Literary Las Vegas: Eric Olsen, Glenn Schaeffer and more
Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer worked together to found the International Institute of Modern Letters, based in Las Vegas, and the City of Asylum program for dissident writers. Schaeffer may be better known to some as the 20-year president of Mandalay Resort Group.
Olsen and Schaeffer teamed again to write “We Wanted to be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” a new book that chronicles the legendary years from 1974-1978 when they studied in the master of fine arts program with workshop talents such as John Irving, Jane Smiley, T. C. Boyle, Michelle Huneven, Allan Gurganus, Sandra Cisneros, Jayne Anne Phillips, Jennie Fields, Joy Harjo and Joe Haldeman. Many of their classmates, including University of Nevada, Las Vegas, professor Doug Unger, chime in with shared memories and lessons learned. For more information about the book, visit wewantedtobewriters.com.
Excerpt from “We Wanted to be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop”
… I’m often asked how it is someone with an MFA in imaginative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop ended up in business and, more particularly, in the gaming business … I’d long found that my MFA was excellent preparation for the business world. Like innovation in literary narrative, which aims to resonate in readers’ hearts and minds, innovation in business is meant to evoke trust and spark desire. Creativity captures and holds the attention (or money) of others, whether signified as audience or customers. … a concept in business, as in a story, must be told forcefully and simply, using consequential logic mixed with dramatic leaps. Writers who can convince us of the real through the artifice of the story are similar to entrepreneurs: Both start every day with the barest essentials, hoping to change us or our experience of the world, and struggle toward expression on the blank page, or the blank drawing board (infernally resistant media in either case).
— Glenn Schaeffer
I was always a reader. I had read the beat poets, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, and some Jack Kerouac before that, and loved the sense of a rebellious, countercultural world they conveyed.
— Doug Unger
I think my interest in writing as a craft began in the late ’60s, when I was involved in the antiwar movement. I had started out at Cal as a pre-med major, just like about every other freshman there, but the required class in organic chemistry – ”orgo” as it was called not so fondly — disabused me of any notions I had about a career in medicine.
— Eric Olsen
