Squatter regionalism: Postwar fiction, geography, and the program era

Abstract

In this article we use computational methods to establish that the Program Era has altered the traditional understanding that a regionalist writer writes about the region in which they grew up. Using the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as an example, we prove that many writers now write about the region to which they moved to study and/or teach creative writing. Using a database of demographic information about faculty and students alongside computational analysis of place names in a curated corpus of work produced by prominent Iowa-affiliated writers, we map authorial career itineraries onto the geographic locations referenced in their fiction, visualizing the ways in which the relationship between writer and place has been inflected by the Midwestern location of the Workshop. We found that Iowa references are significantly higher than in a comparable corpus of postwar literature. They are also significantly higher in percentage terms than Iowa’s population as a proportion of the US population. Finally, we found that the works in our corpus most centrally focused on Iowa are, overwhelmingly, not authored by Iowa natives. Instead, we have identified a cohort of squatter regionalists, authors whose writings prominently feature the state in which they received their MFA, found faculty employment, or (frequently) both. This trend, we believe, may also be evident in works by authors from other MFA programs, which would confirm our larger hypothesis that the professional itineraries mandated by the Program Era have influenced the regional settings of postwar American fiction.