Iowa Farm in Your Pocket Photograph

Iowa Farm in Your Pocket: A Beginner's Guide, by Kirk Murray

CORN COUNTRY by Lee Allen

Gift of Dr. Clarence Van Epps
Reproduced with permission of Lee Allen's daughters, Mary Lee Hoganson and Elizabeth Williams
Courtesy of the University of Iowa Museum of Art

New Forms: The Avant-Garde Meets the American Scene, 1934-1949, Selections from the University of Iowa Museum of Art, edited by Kathleen A. Edwards

MARCH (1939)

Grant Wood’s Iowa not—what

            did you call it?—my Ohio.

Nothing mine about it, especially not

            those creatures scurrying, resentfully

alive, on the sides of snaking roads and somehow

            more unsettling than the remnant dead.

For two years I try not to have anything.

            Instead, I imagine Grant Wood in Paris.

How unlikely the time a certain kind

            of American spends in Europe,

wondering what exactly he is. I suppose

            for some it doesn’t matter:

anywhere but home is home, which is how

            I thought of myself. Not so. Not so

for Grant Wood, hopelessly American and in

            the dark middle of the nation from which

no traveler returns. Picture him ensconced at home,

            his bitter family crowded around to watch

him at a favorite pursuit: tableaux vivants.

            Wood reclines, Wood supplicates, Wood reaches

up to a wordless heaven.

            I know that stillness

from his cartoon swells of hill and field.

            Picture him a latter-day Antigone,

able to speak but unwilling. There is

            something in his paintings

of the burden of what he could never say.

            Sometimes the only choice is

to be buried alive. My Ohio. I say it over

            and over again. In the corner of the window,

on the corner of a street in Mount Vernon,

            the glassy eye of the stag stares at no one.

You can see that particular look

            in the eyes of men buried alive by longing.

Are they not everywhere around here,

            nearly turned to stone by their own

reluctance? I know those men, casting about like

            wolves afraid of their own teeth.

Something about the sky says,

            Take this land. In the end, the land wins.

What heaven, Grant Wood, were you

            looking for that you could not find

in crooked stiles puncturing the soil

            along the broken roads of America?

You wanted to love it, but you couldn’t understand

            the shame was a form of love.

It is dark here, especially tonight,

            and far too quiet. I cannot stay

any longer waiting for you. But I will

            follow the road you’ve left,

to the house on the hill in the dream of the sky,

and I will wait for the stars to swing open a door.

Natural Selections, by Joseph Campana 

Interview with Joshua Doležal, author of DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAINTOP, pt. 3

Joshua Doležal is the author of Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging, published just this month. University of Iowa Press acquisitions editor Elisabeth Chretien asked him a few questions about writing his book, growing up in Montana, and his life in Iowa now. To see the rest of his interview, check out the posts from this week.

You write about starting a garden in Iowa as a way of putting down roots. Tell me about your current garden.

It’s a work in progress. We moved into our current house last May, so I had to content myself with a little garden plot, but we got several batches of salsa out of our tomatoes (Golden Girl, Hungarian Heart, Cherokee Purple, and German Pink) and peppers (cayenne and Olympus), some kale and radishes and a salad mix that I planted thick enough to cut with scissors for several harvests. I am slowly digging up more of the backyard, replacing hostas with raspberry canes, adding some raised beds. This fall I planted a bed of garlic, a Honeycrisp apple tree and a Reliance peach, and we hope to add a German plum in the spring. Squash and melons seem especially vulnerable to vine-borers here, so I hope to try row covers this year until the plants blossom. We like butternut squash pies better than pumpkin pies, so I’ll keep trying until I figure out how to grow squash again. I just bought a new grow light, so we’re excited about starting more plants from seed this year.

What are you working on now?

I’ll admit that teaching and family life have kept me from developing many new essays. I’m working on one now about running. It struck me one morning, while I was plugging away in the predawn dark, that most of my family would laugh at the sight of me in my high-tech tights and windbreaker. Many of my uncles are loggers, one grandfather worked in a lumber mill his whole life, and the other was a ranch hand and firefighter. In that culture, you rarely run unless you’re chasing a chicken on butchering day or fleeing a wounded bear during hunting season. You might run to get in shape for boot camp, as one of my cousins did when he joined the Marines. And if you were a boxer or wrestler, running might be a way to build stamina for demolishing your opponent. Strangely, I associate the discipline of running with those working-class values, even though I recognize that as a pastime – as something more like physical and mental hygiene – it marks me as middle class. Then again, what does it matter? Why do so many of us from working-class backgrounds try so earnestly to be seen as hard workers in the eyes of our blue collar relatives long after we’ve left that culture behind? There’s a lot to sort out about why I run and why I’m sometimes self-conscious about it. Parenting also triggers all kinds of childhood memories, so I’m sure that as I watch my daughter grow and struggle with illness and develop her own sense of place, I’ll find it necessary to revisit my own past.

Interview with Joshua Doležal, author of DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAINTOP, pt. 2

Joshua Doležal is the author of Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging, published just this month. University of Iowa Press acquisitions editor Elisabeth Chretien asked him a few questions about writing his book, growing up in Montana, and his life in Iowa now. Stop back on Friday for the interview's conclusion.

You’re a native of western Montana. How has your homeplace influenced your writing?

Montanans are a fiercely loyal bunch who speak unashamedly of the place burning in their blood. It’s the Last Best Place, God’s Country, the Promised Land. Almost all the Montana writers I’ve read fuel this defiant allegiance to place that I think is common among Westerners. Ivan Doig’s House of Sky, William Kittredge’s Hole in the Sky, James Welch’s Fools Crow, Rick Bass’ The Book of Yaak all impacted me profoundly when I read them from a distance – as an undergraduate in Tennessee and as a graduate student in Nebraska – because they sharpened my sense of exile. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t keep the faith with this place and hunker down, all the costs be damned, like these other writers? I found it liberating to read Mary Clearman Blew’s All but the Waltz and Kim Barnes’ In the Wilderness because they shared some of the ambivalence I felt as a young man born of the landscape of northwestern Montana but also alien to its culture. The heart of Down from the Mountaintop is making peace with that ambivalence – not only learning to love another place, but to feel that it was OK not to belong solely to Montana, that expanding my sense of place was not a betrayal. There is a binary mindset typical of Montana that one sometimes sees in other regions, an insider/outsider mentality that I even now find hard to shake, as much as I still love the place, because I know I’ve become an outsider in many ways.

Who are your inspirations among nature writers and writers of place?

In addition to the Montana writers I’ve mentioned, I have been most profoundly influenced by Ted Kooser. He became my mentor during a creative nonfiction seminar at the University of Nebraska. I took the course for fun while finishing a dissertation on American literature, but Ted taught me the importance of audience, how to make an essay a good house guest for the reader. Willa Cather taught me how to see rural places and my own family history as worthy subjects of literature. Louise Erdrich and James Welch are powerful models of how to evoke a particular place as a touchstone for a larger cultural or spiritual context. I also admire the simple power of David Masumoto’s writing, the vividness of Scott Russell Sanders’ essays, the frenetic brilliance of Annie Dillard. Nature writers sometimes take themselves too seriously, which is why I appreciate John Price’s ability to engage larger questions about place through humor.

Interview with Joshua Doležal, author of DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAINTOP, pt. 1

Joshua Doležal is the author of Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging, published just this month. University of Iowa Press acquisitions editor Elisabeth Chretien asked him a few questions about writing his book, growing up in Montana, and his life in Iowa now. Check back Wednesday and Friday this week for the rest of the interview.

Some say that no one under 50 should write a memoir. You obviously disagree. What were the challenges of writing a memoir earlier in life?

Perhaps the hardest part of writing creative nonfiction is being honest. Is this how I really thought as a ten-year-old boy playing Little League, or am I projecting my adult sensibilities onto the child? How much of my ignorance and narcissism as a teenager can I expect a reader to tolerate? These questions grow more complicated when everyone featured in a memoir is still living, and honesty must be tempered by ethical choices. Is full disclosure more important than the potential impact on my relationship with my parents? How do I tell the truth without telling all? But all of these questions are part of private life, too, part of what it means to code switch between being a husband, father, son, grandson, brother, uncle, teacher, and friend at age 38. All of those selves are a little different. Writing a memoir is just another way to wrestle with those choices, with the ongoing struggle to be the best person I can be. A book written later might draw on a broader perspective, but it might also elide the insights and urgencies one can’t avoid in the thick of a life.

What drew you to write this account of your coming-of-age?

From my earliest school days, when I wore handmade clothes to kindergarten and carried a fringed leather lunch satchel, I knew that my childhood experience was different from everyone else’s. I see essays as experiments in explanation, efforts to make what was and is foreign in my life comprehensible, maybe even familiar, to a reader. And I suppose like many memoirists I was trying to make sense of my past. In “Small Rooms in Time,” Ted Kooser explains how unsettled he was to read a news story about a murder in an apartment building where he once lived, how reconstructing and interpreting the memories he had of living in that place was a way to hold “the violence of time” at bay. That was part of my purpose, too: sealing some of those memories in art and protecting them from the confusion I felt then, as well as the potential violence of forgetting those memories partially or altogether.

Interview with Jenifer Angerer of New Pioneer Co-op, pt. 2

New Pioneer Co-op has been providing the Iowa City corridor with fresh, organic, and locally grown food since 1971. For decades, they have paved the way for other Iowa markets interested in providing their own communities with local, organic food. Today, New Pi has expanded to be more than just a grocery store. The market has grown, and New Pi plans to open a new store in Cedar Rapids early next year. The University of Iowa Press asked Jenifer Angerer, the marketing manager, some questions about the expansion, what New Pi offers its members, and the future of buying local and organic.

Alemar Cheese at New Pioneer Co-op, image from Facebook

Why do you think supplying the community with locally and regionally grown food is important?

When you support your local farmers and producers, you are putting your money back in to the community in which you live. You are also reducing the carbon footprint your food consumption leaves on the planet, and local food is about as fresh as you can get (short of growing it yourself). Iowa is one of the world’s largest producers of agricultural crops, yet we import over 90% of the food we eat. In Iowa, we don’t grow many crops for human consumption, and we’d love to see that focus shift.

Why do you think there has been an increase in demand for local and organic foods in the past few years? Do you think the trend will continue or level off?

Community concern and awareness about “where their food comes from” continues to expand into the mainstream and we believe this trend will continue. With global warming and other environmental issues continuing to be a major concern for the world, finding ways to improve our collective carbon footprint will continue to grow.

The dishes on your food blog look delicious! Who writes the posts and makes the dishes? Does everything come from food available at New Pi?

Thank you! Our Catalyst newsletter Editor, Allison Gnade, writes and cooks most of the posts, though other staff members and co-op member-owners contribute to the blog as well. Our Co-op community is deep in food knowledge and, at this time when cooking knowledge is disappearing, it seems like a shame not to share what we know. And yes, the great ingredients come from the Co-op shelves. Flavorful ingredients make it easy to put a delicious meal on the table! We love sharing hidden gems from the store, like our 32-Bean Soup Mix, cooking seasonally, and sharing cooking tips and tricks.

Can you tell us more about the Earth Source Gardens? What's growing there now?

Earth Source Gardens is a community garden offering over 60 garden plots to New Pioneer member-owners, who have the opportunity to sign up annually for a plot to grow annual vegetables and flowers organically (plot registration is available through March 25!). New Pioneer has planted orchards, berry bushes, and annual demonstration plots in the garden for community enjoyment and education as well. Everyone’s welcome to community Garden Parties during the summer – stay tuned for our Equinox party in June – we’d love to see you there!