Interview with Evelyn Birkby: Part 5

After sixty-plus years of writing a weekly column, you must be running out of ideas. What keeps your writing so fresh and energizing?

Life continues to be exciting. I get up in the morning and follow the pattern of my father and say out the door or window or out on the porch, “Good morning world, it is going to be a good day.” Then I get my coffee and toast and head for the computer and start writing.

I try and get ideas for columns ahead of time. I carry a notebook around with me all the time to write down ideas. Sometimes a thought will come in the middle of the night and I write in my notebook beside the bed so I won’t forget it by morning. Ideas can come from anywhere. I also have three sons who are vitally interested in my writing and give me ideas. I tell them I don’t want to write old, so they help me stay fresh. Lately they tell me to write about what it is like to get old. “Not many people write about how they feel and think and act after 90. You can do that and you should,” they say.
I would like to have lived in a university town. I would have liked the energy and opportunities to learn more. I had samples when I studied at the University of Colorado and later the University of Chicago—so I had a little exposure to this kind of town.

Writer, journalist, KMA radio homemaker, Iowa master farm homemaker: you’ve had a long and successful career. Is there any other path you dreamed of taking? Park ranger, bookstore owner, Amazon explorer?

That really takes some thought. My path has gone one step at a time, sometimes from necessity, sometimes accidentally, certainly when love entered the picture and then children. But what would I have chosen or dreamed of choosing any different? When I was young I talked of being a nurse, until I realized I did not have the natural qualities needed for such work. I took teachers’ training in college because I could get a certificate in two years and money was desperately tight and my parents did well to send me for two years.

I would like to have lived in a university town. I would have liked the energy and opportunities to learn more. I had samples when I studied at the University of Colorado and later the University of Chicago—so I had a little exposure to this kind of town.

So many exciting paths have opened up to me along the way: my time in Chicago, my exciting romance and coming back to Iowa, then the doors that opened with my writing and radio—television, public appearances, working with Fannie Flagg, knowing Jane and Michael Stern, and, lately, the great experience of making a documentary with Iowa Public Television and then writing my books. The fun with the University of Iowa Press and their great staff and the Iowa Women’s Archives wanting my memorabilia and all my writing. Mercy, I would never have imagined so much. And the joy of having three wonderful sons and two perfect grandchildren and a great daughter-in-law.

My cup runneth over. I don’t need any other dreams.

Evelyn Birkby is the author of Always Put in a Recipe and Other Tips for Living from Iowa's Best-Known Homemaker, as well as Up a Country Lane Cookbook and Neighboring on the Air.