Roommates Elizabeth Sloan and Kimberly D. Herbstritt came up with the idea for Cave Writing in the cave-like, pillow and blanket-filled nook underneath their dorm's high-captain bed. Both Elizabeth and Kimberly wanted to create a space solely for novelists on the campus of University of Iowa. They found writing short stories took away time from their novels, so they decided to create a place for novelists to publish their writing and still continuously work on their longer fiction. Under the twinkle lights taped on the bottom of the bed, they decided to make Cave Writing.