In Ethan Canin's world, actions don't always speak louder than words.

"I love words," says Canin, 84MFA, an acclaimed fiction writer and professor of English in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His delight with the recently released The Emperor's Club, Universal Pictures' movie starring Academy Award-winning actor Kevin Kline, is evidence of his love affair with language. In an age when action—sex, violence, and high-speed chase scenes—sells and shallow seems the norm, The Emperor's Club provides moviegoers a welcome relief from more typical film fare. "It's spectacular to see a Hollywood movie like this," Canin says about The Emperor's Club, which was named an official selection by a dozen film festivals around the country. "There's no car chase, no explosion. There's a gun, but it never gets fired. This movie relies solely on words. Kevin Kline has lines that are nearly 40 or 50 words long, and that's almost unheard of in modern films."

Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate and professor Ethan Canin followed a long road with several detours before succumbing to the writing life.

To Canin, The Emperor's Club is also much more than an anomaly in today's motion picture industry. The film is based on his short story "The Palace Thief," one of four short stories included in a book by the same name that was published in 1994. Canin was prompted to write the story when he happened across a former "inspiring tyrant of a teacher" some 20 years after leaving the seventh grade. He says he wrote the story as a tribute to teaching.

The story centers on William Hundert (portrayed by Kline in the film), a passionate classics professor at St. Benedict's School for Boys. Moral issues are raised and Hundert's principles are challenged when a new student enters his classroom. "It's about integrity," Canin says. "It's about understanding the enduring virtues. Mr. Hundert is tempted by power, so this movie in a lot of ways is not about what the kids are learning, but about what the teacher is learning."

Besides The Palace Thief, Canin has also written another collection of short stories, Emperor of the Air, and three novels—Carry Me Across the Water, For Kings and Planets, and Blue River, which Hallmark made into a 1995 Thanksgiving television special. Despite his literary success and the Hollywood hoopla surrounding the release of The Emperor's Club, Canin continues to struggle with his work as a wordsmith. "I've always been filled with doubt—terrible doubt," he says. "Writing is misery."

To allay his fear of failure, Canin admits that he sometimes focuses on good things he's experienced or complimentary things people have said to him. If those routines fall short, then he turns to inspirational reading. For Canin, that means books written by authors whose prose inspires him: works by writers such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Alice, Munro, and Tobias Wolfe. When the creative juices flow, Canin spends an hour or more a day focusing on one moment of inspiration or one burst of energy. The effort usually generates a page of new text each day.

Although the plague of self-doubt continues while he imagines characters, invents plots, and creatively pieces together words and sentences, Canin no longer questions his resolve to beome a writer—a resolve based on an epiphany he experienced while a sophomore engineering major at Stanford University. "I wanted to be an engineer," Canin explains, "and I thought that anybody who was in the arts and humanities was weak-minded. The only reason they'd be in those areas was because they couldn't do the sciences. But then I read a book that I loved—The Stories of John Cheever. It changed my life. I knew I was going to be a writer."

Canin switched majors to English and received his undergraduate degree from Stanford in 1982. Soon after, he packed up his 1967 Ford Mustang—purchased with proceeds from a story he'd sold to Redbook magazine—and headed for Iowa City, where he planned to hone his writing skills in the Iowa Writers' Workshop two-year master's degree program. Instead, his stint as a Workshop student proved catastrophic.

"It was a terrible disaster," Canin says, remembering his time on campus two decades ago. "I worked, and I played a lot of softball. I got humiliated two days after I arrived here. I had just driven across the country, and [Iowa Writers' Workshop assistant] Connie Brothers says to me, 'John Irving is coming tomorrow. You need a story.' And I thought, 'Oh, great, I can't believe it,'" Canin recalls with a laugh. "I'm only here a day and already I'm geting the attention of John Irving, one of the most acclaimed graduates of Iowa's program. I didn't have a story, so I stayed up all night in the photocopy room at the English-Philosophy Building. I didn't have an apartment yet; I didn't have anything. To make a long story short, I was pretty much publicly humiliated by Irving in front of hundreds of people, and I really didn't write for the next year-and-a-half. I didn't write at all."

Canin quickly emphasizes that Irving wasn't to blame for his own dismal Workshop experience. He should have had a thicker skin. "I was too young; I didn't realize what a great opportunity this was. I gave in so easily."

Needing 56 pages for his WOrkshop thesis, Canin wrote two stories in the last month of his second year in the program and received his M.F.A. in creative writing in 1984. But he considered himself a failure as a writer and opted for a career in medicine instead. He enrolled at Harvard Medical School, where—oddly enough—his writing flourished. "I wrote a book—Emperor of the Air—my first year in medical school, because I wasn't supposed to be writing," Canin says. "And not only was I not supposed to be writing, but I wasn't supposed to be imagining anything. In medicine, you can't say anything unless it's backed up by studies. And not only by studies, but by double-blind studies—double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. It's such a constrictive little atmosphere that the idea of making something up is titillating. You can go home and have people do what you want. Do crazy things—steal and cheat—it's very exciting."

Published in 1988, Emperor of the Air received loads of media attention, Canin says, especially because he was in his third year of medical school. Daily interviews—often up to five a day—by numerous media types proved intoxicating for the aspiring writer, so he took a reprieve from medicine. He traveled to Ecuador, where for several years he focused on his writing and on learning Spanish. Canin eventually returned to the States, settling in San Francisco and completing his medical degree and internship. He then began a residency in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where he was granted special dispensation to alternate two months of residency continuation with two months to devote to his writing. Midway through his residency, though, Canin realized the demands of medicine were just too much if he were to continue writing. "I couldn't do it because I had this option of another career," Canin says. "it became untenable. If you don't have yourself fully invested in it, you can't do it. It's just too hard. Being a doctor kills you even if you're in it completely and—to be half in it—just destroyed me."

Canin also realized he would need motivation if he were ever to write another book, so he forced himself to need the money. Leaving the world's most secure profession for a career in the least secure wasn't an easy decision. After he hung up his white coat and stethoscope, Canin and two friends started The Grotto, a cooperative writing space in San Francisco that provides a collegial setting for writers and helps alleviate the isolation that generally comes with the profession. The resulting espirit de corps and opportunity for professional and personal interaction with colleagues help make writing a job. Writers at The Grotto are more productive and even become more courageous as they pursue their creative ambitions. This concept of a cooperative—and oftentimes collaborative—environment has caught on, and The Grotto has expanded from three to nineteen offices of writers and filmmakers.

Now living in Iowa City and teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Canin enjoys a similar community of sorts. His return to Iowa in 1998 followed semester-long teaching assignments at several other schools, including University of Michigan, Columbia University, and the University of California, Irvine. Second time around, Canin's Workshop experience has proven far more enjoyable. He teaches a fiction workshop and a seminar course each semester. In both courses, he's been impressed by the quality of his students. "I have the most fabulous students here," he says. "It's an extraordinary privilege. It's like reading modern American literature, but two years ahead of everybody else."

The admiration is mutual. According to his students, Canin is a tremendous asset to their experience at Iowa both within and outside the classroom. "Ethan really makes us feel at home, and I love the way he teaches," says Kate Sullivan, a second-year Workshop student from Exeter, Massachusetts; "He really knows what he's talking about. He's very confident as a teacher, so he's able to be honest and give us his take on things. Some professors are afraid to give a definitive answer." Teacher and students alike credit the Workshop environment and its setting in Iowa City as a wonderful benefit as they explore the creative life.

"Iowa City is a small, lovely town in the Midwest," says The Palace Thief author. "There's no other town or city anywhere in the country where writing is so palpably important. In Iowa City, writers are kings."