Christopher Merrill, director of the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, and leader of TSWW's poetry workshop, delivered the university's 39th annual Presidential Lecture on February 27th, 2022.

Says Merrill: When I was invited to give this lecture, I was tasked with addressing the past and future of the “Writing University.” The way I’m approaching it is to talk about truth-telling in all of its different guises, which we cultivate in the “Writing University,” whether it’s in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the International Writing Program, the Nonfiction Writing Program, or journalism. Writers tell truths of a different order, and so I will explore some of those truths through a poem by Emily Dickinson, which begins ‘Tell All the Truth, But Tell it Slant’ and goes on to praise “the Truth’s superb surprise.” I talk about some of the ways that has played out in my own life.

We encourage all TSWW alumni and future students to read Chris' excellent and timely address.

Tell It Slant: Notes from the Writing University

I am very grateful to you for choosing to spend this afternoon with Professor Kletzing, Professor
Winokur, and me; to John Keller, Bruce Harreld, and others responsible for arranging this event;
to President Barbara Wilson, whose inauguration as the University of Iowa’s 22 nd president we
celebrate, along with the institution’s 175 th anniversary; and to my dear friend, Ed Folsom, whose
own Presidential Lecture about Walt Whitman informs much of my thinking. His kind words on
my behalf may explain why his friends and colleagues hope he will outlive us so that he might
speak at our memorial services. So to Ed I say, long life! And—thank you.

The title of my lecture comes from a poem that Emily Dickinson wrote sometime between 1858
and 1865, a decade or so after the University of Iowa was founded. This was a decisive period in
American history, echoes of which regularly sound today, and this poem, conceived in a time of
bitter division, when it was difficult to sort out the truth among conflicting accounts of events
and derive meaning from the waves of grief and joy that washed over Americans during the Civil
War, speaks to a fundamental issue of this democratic enterprise: how to create and preserve
spaces for truth telling, since this is integral to our experiment in liberty:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

Dickinson’s eyesight declined during the war, which adds a layer of personal meaning to the last
line of the poem. And who among us has not suffered from the blinding light of truth, especially
when it is delivered unexpectedly? You might say the cornerstone of this Writing University is
“The Truth’s superb surprise”—the kinds of discovery, occasioned by a rhyme, a metrical
imperative, a turn of phrase, the demands of a plot, or the development of a character, that poets
and writers may experience as a quickening of the pulse, an acceleration of thought, a deepening
of perspective. This is what we live for: to work in the language to enlarge our understanding of
the world, broaden our sympathies, learn something new.
Poets and playwrights, novelists and nonfiction writers, journalists and filmmakers, all engage in
different forms of truth telling—which is a precondition for the liberty of conscience enshrined
in our founding documents. A republic of letters is thus essential to the life of the republic, which
depends upon a citizenry capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood. A civic education, then,
may be bolstered by creative individuals who choose to serve apprenticeships in literary forms of
truth telling, the fruits of which include an expanded community of readers and writers who not
only may have a better appreciation of the delights on offer in a vivid poem or short story but an
enhanced ability to discern the truth, which in an age of rampant disinformation—
#FakeNews—is critical to the survival of democracy. Ernest Hemingway said,

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector."

This is the writer’s radar
and all great writers have had it.” Iowa graduates have cultivated that gift for more than a
century—which is why Iowa City was the first UNESCO City of Literature to be designated in
the New World.

Needless to add that literary truths come in a wide array of guises, from straight reportage
to surrealist juxtapositions to hybrid forms mixing prose and poetry, technological advances and
teleological narratives, and a seemingly infinite range of creative expressions in between. When
lightning strikes, writers summon all that they know and much that they do not know in order to
dazzle their readers gradually, with truths that may change their lives.

__________

In the early 1990s, while reporting from the war zones of the former Yugoslavia, I often heard an
adage attributed to the Prussian military theorist, Claus von Clausewitz, “In war, truth is the first
casualty.” For propaganda reigns in the fog of war, facts about troop movements, battles, and
strategy are in continual dispute, and it is easy to fall into the trap of imagining that one knows
more than one does. Whenever I felt I was losing perspective—the first sign was usually hearing
myself parrot an argument from one side of the conflict or another—I resolved to travel to the
other side as soon as possible. Suffice to say that Vladimir Putin’s justification for the Russian
invasion of Ukraine, which depends on a false narrative of Ukrainian history, has brought back
many interviews I conducted in the former Yugoslavia, with people from all walks of life who
used flawed histories to justify atrocities committed by their countrymen. Beware of anyone who
claims to have history on their side. “Here is something we can all agree on,” the Serbian
American poet Charles Simic writes. “Sooner or later our tribe always comes to ask us to agree
to murder.” This is why he believes that lyric poets “perpetuate the oldest values on earth. They
assert the individual’s experience against that of the tribe.” What a literary education can inspire
is a lifelong search for new ways to express those oldest values on earth.
The shock that Ukrainians felt this week when Russian forces invaded their country was surely
similar to what Sarajevans felt when their Serbian countrymen besieged the city just eight years
after it had hosted the Winter Olympics, or what New Englanders felt when Fort Sumpter was
shelled. It is not as difficult as you might think for a political leader skilled in the darker arts of
persuasion to convince some element of his citizenry to think tribally. The courageous Serbian
journalist Miloš Vasić, founding editor of an independent weekly in Belgrade, Vreme, explained
in a memorable fashion his countrymen’s support for what the International Criminal Court at
The Hague would prosecute as crimes against humanity:
All it took was a few years of fierce, reckless, chauvinistic, intolerant,
expansionist, war-mongering propaganda to create enough hate to start the
fighting among people who had lived together peacefully for 45 years… You
must imagine a United States with every little TV station everywhere taking
exactly the same editorial line—a line dictated by David Duke. You, too, would
have war in five years.
His prediction was borne out by the January 6 th insurrection. And I trace my fascination with
different forms of truth telling, each of which can contribute to a greater understanding of our
walk in the sun, not only to what I have witnessed in war zones from the Balkans to Iraq and

Afghanistan but to the growing divisions in our own country. “It is difficult / to get the news
from poems,” William Carlos Williams wrote in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” “yet men die
miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” What we offer in this UNESCO City of
Literature are instructions, space, and time for discovering “what is found there.”

__________

It turns out that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was not the world’s first degree-granting creative
writing program. That distinction belongs to the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow,
which was founded in 1933. Joseph Stalin’s bid to create a new species of human being, Soviet
poeticus, coincided with the Soviet-engineered famine in Ukraine, the Holodomor, which led to
the deaths of nearly four million people—the first methodically planned genocide, in this case by
starvation, in the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. This was the same year that Adolf Hitler was
appointed Chancellor of Germany, marking the beginning of the Third Reich, which would sign
a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union to divide up Poland, while here in the heartland, the
idea of fostering creativity, seeded by Dean Carl Seashore’s decision, in 1922, to grant graduate
credit for creative work, would transform the landscape of American higher education. The
Workshop was established in 1936, in the midst of a devastating drought, a plague of
grasshoppers, and the continuing misery of the Great Depression. This was hardly a propitious
moment to launch such a radical program. But the history of ideas suggests that it is at precisely
such dark moments that humankind may rise to the challenge and effect momentous change.
Surely we have arrived at such a moment with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It was also in 1936 that Paul Engle, the son of a horse trader in Cedar Rapids and one of
the first recipients of the MA degree in creative writing, took his honeymoon in Moscow and
Berlin. And it is tempting to imagine that his tenure as the Workshop’s longest serving director
and co-founder of the International Writing Program was shaped by what he witnessed abroad.
In Berlin, for example, a Jewish bookseller gave him several fine editions by the German poet
Rainier Maria Rilke, and asked him to help his teenaged daughter escape from Germany. Engle’s
letter to the bookseller was returned, stamped Disappeared—a failure that haunted him. He went
on to help writers at every stage of their career, some of whom were in grave danger. I am happy
to report that the International Writing Program continues to offer safe haven to writers at risk,
most recently from Myanmar and Afghanistan. And we have reached out to Ukrainian alumni of
our fall residency and summer writing program for high school students, holding them in our
thoughts and prayers even as we prepare to seek places for them to live in safety.
The Workshop model pioneered at Iowa, a literary apprenticeship rooted in the promise
of democratic access central to public education, has spawned hundreds of undergraduate and
graduate creative writing programs here and abroad, proving to be far productive than what was
on offer at the Gorky Institute, which inspired no imitations in the Soviet Union; with the demise
of the Soviet Union the number of creative writing programs doubled in the Russian Federation,
one less than the three MFA creative writing programs in this state alone. The innovative Iowa
idea to bring together artists and scholars in an academic setting succeeded wildly beyond what
anyone might have imagined in the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and World War II.

__________

The Polish poet Wisława Szymborska declared in her Nobel lecture that “inspiration is not the
exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally.

There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration
visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do
their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners –
and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous
adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it.
Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions
emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a
continuous “I don’t know.”
This is the stance I take not only in my writing but in my prognostications about the future of
writing at Iowa, which boasts the nation’s top-ranked programs in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and
undergraduate creative writing. I cannot predict what literary forms and genres will dominate,
though I imagine hybridity will continue to shape some of the most interesting work. But I can
say with some confidence that poets and writers will explore issues of identity, immigration,
social justice, Black Lives Matter, climate change, income disparities, the clash between
democratic and autocratic forms of government, love and loss. We live in a complicated
historical moment, and if the role that writers play may seem peripheral to the business, political,
and professional classes we also know that what is marginal today may be central tomorrow.
Emily Dickinson, for example, who was all but unknown at the time of her death in 1886. Our
inner lives are immeasurably richer, though, thanks to the 1789 discoveries she made, including
this little poem, which might be emblazoned on the Welcome to Iowa signs by the Mississippi:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

And bees are dying off from various environmental factors, including pesticides, drought,
and habitat destruction. Hence environmental concerns will loom large in what writers address
from here on out. After all, we are gathered today in the rebuilt Hancher Auditorium, which was
destroyed in the Great Flood of 2008. The floodwaters had begun to subside when I dialed into a
World Wildlife Federation conference call, during which a climatologist remarked that if present
trends continued five-hundred-year floods would become regular occurrences. This suggests that
one strand of the vibrant tradition of American nature writing will flourish: the marriage of
scientific insight and literary sensibility that one finds in our fellow Iowan Aldo Leopold’s
famous book, Sand County Almanac. The last seven years have been the hottest on record,
wildfires are now a staple of the evening news in every season, and we know about floods. If
early in my tenure at the IWP writers rarely mentioned climate change, now it is a commonplace
for them to discuss it. For no one will escape the ravages of a warming planet.
During the flood of 2008, we launched Between the Lines, a summer program for high
school students from Arab-speaking, which we had to relocate at the last minute to Chicago. We
had hired an IWP alumna, Iman Humaydan, a Lebanese novelist who had lived through a fifteen-
year-long civil war in her country, and one day she asked me how it felt to have devoted so much
of my writing life to covering conflicts abroad only to have disaster strike in my back yard.
Weird, I replied.

Get used to it, she said.

__________

“To be born in a time and a place is not to join a national destiny,” the historian Timothy Snyder
recently observed, in a commentary on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. “Independence
must be declared again and again, generation after generation, individual by individual.”
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of writers, who must not only master the art and
craft of their chosen genre but declare their independence from their literary masters, the writers
who first inspired them to take pen to paper. “Freedom is made not born,” Snyder concludes. To
which I would add: it is grounded in an unwavering determination to tell the truth. Which is why
the movement to restrict the teaching of history is an anathema to writers. Here is how we know
truth telling is critical to a democracy: Book banning is back in vogue. Art Spiegelman’s graphic
novel about the Holocaust, Maus, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Toni Morrison’s The
Bluest Eye—these and many other books have caught the attention of those who do not wish to
have their children enjoy the complicated mixture of delight, taboo, and uncertainty, that comes
with reading any book that challenges our assumptions. For shame.

__________

Finally, a word about diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, which has been a defining feature
of the International Writing Program from its establishment in 1967. We have hosted some 1600
writers from 150 countries, and what they teach us is how little we may know about other literary
traditions and ways of being in the world. But every voice matters in the world of literature—that
is, in the world—because it contains the possibility of opening our eyes to what we most need to
hear. I date my own education in DEI to my close friendship with the poet Agha Shahid Ali, who
described himself as a triple exile, from Kashmir, India, and Urdu. He celebrated differences at
every turn. He was the wittiest person I have ever known, flamboyantly gay, a Shia Muslim who
liked to cook pork for his Jewish and Gentile friends. He was my older daughter’s godfather, and
when she was christened in the Episcopal Church my wife asked him if he had any reservations
about assenting to Anglican creeds. “I take it all metaphorically,” he said. He was the first poet I
invited to read here at the International Writing Program, when he was dying of the same form of
brain cancer that had taken his mother’s life, and he recited his poems from memory, his eyesight
having failed. He died the next year, and he was buried on Emily Dickinson’s birthday, in her
hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts—which was also my birthplace. For as she wrote:
“Success in circuit lies.” Let Shahid have the last word:

Stationary
The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
The night is your cottage industry now,
the day is your brisk emporium.
The world is full of paper.

Write to me.