The Spy in the Sandwich

Sunday, March 23, 2025

9:00 AM | Remembering the Writers of Iowa, Circa 2010

Last March 6, I read the terrible news I knew was coming. The Trump administration was cutting off its annual funding of the International Writing Program [IWP] of the University of Iowa, of which I am an alumnus, having been an honorary fellow of its prestigious fall residency in 2010, representing the Philippines together with novelist Edgar Calabia Samar.

From the IWP’s Facebook page we read: “On Wednesday, February 26, the IWP learned that its grants with the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, were being terminated. This notification explained that the IWP’s awards ‘no longer effectuate agency priorities,’ nor align ‘with agency priorities and national interest.’ The immediate result was the cancellation of Between the Lines [the IWP’s summer youth program], and the dissolution of Lines and Spaces Exchanges, Distance Learning courses, and Emerging Voices programs. The overall Fall Residency cohort will be reduced by around half due to the loss of federally funded participants; the IWP’s other long-time funding partners, including a combination of donors, grants, foreign ministries of culture, and NGOs, will continue to support writers. We are devastated by the abrupt end of this 58-year partnership...”

I am equally devastated because this program was instrumental in shaping much of what I consider the “mature” phase of my writing. After 2010, I came home to the Philippines, and by 2011, I produced my first two books collecting my short fiction—a book compiling my domestic realism in Beautiful Accidents [published by the University of the Philippines Press], and another one compiling my speculative fiction in Heartbreak and Magic [published by Anvil]. By 2012, I earned my MA in Creative Writing and became the founding coordinator of the Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Writing Center. Did IWP help jumpstart my literary milestones? You bet it did, as it has done for many other writers from all over the world since its founding in 1967. Thus I am devastated that stupid developments in the political status quo would cut short one of the best literary programs in the world.

It made me go back to how I chronicled those three months in Iowa [elsewhere in the U.S.] in 2010. Here are excerpts of some essays I wrote of that time.

* * *

From 17 October 2010:

People have asked me a lot, “Why are you in Iowa? What are you doing there? Isn’t Iowa just one huge field of corn?” And sometimes people back home don’t even bother to listen, and attempt hello with “So how’s Ohio?” Iowa, not Ohio. They’re two different states, I want to correct them. Most of the time, I don’t even bother. I suspect sometimes that most Filipinos find it easier to pronounce or remember Ow-hay-yow than the airy two-syllable conundrum of Ay-wah.

So yes, there’s a lot of corn here. Red barns and silos, too. The whole shebang. When I arrived here in late August, someone native made a jokey reference to the whole area—from Des Moines to Denver—as “fly-over country.” Which meant that this was Nowhere Land for most people in Continental United States, so much so that commercial airliners just “fly over” it.

But what’s in Iowa City? The Filipino writer Edilberto Tiempo asked the same bewildered question when he was sent as a Fulbright scholar in the 1930s to America, and was promptly instructed to get to this heart of the Midwest, four hours west of Chicago. In explanation, he was told something that remains true until today. In Iowa City, you have the best and most influential creative writing workshop in the world. In Iowa City, the world of literature converges to make it the hometown of writers from all over—and that if you are a writer of some note, you must make at least one pilgrimage to Iowa City. In 2008, UNESCO solidified Iowa City’s reputation as a literary capital by designating it a City of Literature, alongside Edinburgh in Scotland, Melbourne in Australia, and now Dublin in Ireland.

The University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, founded in 1936, remains the finest program for creative writing there is, made world-renowned by the poet Paul Engle. (Today, its director is the writer Samantha Chang.) The Workshop has also set the template for how creative writing workshops the world over are structured and ran. In 1961, returning to the Philippines after their graduate stint in Iowa, Dr. Tiempo and his wife the National Artist for Literature Edith Lopez Tiempo set up what is now known as the Silliman University National Writers Workshop, patterned of course on the one in cornfield country. In its early years, Mr. Engle visited the workshop in Dumaguete—and then invited the Filipino fictionist Wilfrido Nolledo and the Korean poet Ko Won, both fellows at the Silliman workshop, to come back with him to Iowa City. Both writers formed the core that would soon become the International Writing Program, a residency founded in 1967 aimed at bringing international writers to the Iowa campus where they could participate in the community’s literary life and devote three months to their own writing projects. (Today, the IWP director is the poet Christopher Merrill.) I am part of that program this year, together with Ateneo poet Edgar Calabia Samar. It is a privilege that has included such Filipino writers as Susan Lara, Charlson Ong, Marjorie Evasco, Rofel Brion, Sarge Lacuesta, Teng Mangansakan, and Vicente Garcia Groyon III. The IWP’s grandest alumnus so far, among so many luminaries, is the Nobel Prize winner for literature from Turkey Orhan Pamuk.

And so, when people ask me what I am doing in Iowa, I just tell them that as a writer, I am merely going back to the mothership.

Iowa City is easy to get used to, at least for me. Not once did it make me feel homesick, and every single day since my arrival has since become an exercise in trepidation of not wanting to go “home,” because this city already feels so much like home. You see, Iowa City has the same feel as my hometown of Dumaguete City—both are university towns, both are small but sophisticated, both are culturally active in ways that compete with cities bigger than them. In Dumaguete City, we wear porontongs and tsinelas and white shirts like a uniform. In Iowa City, the girls wear daisy dukes and the guys wear flannel and jersey shorts.

“It is my blonde Dumaguete,” the writer Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas—who is both Dumagueteña and Iowan, and so she knows what she is talking about—once said. I agree with her.

The only thing different here is the weather. One day many weeks ago, for example, they said it was the last day of summer in Iowa City. I had supposed they were right about that—but to me they have completely different conception of sun and summer here. The slightest instance of blue and the tenderest warmth here is considered summertime. Once, on a walk across campus on a slightly cloudy, slightly chilly afternoon, I chanced upon a pasty-white college boy who had taken the liberty of taking off his shirt to lie on the grass in front of the Old Senate with its shining golden dome. He was sunbathing. I looked up and there were indeed slivers of sunshine peering from behind the clouds. I found it amusing—the way they may find it amusing that I get so cold at 15ºC. It’s a coat for me at that drop of temperature. “You only need a sweater, or a cardigan!” I can hear them thinking. But my body knows only the vocabulary of humidity—not this dry, crisp chill in the air. Not the shivers that come with the wind.

In my three weeks in the Midwest—a span of time that had been spent in an endless cycle of all sorts of acquaintance and adaptation—my body was particularly slow in its attempt to settle down with this change of climate and circadian rhythm, to the point that I had actually taken to bed, sick with both jet lag and coughing. But I took it as an ironic announcement by my biology that I was—am—alive, that I am responding to strange, but ultimately sweet, stimuli. I knew I was flying into an adventure, and I was determined to wring out the best that I could from it before I would fly back into the familiar humidity of back home.

Still, I must admit that settling down in a new place also requires a certain kind of diligence to get out of an instant habit of cocooning. It is entirely understandable and entirely human, of course, this instinct to carve out a space of warmth and the relatively familiar amidst strangeness. A new place, after all, assaults you with volleys of newness—and the details are sharp: people talk differently here; they do things differently here; they move differently here. The smells and the sounds are new; the texture of things are different; the vistas may be familiar from the movies you have seen, but they suddenly come barging at you with the intimidating shock of proximity. This new place is suddenly your context, your present—and you have not prepared well for that change. Your only resort is to slip out, sink in to that cocoon of your making.

In my case, the cocoon was my hotel room. It is a rectangle of generic space, the type that lends itself well as a canvass for your projections of what makes for home far away from home. There is the one grand window that overlooks the Iowa River, there is the bed with its blankets and pillows and comforter, there is the writing desk, there is the tiny refrigerator that soon gets stocked up with food the texture of which brings back a sense of home, there is the bathroom, there is the closet, there is the television. I stayed in this room for days, barely venturing out.

But when I was finally ready to do battle with all these unfamiliarity, I began to sniff out for that one inviting day that was agreeable. I ventured slowly out into the unknown world that was Iowa City, and then I began to conquer it bit by bit, each step a discovery, each decision an adventure into turning the strange into the familiar.

And so it has. Prairie Lights Bookstore. Linn, Dubuque, Clinton, and all the other streets. The Mill. Bread Garden Market. The Englert. The Java House. A Taste of China. T-spoon. Studio 13. George’s. They have become home, have become part of what is familiar to me. I thought this when I ventured out of my hotel room this morning, after freshening up from a good session at the Fitness East gym: you’ve finally really settled down when you don’t even notice anymore you are surrounded by blonde and blue-eyed people everywhere you go.

* * *

From 27 October 2010:

It is a late Tuesday in the waning days of October, and I am hating the chatter of this couple on a study date in this crowded café. They are on the next table behind me, and try as I might, I become an unwilling eavesdropper into their conversation—something the music piped right into my ears with my earphones cannot even remedy. Sigur Ros, James Morrison, the Hans Zimmer soundtrack from Inception are powerless. The girl is Asian and seems inappropriately giggly; the guy is blonde and strikes a macho pose in his probing questions and corny jokes. The guy says something bland or inane, and the girl giggles and provides chatty fodder for their conversation’s twists and turns, including strange detours into Oedipus Complex and living in Canada. They have gone on with this getting-to-know-you game for a while now, and I am on my second cup of café latte. I am hungry and loaded with caffeine, and I cannot write the story I have sworn to finish today, or else. I can feel a headache coming. It is 7.27 in the evening in The Java House along East Washington Street, a football pigskin’s throw from the pedestrian mall in the center of town. I think about the grocery I have to buy in Bread Garden Market after I finish this cup of coffee. The café’s wifi is down, and I miss the occasional Facebook breaks I take from my writing, where the “occasional” is considerably longer than the actual work at hand. The couple behind me now talks about the “rules” of friending people in Facebook, and I roll my eyes. I think hazily about procrastination, and decide to do something about this habit later. I think about missing gym for four days now. I think about the stories and articles I have yet to finish. I think about the books I have to read, and the films I have to screen. I think about my remaining days in America. I think about time slipping fast.

I think about time a lot these days.

I think about the past weekend in Chicago, and think about how I had spent Monday in a pursuit of cocooning rest. This meant movies and books and general avoidance of the outside world. Outside, Iowa City is getting cold. The cold snap of autumn has gone towards its most extreme. The TV news tells me there is a storm brewing all over the Midwest. There are tornado warnings from the Mississippi to Wisconsin. I find myself dressing in a flannel shirt and a sweatshirt and a coat and a pair of canvas skate shoes. I look at myself in the mirror and think about how, in such a simple sartorial act, I have gone suddenly native.

This is not a usual day for me here in Iowa City. Often, each day is sunny and free of irritating moments—when it does become chilly, the beauty of trees turning gold in the fall offsets it. This is why I am recounting all this in detail, because it is unusual. My stay here has been beautiful, and all that is coming to an end soon, in a few weeks. I think about time a lot these days. And how it slips away so fast.

Here’s what is a part of my normal day here. There’s waking up late in the morning, then gym at the nearby Fitness First, then lunch at A Taste of China along Linn Street (or some other place when rice does not do it for you anymore), then coffee-aided writing at The Java House or T-Spoon, then the library till midnight, then home. On weekends, there’s music at The Mill or beer at Fox Head or Donnelly’s. The bibliophiles among us, who are most of us, go to Prairie Lights or The Haunted Bookstore or Murphy-Brookfield for a relief of their book addiction. We are kept busy some days attending to lectures and readings and film screenings and parties and excursions, most of which are optional. We are told that our primary duty in this writing residency is to write. And so we do. I sleep late at night to catch up on work and reading, aided for the most part by Red Bull in cans, something that is treated almost like water here. I have learned to hate the television a month before; the remote control is hidden behind the set, in an attempt to make turning the TV on a little harder, a mile shy of temptation.

In the rooms around mine in The Iowa House Hotel where we are billeted, the writers are battling with words and turns of phrases—and so must I. It is the best kind of writerly pressure. Compatriot Edgar Calabia Samar is finishing the introduction to his dissertation, an anti-detective novel in Filipino. Hong Kong’s Lai Chu Hon is finished with her novella about girls jumping off buildings, and Russia’s Alan Cherchesov is finished with his novel as well. Indonesia’s bestselling author Andrea Hirata began his fifth novel in the beginning of the residency, and is now finished with it. Singapore’s Thiam Chin O has finished four chapters of his first novel about two couples in an unnamed Asian island after the tsunami. Egypt’s Ghada Abdel Aal is biding her time, having decided not to write at all (except her columns back home!), occupied as she is with pressing interviews and readings and classroom visits. She has so far appeared in The Washington Post, which has done a feature on her as the author of a widely popular television show back in Cairo based on her book I Want to Get Married! She tells me that as a Muslim woman, “sometimes I am treated here more as a symbol than as a person.” Argentina’s lovely (and uncomplicated! she would love that word) Pola Oloixarac, one of Granta’s choices for best young Spanish novelists, makes the conference circuit in Spanish language literature from Boston to Barcelona. India’s Chandrahas Choudhury gives readings of his first novel everywhere. Others are finishing screenplays and poetry collections. We—all 38 of us from far-flung places in the world—are all busy writing, when we are not partying or doing readings or visiting places or meeting authors like James Tate, Samantha Chang, Marilynne Robinson, Mona Simpson, Bo Caldwell, Yiyun Li, Jane Smiley, Xu Xi, among others. We get to travel, too, to get the breadth of America, which is part of the pursuits of this program. So far, there has been San Francisco for me (and Cody in Wyoming, Portland, and New Orleans for the others), as well as Chicago, and soon Washington, D.C. and New York. In those places, the touristy stuff prevail: in Chicago, there’re the architectural boat tour, the art overload in the Institute of Art, the plays in the theater district, the dancing in Boystown, the restaurant-hopping in Wicker Park, the skyline from Museum Campus, the view of the world from atop Willis Tower, the shopping along Michigan Avenue, among others; in San Francisco, there’re Alcatraz and Fisherman’s Wharf and the Golden Gate Bridge, the winding descent of Lombard Street, the bohemian air of Haight-Ashbury and The Mission, the nightlife in the Castro and Valencia Drive; in Washington, D.C. and New York, there will be more of the same. The goal is immersion in the culture, as well as to write. I came here to write my second novel, but somehow ended up writing short stories instead. I am almost halfway finished with that new collection Where You Are is Not Here, all set in places not in the Philippines. When IWP writers greet each other in the morning, our hellos are often followed by this phrase: “How’s your word count?” You can say that Iowa City is a writer’s dream. When Teng Mangansakan III, who was a fellow two years ago, told me earlier that this experience would be life-altering, I didn’t know if I could believe him, but now I know for sure. Remember those fantasies you keep about spending your days not preoccupied with such trifling concerns like work, spending only time chasing words and inspiration? The residency in the International Writing Program is the fulfillment of that fantasy—but after its expiration date comes the thought about having to go back to the ordinary world, where you have to take in again all those nagging everyday concerns, which compete with the fact of being a writer. Alas.

But nevertheless. To get a taste of this life, to be given this opportunity, that is enough.

* * *

From 1 November 2010:

It’s the first Monday of November. I have been feeling rather down today—perhaps I am just tired from the previous night’s frenzied partying—that not even a splendid hay ride in a beautiful Iowan farmhouse can mitigate it, and everything now to me seems to run with forbidding shadows. Some things are even hateful in varying degrees. The full capacity of this cafe, for example, when on ordinary days I delight in seeing the constant traffic of interesting faces. Or the fact that it’s cold outside. There’s also my use of the word “mitigate,” which I find utterly pretentious, and I hate it. So is my use of the word “utterly.” It seems that in this down time, I have learned how to perfectly cannibalize myself with little irritations. I use a lot of excuses, don’t I.

The real reason is the fact that there is something inevitable that stares me at me now: going home. How do you go home after Iowa? After the International Writing Program? But I am, all of us are. We are leaving in barely three weeks, and I don’t think I’m ready to go back to my old life just yet. And yet, there are already missives from and of home that are reminders of this inevitability: emails from family and friends, announcements from work, and the constant moans by O Thiam Chin every single day that this is his “last Friday in Iowa City,” his ”last Saturday in Iowa City,” his ”last Sunday in Iowa City.” I keep mum, always in that posture of denial, but in my head I tell him: “I am counting out my last days, too, and I am sad.”

You can see how sad most of us are. We try to hide this silly sentimentality, of course, with smiles and small talk and good cheer and drunken parties—and sometimes, for some of our men here in the IWP, with a slinky black dress or women’s lingerie for a Halloween night’s excuse to let our hair down. Last night, at the ghoulish gathering at the Merinos’, you could feel that pull for camaraderie among many of the writers in the IWP. There was an acknowledgment in the air that we were indeed counting out our days, that we were saying our drawn out goodbyes in whatever form we want them to take, that we were probably not going to see each other again but that we were glad that, for more than two months, we were blessed with their friendships, their capacity for taking us into their lives and making us part of them.

I will miss Egypt’s Ghada Abdel Aal’s smile, for example, and her constant protests about her cheerfulness. I will miss Argentina’s Pola Oloixarac’s wildfire presence, the way she comes into every room and commands everybody’s attention. I will miss Israel’s Touche Gafla’s playful gravity, and his conviction that he is always the most beautiful person in the room. I will miss Indonesia’s Andrea Hirata’s sudden bouts of laughter, and his mission to photograph himself in every single spot in the United States. I will miss South Korea’s Kim Sa-in’s quiet and calming presence—and his totally terrifying Jigsaw Halloween mask. I will miss my compatriot Edgar Samar and the way he walks around with the security blanket that is his bag. I will miss Hong Kong’s Hon Coco’s quiet air, the way she talks to you like you are the only person in the room. I will miss Iceland’s Sölvi Björn Sigurðsson’s tallness—and his wig and lingerie. I will miss Germany’s Christopher Kloeble’s anecdotes, and the animated way he tells them. I will miss India’s Chandrahas Choudhury’ impeccable sartorial sense and his capacity for elegantly working the room. I will miss Poland’s Milosz Biedrzycki’s secret rock star wish and his electric guitar. I will miss being a visitor in Belarus’ Maryia Martysevich’s universe, and the way she can belt out every single song in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I will miss the United Kingdom’s Laura Fish’s delightful accent, and her Gabriel. I will miss Kenya’s Billy Kahora’s hand gestures when he talks passionately about something. I will miss Kyrgystan’s Turusbek Madilbay’s dancing, and his booming voice. I will miss Mauritius’ Farhad Khoyratty’s Cambridge accent, and the whiplashing wit he carries around with him like a weapon of mass distraction. I will miss Ireland’s Michael McKimm’s giggles and his mission to see birds, of all sorts. I will miss Singapore’s O Thiam Chin’s hyper nature and his pickiness. I will miss Taiwan’s Ying Phoenix’s gushing about film. I will miss Pakistan’s H.M. Naqvi’s swagger, and his allergy to the afternoon sun. (Or just the sun, period.) I will miss Brazil’s Amilcar Bettega’s silence, the way his smile seems to just say everything. I will miss New Zealand’s Hinemoana Baker’s quirkiness and deep soul and Halloweena costume. I will certainly not miss Nigeria’s Ismail Bala’s milkshake addiction, and his obsessive fascination for Twinkies and bookstores. I will miss The Netherland’s Albana Shala’s groundedness, the way she makes you feel at ease around her instantly. I will miss everything about Hinemoana’s fellow Kiwi, David Hill, that darling man.

There are the other writers, of course, all thirty-eight of us, each with a piece of memory of each other. Truth to tell, we only have these scant impressions of each other to work with, because two and a half months are never really enough to know anybody. But it is enough to say that given the little time that we’ve had, we gave the world to each other—and made Iowa City in the beautiful autumn of 2010 an impossible place and time to forget in all our lifetimes.

Labels: iowa international writers program, life, politics, writers, writing

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

GO TO OLDER POSTS GO TO NEWER POSTS

Interested in What I Create?

Bibliography

Follow the Spy

Recent Crumbs

Blogs I Read

The Deal

Credits

Tracking Sandwich Eaters

Sunday, March 23, 2025

9:00 AM | Remembering the Writers of Iowa, Circa 2010