The University of Iowa is once again ahead of the curve with its implementation of undergraduate classes that focus on genre writing. Historically, most writing programs have primarily focused on literary fiction, but the University of Iowa has heard the requests of its current and incoming students, and they’ve started to add courses that focus on fantasy, science fiction, fairy tales, dystopian fiction, and romance.
In my freshman year, I was fortunate enough to participate in a Writing and Reading Romance Fiction course which has continued to be offered to students as part of their degree. In this course, undergraduates spend the first half of the semester reading romance titles and the second half workshopping their own. This allows students to have a wide exposure to the genre while also providing them enough time to craft their own romantic tales.
While I was participating in this class, we read a variety of titles including queer stories like “Brokeback Mountain” and Harlequin series romances like, “His Pregnant Texas Sweetheart.” We also discussed the rise of tropes like enemies to lovers, and the influence of a happy or unhappy ending to a romance story. There was even a week designated to writing about intimacy where students discussed accurate and healthy portrayals of sex in our readings. Overall, I felt that this prepared us as we slowly moved into workshopping our own stories. Not only did these works give us some ideas on what to write about for our workshop pieces, but they also provided students ample time to learn how to critique and analyze work effectively without coming off as judgmental.
In the second half of the semester, two students per class presented their short romantic tales, and the rest of the class was asked to provide feedback though workshop letters and participating in class discussion. Having acquired and read the stories about a week beforehand, students were able to discuss, praise, and analyze different aspects of the plot, the characters, and of course, the romance, in ways that would help the author for their final portfolio which was due at the end of the semester.
For the final portfolio, students were asked to revise their romance story based on class feedback and the instructor’s personalized letter. In this way, each author was able to make as little or as many changes as they wanted which also included a reflection paper to detail to the instructor which edits they ended up making.
Whenever people ask me about my favorite writing classes, this class is one of the first that comes to mind! Fresh out of high school, this was the very first writing workshop class I took while at the University of Iowa. I was absolutely floored by the idea of taking a romance class to begin with, and when I arrived, I was amazed by the writers I was suddenly surrounded with. Even better, I had finally found a community of writers who loved romance just as much as I do and even today I’m still friends with some of the people who I met all those years ago.
The English Department’s commitment to offering speculative and genre fiction as part of their writing workshops has not only given students like me an outlet for writing the work I want to be writing, but it also gave me an opportunity to meet other undergraduates and build a community around a similar interest. This has been, and will continue to be, a massive draw for prospective students looking to find their people in their writing courses.