Lan Samantha Chang
Editor’s note: The following tributes to Connie Brothers, program administrator of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for forty-five years, were written for her retirement celebration in Iowa City on October 5, 2019.
When I was a student, Connie was powerful and mysterious. A nature goddess, she lived way out in the country with her daughter, Cammie; her husband, Bill; and several cats. She ate containers of brown rice for lunch. She smoked American Spirit cigarettes. She loved to ask about our problems, and she was also famously private. She knew as much about the literary world as anyone alive. She had eaten breakfast with Borges. She was good friends with Robert Hass and Claudia Rankine. She was an expert on the phone, she had an unrivaled rolodex that contained two, three, four phone numbers each for famous people. Years later, as a visiting faculty member, I began to see Connie as the Workshop’s secret super power, but I did not truly see the depth of Connie’s wisdom and humanity until I became program director. How is it possible that a community of notoriously fragile and complex people did not turn against itself, harden into the bitter, infertile rivalries I had, by this time, witnessed firsthand at several other creative writing institutions? How is it possible that, over decades of organizational and financial tumult in the academy that have crippled so many once first-class arts programs, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has consistently turned out so many exceptional poets and fiction writers? Who is at the core of the program’s extraordinary achievement over the last forty-five years? I believe that this person is, to a large extent, Connie Brothers.
I’m fortunate that for more than a dozen years, I have had the privilege of speaking to Connie for hours at a time, five days a week. During those years, I conversed with Connie more than with any other human being. Technically, as she told people, I was her boss. But in reality, she has been the mentor and advisor of my adult life.
I’m honored to introduce Chris Adrian, James Galvin, Francine Prose, and Marilynne Robinson, whose words will celebrate Connie’s extraordinary legacy.