NOTES FROM IOWA 75

From Raygun in Iowa City.

In June I took a respite from packing to drive out to Iowa City for the 75th anniversary-reunion-celebration of the Writers' Workshop. It was worth the nine-hour drive across I-80, whose stretch of Ohio-Indiana-Illinois makes one think things like, This is what we're fighting for? I swear once you cross the border into Iowa everything looks better. I loved living in Iowa. It was one of the prettiest, most underrated landscapes I've ever lived in. Deep emerald in summer, endless gold in fall, snow-blanketed fields washed pink by sunrise and sunset in winter, a huge blue sky.

All you people who didn't come because you felt insecure or underpublished or worried that people were going to be competitive and size you up (what? at Iowa?), it was in fact so not like that! It was so friendly and relaxed, no résumé checking at all. No one murmuring disdain about your last workshop disaster or cackling over Conroy's lacerating one-liner. No velvet rope or VIP rooms. Just a big loose-knit party. Here are my ramshackle notes from the weekend.

1. The best thing in Indiana is Joyelle and Johannes, who opted not to reunite with the masses but graciously fed me lunch.

2. First stop after checking in with my excellent hosts Kembrew and Lynne and new tiny Alasdair: Marilynne Robinson at the Englert. Choice quote TK when I find my little notebook.

3. O George's Bar of the flocked wallpaper and utterly transfixing scrolling backlit Hamm's sign! In a narrow dark booth that night——Peyton and Pauls and I devised, or derived, titles for bestselling novels. The dim scrawling in my notebook includes

The Justice of Riga (name of an actual sword!) 
The Executioner's Son, or should it be Daughter?
Orphan Season
American Teeth
American Lesbian
The Lesbianists
The Leper's Guide to Sanitation.

4. Next we hit the immortal Foxhead. When we were at the workshop, the Foxhead was the poets' bar and George's was the fiction bar. Now it's the opposite. I always liked the Foxhead a little better, but George's had that enchanting Hamm's sign and would make you a toasted cheese sandwich (a hamburger bun with pickles and a slice of American cheese) for $1.50. (Still!)

Foxhead outside

Foxhead inside

Two Foxes

5. Because my whole life is a small town, of course I ran into Jarrett who I used to know in Portland. He now lives in Iowa City and runs a coffee cart called Wake Up Iowa City. That was my first stop in the morning with Lynne.

Says the blackboard: THE ESPRESSO MACHINE IS ACTIN A FOOL. SORRY

I love Upper Midwest punk. There's something very low-key and homey and unpretentious about it. 

Do you have to-go cups? we asked. "Just bring the mugs back whenever you're done," said Jarrett, "or do whatever with them." This pair were too good to risk, so we opted to gulp down the strong black French-pressed coffee right there.

6. And then off to some panels with grandiose titles. (What Makes Literature Immortal? How Realistic is Realism? etc.) And the Golden Microphone goes to: Allan Gurganus, hands down. Thank you for your bracing sardonic wit and appropriate irreverence. ("Back then, 'diversity' meant admitting a Quaker from Maine. Who wrote prose poems.")

I took hardly any pictures of Official Events, but the Christian Science Monitor has a long thoughtful article. (At the end of the slideshow of famous and famous-ish writers is a nice shot of a group of us chatting on the museum steps--captioned, appropriately, "other alumni.")

The Dey House, partly, its massive new addition too large and luxurious to fit in the frame of my 50mm lens

7. At noon my phone rang. Malena and Antoine's flights had been canceled in Denver the night before. They then got in a van with four Iowan women, none of whom had ever met before, and drove all night, twelve hours!—only to hit a deer 15 miles from Iowa City, at which point I was called to retrieve them from the side of I-80.

8. My beloved tiny house at 723 1/2 East Jefferson Street still stands. The sunny yard to the west (my bedroom window) is now a giant vinyl-sided, student-tenant-crammed addition to the modest gray bungalow that once was, and the shady yard to the east (my kitchen windows) is now a parking lot to a new apartment building. I guess I lived there at exactly the right time, with Jamie Schweser as my landlord ($360/month!) and awesome lesbian neighbors Mel and Kara in the main house's basement apartment. (They duct-taped corncobs to the rearview mirrors of my U-Haul on the day I drove away.) I wrote so many stories in that house.

Sometimes I would roll the television cart into the bathroom and watch movies in the 3/4 (exactly me-sized) clawfoot tub while my cat Foot Foot walked around the rim of it. I fell asleep watching Breathless and woke up when the water had gone cold.

9. Anyway. Iowa City has gotten a little fancier. There are more coffee shops and restaurants. The Record Collector and Daydreams Comics are still going. The public library is much fancier, and the new workshop building is stunning, replete with sumptuous wood-and-leather library. But mostly it still feels exactly the same. For example, La'James College of Hairstyling is still in business, 

and the Hamburg Inn No. 2, though much cleaned-up and remodeled since my time here, is still very much itself, pie shakes and all.

 At Artifacts--which is still called Artifacts but no longer owned by Mark, who opened up another place three doors down--we discovered the world's most fascinatingly repulsive lamp. It is very heavy brown ceramic and it costs $125.

10. On the last morning I met Cathy and Malena and Shannon for breakfast at the Hamburg Inn. I saw them a block away walking up to the restaurant together, these three wonderful brilliant people I have now known for eleven years, and for the first time all weekend my friendly nostalgia swelled into a wave of emotion. For a moment I pretended we all still lived here, and I was just meeting some of my favorite friends for breakfast. The force of the recall knocked the tears right into my eyes.

I paused to let myself miss them, our time there, my sweet little Iowa life. Then I picked up the pace and hurried to meet my friends. There was a wait for a table and the morning was chilly, but I didn't mind. All nestled together on the outside bench, we stayed warm.

AUTHENTICITY FAIL

Nice try, J. Crew. Minnetonka Moccasins ditched Minnesota (surreptitiously as they could) years ago for cheaper labor. 

And get a better proofreader.

OVER & OUT

The end of the school year was a sweet one. For the last meeting of my Beyond Genre workshop (full title: "Beyond Genre: Fabulism, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction"), we convened in the town cemetery at 7:00 pm. Then I set them loose to collect names of the dead and bring them back to life on the page.

So we prowled around the tilting tombstones with notebooks in hand. But finding names was so entertaining it was hard for anyone to stop to actually start writing character sketches. Chauncey Wack! Rufus Jump! And his son Giles Jump. Halloween K. Peabody! Darius Darling. Narcissa Pay! 

Living in such a tiny town, walking my dogs down the same streets every day, I always liked veering off to take the cemetery route. There was always something to read. Other lives to imagine. One of the best parts of teaching is that you can share these things with a little audience. You love a story, and then you get to teach it. You find a lovely spot, and then you wait all semester for an evening that's temperate enough to bring the students to it. And they bring chocolate-covered Oreos. What a job.

Names in hand, before we headed back to the seminar room.

My friend Ginger Brooks Takahashi came during commencement week to give a talk about her art. She said that it's important for young artists to know that there isn't just one Art World, there are many art worlds and ways to be an artist. Smart and true. 

In college Ginger and I played in a band called Endor, along with Gillian and Lena. We had a handful of songs and did a cover of "The Metro" by Berlin. All that survives is a very scratchy tape recording of a co-op basement show and some photos wherein I'm wearing a suit made of duct tape. But it was one of the most rewarding things I did in college. Ginger has a punk soul and a great pop sensibility, an excellent combination. She is also brave and enthusiastic. Which in a way are sort of the same thing.

Last radio show at WOBC.

On Commencement Day itself I didn't walk in the ceremony (I don't own the requisite regalia--Iowa's graduation is an informal affair--and didn't rent it this year). I headed down to Tappan Square anyway to scope out the crowds and bid farewell to some of my students. I was seeking, I think, a sense of closure. I had hoped that the ritual would give me a sense of finality. But when I got there, though the president was just launching into the C names, the ground was already strewn with trampled programs and people wandered around, talking and mingling. It was as apt a closure as any—a handful of people going through the formal motions in the background, while real life chatted and shuffled around and made kind a benign mess.

Nothing ever really feels over.

Classic OC.

Thanks, Oberlin. What good stories you've given me.

I'M STILL LIVING IN THE DARK, I'M STILL LIVING IN THE DARK

Do you ever wake up with a song in your head, and you can't do anything until you've played it? This morning that song was "Electrocution" by Bill Fox.


Bill Fox: "Electrocution"

A year or two ago I was looking for this song "The Dress You Bought in Cleveland," which meant something to me in 1995, and came across this comp of Ohio bands, I Was Up All Night Listening to Records. I'd never heard of Bill Fox but I couldn't stop playing that song.

Well. Apparently Bill Fox is (not)famously brilliant--Guided by Voices' love for him is all over their sound, he's like a proto-Pollard--and (not)famously reclusive. A lengthy Believer piece had a writer lurking around Cleveland for weeks trying to find the guy, and failing. As it turns out, he works at the Plain-Dealer selling ads.

He played here a few weeks ago. A forty-minute set in a gymnasium, early evening light in the high windows, a couple of handfuls of people sitting on the floor before the huge stage where it was just Bill Fox and his guitar.

His voice now was hoarser than the recordings, which have a crackly sweetness to them--it was strained, a little laryngitic Westerberg-ish. Between songs he hardly said a word. He played some of beautiful songs from Shelter from the Smoke and Transit Byzantium. He did not play "Electrocution" or "Bonded to You," my other favorite. And he played several protest songs in 6/8 time that I wasn't that into. But he clearly meant every word. And I was just glad to have him there.

I like knowing that someone like Bill Fox can be hiding out in Cleveland, a city half leafy and homey and half in ruins. A treasure in the rubble who has no interest in being found. He's like that cave in the new Werner Herzog movie: all this beautiful art concealed behind a landslide, its secrecy its saving grace.

BLANK TIME

Classes are out and I'm writing and writing. It's such a treat. I can be a little obsessive and it's a great pleasure to fixate fully on my work again instead of my students and their stories and needs. I wandered over to This Recording to read what other writers say about writing. Chekhov's words I instantly copied and put many asterisks by (and, I confess, felt the urge to send to my students). The one I'm lingering on now is Toni Morrison:

You learn how to use time. You don't have to learn how to wash the dishes every time you do that. You already know how to do that. So, while you're doing that, you're thinking. You know, it doesn't take up your whole mind. Or just on the subway. I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in that packed train, where you can't do anything anyway. Well, you can read the paper, but you're sort of in there.


And then I would think about, well, would she do this? And then sometimes I'd really get something good. By the time I'd arrived at work, I would jot it down so I wouldn't forget. It was a very strong interior life that I developed for the characters, and for myself, because something was always churning. There was no blank time.

And I looked at my iPhone sitting black and serene on the desk. How my blank time has changed since it entered my life. And I'm going to grandiosely generalize and make that an our, since every line I stand in is a row of people finger-stroking a little screen. Even waking up in the morning--that moment of easing into consciousness as the world materializes again, sorting the dream from the day and trying to make sense of it--has changed. Too often I cut it short, reach for the nightstand, and look for what the device has brought me in the night. Which is? E-mail.

For years now I've clenched my fists under the table at the friends who can't stop texting during the board game, who pause dinner conversation to attend to the clinking-glass sound of their iPhone, and so on, whose attention is divided between the here and the there.

It's annoying. But even worse, I think, is what it does to solitude. I tell my students that you can write everywhere, in your mind--in the shower, walking across campus at night, during the orchestra concert, etc. I solve a lot of story problems when I walk the dogs (notably, a two-handed affair). But alone, walking home or waiting in line at the post office, how often do I compulsively, absently pull out the iPhone and check something or other? Vs. what did I do before?

Nothing will doom writing, per se, I'm not saying that. But I think a lot of us are missing out on those unplanned moments where we go places in our minds. We look at the weather app instead of the sky.

AMY THIELEN WON A JAMES BEARD AWARD

I emerge from weeks (months!) of bloglessness to shout this out. Amy won a James Beard Award in journalism! I can personally attest that Amy's gifts in the kitchen are equaled only by her eloquence and humor and grace as a writer. I have been a vegetarian since 1989, and still I will read with relish and delight Amy's accounts of, say, cutting up a whole pig in her yard or cooking steak in the Spanglers' sauna.

Go read her blog here for aforementioned and more. And here are the articles that won her the prize:
• "From the Bean Patch, Plenty" ("Their pods pack as much insulation as an arctic-rated sleeping bag"
• "Low-Tech Wonder" ("My first aioli separated. I fixed it, but sat through dinner beneath a black-mood cloud, undone by a broken sauce but loath to admit it.")  (I've got to make the recipes for romesco sauce, chimichurri, and hazelnut praline) (or just go over to Amy's when I'm home in MN and gaze at her hopefully from my kitchen stool perch)
"Walleye: Plentiful and Only a Phone Call Away" ("It turns out that walleye's firm flesh steams beautifully, and within 15 minutes after getting to work I was dipping moist, snowy chunks of sake-steamed walleye in a spirited ponzu sauce that I Midwesternized with a little freshly ground horseradish in place of wasabi.")

Proof you can live in the middle of the woods with six-month(+) winters thousands of miles from a coast and be the most kick-ass chef and food writer ever AND be recognized for your genius. (As does the brilliant artist she's married to, Aaron Spangler.) High fives, old friend.

NOSE TO THE GRINDSTONE

All of January and nary a post. I was writing in my snowy den. My third January in Ohio was an interior one, literally and figuratively. Snowfall was too erratic to even snowshoe. The landscape was sometimes white as a page, other times brownish and deadish. Much like the writing cycle. We stoked the fireplace and got a lot done. I use Scrivener and on many days the little toolbar that shows your progress toward your target went from red to green, and sometimes even blue (exceeded!)

If you are writing a novel or collection or any kind of long-form project, you have got to try Scrivener.

I did start a Tumblr upon which I will post the Incident Reports. I like Tumblr so far, mostly because I like looking at queer old vintage photos and following various excellent book stores, whose Tumblr authors are just the kind of smart, witty readers & writers one would wish for as tastemakers in the bookselling world. Of Another Fashion, an outgrowth of the brilliant Threadbared academic/fashion blog, is an amazing archive of the style of women of color. I also really like the Lazy Book Reviewer and Things Organized Neatly. Things Organized Neatly exemplifies the purest form of my Virgo paradox, which is cluttered chaos on the macro and obsessive/aesthetic on the micro.

More coming soon.

MR. CARTER

Years after the fact, I can joke about high school theater and its devout practitioners. The drama we threw ourselves into and created, our over-emoting, our line-quoting, all the ways we fell in love with our own adolescent performance. It's an easy target. But yesterday I attended the funeral of my beloved English teacher, play director, and speech coach Martin Carter, and was hit hard in the heart by how important and wonderful that freaky funny little microcosm was and is.

Maybe things are different in urban and suburban schools, where the stakes are higher, competition stiffer, and the top talent really might go on to be professional actors. But in the homogeneous middle-of-nowhere small-town school where physical prowess reigns and strict gender codes keep kids brutally in their place, the theater department is a rare refuge. A place to escape and a place to pretend to be someone else. To try on other lives for size. To construct another time and place to inhabit where you are implicitly important to the story. And Mr. Carter was genius at bringing us in and making us feel like we mattered.

He had a lot of pain in his life--he'd been orphaned young and raised in a foster home, and his only son was in and out of trouble and died tragically--and the way he carried that was neither a hard bitter scar or a needy open wound, but a steady pulse of sensitivity, the openness of his marvelously expressive elastic face, his slouchy, purposeful stride. It fueled his drive to make life better for the kids he could reach every day. He was a magnet for misfits, nerds, smart kids, shy kids, weirdos, kids that were or felt different in any way.

He had a big classroom next to both an outside exit and the door backstage—a gateway and escape. In it he taught literature by day, coached speech practice after school, and gathered us for play rehearsals in the evening. Mr. Carter's room was like a living room for me and my friends and our fellow speech-and-drama nerds. It was where you could go to find each other, to take a break, to eat lunch in his office in peace. In the back of the room were three closet-sized dressing rooms, in which I smoked my first and last puff of clove cigarette (I fell down from the headrush). In the makeup room, our faces were slicked with thick sticks of stage makeup, a heavy perfumey grease that was near impossible to wash off. Newly crow's-feeted and cheekboned, we blinked at ourselves in the wall of mirrors, trying to touch without smearing the new faces on our faces, these garish caricatures of adulthood: Is this what I'll look like? In the costume closet, surrounded by decades of discarded prom dresses, we turned off the lights, gathered around my Ouija board and summoned spirits who spelled badly and alluded vaguely to ominous deaths.

No matter how ridiculous, we were always welcome.

When we would go down to the Twin Cities for the state speech meets and one-act play competitions, or I would visit Amy who had moved to a cushy suburb, it shocked me how well-trained and equipped other schools were. The immaculate sets, the cushy auditoriums and classrooms, the students' exquisite poise--even the techies scurrying around were super-cool, dressed to the alternative nines. We were a ragtag northern bunch, with our nice clothes from the Fargo mall, rayon dresses and teal button-ups and cheap shoes from Baker's, many of us still permed and mulleted. I people-watched with awe and fascination and occasional seizures of inferiority. We were so small.

But Mr. Carter elevated us all. Everyone knew him, and he knew everyone; he was sort of a legend. And he took for granted that we were as good as or better than anyone else there, no matter where we or they came from. And, it turned out, we were. He loved to win, yes, and he often did--but mostly he just loved us. The real prize, always, was him.

Photo from the Enterprise from 1993, the year he technically retired--yet his funeral was full of current high school students. "I see Mr. Carter pretty much every day," one girl told me. Teacher for life.

ME TOO, BUDDY.

ZOO SHAME

Over on the University of Minnesota Press blog, a brief Q&A with Lisa Uddin, who writes about zoo shame, i.e. "why people feel bad at and about the zoo":

These decades [the 1960s and 70s] of intense revitalization transformed many U.S. zooscapes from the so-called “Naked Cage” template of animal display – widely condemned – to early incarnations of the naturalistic, immersive enclosures that typify zoo design today. Zoos also began revitalizing their animal collections in this period, breeding select species whose populations in and outside of captivity were dwindling. This spatial and biological overhaul often gets discussed as an institutional turn to wildlife conservation. What is missing from these accounts is analysis of how the turn was also fully contemporary with the smoldering racial tensions that defined the urban experience in the long postwar period, and, more specifically, the shame that made cities unbearable for so many Americans... I am considering how zoo renewal variously reflected feelings about race and urban space, how it amplified those feelings, and how it offered channels for relief. The shame of American zoos, I argue, is part of the shame of American cities. 

The last time I was at a zoo was in the summer of 2008, when I went to see some bands play at the Oregon Zoo (friend of a friend playing, got in free, otherwise it would pain me to pass dollars through a zoo's ticket window.) The Cowboy Junkies were playing when we arrived and I wasn't ready yet to succumb to a blanket on the grass, the soporific was already heavy in the July afternoon air, so I wandered the perimeter and came upon the elephants.

The elephants were walking back and forth in the same easy meter as the Cowboy Junkies. I thought of a beautiful essay a friend of mine wrote about watching these same elephants sway in time to the music. "They were dancing!" she said, and that fit so well with what her essay was about, a moment of relief and beauty and redemption after an ugly, rattling event. But what I learned later, by accident, was that elephants sway when they're distressed.