I spent this week chewing on a piece I read on LitHub headlined “What Does It Mean To Be a Working Class Writer at Iowa Writers’ Workshop?” by the novelist Lee Cole.

For those of you that don’t know – the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the famed MFA writing program in the U.S.. Graduates include Flannery O’Connor, John Irving, Justin Torres, Claire Lombardo and more. Some folks might also remember the pretty great stretch in the TV show Girls where Hannah Horvath attends the workshop. Which is to say, the place looms large among a certain cohort of aspiring writers.

But who is that certain cohort? As you can probably glean from the title, Cole’s LitHub piece examines the dearth of working-class writers in the program. There are two main causes for this, he writes:

“One is that working class people from the American hinterlands simply lack the time, resources, and networks to gamble on a vocation with so little security. The other is that readers of literary books are more likely to come from highly educated professional backgrounds, and they seek out fiction that reflects their experiences and values, creating a cycle of class reproduction.”

This is bigger than just one writing program, as Cole notes. An overrepresentation of any one type of person creates a less rich (pardon the pun) literary culture. But what to do about it? Cole argues for an overhaul of arts funding, particularly in so-called “middle America.” Which sounds nice, but it doesn’t seem likely considering what’s going on with arts funding these days. Tech optimists might point to places such as Substack as the way forward for writers without fancy degrees to start publishing. But these writing programs are more than just the degrees you get after – you gain a strong network of fellow writers, and you do learn something about the craft of writing (I assume – I thought about pursuing an MFA in my 20s, but it didn’t make sense financially for me at the time).

The more difficult-to-swallow question is – so what? As we’ve covered in this newsletter, romance does gangbusters on the sales charts. Thrillers do well. As do mysteries. The type of literary fiction grads from places like IWW write wins awards, sure, but it’s a small market share of the overall publishing industry. And so, if it continues to become an increasingly boutique product only for a small subset of people, do we lose anything?

Let us know what you think! Is there a class issue in litfic? How do you think we should solve it? Do you think it’s worth solving, at all? Bookoftheday@npr.org.