By DINITIA SMITH
Published: April 18, 2005
NYTimes, E1,7
SOMERVILLE, Mass., April 13 - The
first thing to know about Lan Samantha Chang, who has been named the new
director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is that she has strong ideas about
teaching.
For one thing, workshops should
not be therapy sessions. "I don't think they should advocate one aesthetic
over another," Ms. Chang said firmly during an interview last week in a
restaurant near her apartment here. "I don't believe in singling out
particular people or destroying them in public, though I make my opinions
known."
Advertisement
Ms. Chang, 40, is a well-praised
novelist and short-story writer herself. She will become director next January,
with an annual salary of $115,500. She succeeds Frank Conroy, who died this
month, and who during his 18 years as director made Iowa one of the nation's
most prestigious training grounds for writers. Ms. Chang, now a Briggs-Copeland
lecturer in creative writing at Harvard, was among four finalists for the job.
She will be the first woman and the first Asian-American to hold the position,
school officials say.
Ms. Chang will teach a graduate
fiction workshop, choose students for the fiction program (poetry students are
chosen by the poetry faculty) and will consult on hiring, among other duties.
The two-year program, which leads to a master's in fine arts, has no specific
academic course requirements. The fiction workshop, which became a full-fledged
program in 1936, receives 750 applications for 25 places, and there are 450
poetry applications for 25 places. Tuition for out-of-state students is about
$17,000 a year and for in-state students about $6,500 a year.
One of her goals, Ms. Chang said,
is to raise money from individuals and foundations to provide full tuition
scholarship to all workshop students. Now some of them get aid through
scholarships and teaching fellowships.
The novelist Marilynne Robinson,
who was on the seven-member search committee said, "We felt we couldn't go
wrong choosing any of the candidates." The others were Jim Shepard, Ben
Marcus and Richard Bausch.
But she noted of Ms. Chang that
"her career is on the upswing, which makes her a valuable presence as an
active writer," and added: "She's very devoted to the program,"
where she studied in the early 1990's, and where she has been a visiting
faculty member.
James Alan McPherson, acting
director of the workshop and another member of the search committee, said he
expected no major changes in the program. "They have comparable
sensibilities," he said of Mr. Conroy and Ms. Chang. Like Mr. Conroy, he
said, Ms. Chang is comfortable with people from varying backgrounds. In Mr.
Conroy's time, the workshop produced writers with as varied an aesthetic as T.
C. Boyle, Jane Smiley and Allan Gurganus, all in the same class at Iowa in the
1970's, all taught by John Cheever, a writer with his own singular style.
Mr. McPherson added: "She
will be closer to the experience of young writers than I was or Frank
was."
He said the workshop expects from
Ms. Chang, as it did from Mr. Conroy, "a sense of community, a commitment
to develop students, and the encouragement of financial help."
Ms. Chang is the daughter of
Chinese immigrants who left China in 1949 and moved to Appleton, Wis. Her
father, Nai-Lin Chang, is a retired professor of engineering affiliated with
Lawrence University there; her mother, Helen Chung-Hung Hsiang, teaches piano.
Ms. Chang, one of four sisters, graduated from Yale, where she was managing
editor of The Yale Daily News. She was also an intern in a program at The New
York Times aimed at minorities.
After Yale, she went to the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard to study public administration. "I
thought I would get a job where I would have to wear pantyhose to work,"
she said.
Then she began taking writing
courses at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and was accepted at the
Iowa Writers' Workshop. She studied with Ms. Robinson, Mr. McPherson and Mr.
Conroy. Just as she was leaving, she learned that one of her short stories had
been accepted by The Atlantic Monthly. It became part of her first collection,
"Hunger," published in 1998.
Ms. Chang said she was
disappointed to learn that The Atlantic Monthly had recently announced it would
cease publishing fiction regularly in its pages. "Our country is currently
in sore need of fiction," she said. "Our country is hung up on what's
quantifiable, on spreadsheets and cost-benefit analysis, the things I learned
at the Kennedy School. Even the most honest economist says there are things
that can't be explained by numbers."
She has not turned her back,
however, on what she learned about public administration at the Kennedy School.
"I took two classes on leadership and authority," she said. "I
found them fascinating."
"I think I will use
them," she added with a smile. In 2004 Ms. Chang married Robert Caputo, a
landscape painter and art teacher, and published her first novel,
"Inheritance," about two sisters, Junan and Yinan, in China during
the turmoil of the 1930's and 40's who fall in love with the same man.
The novel is narrated by Hong,
Junan's daughter, who lives in New York in the 1990's. "My subject is
time," Ms. Chang said. "The immigrant experience throws a powerful
light on the way time affects us and our families," she added.
"Moving to another country creates a gap between the generations,
emphasizes the bridges and dislocations across and between the
generations."
Today, she said, "the publishing industry is focusing on writers as entertainment personalities," and for that reason, Iowa is especially valuable because it is "one of the few havens where a developing writer is given the opportunity to focus on work alone."