Friday, August 24, 2012

Cary Illian Exhibit


Attention Cedar Rapidians! Be sure to check out Clary Illian’s special exhibition preview reception at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art tonight from 5:00-7:00 p.m. This event is free and open to the public! If you can’t make it to the reception, swing by this exhibition, which will be available for viewing from August 25, 2012, to February 17, 2013. 
Clary Illian is the author of A Potter's Workbook (University of Iowa Press, 1999). Clary says of her pottery, “What is the heart of the matter in pottery making? To call into being an object and to ask the object to have qualities that evoke in the viewer a sense of rightness, beauty, or vitality is to tinker with the divine. Making pots offers a constant challenge to search for the mysterious underpinnings of the physical world itself.” We hope to see you at the exhibit!
http://www.crma.org/Exhibition/Detail/Upcoming/Clary-Illian-A-Potters-Potter.aspx

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

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.


Monday, August 20, 2012

Interview with Evelyn Birkby: Part 4



What was the best part about representing Iowa at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival?

Oh that was a wonderful experience. Being interviewed by newsman Paul Hendrickson and a subsequent two-page spread  in the Washington Post. The time High Sidey (raised in Greenfield, Iowa) of Time magazine walked onto our broadcast set and joined in a discussion I was moderating that went out over the air. The television interviews I did with the Washington Monument in the background. And being a presenter in the food tent of some of Iowa’s most interesting cooks. That was great fun.

The final night with Lee Kline when we helped present a magical evening. Lee and I were the co-masters of ceremony, and we decided to make it like a real live old-fashioned radio broadcast. Somewhere the Smithsonian has a tape of that evening. It deserves to be preserved. And I made lifelong friends--Lee Kline, Lorene Horton, Riki Saltzman, etc.
The hotel where we stayed also had the people from the South who were part of that event, and I learned to love every one of them, especially the Native Americans. The day we said good-bye, one of them told me, ”We may not meet again in this world but hopefully we will meet again in the spirit world.” I told him, “I hope so, too.”


If your friends from the University of Iowa Press were coming to your house for lunch, what would you serve us?

My favorite menu for company lunch now is chicken in a sour cream sauce over rice, orange sherbet salad, probably a green vegetable, pie made with fruit in season—and if I have time and energy, fresh Hay Hand Rolls coming out of the oven when we are ready to eat, served with my homemade strawberry jam.





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.