Bored by the isolated world of the boys’ private school where she grew up, Margot Livesey, a 30-year veteran of teaching creative writing and professor of fiction in the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, originally swore she would never teach.

“My father taught in a private school, so I grew up surrounded by teachers,” says Livesey. “I wanted to do something different, something exciting. I got my first (teaching) job almost accidentally and, every week as I struggled to prepare my classes, I’d think, ‘This is much more work than waitressing.’ But then I began to realize how much I was learning from the work of my students, and from reading stories and novels in their company.”

As she describes in a recently published collection of essays, The Hidden Machinery, Livesey attributes much of what she’s learned about fiction and writing to her love of reading. Her book is focused on the craft of writing fiction, but Livesey’s collection also describes her journey to becoming a writer, and like her early disinterest in teaching, Livesey recalls an early disinterest in reading.

“Reading struck me as much less important than tree climbing or bridge building or visiting the nearby pigs,” Livesey writes of her 5-year-old self.

It wasn’t until the autumn after her fifth birthday that the written word became “a window” instead of a “wall.” From then on, she embraced books and she continues to see them as portals to new places.

“I may be living in a small town,” says Livesey, “but every week the pages I read take me to myriad worlds.”

Though she was an enthusiastic reader and studied literature at the University of York in England, it was not until after she graduated and found herself bored while traveling in Europe that she attempted to write a book.

“I did not know enough to write a history of the Crusades, or a biography of the Brontës,” writes Livesey, “but, after 16 years of reading, I felt amply qualified to write a novel. After all, this was the only training that most of my favorite writers had undergone. ‘Read good authors with passionate attention,’ runs Robert Louis Stevenson’s advice to a young writer, ‘refrain altogether from reading bad ones.’”

But reading alone, Livesey discovered, did not make her a good writer. Her first “novel” was a disaster. A turning point in her struggles to understand the hidden machinery came when the Irish novelist Brian Moore visited the University of Toronto. Livesey was waitressing in Toronto at the time and arrived at Moore’s office in her waitress uniform with a story clutched in her hands. Moore agreed to read it.

“The care and attention he paid my work made a huge impression on me,” says Livesey. “Mr. Moore sat down at his desk, got out his fountain pen, and read my story aloud, imitating all the characters and the animals, and pausing frequently to write in suggestions. He made me realize that every word mattered; that every sentence needed to be in the service of the story. I try to bring that same level of attention to the work of my students.”

In October, Livesey demonstrated the care she gives her students. Visiting from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she spends half the year, she taught a one-day master class at the Dey House on the UI campus, which houses the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Many writers submitted short stories or novel excerpts, and Livesey selected two to receive her feedback in front of an audience. Open to the public, the authors of the selected stories were invited to hear their work discussed by Livesey and anyone else present.

“For me, teaching is a constant exploration and negotiation,” says Livesey. “Workshops are machines for criticism; they deliver long lists of suggestions but they don’t always leave the author feeling inspired. I’m always trying to find the question, or insight, that will speak to the writer and make them want to return to the story.” 

“The quality of attention that Margot brings is unparalleled,” says Samsun Knight, a second-year graduate student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. An excerpt of his novel-in-progress was one of the two pieces selected by Livesey to be analyzed in the master class.

“She has an excellent approach to feedback that manages to be precise without being overwhelming,” says Knight. “She clearly communicates the most important takeaway without diluting it with smaller concerns, while at the same time providing you with all those smaller concerns for when you're ready to digest them. Absolutely it helped my writing.”

Livesey began teaching at the workshop as a professor in 2015, though she was a visiting instructor years before and taught the current director of the workshop, Lan Samantha Chang. Livesey says she was drawn to teach at the workshop by the inspiring faculty and terrific students. She attributes the workshop’s continued success to the care that Chang takes with admissions and the community that she’s created.

During a career spanning more than three decades, Livesey has taught at lauded institutions such as Brandeis University, Emerson College, and the University of California at Irvine. When asked what distinguishes the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from other institutions, Livesey said, “Many MFA programs put quite a lot of other demands on their students: literature courses, language requirements etc. At the workshop, the main focus is on writing, and on giving people time to write. There is a strong sense that we’re all here together, trying to create art.”

Regarding that art, Livesey says the one topic she wishes her students would ask her more about is aesthetics, which she thinks too often go unscrutinized. She devotes an entire essay in her collection to Virginia Woolf’s ambitions for her novel, To The Lighthouse, and highlights Woolf’s aesthetic interests. There, she broadly defines aesthetics as “...what we value in fiction, what we are writing toward, and against, and how our work can more accurately capture the chaos of experience in the golden net of consciousness.”

“Every writer has a set of aesthetic beliefs—even if they’re not fully articulated,” writes Livesey, “but very seldom do I hear myself, or my friends, cite these beliefs to defend or explain our work. Most of us, I suspect, have not taken the trouble to figure out what we are writing against. Or what we are writing toward. We are working, mostly in the tradition of realism. Does anything more need to be said? I would argue the answer is yes.”