Dylan Nice recently published his first book, Other Kinds, which was praised by Publishers Weekly as “alive with the smell of rain and the pulse of silence.” A MacDowell Colony Fellow, he now teaches with Chatham University’s Low-Residency MFA program and in creative writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg.

“My time at the NWP began by chance. I desperately wanted to leave Pennsylvania, where I had always lived, and be someone else. Because I had written a few things I liked, I thought I might be a writer and that it might be a good way out. I was possessed by unearned confidence and young to a fault. An English professor at my undergraduate campus told me about MFA programs and gave me a list of sixteen programs to consider, a list I narrowed down to eight using a sloppy kind of emotional math. How much was the application fee? Could I imagine myself there? I knew almost nothing about Iowa, and that it stayed on my list might be attributed to the modest length of the state’s name or the familiar black and gold of its football uniforms.

Here is an instance in which my gut has done the best thinking of my life. It isn’t difficult to catalog how profoundly the NWP changes the trajectory of a literary career: the quality of instruction; the dedication of its brilliant faculty; the opportunities and connections the program offers; and the validation implicit in being one of its students. These are reason enough to pack up your life and head toward the cornfields. But what arrives to my memory more vividly than anything else is the life I lived there. For the years I was in Iowa City, I had talented friends who read my work and who let me read theirs. There were readings in bars of literary fame and on make-shift stages in floodlit backyards. With the right set of eyes, even the often-complained about winters flash into other-worldly beauty: bare oak branches, the dim blue light at dusk. Brick streets led past landmarks from the work of other writers who have gone there: the Mercy Hospital awning that reads EMERGENCY in electric red light. I always stopped and stared. My life never felt so significant or the work I was doing so worthwhile. I didn’t keep the list with the name Iowa scrawled in blue ink somewhere in the middle, but I owe it the best things I’ve done.”