Despite numbers of successful writers who have ties to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — Kurt Vonnegut and James Alan McPherson to name a few — there are plenty who leave without the fame or even the opportunity to read their work to an audience.

So Andrew Wells organized Talk Art— a biweekly event that offers a place for Writers’ Workshop students to present their writing.

The Talk Art series starts at the Mill, 120 E. Burlington St., at 10 p.m. today with 15 minute readings from student poets Steve Toussaint and Dan Poppick. Wells said that while the event typically takes place on Wednesdays, it will move to Thursdays in October.

Today’s readings will be a bit different from usual. Wells said each series offers work from a fiction writer as well as a poet, but tonight it will focus solely on the latter.

“Talk Art is kind of a long-standing tradition in the Workshop,” he said. “I’m not even sure when it began — it’s kind of one of those things that has been going on as long as anybody has known. It’s a chance for a poet and fiction writer to read out loud to the public on the pretense that we might not ever get to again after we’re finished here.”

Touissant is a second-year graduate student, and Poppick is in his first year at the Workshop. Wells said the atmosphere of the readings is relatively informal, with less focus on word aesthetics and more on the power of the writing itself.

“It’s not like the readings at Prairie Lights,” he said. “It’s a little more relaxed — you can have a beer.”

He is currently working on a manuscript consisting of a collection of poetry that he one day hopes to get published.

“The poems I write don’t rhyme and tend to be more narrative,” he said. “I read last year, in the fall at Talk Art.”

Readings for Talk Art range from comedic to the more serious, but generally the writers try to pick pieces that are humorous or entertaining.

“Often times, the readings are funny, and everyone who participates has talent,” Wells said. “It’s a time to meet with writers before it’s hard to catch them. You never know when someone from the Workshop may become famous.”

— by Eric Andersen