By
BRENDA WINEAPPLE
Imagine
Stephen Dedalus in a fiction workshop surrounded by 20-something neophytes.
Better yet, picture Huck Finn, having lit out for the territory, handing
sections of his new memoir to Tom and Aunt Sally. Though this may seem amusing,
today thousands of hopeful authors distribute their self-portraits to other
hopeful authors who sit around seminar tables in one of the hundreds of writing
programs thriving nationwide.
Why
students flock there and what they hope to learn are the subjects of Lan
Samantha Chang’s new novel, “All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost.” Chang, a
writing-school success story, certainly knows the scene. A 1993 graduate of the
renowned University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and its director since 2006,
Chang has also received fellowships from Stanford University, Princeton and
Radcliffe. In 1998, she published a superb first book, “Hunger: A Novella and
Stories,”
