“Mulberry and Peach” by Hualing Nieh Engle: Peach is Mulberry’s alternate personality in novel by author associated with Iowa Writers’ Workshop

Hualing Nieh Engle, born in China in 1925, is a novelist, poet, and professor emerita of the University of Iowa (1). She co-founded their International Writing Program (2) in 1967 with Paul Engle, her husband, who was Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1941 to 1965.

I have just started this novel (3), which I chose to read, because of the author’s association with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Ordinarily, I don’t read novels that have explicit multiple personality. This site is about finding multiple personality in widely read and classic works of fiction in which it is not labeled as such, but is what I call “gratuitous multiple personality,” meaning that features of multiple personality are in the work only as a reflection of the author’s own psychology.

Other writers I have discussed who have been associated with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop include T. C. Boyle (alumnus and faculty), Frank Conroy (Director and faculty 1987-2005), Philip Roth (faculty), Kurt Vonnegut (faculty), Andrew Sean Greer (faculty), Deborah Eisenberg (faculty), Jane Smiley (faculty), Robert Penn Warren (faculty), and Marilynne Robinson (faculty).

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the best-known graduate writing program in the USA (4). I don’t know whether they or other writing programs ever discuss multiple personality in works of fiction, fiction-writer psychology, and the fiction-writing process.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualing_Nieh_Engle

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Writing_Program

3. https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/167788/Review%20Mulberry%20and%20Peach.pdf;sequence=1

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Writers'_Workshop