For a year, the only thing Paula Lamamie de Clairac Garrido knew about the University of Iowa was its mailing address.

She’d been working as a bookstore clerk in her native Madrid, Spain, when she met Ana Merino, associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the UI, who’d stopped by to collect source texts for her Spanish creative writing classes at the university.

“For months, she had me shipping all these books to the University of Iowa,” Lamamie laughs, “and I didn’t even know what it was. I had no idea it was this famous place for writing.”

Eventually Merino discovered that Paula had a degree in philosophy, wrote poetry and book reviews, danced, and was working on a novel—“so she asked me,” says Lamamie, “‘What are you doing next year?’ Then she told me about the writing program she was developing, and I went online right away to see where Iowa was.”

Lamamie is now a second-year student in the UI’s Master of Fine Arts in Spanish Creative Writing program. Housed in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the two-year program allows Spanish-speaking students to develop their writing talents in their native language while working with established writers from across the Spanish-speaking world.

Core faculty are Merino, the program director and a poet and comics scholar from Spain; Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos; and Chilean crime novelist (and, as it happens, newly appointed ambassador to Mexico) Roberto Ampuero. Spanish poet Luis Muñoz and Mexican-American novelist Luis Humberto Crosthwaite are this year’s visiting faculty.

Interior scene: a college theater classroom

Professor: Who are the first five playwrights that come to mind? Anyone?

Student: Shakespeare, Chekov, Miller, O’Neill, Beckett.

Professor: OK, and who would you say are their best characters?

Student: Iago, Uncle Vanya, Willy Loman, Hickey, Estragon…

Professor: Good—complex roles, lots of stage time. Any female characters we could add to the list?

Student: (drumming fingers on desk): Um...Lady MacBeth?

Most of us, asked to list major female playwrights and stage roles, could probably count the number we know on 10 fingers, while we’d need five or six hands to list their male equivalents.

The reason is simple, says Alan MacVey, director of the UI Division of Performing Arts and chair of the Department of Theatre Arts: “There are many more male than female playwrights in the industry, and more good stage roles for men than for women. It’s a well-known problem.”

“It’s particularly difficult to find good scripts for performing arts education,” he adds, noting that many substantial female roles—central, complex character roles rather than supporting or stereotypical roles—are for characters middle-aged and older, which can be a struggle for young actors to portray.

That’s why, in 2010, MacVey proposed that the Big Ten Theatre Consortium (the group of theater department heads at Big Ten Conference universities) establish a commission program to support female playwrights and provide female theater students and professional actors with strong roles. The program would not only be the first of its kind, but would also represent the first time the Big Ten Consortium schools collaborated on a project. MacVey’s colleagues embraced the idea and set about crafting the details.

In a sunny, second-story room at the Wendell Johnson Speech & Hearing Clinic, six kids perch on brightly colored chairs arranged in a circle. Beside each child sits his or her personal speech coach for the week, so designated by her badge. There is some fidgeting, some excited chatter, before one of the coaches asks, “So who wants to lead the group today?” A boy in a blue shirt shoots up a hand, and the clinician hands him an index card. “Question number one!” he reads aloud, tripping a little over the n, “What have you learned from camp so far?”

It has only been one day, but the children—many of whom take pains to avoid being called on at school—are eager to answer. As the boy in blue calls their names, they respond: “That it’s OK to stutter.” “Just because you stutter doesn’t mean you’re not normal.” “If you practice, you’ll become more fluent.” “To be determined!” “If people make fun of you, you can ignore them because they don’t understand, but you understand.” Of course the answers don’t come quite as effortlessly as this: there are hesitations, pauses, repetitions of words and syllables, to which the speech coaches respond with small words of encouragement, like “easy” or “focus.” And yet the others do not become impatient or interrupt, or worse, laugh. They know what it’s like to stutter; they wait. They listen.

The kids are participants in the UI SPEAKS week-long stuttering camp hosted each summer by the Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. Because there is no known cure for stuttering—a condition experienced by some 3 million Americans—the goal of the program is to offer a safe and supportive place where children aged eight to twelve can learn strategies to increase their speech fluency, practice their speech, meet other children who stutter, and learn to talk openly about the problem. “We help to demystify it,” explains Toni Cilek, director of the camp and a clinical associate professor in the Department. Cilek established the program in 2006 with the recognition that early intervention is important in the successful management of stuttering, emotionally as well as linguistically. “We want the kids to learn to accept their stuttering, but we also want them to try to improve it,” she says, noting that for many people—especially children—stuttering, untreated, can be a source of anxiety, fear, anger, and shame. The summer, she says, is a good time for the kids to do intensive practice and to focus without the distractions of school.