Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Measuring the lifespan of a fact is no easy task

Originally printed Feb. 22, 2012.

When my kids force me to watch "Dinosaur Train" with them on PBS, the most redeeming feature is "Dr. Scott," the real life paleontologist Scott Sampson who ends every episode with a quick, kid-friendly account of all science featured on the show.

But the "Dinosaur Train" scriptwriters also seem to think that some parents just won't be able to appreciate the sheer absurdity of telling the story of a family of pteranodons, with an adopted baby T-Rex, who learn about other dinosaur species aboard a time-traveling, passenger train.

So, Sampson's closing segments at times also include a character who offers a refutation of the most fantastical features of the program. Dressed in a lawyerly suit and stuffy bowler hat, "Mr. Disclaimer" bursts into the scene and interrupts with short, terse, obvious statements such as, "Point of fact: Dinosaurs did not play Dino-ball!"

"Dinosaur Train" scripts, of course, are a far cry from the type of quality writing associated with the faculty of the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program. But it's hard not think of Mr. Disclaimer, with his stiff voice and absurd outfit, when reading through "The Lifespan of a Fact," a highly intellectual and surprisingly theatratical dialogue co-written by UI professor John D'Agata and his frustrated fact checker Jim Fingal.

Back in 2003, a magazine commissioned D'Agata to write about a Las Vegas teen who committed suicide. The resulting essay eventually went on to become the foundation of D'Agata's award-winning book, "About a Mountain," but the magazine ultimately rejected the piece because, while moving and well written, it contained too many of what the editors considered "factual inaccuracies."

D'Agata then offered his essay to another magazine, who was interested in printing it, but assigned Fingal to fact check D'Agata's prose. Fingal immediately takes issue with so many of the assertions in D'Agata's opening paragraph that his senior editor gives up trying to address every point. Instead, the fact checker is left on his own to own find some kind of accommodation with a literary essayist who refuses to abide by the magazine's normal standards for nonfiction.

"The Lifespan of a Fact" tells the story of how D'Agata and Fingal utterly fail to find points of common ground in their understanding of "literary nonfiction" (a term that D'Agata despises despite being a professor of nonfiction). Each page includes a centered column of text from D'Agata's original essay surrounded by the email conversations between the journalistic editor and the essayist — between the artist and killjoy. When Fingal confirms a fact, the marginalia text is in black; when he disputes a fact, the marginalia text is in red.

Needless to say, there's a lot of red.

At times, Fingal comes across as a Dr. Scott — providing helpful information that corrects verifiable factual inaccuracies in a way that won't affect the tone and style of D'Agata's literary voice.

At other times, Fingal comes across as a verbose version of "Mr. Disclaimer," aggressively challenging facts and epistemological assumptions that have absolutely no bearing on the literary experience D'Agata is trying to create.

D'Agata, likewise, comes across at times as an artist whose broader vision is completely misunderstood by his editors. But in his unwillingness to make even the most basic of factual corrections, D'Agata loses his reader's sympathy — even as he makes the more compelling arguments about the intersection of art and life.

"It would 'ruin' it to make it more accurate?" Fingal asks at one point.

"Yup," is all that D'Agata replies.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

When children's speech becomes just too painful

Originally printed Feb. 9, 2012.

While my 5-year-old daughter and I were walking the other day, she seemed to be complaining less than usual.

She soon explained that she wasn't getting tired — even after nearly two miles — because she had learned the secret of how to keep going: just keep on talking.

"As long as I talk, Daddy," she said, "I make energy, and that let's me keep walking."

She was clear that this energy also depended on getting enough sleep and eating healthy food, but it was the talking, she stressed, that let her keep walking even when her legs hurt.

So I let her talk, and a flood of words came out. Some of them were questions I was expected to answer. Some of them were statements I merely was expected to acknowledge. Most of them were nonsensical chatter that I was supposed to walk through uncomprehendingly.

If I were a character in Ben Marcus's "The Flamee Alphabet," however, my daughter's gush of language not only would have left me unenergized, it also would have begun sapping my existing strength. Her carelessly uttered words, in fact, would have made me ill. And, if I would let her continue talking, it eventually would kill me — along with killing any other adult who was foolish/loyal enough to remain within earshot.

Marcus's novel joins a number of other recent literary "Twilight Zone"-like morality plays:

From Kevin Brochmeier's "The Illumination," in which everyone's personal pain gets displayed as light emanating from the body,

To Tom Perotta's "The Leftovers," in which the Christian Rapture occurs, but it takes a completely random sampling of people and leaves behind a world in stunned confusion.

But Marcus uses his plot device as an excuse to ruminate on the limits of language and on the sheer impossibility of true communication — especially between parent and child.

Add to that Marcus's delving into the mysteries of Reconstructionist Judaism, and "The Flame Alphabet" reads like an extended tale by Borges or a mystical, magical-realist, fabulist twist on George Orwell.

"A list of speech rules filled the inside cover," Marcus writes of a pamphlet describing how to protect yourself from the language toxin he describes. "... A list of rules so knotted that to follow them would be to say nearly nothing, to never render one's interior life, to eschew abstraction and discharge a grammar that merely positioned nouns in descending orders of desire."

The effects of the language toxin seeps into Marcus's finely crafted prose as well. His basic metaphor — that the language of children produces a wasting effect on their parents — is both so powerfully true and untrue that it becomes difficult (even painful) to linger too long in the world he's created.

"The Flame Alphabet" makes you long for your kids to stop talking long enough for you to hold them tight.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlon can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

Maintaining balance on the water and in life

Originally printed Jan. 27, 2011.

"Two and a half years after our thirty-eight-year-old daughter, Amy, died of an undetected anomalous right coronary artery, I have taken up kayaking. They say that people in grief become more like themselves. I have always been a loner, so going out in the kayak suits my temperament."

That's how Roger Rosenblatt begins his 15th book, "Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief and Small Boats." It's the second book that the award-winning essayist, broadcast journalist and literature professor has published since the death of his daughter.

And it's after reading those sentences that I thought I should check in with Jeff Swenson, an assistant professor of English at Hiram College in Ohio, whose dissertation was titled, "Canoe Passages: Cross-Cultural Conveyance in U.S. and Canadian Literature."

Swenson, not surprisingly, took issue with the short, Inuit-specific history of the kayak that Rosenblatt provides.

"Skin boats, like the kayak, are far more common than the canoe," he said. "Wherever people were in the world, if they lived by the sea, they had some version of them."

But Swenson, as a father himself, was more impressed with how Rosenblatt discusses the special relationship between father and daughter as well as with how Rosenblatt continues to be so honest about the anger and loss he still feels.

"While reading, I kept dreading that he was going to come to some quick epiphany that would tie everything together," Swenson said. "That he would bring the water, his reading of 'Moby-Dick' and the kayak to some kind of closure. Instead, he leaves the book in his grief. And the journey goes on."

Unlike the canoe — which is more associated with lengthy wilderness journeys that require supplies — the kayak offers Rosenblatt an intimate experience with the water. Just a morning's journey. One in which he can ruminate on many poems, elegies and other laments in which parents mourn the loss of a child.

Swenson said serious sea-kayakers probably would be disappointed by Rosenblatt's limited experience — being content to paddle in a creek, afraid to go out to sea — but Rosenblatt made good use of his time on the water.

"Usually writers choose metaphors because they are strange and unexpected," Swenson said. "Rosenblatt's use of the kayak as metaphor is relatively simple, but it works for him."

Unfortunately it also means Rosenblatt often skims the surface of his grief. He's not willing to go out into the deep sea, nor is he willing to dive into the depths.

"Water is groundless," Rosenblatt writes. "It has no basis, like art. It is the answer to no one's questions. I love the feel of it. Paddling, I churn up great bulbous drops, splash my arms, my legs, my face. ... I could live this way, forever damp as a sail, a seal, a hull, a sluice. Diluted as a column of water."

Rosenblatt will be on hand to talk about kayaks, love and his still undiluted grief at 7 p.m. today in Prairie Lights Bookstore.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

How to sift through the 'sacred trash' of history

Originally printed Jan. 24, 2011.

Over the past year, it seems book reviewers and historical scholars alike have had a hard time restraining themselves from heaping praise on "Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza," by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole.

In his review for The Nation, David Nirenberg described the book a "literary jewel whose pages turn like those of a well-paced thriller."

Norman Stillman, writing for The Jewish Review of Books, described the authors as "charming and unobtrusively erudite."

Harold Bloom wrote that the "romance of Hebrew scholarship has never been so vividly conveyed."

And Robyn Creswell of the Paris Review Blog opined, "I can't think of another work that succeeds so well in making archival research into gripping adventure."

The universal high praise for the book — including glowing reviews from the New York Times as well as the Wall Street Journal — is made all the more astounding by how Hoffman and Cole have chosen for their subject a veritable garbage heap of scholarship: The fragments of nearly every document added to the Cairo Geniza between the ninth and 19th century.

"Geniza" is an untranslatable word, but the core idea comes from the Jewish practice of not trashing any holy texts. For nearly a thousand years, the Jewish community in Cairo applied that practice to anything written in Hebrew. And as a result, they basically wound up saving everything from theological treatises, to bills, to pink slips, to poems, to love letters, to eviction notices.

And ever since the "discovery" of the Cairo Geniza more than a century ago, scholars have been reconnecting the fragments as they try to the tale of what this holy hodgepodge says about the intersections of east/west and Arab/Jew in the medieval world. Almost all of those scholars, however, have been specially trained medievalists who have been writing primarily for an audience of other specially trained medievalists.

Hoffman and Cole, by describing the Cairo Geniza as a sort of cherished/condemned junk heap, managed to find a way to translate the insights of the specialists so they could be fully appreciated by everyday and accidental readers.

"I normally can't read a work of history as bedtime reading or airport reading," said University of Iowa history professor Linda Kerber. "I'm a professional, and I want to take notes about what I should know. ... But this book was a page-turner. I found it was just remarkable how they could tell me the history of something that I would have thought was extremely arcane ... even to the experts."

Kerber said she had admired the work of Hoffman and Cole separately for years. She first learned of Cole when he came to Iowa City a few years ago as the translator for visiting Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali. And she learned of Hoffman — Cole's wife — through her 2009 biography of Ali, "My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness," which was the first full-length biography of a Palestinian poet in any language.

So Kerber was intrigued when one her students returned from the American Historical Association last year with the galleys in hand for the latest collaboration of the married couple. Kerber knew the couple had operated Ibis Editions, a small press and non-profit organization, in Jerusalem since 1998, and that press offered translations from Hebrew, Arabic and other languages of the region. But she — like other scholars and reviewers across the world — wasn't expecting the book would "stop me in my tracks."

"I have tried very hard to make what I write accessible to an interested reader who is not necessarily a historian," Kerber said. "But they have managed to find the writing voice to which I aspire."

Although Kerber raced through "Sacred Trash" during her first reading experience, she since has gone back to reread the book and more closely analyze how Hoffman and Cole were able to craft such a knowledgeable, lively, engaging voice. And she has assigned the book to the students in her history seminar so they can figure it out as well.

Anyone interested in learning to sift through "sacred trash" can hear Hoffman and Cole read at 7 p.m. today in Prairie Lights.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

Leafing through this year's 'Wapsipinicon Almanac'

Originally printed Jan. 20, 2012.

Over the past two months, I have spent far too many hours reading through all the letters and columns submitted in response to Stephen Bloom's online essay in The Atlantic — including several 1,200- to 3,000-word tomes that the writers refused to pare down for publication.

As a result, I now find myself having to fight hard against the temptation to try to cram all Iowa-centric writing into one of three categories:

Writing that expertly, passionately or eloquently disproves Bloom's explicit and implicit arguments.

Writing that strives to disprove Bloom's arguments, but unintentionally provides further evidence for Bloom's arguments.

Writing that doesn't give a whit about Bloom's pretensions and embraces everything about Iowa that Bloom disdains.

Luckily for me, Tim Fay's "Wapsipinicon Almanac" refuses to fit snugly into any of those categories. While some of the individual pieces in Fay's nearly annual collection are clearly in Category 1 or 3 — with a few in Category 2, as well — the letter-press-printed almanac, when taken as a whole, blurs the distinctions between nostalgia and satire and manages to live up to its reputation of being part New Yorker, part Farmers' Almanac.

As with its 17 predecessors, "Wapsipinicon Almanac No. 18" looks like it came straight out of the early 20th-century. And although the well-designed ads look like they come from that bygone era, they highlight the Iowa businesses that help make the state such a worthwhile place to live in. (Some of the local advertisers include Fired Up Iowa City, Houseworks, Eble Music, University of Iowa Press, Cafe del Sol coffer roasters, Iowa Artisans Gallery, the Haunted Bookshop, the Red Avocado and, of course, Prairie Lights Bookstore — where Fay and many of his most recent contributors will be reading at 7 p.m. today.)

But Fay's editorial sensibility is more on par with that of Garrison Keillor and his equally anachronistic radio variety show. Like Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion," Fay's "Almanac" is simultaneously a self-conscious parody and a heart-felt homage to an art form that fell from popularity generations ago.

A similar sensibility is clearly at work in the essays:

"What Went Around Came Around," in which Winston Barclay recounts the history of Iowa City's Record Collector store and describes the rise, fall and resurrection of vinyl among audiophiles the world over.

"Fake Lake," in which Barbara Hass describes the history of Lake Delhi and the economic and environmental debates over whether to rebuild the broken dam on the Maquoketa River.

"Frankenfields Forever," in which Todd Kimm contrasts today's fields on modified corn and beans with the fields he grew up with 40 years ago.

And, as usual, Fay has filled his "Almanac" with reviews of Iowa-focused books that — well before Bloom's essay — help shine a journalistic and sociological light on state past, present and future. This year's list includes Stephen Longmire's "Life and Death on the Prairie," Ted Kooser's "Pursuing Black Hawk," Charles Shields's "And So It Goes — Kurt Vonnegut: A Life," Lisa Ossian's "The Depression Dilemmas of Rural Iowa" and Colleen Bradford Krantz's "Train to Nowhere: Inside an Immigrant Death Investigation."

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

Last-minute gift options for local readers

Originally printed Dec. 21, 2011.

If, like me, you've put off your holiday shopping until the last minute, here's a list of a few books by local authors you might consider buying for your favorite bookworm.

'Fourteenth Colony'

Local author Jason T. Lewis is quite the renaissance man. A frontman for the bands Star City and Sad Iron Music, the West Virginia native initially came to Iowa City to study in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Since graduating, he has been digging his roots deeply into the local community.

Last month — with the release of his debut novel, "The Fourteenth Colony" — Lewis found a way to combine his loves of writing and music. The novel focuses on a few meaningful days in the life of John Martin, a down-and-out musician who is returning to his West Virginia hometown for the first time in 13 years. Martin finds his mother dead, his estranged father dying of cancer, and a past beginning to overwhelm his present.

But "The Fourteenth Colony" isn't just a novel; it's "a novel with music." The Americana-roots companion album features songs, written and performed by Lewis, that parallel the storyline.

The result is so good that I asked Lewis to be the first local writer to participate in what we at the Press-Citizen hope will be a new tradition: Printing a locally-written short story each Christmas.

Keep an eye out for Lewis' story, "Motel Santa," in Sunday's Press-Citizen.

'Here Lies Linc'

Ever since local historian Timothy C. Parrott published his pamphlet, "The Enigma of Theresa Dolezal Feldwert and the Black Angel" (2007), I've thought that the true history behind Oakland Cemetery's most famous grave would make an interesting back-story for a children's book. I always imagined it would be a lavishly illustrated picture book in which a character based on Parrott would get into well-rhymed debates with various myth-makers and ghost-storytellers.

Local writer Delia Ray must have had a similar idea because her latest young adult novel, "Here Lies Linc," tells the story of Lincoln Raintree Crenshaw, a 12-year-old boy who lives at the edge of Iowa City's Oakland Cemetery and who researches the Black Angel's history as part of a school project. (It even features a character based on Parrott.) Narrated from Linc's first-person perspective, the novel nicely contrasts his research on the Black Angel and his search into his own family's mysterious past.

My 7-year-old daughter loved "Here Lies Linc" so much that she made me buy several copies as Christmas gifts for her older cousins. And she especially enjoyed using the slightly fictionalized map in the novel to spend an afternoon exploring the real life Oakland Cemetery.

'Mule'

I didn't receive a review copy of Shane McCrae's "Mule" until after the Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate read at Prairie Lights earlier this year. But that's probably for the best, because it's taken me some time to learn to appreciate McCrae's poetic voice.

Now it's hard to imagine reading McCrae's poems as isolated texts — even though many have been published in literary journals. Read individually, the poems just give a taste of the themes of collaboration/division, marriage/divorce, racial identity and neuro-atypicality that echo throughout the collection.

McCrae's slash marks, for example, don't just stand in for a line break when his poetry is rendered in prose. Instead, he slashes his poetry mid-line — even mid-word — to show how no unit of poetry is truly unified.

The result is a sometimes confusing swirl of contradictions. But it's a collection well worth reading and rereading until the confusion resolves.

Opinion page editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

A book worth reading amid life's many, many distractions

Originally printed Nov. 28, 2011.

In his new book, "Becoming Real: Authenticity in an Age of Distractions," Iowa City author Robert Sessions distills a career's worth of insight from his 26 years teaching philosophy at Kirkwood Community College.

Halfway through the book, the professor poses the very question his students must have asked him most often: "But why ... should we make the effort to listen to philosophers? They tend to write in technical and often opaque jargon and style, and their ideas seem far away from the kinds of realities we discussed."

Sessions' answer to that question is the polished retort he must have provided hundreds of times. But it also offers fresh insight into the questions about "freedom," "authenticity" and "autonomy" he has been struggling with since his dissertation days.

"Here is where you need to trust me a bit," Sessions writes. "I believe that without going through some philosophical rigors we will not find a satisfactory understanding of that which we seek — answers to how to lead an authentic life in a world swirling with confusing and alluring distractions that take us from ourselves instead of helping us find and be who we are."

Sessions, in fact, is striving to be the type of philosopher described by Henry David Thoreau: "To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts nor even to found a school but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically but practically."

"Becoming Real" does include Sessions' treks alongside the philosophers one might expect to see in a book about authenticity — Søren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, Jean Paul Satre, Martin Heidegger, Martha Nussbaum and the most upliftingly optimistic reading of Friedrich Nietzsche you're likely to find anywhere. But the book also sojourns and saunters with Thoreau ("Walden"), Kathleen Norris ("Dakota" and "Acedia and Me"), Phil Cousineau ("Once and Future Myths" and "The Art of Pilgrimage"), Jane Kenyon ("Happiness") and other spiritually-attuned, poetically-aware, cultural critics.

Most refreshingly, Sessions also draws upon the subtle inspirations from his own life: his experiences as an early home-schooling advocate, his "devastating" divorce, the thrill he and his Kirkwood students have watching leatherback turtles during an annual trip to Costa Rica.

Sessions is careful to identify the dead ends and blind alleyways into which the search for authenticity can lead people — from religious/political fundamentalism, to the eternal adolescence of "Guyland," to the purposelessness of "Leisureville," to the helplessness brought about by many self-help approaches. But he unironically and unabashedly offers "Becoming Real" as a means of calling people to begin "a pilgrimage to a more authentic self."

To hear Sessions offer his call in person, come listen to him read from "Becoming Real" at 7 p.m. Tuesday in Prairie Lights Books.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

In Cawelti's new 'whydunit,' a brother's blood still cries out

Originally printed Nov. 18, 2011.

It's a shame that television actor Peter Falk recently died because Iowa author Scott Cawelti has just published a true crime book — "Brother's Blood: A Heartland Cain and Abel" (Ice Cube Press, 2011) — that easily could be transformed into a compelling episode of "Columbo."

In 1975, Cawelti was as shocked as rest of his Cedar Falls area neighbors to learn that one branch of a prominent local family — Les and Jorjean Mark and their young children Julie and Jeff — had been shot to death in their home. Days later, he was even more shocked to learn that the police had arrested Les's brother Jerry Mark and charged him with the gruesome killings.

But the evidence presented in the subsequent trial eventually convinced Cawelti — as it convinced a jury of Jerry Mark's peers — that the murder of the Mark family was indeed the modernized version of the biblical Cain and Abel story that the prosecutors claimed it was.

Jerry Mark — a lawyer and Peace Corps volunteer turned self-described hippie — angry that his younger brother was exercising more leadership in the family farm business than he was, rode his motorcycle across country from California to Iowa, slaughtered his brother's family in their home, and then rode back west — all the while making collect calls to his girlfriend in California lying about his location and about the reason for his extended motorcycle holiday.

Cawelti began researching for a book on the murders a few years after Jerry Mark was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. But Jerry Mark consistently has maintained he is innocent in the killings, and his many appeals made it difficult early on for Cawelti to find officials involved in the case who were willing to talk on the record.

After allowing the book idea to simmer for more than two decades, Cawelti decided to begin working on "Brother's Blood" in earnest in 2006, after a federal judge ordered that Jerry Mark either should receive a new trial or be released — a decision reversed by an appellate court the following year.

With the Mark family murder in the headlines again, Cawelti dug out his old notes, re-immersed himself in the trial transcripts and other public records and eventually gave himself permission to move into the realm of narrative speculation whenever the facts didn't clearly explain the motives for Jerry Mark's actions.

As a result, "Brother's Blood" isn't a traditional "whodunit" in which readers have to wait until the end for a detective character to reveal the killer. Nor is it a "CSI"-style mystery solved only when forensic scientists use the most up-to-date technology to unlock something no one expected. Instead, the book is a "Columbo"-style "whydunit" in which readers are with the murderer when the murders take place and when the police — led primarily by small inconsistencies and a growing mountain of circumstantial evidence — eventually close in.

Cawelti has gone out of his way to stress the "nonfiction" component of his true crime tale. More than a third of "Brother's Blood" consists of public records, interview transcripts and new accounts from law enforcement officers, lawyers and family members that attest to the veracity of Cawelti's version of events.

But the tone of "Brother's Blood" still seems to match the sentiments Lt. Columbo conveys to the murderer in the TV show's pilot episode: "I must say I found you disappointing; I mean your incompetence. You left enough clues to sink a ship. And for a man of your intelligence, you got caught in a lot of stupid lies."

Cawelti will read from his new book and discuss the Mark family murder at 7 p.m. today in Prairie Lights Books.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at 319-887-5435 or jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

In Cawelti's new 'whydunit,' a brother's blood still cries out

Originally printed Nov. 18, 2011.

It's a shame that television actor Peter Falk recently died because Iowa author Scott Cawelti has just published a true crime book — "Brother's Blood: A Heartland Cain and Abel" (Ice Cube Press, 2011) — that easily could be transformed into a compelling episode of "Columbo."

In 1975, Cawelti was as shocked as rest of his Cedar Falls area neighbors to learn that one branch of a prominent local family — Les and Jorjean Mark and their young children Julie and Jeff — had been shot to death in their home. Days later, he was even more shocked to learn that the police had arrested Les's brother Jerry Mark and charged him with the gruesome killings.

But the evidence presented in the subsequent trial eventually convinced Cawelti — as it convinced a jury of Jerry Mark's peers — that the murder of the Mark family was indeed the modernized version of the biblical Cain and Abel story that the prosecutors claimed it was.

Jerry Mark — a lawyer and Peace Corps volunteer turned self-described hippie — angry that his younger brother was exercising more leadership in the family farm business than he was, rode his motorcycle across country from California to Iowa, slaughtered his brother's family in their home, and then rode back west — all the while making collect calls to his girlfriend in California lying about his location and about the reason for his extended motorcycle holiday.

Cawelti began researching for a book on the murders a few years after Jerry Mark was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. But Jerry Mark consistently has maintained he is innocent in the killings, and his many appeals made it difficult early on for Cawelti to find officials involved in the case who were willing to talk on the record.

After allowing the book idea to simmer for more than two decades, Cawelti decided to begin working on "Brother's Blood" in earnest in 2006, after a federal judge ordered that Jerry Mark either should receive a new trial or be released — a decision reversed by an appellate court the following year.

With the Mark family murder in the headlines again, Cawelti dug out his old notes, re-immersed himself in the trial transcripts and other public records and eventually gave himself permission to move into the realm of narrative speculation whenever the facts didn't clearly explain the motives for Jerry Mark's actions.

As a result, "Brother's Blood" isn't a traditional "whodunit" in which readers have to wait until the end for a detective character to reveal the killer. Nor is it a "CSI"-style mystery solved only when forensic scientists use the most up-to-date technology to unlock something no one expected. Instead, the book is a "Columbo"-style "whydunit" in which readers are with the murderer when the murders take place and when the police — led primarily by small inconsistencies and a growing mountain of circumstantial evidence — eventually close in.

Cawelti has gone out of his way to stress the "nonfiction" component of his true crime tale. More than a third of "Brother's Blood" consists of public records, interview transcripts and new accounts from law enforcement officers, lawyers and family members that attest to the veracity of Cawelti's version of events.

But the tone of "Brother's Blood" still seems to match the sentiments Lt. Columbo conveys to the murderer in the TV show's pilot episode: "I must say I found you disappointing; I mean your incompetence. You left enough clues to sink a ship. And for a man of your intelligence, you got caught in a lot of stupid lies."

Cawelti will read from his new book and discuss the Mark family murder at 7 p.m. today in Prairie Lights Books.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at 319-887-5435 or jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

Sís' books keep delighting readers of whatever age

Originally printed Nov. 14, 2011.

"The Conference of the Birds" is being touted as the first book for adults published by Caldecott Honor-winning children's book author and illustrator Peter Sís. But the book — a lavishly illustrated retelling of a 12th-century Persian poem — offers the same mix of rich images and simply stated but profound words that has made Sís's previous work so enjoyable and so re-readable to children and adults alike.

The career of this 62-year-old, Czechoslovakian born author and filmmaker, in fact, demonstrates the truth of C.S. Lewis's half-century-old observation: "No book is really worth reading at the age of 10 which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of 50. ... The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all."

While largely marketed to children, Sís's books already have focused on a number of more mature and complex themes. He won the American Library Association's Caldecott Honor in 1996 for the illustrations in his "Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei," in 1998 for his "Tibet through the Red Box" and in 2007 for his very politically and historically aware "The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain." And his "Madlenka," "Madlenka's Dog" and "The Tree of Life: Charles Darwin" were all named New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Books of the Year.

Booksellers must find it very difficult to decide whether to shelve Sís's work among the children's picture books, with the graphic novels or alongside the art collections.

Although marketed for adults, "The Conference of the Birds" will prove equally difficult to pigeon-hole. The 850-year-old Sufi epic poem that serves as the inspiration for the book tells the story of thousands of birds who, responding to the call of a human poet turned hoopoe, gather to begin a quest to find their true king, Simorgh.

Their long journey takes them to the mountain of Kaf, where Simorgh lives, but along the way they discover that the true king is each of them as well as all of them.

Although children might get lost in the lyricism of the poem — and some adults might reject the poem's "Jonathan Livingston Seagull"-like message of self-actualization — readers of all ages will be amazed by the level of detail in Sís's illustrations. Not only does Sís depict dozens and dozens of species of birds, but nearly every page in this book is worthy of being framed and displayed.

Heller McAlpin of NPR goes as far as to describe "The Conference of the Birds" as Exhibit A for anyone looking "to make a case ... for what print books can do that e-books can't."

Sís — who was named a MacArthur "genius" fellow in 2003 — will read from his newest book at 7 p.m. today in Prairie Lights.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at 319-887-5435 or jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

Rolnick's stories more than pulp and paper

Originally printed Oct. 27, 2011.

Josh Rolnick has a knack for anticipating and twisting his readers' expectations.

He sometimes does it directly — as when the narrator of his story "Funnyboy" finally blurts out, "By now I hear you saying, Spill it already. What's this all about?"

But more often it's simply part of his storytelling style. How he comes to the brink of melodrama and cliché but then pulls back at the right moment — giving readers just a second to peer over the edge of what could have been a sub-literary catastrophe.

Take "Funnyboy," for example. It's the story of a father confronting the teenage girl who crashed into and killed his 12-year-old son. The basic plot has all the makings for a tear-jerky after-school special.

But Rolnick isn't interested in such overt displays of emotion. His narrating father, Levi Stern, is overwhelmingly grief-stricken, but his grief comes out as snarkily as possible.

"It was actually less a letter than a heavily perfumed run-on sentence with postage," Levi says of the tear-stained letter of apology that cheerless cheerleader Missy Jones ("the girl who killed my son") sent to him and his wife.

In fact, there's something charmingly immature — something unfinished and mutable — about each of the different voices populating Rolnick's debut short story collection, "Pulp and Paper." Even his most responsible adult characters still have a lot of growing up to do as they learn to surive large and small life changes.

"Pulp and Paper" is an invitingly disturbing collection full of dead children, lost daughters, missing moms and animals who know better than their owners when to run away from dangerous situations. It's self-consciously "literary" collection that manages to avoid coming across as pretentious despite being full of stories set in the inn where Peter Benchley knocked off the last chapter of "Jaws" or of stories involving journalist characters who name their cats "Pulitzer." But it's also a collection filled with stories bearing compound titles and complex emotions.

Rolnick's stories, in fact, refuse any simple retelling.

It's little wonder, then, that Rolnick now has joined the ranks of John McNally, Doug Trevor, Thisbe Nissen and dozens of other writers as the winner of the University of Iowa Press's John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Nor is it surprising that his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices.

Rolnick will be reading from that award-winning new collection at 7 p.m. today in Prairie Lights Books.

Opinion page editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

Orlean's 'Rin Tin Tin' and Bell's 'Dead Man' face off

Originally printed Oct. 20, 2011.

Today in the City of Literature, there will be a literary face-off between the long-lived legend of the world's favorite German Shepherd and the musings of a living Dead Man.

A legendary dog

Prairie Lights Books and the Engert Theatre have combined forces to bring Susan Orlean — staff writer at The New Yorker — to Iowa City to read from her new book, "Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend."

As with all of Orlean's long-form journalism, "Rin Tin Tin" doesn't just tell a simple story; it provides extensive background information on nearly every topic tangentially connected to the main tale.

In this case, readers will be treated to a wealth of detail about the development of the German Shepherd breed, the French battlefields of World War One, the early days of Hollywood and the transformations of radio and television. And that's all in addition to learning about the personal history of Lee Duncan, owner of the first Rin Tin Tin, and the many similarly-named descendants of that original dog.

And as with Orlean's best-known book, "The Orchid Thief" — which was made into the film "Adaptation" — the author herself becomes an essential part of the story. It's Orlean's nostalgic memories of the Rin Tin Tin toys and other memorabilia of her childhood that makes her seek after such a "mysterious and eternal" canine figure.

The reading will begin at 8 p.m. in the Englert. Single tickets are $15 each ($10 for students), but the bookstore and theater are offering the special deal of two tickets and a copy of the book for $27.

The living dead

There's nothing really strange about the pop-cultural resurgence of zombies in everything from recent remakes of George A. Romero movies; to the AMC television series, "The Walking Dead"; to Colson Whitehead's new novel, "Zone One"; to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control posting "Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse" to the CDC Public Health Matters Blog.

After all, depictions of the undead have long stood symbolically for the soul-sucking effect that society and institutions has on individuals.

But if the zombie apocalypse really does occur, we can only hope that a few of those walking corpses eventually will stumble upon "Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems," the newest collection by former Iowa Poet Laureate and Iowa Writers' Workshop professor emeritus Marvin Bell.

If the right neurons continue to fire in those zombies' decomposing brain — and if they can retain some memory of what written words are meant convey — the living dead readers may discover their non-existent souls rekindled by Bell's poetic ruminations on the repeated Zen admonition, "Live as if you were already dead."

Bell's Dead Man, of course, is not a zombie. He's a Whitmanian everyman who ruminates on all phases of uman history, from the ancient Sumerians to Leno and Letterman. And in the past two decades, he has turned the Dead Man poem into a new literary form.

Bell — alive and well — will be on hand today to read for free from his new collection at 7 p.m. in Prairie Lights. And if you run as if a dead man is chasing you, you'll have just enough time afterward to make it to the Englert to hear Orlean.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

A welcome workshop history

Originally printed Sept. 26, 2011.

If you google the phrases "Sandra Cisneros" and "Iowa Writers' Workshop," the top search result is a YouTube video titled, "Sandra Cisneros: I Hate the Iowa Writers' Workshop," in which the Chicago-born Latina poet and novelist explains in detail why she detested her time in Iowa City.

That's why I was so surprised to see Cisneros listed as one of the more than 30 workshop graduates and faculty members during the 1970s whose shared memories and insights make up the new book, "We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at the Iowa Writers' Workshop," by fellow Workshop graduates Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer.

I had been expecting "We Wanted to Be Writers" to be some kind of self-congratulatory, uncritical celebration of the workshop -- or, even worse, some kind of hagiography of the workshop's more illustrious graduates. I knew Schaeffer only as the donor for whom the Dey House's Glenn Schaeffer Library and Archives addition was named. And I knew little about Olsen other than that he and Schaeffer graduated with their MFAs in 1977.

But when I began leafing skeptically through the collection of transcribed interviews, I soon saw that not only was Cisneros allowed to say, "I believe in workshops. I teach in workshops. I just don't believe in the academic workshop." But several other interviewees -- from poet Joy Harjo to sci-fi writer Joe Haldeman -- also were allowed to express their own critiques of the Workshop experience. And many of those critiques were inextricably intertwined with the writers' positive -- often nostalgic -- memories of his or her time in Iowa City.

In addition to Cisneros, Haldeman, Harjo, Olsen and Schaeffer, the list of former workshop students interviewed include Jeffrey Abrahams, Doug Borsom, T.C. Boyle, Anthony Bukoski, Sandra Cisneros, Jennie Fields, Catherine Gammon, Robin Green, Allan Gurganus, Joe Michelle Huneven, Gary Iorio, Sherry Kramer, Geri Lipschultz, Bill Manhire, Dennis Mathis, Bill McCoy, Gordon Mennenga, Cheryl Olsen, Mindy Pennybacker, Jayne Anne Phillips, Jane Smiley, Douglas Unger and Don Wallace. Faculty members Marvin Bell, Rosalyn Drexler, John Irving and Jack Leggett were interviewed as well.

The list does include many big-name novelists and poets, but "We Wanted to Be Writers" is all the more interesting because it includes so many graduates who went on to excel in other, non-literature related fields. Schaeffer himself went on to make his fortune in the stock market and real estate/resort ventures. And while Olsen continues to write, he largely is focused on writing magazine articles and non-fiction books on health related topics.

"We Wanted to Be Writers" turns out to be not only an exploration of the literary creative process, but also a case study in what graduates can do with an MFA from the No. 1 creative writing program in the nation if they don't become a literary superstar or an creative writing professor.

And that's one of the main points Schaeffer wants to get across through this book.

"The MFA is the new MBA," Schaeffer told me this summer, while sitting in the library that bears his name. He said his next project will be a more detailed exploration of the links between literary imagination and entrepreneurship.

Of the two, Olsen seemed the more responsible for deciding how to present the insights by the interviewees. Rather than focus on one writer for pages at a time, Olsen chopped up the transcripts and shuffled them until they formed engaging, lengthy conversions around some general questions about the craft, the writing life, youthful ambitions and heartbreak.

As result, "We Wanted to Be Writers" reads like the transcript of a good documentary -- with voice-over narration from Olsen and Schaeffer thrown in along with the occasional lists of "Books by the Bed" for each of the interviewees.

Olsen and Schaeffer have presented a welcome, controversial addition to collection of books on the workshop that stretch from Stephen Wilbers's "The Iowa Writers' Workshop" (1980), to Mark McGurl's "The Program Era" (2009).

And if you want to hear any of the stories that -- for whatever reason -- didn't get included in "We Wanted to Be Writers," Olsen will be reading at 7 p.m. today in Prairie Lights.

Contact Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson at jcharisc@press-citizen.com..

Torres leaves you wanting more

Originally printed Sept. 21, 2011.

The only problem with Justin Torres's "We The Animals" is that I'm left wishing the 125-page book was longer.

Not that I usually would want to read more about such a troubled childhood -- the narrator and his brothers are left on their own so much that they almost go feral. Or more about a woman who becomes a mother at 14 and then slips in and out of a poverty-induced depression and basically leaves her children to fend for themselves. Or more about a father who literally leaves his wife and youngest son to sink or swim.

But Torres had me hooked.

His 125-page book sits nicely alongside Piri Thomas's "Down These Mean Streets" and Junot Díaz's "Drown" for its focus on Latino self-identity and the exploration of color lines within the color line.

And as a widely dysfunctional family tale, "We The Animals" is on the order of Jeannette Wahls's "The Glass Castle."

Throw in how "We The Animals" also is a coming of age sexuality tale, and it's hard to imagine any writer -- especially a first-time novelist -- living up to all those literary predecessors in a mere 125 pages.

So it's not surprising that Torres doesn't quite pull it off. He leaves it up to his readers to fill in all the context and content that he doesn't think necessary to provide.

Torres does provide some of that missing context through interviews. He explains that none of the specific events in his novel actually happened the way they were written. But he also stresses that what he wrote is so close to the feeling of what his childhood was like that his brothers claim to "remember" the events described as if they actually had happened.

I'm left wishing more information was included in the later parts of the storyline. Maybe then the ending -- in which the animal/feral metaphors overwhelm the otherwise straightforward, hard-hitting, descriptive vignettes -- wouldn't come across as some kind of dark, existential reworking of "Where the Wild Things Are."

If fleshed out a bit more, "We The Animals" still would be worthy of all the blurbish praise it's received from Pulitzer Prize winners Paul Harding, Michael Cunningham and Marilynne Robinson. But that praise would be for a story that fully develops rather than ends abruptly.

"We The Animals" does make me look forward to Torres's next book -- and I think there's still plenty of room for him to pick up right where this one left off.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

For Perrotta, being left behind is not the end of the world

Originally printed Sept. 14, 2011.

Last week, I watched an illegally YouTube-posted version of the 1973 religious cult classic, "A Thief in the Night." It proved to be as shlocky and unprofessionally produced an apocalyptic horror feature as I excepted. But the last time I saw the movie -- at a church service when I was 7 or 8 -- it terrified my little brother and me so much that we grabbed hands and ran down the aisle to the altar shouting, "We don't want to be left behind!"

There's very little about that cinematic experience -- or its more recent literary reincarnation in the "Left Behind" series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins -- that's comparable to Tom Perrotta's new novel, "The Leftovers."

Yes, there is a Rapture (or a Sudden Disappearance) that seems to fulfill the literalist readings of the New Testament by the Premillennial Dispensationlists. But there's no anti-Christ, no Mark of the Beast, no One World Order and no multi-year Tribulation.

There's just a bunch of people trying to make sense of what happened on Oct. 14 -- the day when about a tenth of the world's population just ... vanished.

» Most of those left behind struggle over how to go back to their Oct. 13 lives. (The U.S. president has to give a speech encouraging people to go back to school and to work in order to get the economy going again.)

» A large minority try to carve out a new identity and new purpose in an Oct. 15 world. (A local minister, so upset about having been left behind, begins to print a newsletter featuring all the dark sinful secrets of those who vanished.)

» And a small number dedicate themselves to actively disrupting anyone from ever being able to move on to the next stage of grief. (The members of a new religious organization, the Guilty Remnant, dress themselves in all white, take up smoking again and stand silently as "living reminders of God's awesome power" and how "his judgment is upon us.")

But the situation is made all the more confusingly random because Perrotta's Rapture is utterly ecumenical -- taking as many "Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and atheists and animists and homosexuals and Mormons and Zorastrians" as born-again Christians.

As the narrator writes of the television coverage after the disappearances, "There were so many different levels of fame, and they all kept getting mixed together -- the nerdy guy in the Verizon ads and the retired Supreme Court Justice, the Latin American tyrant and the quarterback who'd never fulfilled his potential, the witty political consultant and that chick who'd been dissed on The Bachelor. According to the Food Network, the small world of superstar chefs had been disproportionately hard hit."

Given the novel's fixation on a specific date, "The Leftovers" could be shelved nicely alongside Jonathan Safran's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," Amy Waldman's "The Submission" and Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland" as Perrotta's attempt to make some fictional sense of Sept. 11 in a Sept. 12th world. But it's equally well placed alongside Kevin Brockmeier's recent novel, "The Illumination," in which every human being's pain suddenly starts to manifest physically as such a bright light that doctors have to start wearing sunglasses.

And if Perrotta's "The Leftovers" ever gets made into a movie, I can only hope the filmmakers match the quality of the adaptations of his other novels, "Election" and "Little Children," and manage to leave "A Thief in the Night" far, far behind.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

A child of 9/11 finds family and home in Iowa City

Originally printed Sept. 11, 2011.

Kahleb Fallon's first memories aren't of his mother's bright red hair.

They're not of the big grin his mother wore every day or of her biting wit.

That's because Kahleb's mother -- 23-year-old Jamie Lynn Fallon -- was working in the Pentagon as a storekeeper third class on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. She was one of the 184 people who lost their lives after a hijacked Flight 77 crashed into the building.

Kahleb was 7 months old at the time.

Yet Kahleb's early memories are happy ones.

They're memories of jumping on cardboard boxes and sledding down hills at his grandmother's house in Virginia -- the house he called home until he was 5.

They're memories of coming to Iowa City to visit his mother's older brother, Mike, and wife, Cornelia, and of playing with his newborn cousin, Amelia.

And they are memories of moving to Iowa City and spending the next five years becoming part of a new family, a new neighborhood and a new community.

Now 10, Kahleb said he no longer remembers a time when he didn't call Uncle Mike "Dad" and Aunt Cornelia "Mom."

A 'normal' childhood

For the past five years, Mike Fallon and Cornelia Lang have worked to provide as normal a childhood as possible for their nephew, now son, Kahleb.

And while there have been challenges along the way, they've largely succeeded.

Kahleb is an energetic, athletic fifth-grader who enjoys playing soccer on his Kickers team every bit as much as he enjoys trying to outwit his classmates on the chess club.

"He's so energetic and involved," said Zac Wedemeyer, director of Taproot Nature Experience, "that he helps make my job as a nature teacher much easier just by his being there."

Kahleb said he doesn't remember explicitly telling his friends about how his birth mother died, but many of them already know. Mike and Cornelia have shared the story with several of their neighbors, and each year they take time to meet with Kahleb's teachers at Mann Elementary to make sure everyone understands his back story.

That has been important because Kahleb, especially early on, would mention his birth mother at unexpected moments. When a teacher would hold up cutouts during a lesson on shapes, for example, Kahleb might raise his hand and say, "That's a pentagon. I know that because my mom died in the Pentagon."

Explaining 9/11

Kahleb's understanding of his mother's death has evolved over the years.

At first, it was just a 7-month-old's wordless sense of loss over the absence of someone so familiar.

"After the event, he used to get really excited whenever he saw people with red hair," said Kahleb's grandmother, Pat Fallon, who was his guardian from 2001 to 2006.

Pat said she was very clear with Kahleb that his mother had died. After he started asking more questions, she then explained that his mother had died in the Pentagon after it was hit by a plane.

But it wasn't until earlier this year that Mike and Cornelia decided to tell Kahleb that the plane crash hadn't been an accident -- that someone intentionally had crashed the plane into the Pentagon.

After that revelation, Kahleb began to ask more questions about "the event." And when he saw an age-appropriate book about 9/11 at the library, he checked it out and had Mike read it along with him.

"I had a lot of questions after reading it," Kahleb said.

No claim made

One question Kahleb doesn't ask very often -- at least for now -- is, "Who is my biological father?"

The answer, like much about Kahleb's life, is complicated.

Jamie, following in her father's footsteps, joined the U.S. Navy in 1996. After four years abroad, she returned stateside and was assigned to the Pentagon. When she became pregnant, the Navy allowed her to move in with her parents in Woodbridge, Va.

Pat was understandably curious about the identity of Kahleb's father, but she said Jamie was a very private person and never referred to the two possible fathers by anything other than first names.

After "the event," everyone in the family felt it was in the best interest of Kahleb for the grandparents to become guardians. So Pat and her husband -- also named Mike Fallon -- worked with Navy lawyers to take the necessary steps. They placed ads in newspapers stating that anyone who wanted to make a paternity claim for Kahleb needed to come forward.

In the past 10 years, no one has made such a claim.

Good kind of inevitable

Even in the midst of everyone's grief over Jamie's death, a plan for Kahleb's well-being seemed to form early on.

"It felt very inevitable," Cornelia said, "but a good kind of inevitable."

During Jamie's funeral, for example, Cornelia was the one who looked after Kahleb while the Fallon family focused on their mourning. She then found herself in the same position a few months later when the elder Mike Fallon died of cancer in early 2002.

"As I was holding him, I started thinking, 'We're going to wind up with this kid,'" Cornelia said.

Over the next few years, Mike and Cornelia focused on developing their relationship -- moving to Iowa City, marrying in 2004 -- and visiting Kahleb regularly.

Once the couple had Amelia in 2005, they decided they were in the position to offer Kahleb a new home and a new family in a caring community.

Pat also knew that her time as Kahleb's guardian would be limited.

"At 60, I knew I probably didn't have the energy or the effort of will to raise him beyond the time he was 5," she said.

So after Kahleb turned 4½, Mike and Cornelia began a series of visits over the next year until Kahleb made the permanent move to Iowa City on July 4, 2006.

Rejoining the 9/11 community

Because Mike and Cornelia had not been involved with Kahleb's day-to-day care until 2006, they didn't deal directly with the government programs and officials designed to help the families of 9/11 victims. And for the past five years, they haven't reached out to connect Kahleb with the largely East Coast-based organizations and resources for the "Children of 9/11."

But Mike decided to make some inquiries earlier this year about the 10th anniversary events. And once connections had been reestablished, Mike and Kahleb were invited to travel to Washington, D.C., to participate in today's commemoration ceremony at the Pentagon.

"I think we're finally ready to join the 9/11 community," Mike said. "It's kind of like Kahleb's coming out party. His quinceañero, if you will."

Mike said his expectations for this weekend are high.

"After so many years of drifting and suffering, I'm hoping for some healing in my family," he said. "I'm hoping this will touch (Kahleb) on a deep level. That he'll feel something powerful. Something all his own."

Kahleb said he's excited to tour the Pentagon and to see where his mother worked. But he's most excited to go to a Washington Redskins football game today and to get to walk out on the field with other family members of 9/11 victims.

As of Tuesday, however, Kahleb said he didn't know what he was going to do when he visited the bench dedicated to his mother as part of the Pentagon Memorial.

Cornelia said she knows this weekend is a time of healing for the Fallon family. And she also knows Kahleb will be better able to connect with this new community if he doesn't have the distractions of a 6-year-old sister and 1-year-old brother tagging along.

But part of her still wishes she had been able to go to Washington, D.C., this weekend.

"It would have brought everything full circle," she said.

It would have brought everything back to the moment she sat at Jamie's funeral with Kahleb in her lap and -- amid the chaos -- felt the future starting to come into focus.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at a jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

Reflecting Dean Young's poetry

Originally printed Aug. 30, 2011.

"Of course I have written a poem by Dean Young," Dean Young supposedly writes in the poem, "A Poem by Dean Young," featured in his 2002 collection, "Skid."

"More than once I have written a poem by Dean Young," the poet continues. "More than once I have left them by your gate. / More than once I have stuffed the eucalyptus leaves / in your mouth. More than once I have lived, / more than once I have died because of it."

The only problem is that the poem really wasn't by Dean Young. According to the endnotes, the poem was by Mary Ruefle, and a companion poem ("A Poem by Mary Ruefle" written by Dean Young) can be found amid Ruefle's works.

It's entirely possible, in fact, that you too -- Press-Citizen reader -- may have written a poem by Dean Young.

If so, you'll know because you'll start hearing "time's winged whatchamacallit" while you vacuum.

You'll know because you'll bemoan how you "don't / have that house anymore across from the graveyard / and its black angel."

You'll know because you'll try to roll the everyday image of a dog tied to a parking meter together with the theoretical "curve in the continuum when space becomes time and time becomes a big / bowl of grub" -- and then you'll try to encapsulate the experience within the single word, "Zypxtflo."

You'll know because your poems will be wildly misunderstood: "At the Center / for Useless Experimentation, my poem / about sick swans went over big although / no one caught that it was really about / Keats's tuberculosis."

You'll know because John Keats will keep popping up.

You'll know because you'll start noticing "the word roses lurking inside neurosis" and start recognizing that "every word is a euphemism."

You'll know because you'll start wondering whether "poetry is all just artifice / devices, hoax, blood only there / to rhyme with mud."

But you really won't know for sure unless a host of other poets -- including James Galvin, Mark Levine, Cal Bedient, Robyn Schiff, Christopher Merrill and Jan Weissmiller -- start reading your poems aloud at 7 p.m. Wednesday in Prairie Lights as part of a benefit for the real, flesh-and-blood Dean Young.

The Dean Young who has made a career expressing his social outrage through surrealistic comic excess.

The Dean Young who taught in the Iowa Writers' Workshop and whom fellow poet Tony Hoagland calls "a critical nucleotide in the DNA of American poetry."

The Dean Young who was born with a heart defect, who had a heart transplant operation earlier this year and who, unfortunately, continues to face a daunting $50,000 in annual out-of-pocket medical bills that aren't covered by his insurance.

Dora Malech, a workshop graduate who identifies Dean Young as her mentor and friend, said she got the idea for the event after participating in a similar benefit reading for Young at the University of California, Berkeley. She also said she doubts whether anyone else could write a poem by Dean Young.

"Perhaps there are a lot of reflections of Dean out there," Malech said, "but the heart of Dean's voice is so singular, it would be impossible to really imitate. Anytime time I see a little bit of Dean in my poetry, I'm nothing but happy."

Various "reflections" of Dean Young will be available for sale, auction and drawing Wednesday. Joseph Patrick, a University of Iowa professor emeritus of Art and Art History, has donated drawings of Young. Shari DeGraw of Empyrean Press has printed a letter-press broadside of an unpublished, post-operative poem by Young. And the UI Center for the Book will be offering copies of "Original Monkey," a chapbook that includes Young's poetry and some of his original artwork.

The benefit reading will be streamed live on the Writing University site at www.writinguniversity.uiowa.edu. And all the money raised will be donated to Young's care through the National Foundation for Transplants, www.transplants.org/donate/deanyoung.

But don't expect a lot of warning for when Wednesday's reading -- or the reception afterward -- closes down.

As Dean Young himself has observed, "Zypxtflo. Zypxtflo. / The truest endings are abrupt."

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com .

Hoover's book stands out

Originally printed Aug. 6, 2011.

At a time when Republican presidential hopefuls are coming to Iowa to beef up their family values credentials, the great-granddaughter of Iowa's own President Herbert Hoover is calling on her fellow conservatives to stop demanding litmus tests and pledges and to start opening up the party to the next generation.

In "American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party," Margaret Hoover -- one of Bill O'Reilly's "culture warriors" -- expresses a timely message that stands out against the many diatribes passing for books on politics and current events these days.

Yes, her subtitle is partisan-focused, but it doesn't excoriate readers who might dare to disagree with it. (And that's a good thing because Hoover -- an active supporter of same-sex marriage and other "freedom" issues -- is going to have her share of critics from both the right and the left.)

Even more impressively, rather than divide the American political universe into an us-against-them face-off, Hoover actually acknowledges that there are more than merely two sides to every political story.

"American Individualism," for example, provides a field guide to "the various tribes of the conservation nation." Hoover's list includes:

» Economic libertarians and "Starve the Beasters."

» Social conservatives, seekers, spiritualists, traditionalists, the Bible Belt and the Religious Right.

» Old-world orderists, paleo-cons and anti- communists.

» Freedom and national security conservatives and neo-cons.

» Tea Partiers, Dittoheads, Mama Grizzlies and other populists.

» Crunchy-cons and Enviro-cons.

Hoover places herself amid the tribe of western conservatism, which she describes as "individualism tempered by responsibility for the community; a predilection for limited federal government, lower taxes, the entrepreneurial spirit and individual initiative; and an appreciation for the exceptional idea of America."

And not surprisingly, it's a tribe that shares many qualities with Ronald Reagan, the last leader who was able to keep the conservative coalition together.

According to the 34-year-old Hoover, that coalition now needs to fixate less on finding some sort of conservative purity and focus more on expanding to include more members of the Millennial Generation -- the 80 million Americans born from 1980 to 1999.

And there's no time to lose, she writes. Political party identification usually hardens after voting in three presidential elections. And because the millennials came out slightly in 2004 for John Kerry and then 2-to-1 in 2008 for the promised post-partisan politics of Barack Obama, Hoover thinks the Republican Party really has only one more shot to prove its relevance to the next generation.

The good news from Hoover, however, is that she also thinks the Republicans actually have a shot because so many millennial voters think Obama has failed to live up to his campaign rhetoric.

"On a range of issues," Hoover writes optimistically, "such as the relationship between the individual and government, or the appropriate rates of taxes and of government spending, or how much government regulation is necessary, millennials are decidedly not liberal."

The problem, she continues, is that the millennials "are passionate about expanding individual freedom" to such a degree that even the more fiscally conservative of them tend to tune out a Republican Party that is on the wrong side of history when it comes to social issues.

Through its opposition to same-sex marriage and its many calls for overturning of Roe v. Wade, she writes, "the Republican Party has violated a core premise -- that it is the party of individual freedom -- and by doing so, it jeopardizes its own future and that of the country."

Hoover doesn't believe in attaching the RINO label (Republican in Name Only) to anyone. And because the millennials tend to agree with her dislike of such labels, she argues again that the party needs to become the Big Tent it once was under Reagan rather than a party full of litmus tests and pledges seeking some narrow and parochial version of conservative purity.

"The RINO hunters have it backward," Hoover writes.

Hoover looks to her great-grandfather -- and his 1922 book "American Individualism" -- to help focus her thoughts on the "American psyche" and how it has changed over time. She then describes what conservatism, viewed through the lens of American Individualism, has to say about the deficit (which she describes as "generation theft"), a new Republican Feminism (which she shows is not an oxymoron), abortion (for which she tries to balance a pro-life and pro-sex perspective), education reform, conservation, immigration reform and other issues.

There are plenty of moments in this book in which I disagree strongly with Hoover. And I get frustrated with how she admits that important cultural changes have taken place, but then goes on to discount (occasionally denigrate) many of the people who made them happen.

But I enjoyed having Hoover, as an author, give me room to disagree with her. And I look forward to watching how her message resonates politically in her great-grandfather's home state.

She'll be signing copies of "American Individualism" today as part of Hoover Hometown Days in West Branch. For a schedule of events, visit www.hooverassociation.org/newsevents/hooverfest.php.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Two books worth rescuing

Originally printed July 28, 2011.

When we checked in with Rescue Press this time last year, the Milwaukee-based organization was celebrating its inaugural book offering: "The Smaller Half," a collection of poetry by local Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate Marc Rahe.

Managing editor Daniel Khalastchi and editor-in-chief Caryl Pagel -- both Workshop graduates -- said Rescue Press came about because the more they spoke with their writing colleagues and students, the more they realized there are more good writers out there than there are publishers to print them.

"It's so difficult to get good work into print," Khalastchi said. "There's really a state of emergency in print media. ... We're just trying to rescue the world from the absence of pieces of literature."
In the past year, Khalastchi and Pagel have managed to rescue a few more books from non-existence, the most recent being:

» Andrea Rexilius' poetry collection, "To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation."

» And fellow Workshop graduate Madeline McDonnell's short story collection, "There Is Something Inside, It Wants To Get Out."

Rexilius's collection lives up to the "conversation" in its title. Not only do many of the poems explore the duality of mind/body, twinning and sisterhood -- including a whole section on "Sister Sutures" -- and not only does Rexilius include lengthy quotes from Martin Buber on the I/Thou relationship, but some of the pages feature prompt-like questions followed by so much white space that they all but require readers to respond with their own essay-length replies.

"One unifies by splitting the beginning of the other," Rexilius writes in one of the many poems titled "Essay On Sisterhood."

The three stories in McDonnell's collection are ever more worthy of rescue.

The first, "Wife," follows a 26-year-old graduate student named Wednesday who is having trouble telling her mother, a second-wave feminist professor who has written several articles on the the theme of "Marriage as Legalized Rape," that she not only has accepted a marriage proposal from an unacceptable History Ph.D. candidate, but also that she is actually toying with the idea of becoming "just a wife ... a bad wife, even."

"'Convinced as you are that I should never marry,' Wednesday once asked, 'why on earth did you give me a name that starts with "wed"?'" Wednesday asks, only to discover that her mother wanted to name her after Tuesday Weld, star of "Sex Kittens Go to College," but decided Wednesday was "more original."

The second story, "Physical Education," tells the story of a high school girl with cancer whose middle-age father begins to attend gym class with her. At first she is bemused, if not actually pleased, with his act of solidarity -- as she is with his insisting on praying for her even though he doesn't really believe in God. But his all-or-nothing competitiveness slowly complicates an already complicated situation.

The third story, "Trouble," tells a haunting tale of Lucy Penrose, née Burke, whose current pregnancy triggers unresolved memories of an unwanted pregnancy when she was 16.
As fellow Workshop graduate Kevin Brockmeier writes in his blurb, "(McDonnell) approaches the story as a hang-glider approaches the wind, bending herself to its movements."

Both recently "rescued" authors will be on hand to read at 7 p.m. today in Prairie Lights Books.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharsic@press-citizen.com.

Poems resonate best when placed in conversation

Originally printed July 16, 2011.


For several years now, the Press-Citizen has been committed to returning poetry to the pages of newspapers. Inspired by William Carlos Williams' observation -- "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there." -- our "Poetic License" feature invites everyday readers to respond poetically to current events.

Yet in her recent poetry collection, "Smith Blue" (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), poet and former Iowa City resident Camille Dungy finds that the news she reads in The New York Times and hears on National Public Radio has led her to a crisis of faith about poetry itself. That is, the worst events from the news -- from cluster bombs, to massive dyings-off, to the gruesome facts of a fellow poet's death -- leads Dungy to write poems about the inadequacy of poetry (or at least of some poets) to come to terms with the misery that people die in every day.

"This was meant to be / about love. Now there is nothing left but this," Dungy writes in the collection's long-titled first poem, "After Opening the New York Times I Wonder How to Write a Poem about Love."

Dungy bookends her collection with the throw-up-her-hands surrender of the introductory poem (although it's not a complete surrender because she's still using poems to discuss the limitations of poetry) and the slightly more optimistic tone of the final poem, "Maybe Tuesday Will Be My Good News Day."

In between, Dungy throws in a series of lengthy, clever, meaningful responses to poets that range from Adrienne Rich, to Gertrude Stein, to C.P. Cavafy, to Carl Phillips, to Philip Levine, to Ira Gershwin, to Phebus Etienne.

Dungy's longing to converse with poets past and present will serve her well at 5 p.m. today when she holds a joint reading with Shane McCrae, author of "Mule" (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010). In what's been billed as the "round robin" poetry reading session of the Iowa City Book Festival, each poet is to choose a poem that in some way connects to the piece previously read.

That poetic conversation should benefit McCrae as much as it will Dungy. After all, it's hard to imagine any of the poems in "Mule" as purely isolated texts. Read individually, each poem provides only the smallest hint of the themes of marriage/divorce, collaboration/division, racial identity and neuro-atypicality that swirl and develop throughout the collection.

Both Dungy and McCrae, although two very different poets, seem to understand that no poem is complete in itself. It always resonates more suggestively by being placed in conversation with other poems, other poets and other readers as well as with the news of the day.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson will be participating in the Iowa City Book Festival panel on book reviewing at 10:30 a.m. today in the UI Main Library.