Campus luminaries, including UI President Barbara Wilson, the Center for Advancement's Lynette Marshall, and CLAS Associate Dean Roland Racevskis, spoke at the September 22 dedication ceremony for the new Nonfiction Writing House.

We're pleased to present the speech by Roland Racevskis:

"In the birthplace of the academic discipline of creative writing, the development and emergence of the Nonfiction Writing Program over these past five decades reflects and reinforces our commitment to literature in its many forms of expression.

Building the Nonfiction Writing Program is a strategic priority of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. And now having the NWP House in its prominent position on Writers' Row is an opportunity to elevate this program in a way we haven't been able to achieve before.

This striking facility establishes a proper home for a program that has long been a destination for writers, and a pillar of the University of Iowa writing community.

And it makes sense now for the NWP to live so close to the Workshop, as it shares so much with that program—not just in the extraordinary quality and range of writers who come through the programs, but in their kindred commitment to the development of emerging writers, who come to study the craft, practice their art, share their work, and learn from each other.

I'll end by referring to the sixteenth-century pioneer of the essay form, Michel de Montaigne, who once observed that:

“It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.”