The defining attribute that makes a writer a writer is debatable — it’s a job title, a history of published work, or an ambition to actualize the abstract. Most of all, though, what makes a writer is their ability to squeeze out the substance of humanity’s sponge.

The International Writing Program, also known as the IWP, is bringing 32 critically acclaimed writers from the 2024 residency to the Iowa Public Library on Fridays throughout the semester. Christopher Merrill, world-renowned poet, author, and director of the IWP for over 24 years, outlined the purpose of the residency.

“We hope to have the most talented and diverse group of writers we can find from every continent, working in as many different genres as possible and an age range from the mid-20s to mid-60s,” Merrill said. “[We do this] so that we will have people coming at the common work of writing literature from quite different perspectives.”

These different perspectives are shared with the public in several panels. Beginning Sept. 1 and running through Nov. 17, these conversations cover a litany of substantive literary topics.

“We want [these writers] to engage with the community, but we also want to take advantage of their thinking and their skill as writers to address at least one issue in a serious matter,” Merrill said. “These writers are thinking through an issue that, in a few years, may feel like headline news. Writers are often ahead of the curve, and so we just want to know what they are thinking about.”

The Sept. 20 panel was titled “Writing with the Weight of the World.” Writer-in-residence Pervin Saket, co-founder of the Kolam Writers’ Workshop and curator of literature at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, was in attendance.

“My goal for this discussion is to eventually get to a point where writers are not identified by the issues they write about. T.S. Elliot is a poet, but Rabindranath Tagore is an Indian poet, Kamala Das is an Indian woman poet,” Saket said. “So, the more you come from further away from the center, further away from this neutral space of creating art, the more descriptors get added to you. And you can’t just be a writer.”

Saket pondered the ability of a person to become something outside of the identifications placed upon them by the world. Literature from our first-world, metropolitan country is exponentially different from the literature of second and third-world areas. The IWP platforms a range of writers from various places to dissolve the barriers between writers’ national identities.

Tabish Khair, an Urdu and Hindi-speaking poet, novelist, and critic understands the value of this concept all too well. Being raised in the state of Bihar, India, writing in English rather than his native language allows him to communicate a life that other English writers may not have lived.

“Most Indian-English writers are cosmopolitan people. They’re from the big cities of India or big cities abroad. They’ve been through quite a privileged education,” Khair said. “So, when I started writing in English, I thought they were often talking about my kind of world in ways that I did not always recognize or agree with. I wanted to talk about my experience of the world, my parts of the world, in ways that I felt would not be visible to people who had grown up in big cities.”

Writing, sculpted by language, is an ever-changing and oscillating medium thanks to the unpredictable tides of our world’s political climate. Reflecting on this, panelist and Ukrainian poet, screenwriter, and journalist Lyuba Yakimchuk explores the vehicle of language through an entirely different lens.

“I’ve seen how the destruction of our territories by war is mirrored in language — language, after all, was invented to reflect reality and our emotions,” she said. “I want to talk about how ethics shift in wartime, how language changes, and how creative writing evolves.”

Literature brings people of diverse backgrounds together. Born and raised out of nonidentical soil, weaving through disparate paths, people are still able to relate to each other regardless of how small their niches are.

“We live in a pretty complicated moment in history,” Merrill said. “Everyone has their cross depending on where they are at this point in their political lives. Wherever [these writers] find themselves at this moment, we want to understand what the weight of the world is and how they propose to address it in their writing.”

Yakimchuk agreed, finding the injustices she has witnessed have largely shaped her purpose as a writer.

“Every writer has the ambition to make an impact. Our job is to achieve justice you can’t as easily achieve in real life. Writers model the future at the level of ideas,” she said.

In responding to the issues of their time, writers find that every word has a grave impact on their audiences, thus shaping the trajectory of social movements. Khair has observed this himself, learning that even though words may take on different meanings depending on the writer, their definitions are impacted by the contexts past writers have placed them in.

“Every word comes weighted with the world,” Khair said. “It’s not just your word, but the word that has passed through millions of miles, been in thousands of texts, every time, every space, every utterance, leaves it with a surcharge.”

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Saket, too, is a part of this literary lineage. Silence is what motivates her to keep creating.

“For me, some of [the weight of the world] was the weight of silence, in the sense that we didn’t have the kind of stories that needed to be there in India,” Saket recalled.

As a female writer in India, Saket has sought out perspectives of marginalized women that highlight not only their struggles but their accomplishments as well. Where she saw there were none, she filled these gaps of silence with her own voice.

Writing allows her — and other thinkers — to alleviate the weight of the world. Khair notes that this is a double-edged sword.

“I knew [writing was] what I wanted to do,” he added. “I wouldn’t say it made me happy because writing doesn’t make you happy. It’s just something I had to do. If you put it in a good way, you would call it a calling. If you could put it in a bad way, you would call it an addiction.”

For Yakimchuk, this need to create and share at the core of her writing is deeply rooted in her country and culture.

“What solidified my conviction that I must pursue literature was the concept of ‘srodna pratsya’ (one’s calling),” Yakimchuk said. “The idea is that everyone has a talent or inclination towards a particular type of work, and we should listen only to ourselves to figure out what that is. When you decide to be a writer, everyone will tell you that you can’t make a living from writing. But you have to listen only to yourself.”

This is what a writer is: a listener — but not just listening to the world and its people. We must first listen to ourselves before we lend an ear to all the other sounds around us. Writing is not done in the context of the world — it is the world, and with each word, we share burdens that we have carried on our shoulders for far too long.

Teasing the residency’s close, Merrill described the final panel in November.

“It’s called ‘Images of America’, and we don’t ask the writers to write something. We ask them to speak about something that they have witnessed or learned or understood better during their time here,” he said. “It’s usually a pretty funny engagement to have people from outside looking in on our life in this UNESCO city of literature.”

Besides being home to the International Writing Program, the city’s UI is ranked ninth in the country for writing, according to the U.S. News & World Report.

From sidewalk engravings and poetic murals to Prairie Lights readings and Hancher performances, Iowa City is filled with art and literature. The weight of words has literally impressed itself onto the very ground Iowans walk on, if not into the minds of students and writers who pass through.

“There is a sustained effort towards recognizing creative writing [here] as something that can be studied, that can be examined as a serious art,” Saket said.