Nochebuena: North Hall

This is the front entrance to North Hall, where I've been teaching creative writing for the past year. Back in the day, this was an experimental elementary school, staffed by University of Iowa professors and students in the School of Education - it's where people learned to teach. Now it's the home of the Social Work department, but also hosts a slew of ancient classrooms used by the Workshop for its undergrad classes and grad seminars. My first semester at Iowa, I took a seminar here with poet Mary Jo Bang that blew my mind, rocked my world, and knocked the metaphorical monkey off his log. A year and some change later, I was teaching in the same classroom, standing where she stood, addressing my peeps. I was all Things seem to be accelerating as down the hall I heard a lecturer going on about Erik Erickson.