing the work sheet of another student whose poetry had stunned him into admiration. “Damn it, I have to go home and try harder,” said the student, who then turned around and left the class before it began.

At 40, Boyle is the workshop staff’s most published writer — World’s End, Budding Prospects and others — “more than everyone else combined, in fact,” he is quick to volunteer.

“He symbolizes for us what discipline will get you if you take everything out of you and put it on the page,” Fred Leebron says. Boyle has his students read a book each week and write a paper in addition to writing their own fiction for the class. “I make demands on them,” he says. “I want them to understand there’s no mystery involved in creativity. You have a gift, and you have to exercise it. It’s like Juilliard: Once you get in, you practice your violin.”

The idea in all the workshop writing classes is to reach and maintain a state of readiness, to prepare for that day when “lightning strikes,” as Graham puts it — when form, substance — and sometimes recognition — come together in a gratifying mesh that can stun the others in the workshop community.

EXPERIENCE NECESSARY

The experience question emerges at Iowa in traditional and non-traditional forms of storytelling (the distinction is fading). Age alone is not necessarily a part of that question. Some see youth as a potential virtue in writing. “The younger the writer, the more access he has to his heart,” says Gordon Lish, a senior editor at Knopf and a teacher of the short story. Others are concerned, however, that the high school-to-university-to-workshop continuum that seems to characterize the resumes of many workshop students leaves no room for experience. “Somewhere along the way they have to get something to write about,” Gail Hochman says.

McPherson, who in the 1960s worked his way through Harvard summers as a railroad dining-car waiter, a rich source for his writing, fears too many students fail to reach out for that experience and to make contact with universal values.

“Many students are all dressed up with nothing to write about,” he says. “Sometimes it’s sad they waste all these words on trivial stuff that has no meaning beyond themselves. They’re all wrapped up around themselves.”

Scott Raab, who graduated from the workshop in 1986, sees this phenomenon as the result of a shift in the profile of workshop students from “a diverse group who felt it important to be voices of their culture” to a group with a concern “for form, tightness, technical proficiency, agents and ‘will it sell?”‘ Moral and social concerns, Raab said, have been left to the poets.

But fiction teacher Allan Gurganus sees his Iowa workshop students as being more diverse. “Most of the students here have worked. The just-out-of- the-university students are the minority.

“None of these lessons are lost,” says Gurganus, a graduate of the workshop in the 1970s. “They develop a certain kind of skill they then apply when they have the experience to really utilize it. The one thing we know about experience is that eventually it gets its claws in everyone.”

Gurganus, who has taught at Stanford, Duke and Sarah Lawrence, speaks to his students in long, passionate cadences about craft and accountability in their work and the value of “community” at Iowa. Students should treasure this feeling of community, he urges, defining it as “a group of people profoundly interested in each other and in their work.”

“Do you know,” Gurganus asks them, “how rare community really is?” No such thing exists, he says, at the other leading graduate writers’ workshops.

THE COMMUNITY

Being of that community becomes a significant part of the allure for workshop students. Short-story writer Bob Shacochis, who attended the Iowa program in 1980 and taught fiction there in 1985, considers it “the greatest benefit” of his Iowa experience. “There’s no way you can talk about the things writers talk about unless you have a writer to talk about them with,” he says. “It’s such a nurturing place. It gives you a valuable sense that protects you from the self-incrimination, from your decision to play the gamble and try to make it as a writer.”

The community supports itself in other ways. Student poets who read Sunday nights at Prairie Lights bookstore usually can count on 25 or so fellow workshop students for an audience. They turn out en masse for readings by visiting poets and authors. Even long-standing staff members such as Bell and Stern draw standing-room-only crowds for their readings. “Without exception, there is no place in the United States where you get as large and intelligent an audience as you do here,” Stern says.

Even after the workshop years are over, the community continues as an ever-expanding network of writers, teachers and editors who draw upon each other for support, information and jobs. Gurganus, who has a novel and short- story collection coming out this spring, says he still counts as his best readers classmates from 15 years ago.

But all this is not to say there is no sense of competition at Iowa. There are glints of envy when the coveted second-year teaching grants and the Michener and Maytag prizes are awarded, or when a workshop student regarded as a peer suddenly publishes in a nationally prominent magazine or when a prominent agent’s interest in a fellow student becomes known.

Some fiction writers at the workshop have an agent when they arrive at Iowa. Others make a connection after they get there. Agents have been known to regard the workshop’s writers as something of a literary farm team from which may come the next talented rookie of the year.

FUTURE TEACHERS

For most who pass through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, there is no “big time”; no day when the lightning really strikes. Such as that day in the mid- 1970s when John Irving, then a workshop teacher, greeted David Morrell, a University of Iowa American-literature professor, with “eyes ecstatic” and announced he had just sold The World According to Garp and had quit his teaching job.

Most graduates of the workshop today will have to struggle just to get a teaching job. They go on to do many other things in life. They work as editors, advertising copy writers, public-relations writers, staff writers for museums and libraries. Some go on to medical school. Some get a master’s degree in business. Some enter government. Some go for a doctorate in literature. And some write for film and television.

Although no one has done a survey of Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumni, it seems that few to none go on to write fiction or poetry full time. In fact, one is left with the pervasive sense that what is getting done at the workshop is mostly the training of future teachers of writing who may write on the side.

Many, perhaps most, serious writers now make their way to universities, which, by default, have become the watering holes of contemporary American fiction and poetry. Conroy, a disaffected native New Yorker with a newly born son, sees a secret virtue in this for the writer who lives his afternoons in classrooms, and his mornings and nights in roomy old frame houses on shady university-town streets.

“Live like a bourgeois,” he quoted Flaubert, “so you can write like a revolutionary.”