Is it an open secret at Iowa Writers’ Workshop and other graduate-level creative writing programs that novelists have normal version of multiple personality?

Four of the many illustrious writers associated with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop have been cited here in past posts: T. C. Boyle (alumnus and faculty), Frank Conroy (1987-2005 director and faculty), Philip Roth (faculty), and Kurt Vonnegut (faculty).

My guess is that multiple personality is, indeed, an open secret at writing programs: everyone, vaguely, knows about it, but they don’t speak about it, except, occasionally, in euphemism or jest.

Another way of putting this is to say they both know it and don’t know it.

Take, for example, Conroy’s “Me and Conroy” (see post earlier today). It was apparently written by an alternate personality. Does this mean Conroy knew he had multiple personality? Not necessarily. Conroy may have felt that the essay was written by a writing self (a euphemism), while the latter apparently thought of himself as another person, not as Conroy’s alternate personality. Was the whole thing a joke? No, it was published in a collection of nonfiction essays, and was seen by his friend, Tom Grimes, as consistent with what he knew about Conroy (see past post).