An old friend/nemesis of mine is anonymously blogging his trip to Iowa City for summer classes at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at new blog It's Not Heaven. From one post:

Nowadays the program accepts 25 MFAs every year in fiction, and 25 in poetry. A handful might go on to some renown, and a handful more might deserve and never get it. It remains that a majority of Iowa's writers are along for the ride, subsidizing the education of their uniquely talented peers. I cannot escape the feeling that Iowa's self-mythologization and star-worship has created a sense of complacency: Secure in the knowledge that a few talented writers following the star of reputation or celebrity faculty will find their way to the cornfields every year, and rise inevitably on their own merits, the program seems not to have bothered to create a program. There is no coherence that I can see, no philosophy, no direction, and however true it may be that every MFA program caters to its supernovas, and underserves those students incapable of self-direction, there is a special tackiness to the way Iowa basks in the glory of its products, and in the efforts it takes not to differentiate between young writers who stayed for two years, fashioning themselves, and established writers who passed through on fellowship, if only for a single lazy semester. All get stapled indiscriminately to the crest.

Check him out. People interested in the vagaries of MFAology might also be interested in the 2007 ranking of creative writing programs at The Suburban Ecstasies, which surprisingly (and almost certainly incorrectly) drops Iowa to the #12 slot because of the competitive infighting engendered by the ranked fellowship system they use there for student support.