Harding: Not just tinkering around

Originally printed April 21, 2011.

Paul Harding's year as the reigning Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction ended Tuesday when the Pulitzer committee announced novelist Jennifer Egan as the 2011 winner.

In a phone interview Wednesday, Harding said he had noticed a drop-off in the number of the domestic appearances related to his award-winning debut novel "Tinkers." But he also has seen a ramping up of international interest. With several translations of "Tinkers" in the works, Harding already has readings scheduled in such international cities as Paris, Capetown, Hamburg and Dublin -- one of Iowa City's fellow UNESCO Cities of Literature.

"But how do you translate 'Tinkers'?" I asked. "It's so language-driven rather than plot-driven."

"Its language-based aesthetics actually help the translation," Harding said. "The translators aren't limited by trying to find just one corresponding word in the other language."

I'm not sure how international audiences will react to the very stylized and regionalized rural Maine setting for Harding's tale of a dying watchmaker, George Washington Crosby, whose final thoughts flash between his hospice stupor, the memories of his father, Howard, and memories of his unnamed grandfather. (Each generation, it seems, passes further into an almost mythic past.)

But those international audiences probably will have the same reaction that American audiences have. Those who love the book will really love the book. (They'll also love the Cinderella publishing story that makes "Tinkers" the first Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in 30 years to have been printed on a small press -- let alone on a small press such as Bellevue Literary Press, which is run out of New York University's School of Medicine

But that "love" only comes with a struggle. "Tinkers" is still a "literary novel" that makes far more strenuous demands on its readers than your standard book-club fare. Anyone expecting to whip through the slim, 192-page book is in for a surprise. In addition to the shifts in time and voice, the novel also is filled with fictional excerpts from centuries-old manuals on clock-making and horticulture as well as prose-poetic passages that often make sense only after multiple readings.

For most of the translations, Harding sees only the finished product. But some of the translators do check in with him periodically to ask questions about particular American phrases or to ensure they understand a passage correctly.

"The Italian translator wanted to get all the Latin in the book right," Harding said. "Which is interesting because ... well ... I was always just making it up. All those references to 'borealis.' It's kind of an ersatz fairy-tale Latin. But he wanted to correct the declensions and the conjugations ... and was somewhat shocked when I said, 'Do whatever you want.'"

Harding hasn't moved on from the characters and setting of his debut novel. Following in the footsteps of Marilynne Robinson and William Faulkner -- novelists he considers among his "literary aunts and uncles" -- Harding already is working on several stories and a new novel set in Enon, the town where much of "Tinkers" takes place.

The 2000 Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate also said he's not at all concerned about the so-called "sophomore curse." Having signed a two-book deal with Random House even before last year's Pulitzer announcement, he's confident his next book will be a worthwhile follow-up to "Tinkers."

And now that the spotlight is shifting off him -- even slightly -- Harding just might have enough time to finish that next draft.

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

Hale's "Bruno": Not just another ape novel

If you go to the University of Iowa Main Library and read through the 2008 thesis Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate Benjamin Hale submitted for his MFA, you'll see some flashes of the narrative power Hale unleashes in his debut novel, "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore" (Twelve, 2011).

You'll read a long-titled novella -- "If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day" -- that tells the story of characters who are overwhelmed by the sound and fury of their lives. You'll see Hale's fondness for weaving literary allusions -- especially direct biblical quotes -- into inappropriate situations. You'll see characters who can look beyond their immediate problems, turn their gaze to the nighttime sky and imagine the awe that filled their ancestors long ago.

And, yes, you'll read a lot of descriptions of sex acts -- sometimes disturbing, sometimes violent and sometimes unwanted.

But you won't hear the voice of Bruno Littlemore, the chimpanzee narrator of Hale's exhilarating new novel. You won't experience the 578 pages of first-person narration from a character critics are comparing to Vladimir Nabokov's Humbert Humbert ("Lolita"), Philip Roth's Alexander Portnoy ("Portnoy's Complaint") or the nameless narrator of Ralph Ellison's "The Invisible Man."

"Bruno was always a separate entity from the rest of my writing," Hale said in a phone interview Friday. "The book, the character and the voice were all the same thing. It was a persona that was a lot of fun to slip into."

Hale said the premise for the novel "slowly congealed." He was inspired largely by Franz Kafka's story, "A Report for an Academy," in which an ape named Red Peter presents a scientific paper on how he acquired language and became a 19th-century gentleman of letters. Hale wanted to see if he could write a book-length homage to Kafka's short character sketch.

Toward the end of his first semester in the Workshop, Hale had an "initial gush of inspiration" and wrote what now is the first 50 pages of the novel over a two-week period. He then wrote the last chapter of the novel and then spent the next three years trying to tie those two points together.

Although inspired by the Kafka story, Hale become aware of other talking ape novels over the course of writing: From John Collier's "His Monkey Wife" (1930), to Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael" (1992), to Will Self's "Great Apes" (1997), to Sara Gruen's "Ape House" (2010), to Laurence Gonzales' "Lucy" (2010).

Hale said he refused -- and still refuses -- to read those novels for fear he might become too influenced ("even retroactively") by them.

Instead, the first-time novelist immersed himself in research about the history of ape language studies. And that research included many trips to Great Ape Trust in Des Moines and long conversations with the few scientists who actually are involved in studies about animal consciousness.

As a result of all this hard work, the 27-year-old Hale was able to take the "absurd premise" that Kafka had worked over in just a few pages and stretch it into a "feast of narrative" about growing up in America in the 1980s and 1990s. The world of Bruno Littlemore a cartoonish world à la Dickens and Pynchon, but one that grows more disturbingly real over the course of the novel. And Hale manages to keep his long, divergent storyline in check through the contrast between Bruno's narcissism, charisma, overblown erudition and utter cluelessness.

The novel received a lot of pre-publication hype because of concerns over the complicated sexual and domestic relationship that develops between Bruno and Lydia Littlemore, the female scientist who teaches Bruno language and from whom he takes his last name. But Hale has worked hard to ensure that the relationship -- as well as the fits of violence that the encultured Bruno still remains capable of -- comes across as "natural" and "necessary" to the story.

In the end, "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore" tells us much less about the mystery of animal consciousness and much more about what it means to be human.

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

Lewis-Beck writing out of both sides of his brain

Originally printed February 22, 2011.

"What possessed you to think you could write a novel?" I half-kiddingly asked University of Iowa political science professor Mike Lewis-Beck in a phone interview last week.

After laughing, Lewis-Beck explained that his novelistic aspirations actually go back more than 20 years, back to when he wrote the first full draft of his newly published "Death Walks the Riviera."

Back in the late 1980s, Lewis-Beck was a fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. While there, he realized that the study center would make an interesting setting for a murder mystery. Modeling his style after the academic novels of David Lodge and stories of Richard Russo, Lewis-Beck invented a series of fictional murders in what he renamed the Calendal Foundation. He then imagined how the assembled scholars -- philosophers, sociologists, literary critics, pianists, historians, oboists and linguists -- would react to the killings.

"I would describe the book as a comedy of manner," Lewis-Beck said. "It's about how amusing academic, writers and artists are when you look at them from the outside. And I include myself in that list. We're a pretty funny crowd -- funny in both senses of the word."

Lewis-Beck said the writing process had been enjoyable, but he put the novel in his desk drawer when he got back to Iowa City.

He only got it out again after his wife, an adjunct professor of book design, asked if she could use the manuscript as a teaching tool for her students -- showing them how a book moves from words on a screen to a bound object of art that authors can hold proudly in their hands.

Expecting to cringe at the clunkiness of his 20-year-old prose, Lewis-Beck instead found himself impressed with a storyline and characters that he had put out of his mind.

He was pleased the novel was to be put into print, but he wasn't sure how his story would hold up under the critical gaze of some of his more literary-minded colleagues.

"I reached the point in which I said to myself, 'I'm not ashamed of this book,'" Lewis-Beck said. "But I was frankly worried that it wasn't good enough to show to people of that caliber."

The overall local response, however, as been quite positive.

Holly Carver, former director of the UI Press, says the book has a "gripping storyline, real-time dialogue and snarky insights into academic self-obsession."

Jim Harris, former owner of Prairie Lights Books, calls it, "Delightful, insightful, vengeful!"

And UI professor of English Garrett Stewart writes, "If academic thriller sounds like an oxymoron, that's because you haven't yet sampled this book."

Lewis-Beck will read from "Death Walks the Riviera" -- as well as be available to talk about novel writing, political science or a host of other topics -- at 7 today in Prairie Lights Books.

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

McIlrath trots out in style

Originally printed November 18, 2010

There a reason why J. Harley McIlrath's "Possum Trot" (Ice Cube Press, 2010) has such long list of blurbs from local writers: It's a book packed full of tightly written, powerful stories about Iowa. And luckily for local readers, "Possum Trot" lives up to such high praise as "an instant classic" (Stephen Kuusisto) and "an entertaining, timeless book" (Josh Emmons).

"If I was to tell you what Grandpa looked like," writes the narrator of "China," "I'd start with his Magnavox and then go to his La-Z Boy. Then I'd tell you about the Folgers can he spit in, and if you were still interested after that, I might think what his face looked like."

In that story, the narrator never really gets around to describing his grandfather's face, yet McIlrath still manages to flesh out the characters indirectly as he tells a story about why the grandfather's wife threw all of her expensive china into the creek before she died and why, even though years have passed, no one has dared pick up any of the pieces.

McIlrath primarily tells stories of the dirt roads and rural byways that most people never reach or that they travel only when they're tossing trash or participating in various illicit activities.

"My mom said that once the high school kids and town people left the city limits they acted like they were in the wilderness," writes the narrator in "Dirt Road," "like they thought nobody lived out there."

McIlrath writes about children like Mickey McDonald, about whom the narrator of "Micky's Dad" notes, "We all noticed how our parents doted on Mickey when he came over. Not doted, really, but treated him different. Gave him a little more attention than the rest of the guys. Our dads all tousled his hair and our moms all made sure he had everything he wanted. We didn't mind. We figured they was making up for his dad being crazy."

And while a few stories foray into more urban settings, McIlrath does so only to highlight the isolation, anonymity and mistaken identity that can be experienced by anyone, anywhere.

A few people have mistakenly described "Possum Trot" as a collection of essays rather than stories, but that's understandable given the authority in McIlrath's voice. It's hard to believe he didn't experience these events firsthand.

Many of McIlrath's paragraphs are so inviting, in fact, it's hard to fight off the temptation to read them aloud -- even in public places. That's why it's good McIlrath is in town to read them aloud at 7 tonight in Prairie Lights.

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

Frank Conroy, Tom Grimes and the writing life

Originally printed October 28, 2010.

About a month ago, novelist Tom Grimes felt a great reversal taking place.

After a post-class session at Texas' version of Iowa City's The Mill, the director of the Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University drove one of his students back to her car. And as he parked, she began telling him how worried she was that her work wouldn't live up to his expectations and how much she wanted to make sure she didn't disappoint him.

"She said, 'You know, the way you didn't want to disappoint, Frank'," Grimes remembered during a phone interview Friday.

Grimes said he suddenly was taken back to two decades earlier, when he was an MFA student in the world famous Iowa Writers' Workshop and he sat idling in car in the alley across from Prairie Lights Books, and he told his mentor, the late Workshop director Frank Conroy, of his fears about not living up to the praise that the older writer had heaped upon his application manuscript.

"What had changed was that she was in the passenger seat, and I was in the drivers' seat," Grimes said. "I now was the guy behind the wheel."

Grimes' MFA student knew all about her professor's past fears, neuroses and anxieties of influence because the novelist describes them so extensively in his new non-fiction book about the writing life and his long relationship with Conroy: "Mentor: A Memoir" (Tin House Books, 2010).

Grimes said the project began when he was asked to write an essay about Conroy's legacy for Tin House Magazine. After rereading Conroy's oeuvre, he submitted a section of the essay that described Conroy as a stand-in for Grimes's own non-literary-minded father. The editors didn't think the direction was quite right for an essay, but they urged Grimes to keep working on "whatever it is you've started here."

The result is a book that documents just how much -- or how little -- one writer can pass along to another. Conroy loved Grimes's manuscript and offered him a fellowship to focus the younger writers' time in Iowa City on finishing the novel, but the older writer never provided any close, instructive reading of the manuscript until after Grimes's agent secured a publication bid. And Grimes seems to learn as much about writing from reading Conroy's work than from anything Conroy did in an institutional capacity.

It's not surprising to learn that many of Grimes's students and colleagues have thanked him for being so candid and thorough in describing the humbling agony that come with wrestling with language -- especially for a workshop graduate who says his ambitions may have been stoked beyond his talents.

"They tell me, 'I'm glad to know I'm not alone,'" Grimes said.

Nor is it surprising that reviewers seem to disagree about whether the excruciatingly painful writers' life Grimes describes is:

• A difficult but rewarding process worth celebrating.

• Or a strange form of literary self-flagellation that only serves to exacerbate (rather than to exercise) a writer's depressive demons.

"I understand myself through the lens of failure," Grimes said. "A lot of people might say to me, 'You must be pretty happy. You're directing a creative writing program and publishing books. It's a great life.' Yeah, but the only problem with it is that it's my life, and it's not what I expected."

At its storytelling best, "Mentor" is a well-written tale that in which Grimes honors Conroy's own 1967 memoir, "Stop-Time," without at all seeking to imitate that ground-breaking book.

And even at its solipsistic worst, "Mentor" still is a book that, as Jayne Anne Phillips writes, "belongs on the shelf of every writer, every teacher, every reader."

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

Chang: Are poets taught or born?

Originally printed September 30, 2010.

There's an old New Yorker cartoon in which one student says to another, "They say, 'Write what you know.' But all I know is writing workshops."

Lan Samantha Chang knows about a lot more than just writing workshops.

As the daughter of Chinese parents who survived Japan's World War II occupation of China and eventually moved to Wisconsin, Chang has brought a Midwestern sensibility to her fictional accounts of Chinese immigrants in American society. The promise shown in her 1998 book of short stories, "Hunger," and her 2004 novel, "Inheritance," have earned her a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and host of other awards.

For the past five years, however, Chang has learned more about writing workshops than she -- or nearly anyone else -- would ever care to know. Having taken over as director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has been working to fill the very big shoes left by Frank Conroy, Paul Engle and a handful of other administrators/mentors over more seven decades.

That half-decade's worth of experience has given Chang ample opportunity to ruminate on what -- if anything -- writing workshops can offer to a developing writer or poet. She finds herself in a unique position to explore whether writers can be taught or whether writers just are. Whether there is a difference between learning to become a better poet and simply learning to write a few better poems.

And that's what makes Chang's latest novel, "All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost," such a brave and intriguing study of the creative life.

Set in Bonneville, the novel tells the story of one professor and several students in a fictional school of creative writing during the 1980s and then traces how their lives continue to intersect over the next three decades. Some go on to be celebrated academics and poets. Some go on to be stay-at-home spouses. Some go on to obscurity. But all continue to view themselves as taking part in the great poetic conversation.

Bonneville seems suspiciously similar to Iowa City -- complete with a fictional stand-in for George's Buffet. And "the School" seems suspiciously similar to UI's own No. 1 creative writing program in the nation. Even the professor, Miranda Sturgis, bears at least a superficial resemblance to workshop graduate and former professor Jorie Graham.

But the story that gets told in this slim, 200-page novel is about as far from navel-gazing meta-fiction as a contemporary author can be.

The poets in Chang's novel find no easy answers to the question, "Why did you write poetry?" But they do learn that their urge to write comes from the same source as the answer to the questions, "Why do we want to fall in love? Why do we pray?"

Chang manages to keep an anthropological distance between herself and her subject by focusing on the poetry half of the workshop's fiction/poetry divide. As she explains in her acknowledgements, her "interest in poetry and poets is that of an outsider." That perspective gives Chang the opportunity to describe poets -- "true poets," her characters would say -- as mercurial, near mythical beings.

(Former workshop fiction professor Richard Yates, in contrast, describes the workshop's faculty in far more earthy, petty and vindictive terms in his 1976 novel, "The Easter Parade.")

That perspective also allows Chang to avoid the more mundane, real-world implications of her abstract discussion of whether writing can be taught -- especially as the discussion relates to graduate programs funded by and housed in public universities. (Similar academic-political issues get raised and avoided in Tom Grimes's recent memoir of his workshop years, "Mentor.")

In the end, "All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost" is about much, much more than writing workshops. And the novel deserves a prominent place not only on that small shelf of novels set in fictionalized versions of Iowa City but also on the must-read list for anyone interested in becoming a better writer.

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

Baghdad , Ga.: Where the past is never far away

Originally printed September 27, 2010.

It's become commonplace to describe Mary Helen Stefaniak's "The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia" as one part Flannery O'Connor, two parts "To Kill a Mockingbird" and three parts "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night" (better known as "The Arabian Nights.")

After all, any story set in the Depression-era South and told from the perspective of a young girl ready to challenge the racial order can't help but evoke Harper Lee's classic tale. Add to that a Georgian setting with multiple references to cities such as Toomsboro and O'Connor's hometown of Milledgeville -- not to mention a few O'Connor-esque family names like Turpin -- and Stefaniak's characters come across as not-so-distant cousins to the people who populate "Revelation," "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Wise Blood."

But Stefaniak stresses that her characters -- although related to O'Connor's -- come from a very different side of the family. Her Georgia is a more secular and optimistic place than the "Jesus-haunted South" of O'Connor's overtly religious tales. And by deciding to add "The Arabian Nights" so prominently into the mix, Stefaniak gave herself the chance to tell a wider historical back-story.

In Stefaniak's novel, it's 1938 and life in Threestep, Ga., is never going to be the same again after Grace Spivey -- a WPA-funded elementary teacher -- arrives on the scene. Not only does she refuse to abide by the community's strict racial rules -- to the point of tutoring black high school students in the white elementary -- but Miss Spivey also introduces her students to the exotic allure of Iraq. She regales them with tales from "Arabian Nights" and discusses the incongruity of having a relatively new country carved out of an ancient land.

Transforming Threestep's annual spring festival into a "Baghdad Bazaar," Spivey turns the town into the "Baghdad, Georgia" of the title. But the results of her efforts prove to be as dangerous as they are enlightening.

Because Stefaniak tells the story primarily through the voice of 11-year-old Gladys Cailiff, readers find themselves on fairly familiar territory for the most of the book. Whether Gladys is describing her wide-eyed workshop of Miss Spivey, the movie-star good looks of her brother, Force, or the brilliance of her neighbor, Theo Boykin (a black teenager who even the racists recognize as the smartest person in town), she comes across as a compelling and authentic guide to her changing world.

But the novel's pace changes dramatically about two-thirds of the way through. In the midst of one particularly chaotic night, Gladys's older sister May -- who plays the role of the storyteller Scheherazade in the town's staging of scenes from "Arabian Nights" -- takes over the narrative directly and begins to weave her own series of stories.

Suddenly this novel about the late 1930s strives to explain the longer historical connections between America and the Muslim/Arab world. And suddenly this all-American tale in the tradition of "To Kill a Mockingbird" highlights how easily those connections can be drawn when they involve the descendants of African Muslims who were brought to the United States as slaves.

Gladys eventually resumes her narration and quickly explains what happens to the characters over the next 72 years. But Stefaniak has created a novel in which the past never seems far away -- even as her characters begin to use e-mail and websites to make sure that their story keeps being told.

Contact Press-Citizen Opinion Editor Jeff Charis-Carlson at 319-887-5435.

Reading provides a glimpse of Iowa City's future

Originally printed July 15, 2010.

The Iowa City Book Festival officially kicks off Friday night with a chance to dine with many of the authors participating in the weekend's events -- the dinner already is sold out. The festival then begins in earnest Saturday with a host of opportunities to meet with authors, filmmakers and publishers. And Sunday -- titled "A Day in the City of Literature" -- the readings move out from university settings and bookstores and in to jewelry stores, clothing shops, churches and museums.

But every great Iowa City-linked writer, poet and publisher had to start somewhere. And where the book festival offers an opportunity to celebrate the Iowa City's literary past and present, local residents have an opportunity tonight to observe a literary experiment in progress and perhaps to catch a glimpse of Iowa City's literary future.

Mark Rahe, a local graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, will read from his first book of poems, "The Smaller Half," at 7 p.m. in Prairie Lights Books.

Rahe is the type of poet who always notices "the entrances to homes / where a wheelchair couldn't go" ("Summer"). Who proudly announces, "I've signed the petition against me" ("Petition"). Who bemoans to a friend that he "would have responded sooner, / but they didn't allow smoking on the train" ("Dear Paul"). Who contemplates, "How the stretch is not yet a yawn / but yawn becoming" ("Outstretched").

And with titles such as "Hangover at the Family Diner," "There Are Cabs That Will Come Too Late" and "Felix's Helixes," Rahe's poems bear all the marks of a workshop graduate. Christina Mengert, in her review of "The Smaller Half" for www.constantcritic.com, lists those tell-tale workshop signs as: "(The poems are) slightly narrative, with the occasionally surreal image twisting our sense of time and place; (they employ) explosive, Donne-like openings followed by short, well-crafted lines, and an ending that lifts off the page as the poem gently but firmly settles into heavy silence."

It's not surprising, then, that "The Smaller Half" isn't merely the work of one workshop graduate; it represents the collaboration between three graduates. Not only is "The Smaller Half" Rahe's first book of poetry; it's also the debut publication of Rescue+Press, a Milwaukee-based operation run by workshop graduates Caryl Pagel and Daniel Khalastchi.

"We really felt that the book chose us and that it would give us a wide audience," Khalastchi said in a phone interview last month. "We approached Marc and asked him he wanted to help us get all this off the ground. And he entrusted his work to two people who had never done this before."

Khalastchi said Rescue Press came about because the more he and Pagel spoke with their writing colleagues and students, the more they realized there are far 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."

Although Khalastchi and Pagel so far have saved only one book from a non-print existence, Khalastchi said they are working to ensure that Rescue+Press isn't limited by their contacts and aesthetic preferences.

That's why the call for submissions on the press's website (www.rescue-press.org) reads: "We are interested in small collections of artwork, comics, compositions, essays, experiments, how-tos, interrogations, lectures, lists, manifestos, notes, outlines, poetry, procedures, questions, reviews, sketches, stories, technical prose, textbooks, travel writing and anything else that transforms us."

It's unclear what the future holds for either Rescue+Press or for Rahe's poetry. But the collaboration among Rahe, Khalastchi and Pagel is just one small, recent example of the many such presses and literary partnerships that have dotted Iowa City's history. Observing this present day example is an opportunity to watch a little bit of that history unfold.

Or, in Rahe's words, it's an opportunity to lift our faces and to open our eyes to "something carried in the cold / some trivia brought down from above / that gains weight as it approaches" ("Stray").

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

Dutton faces the risks of being 'Stranded'

Originally printed June 21, 2010.

"In Iowa City, there are Authors and there are authors," novelist J.T. Dutton wrote in a 2008 guest opinion for the Press-Citizen. "I mostly pass for the small 'a' kind, the kind you don't cross the street to ask an autograph of."

And Dutton should know. She lived in Iowa City from 2001 to 2008 while her husband earned his Ph.D. in the English department at the University of Iowa.

After arriving in town already armed with an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Dutton had to settle for writing only in the small amount of free time she found between teaching at Kirkwood Community College and parenting two small children.

As her husband was finishing his dissertation, however, Dutton decided to be more aggressive in trying to find someone willing to publish a revised version of her MFA thesis. After some initial disappointments, she eventually found an agent who suggested that her manuscript -- which featured a teenage deadhead narrator -- might be better suited for the young adult market.

After additional revisions that led her into some unexpected new directions, Dutton published her debut novel, "Freaked," with HarperTeen in 2009.

Dutton and her family have moved on to Ohio, but it was her time in Iowa that provided the inspiration for her recently released second novel, "Stranded" (also with HarperTeen). While spending many hours driving on the Highway of the Saints and other byways across the state, Dutton became fascinated with a landscape covered with fields and dotted with anti-abortion billboards.

That's when she got the idea of telling the story of a baby who was abandoned and left to die in one of those fields -- a baby that the surrounding community comes to call "Baby Grace."

As Dutton honed the plot, she not only needed to invent a small town (Heaven, Iowa) and an otherwise straight-laced teenage mother (Natalie Sorenson), but she also had to find an outsider to narrate the story. She eventually came up with Kelly Louise Sorenson, Natalie's cousin from Des Moines, who has to move back to Heaven to live with her grandmother and Natalie because of the Baby Grace incident.

As the town's name suggests, religious themes and symbolism are abundant in "Stranded." If you were to pitch the novel as a movie, in fact, you'd probably say, "It's 'Juno' meets 'Saved.'" But in "Stranded," the hyper-religious, small-town teenager (who seems straight out of "Saved") has her baby and leaves it to die. And the secular, amoral teenager (who seems straight out "Juno") not only provides the novel's comic relief but also serves as its moral touchstone.

"I preferred my conversations with (my Des Moines friends)," Kelly Louise says when her mother chastises her for some mild misbehaviors while helping to cover up Natalie's tragic mistake. "They were much more sane and inane."

Kelly Louise's constant wit and confusion helps Dutton undercut her storyline's potential for melodrama. Not only is Kelly Louise named after Tina Louise, the actress who played Ginger on "Gilligan's Island," but Dutton also has endowed her with observational commentary as sharp and dark as anything the screenwriters could provide for high schooler Buffy Summers in TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

"When we reached the door and the sun streamed in, my eyeballs just about fell out," Kelly Louise observes while trying to navigate Heaven High School. "I wondered if my sunglasses had enough UV protection to help me deal with all the shining judgment. My guess was likely not."

And after losing her own virginity to one of the town's bad boy characters, the narrator accurately observes, "He and I were both in the same seminaked state, partners in our universal insignificance to God, who had dropped the ball in letting a tragedy like Baby Grace take place."

Dutton clearly is taking a big risk by writing a young adult novel that deals unabashedly with issues such as teen pregnancy, infanticide, religion, homosexuality and the underside of small-town values. But she also has read enough authors -- of both the capital "A" and small "a" varieties -- to know that good stories don't reinforce boundaries; they break through them.

"The publishing industry has been often blamed for putting dollar bills ahead of aestheticism," Dutton wrote in her 2008 column, "but I discovered some of the books that are getting published for teens are groundbreaking and complex. True, some indulge in happy endings, gossiping girls, traveling pants, boys with attractive smiles and double lives as vampires, but others are by writers who have crossed from the adult trade into the youth market in order to produce material that is bound to influence and be echoed in prose to come."

"Stranded" definitely belongs in the latter category.

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

Feeding on reality hunger

Originally published April 7, 2010.

It's hard to know where to place David Shields' latest book, "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto."

Chocked full of pilfered words of wisdom from other artists -- such as "Art is theft," from Picasso and "Good poets borrow; great poets steal," from T.S. Eliot -- "Reality Hunger" seems either an attempt to update the commonplace scrapbook for the era of YouTube and reality TV or a literary throwback to a time when writers could steal freely from one another without being labeled as plagiarists.

Divided into a primer that has nothing to do with the alphabet, "Reality Hunger" makes the argument that, in today's cultural environment, works of straight fiction or straight fact are just not as compelling as works that explore the complicated intersections between fact and fiction.

"My misreading of David Remnick's New Yorker profile of Bill Clinton as the first page of Miranda July's short story was more interesting to me than the story itself," Shields writes.

Following (and stealing from) Nietzsche -- "It is my ambition to say in 10 sentences what everyone else says in a whole book" --Shields distills his arguments into 618 pithy points that range from one-sentence aphorisms, to short essays, to reading lists long enough to fill entire college semesters.

The result is not unlike reading the long list of blurbs that fill the dust jacket. A host of famous writers testify to how "Reality Hunger" is a "pane that's also a mirror." How it is a book that "tells us who we are and why we read." How it "has goosed the zeitgeist." How Shields daringly has combined "montage and essay" to produce a work of "imperious, comic, menacing," "playful, forthright, devious" "argufication."

But even with all the high praise, it's still hard to know how to evaluate Shields' utter dismissal of the straight fiction novel -- especially given that Shields is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is the author of "two linear, realistic novels and dozens of conventionally plotted stories."

Take Shields' 1984 college basketball novel, "Heroes," for example. Published a few years after Shields graduated from the workshop, the linear plot involves a fictional take on the business of college basketball in a thinly fictionalized River State University in River City, Iowa. The storyline raises real and historically appropriate questions about the exploitation of "student-athletes" in college sports -- as well as questioning about whether local sports reporters should be cynical journalists or just knowledgeable fans. But reading "Heroes" would not be enough to abate the 21st-century reality hunger Shields describes today.

"Perhaps under the influence of the Iowa Writers' Workshop," Shields writes in Section 513, "which when I was there in the late 1970s was a citadel of traditionalism (as, for that matter, it still is), my first novel couldn't have fit any more snugly inside the rubric of linear realistic novel and is the only book I've written that is pretty much whole-cloth invention. But I wanted to write a book whose loyalty wasn't just to art but to life -- my life. I wanted to be part of the process, part of the problem."

Yet Shields' arguments still should be received well in Iowa City. He quotes often and approvingly from University of Iowa nonfiction professor John D'Agata (author of "The Next American Essay"). And he hails former workshop director Frank Conroy's "Stop-Time" for how it deliberately undermines "the traditional and largely spurious authority of the novelist" and for how it narrows "the gap that exists between fiction and autobiography, a gap that is artificial to begin with."

To hear more about non-existent gap, come listen to Shields read at 7 p.m. today in Prairie Lights Books.

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

'After the Workshop' and Iowa Cities of fact, fiction

John McNally just keeps coming back to Iowa City.

The lived city

He first came to town in the late 1980s for his two years of study in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. During a phone interview Monday, he said although he had "mixed feelings" about his time in the workshop -- especially because he viewed himself as being on the bottom rungs of the Workshop hierarchy -- he "really liked the town." In fact, McNally said he considered Iowa City in the 1980s to be the "perfect size" for a town.

After graduation came Ph.D. studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and marriage. But then in the mid-1990s, McNally decided to move back to Iowa City for "sentimental reasons." After persuading his wife to make the move, he re-entered Iowa City's creative economy as yet one more well-degreed writer who couldn't find job that paid well enough that it didn't require finding a second, third -- sometimes fourth -- job to make ends meet.

"I wanted to move back, but it was a different experience," McNally said. I didn't have a purpose there."

And to add insult to financial injury, one of the many jobs McNally had during the 1990s was as a media escort -- the local contact who works with publishing houses to make all the arrangements for shuttling authors from the Cedar Rapids airport to their readings at Prairie Lights.

Most of the authors were fine, McNally said. They were happy for the ride and for the conversation. But McNally said the publicists -- especially those from New York -- seemed to take joy in reminding him that his time, his schedule and his needs were utterly unimportant.

"They had this sense that, because they were sending these authors to me in Iowa, that I was some hayseed," McNally said. "There was a lot of condescension."

The remembered city

McNally eventually moved on from Iowa City and established himself as an author who sometimes needs his own media escort. He has published short story collections ("Troublemakers" and "Ghosts of Chicago"), a collection of interconnected stories that got marketed as a novel ("The Book of Ralph") and a novel pulling from his experiences scoring standardized tests in Iowa City ("America's Report Card"). He also has co-edited a number of short-story anthologies on topics that range from super heroes, to high school, to baseball, to humor writing, to college, to infidelity.

After moving from Iowa City a decade ago, McNally is returning again for his new novel, "After the Workshop," which provides a satiric take on his experiences as a media escort. The novel's narrator, Jack Hercules Sheahan, is a workshop graduate who showed early promise (published in the New Yorker and in a "best of" anthology) but who never makes it out of Iowa City. Instead, he stays in town and lets his unfinished manuscript gather dust in a basket in his apartment.

McNally said he places "After the Workshop" in the "dark night of the soul" genre, in which a protagonist undergoes a life changing experience in the space of a very short amount of time. In this case, Sheahan finally comes to terms with his writer's block, but only after he loses track of one visiting author, steals property from another author, is robbed by yet another author, reconnects with his ex-fiancée and has his neighbor decide to come out as a nudist in the middle of an Iowa City winter.

"I've been writing a lot of screenplays lately," McNally said, "which involves just throwing characters together and hoping that it all comes together in the end. ... I recently read a review that listed all the characters in the novel, and even I was amazed at how many were in there."

The result is a romp through the overlapping Iowa Cities of McNally's memory -- both the purposeless city of the 1990s and the perfectly sized city of the 1980s.

The fictional city

Rather than fictionalize his Iowa City as "Athens. "State City" or some variation on "River City," McNally considered the real names and places "so iconic" in their connection to the workshop that he couldn't change them.

"I just remember how I felt reading books like John Irving's 'The Water Method Man' or (W.P.) Kinsella's 'The Iowa Baseball Confederacy' when I'd recognize a specific street name ... or an actual address," McNally said. "I wanted that same experience for people who know Iowa City. To have that physical sense of where the characters are walking to and from. ... That sense of place becomes another layer of the novel."

McNally succeeds in capturing Iowa City as a big small town full of aspiring writers. His city is small enough that every trip downtown -- or to the bar -- involves Sheahan seeing many people that he knows. But the city also is large enough that former friends and lovers, if their schedules are slightly off, can go years without bumping into one another.

The comedy of "After the Workshop" might lead readers to wonder which real-life writers and publicists McNally has been caricaturing.

"I really stick it to the publicists," McNally said.

But the author denies that he has written a "roman à clef" in which tries to disguise fact as fiction. Instead, McNally said his characters are based more on types of writers that people may know than on composites of the real writers he's been in contact with.

That answer not only seems a little disingenuous, it's begging to be challenged. Luckily, Iowa City residents can share their own ideas about where fact and fiction intersect in "After the Workshop" when McNally reads in Prairie Lights at 7 p.m. Tuesday.

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

Tim Johnston joining Iowa City literary history

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Jan. 27, 2010.

By Jeff Charis-Carlson, Iowa Cityscapes

After reading Tim Johnston's short-story collection, "Irish Girl," I spent some time watching my 3-year-old daughter sleep, imagining the teenager and woman she would later become. Johnston's stories are filled with similarly quiet moments in which characters remember what was and imagine what might have been.

But Johnson, an Iowa City native, always seems to catch his families at some moment after their relationships have become irreparable -- after the door has been kicked down, after a body has been dug up, after the charges have been filed, after the shots have been fired.

"To predict where objects in space are going you need to know where they've been," Johnston's narrator, Richard Gorseman, writes in "Lucky Gorseman." "All I knew at twelve was that a young man could show up one day and start shooting people in the head, and that that was reason enough to go back to Canada, to leave your husband and son to fight for themselves."

In a phone interview Monday, Johnston said he had his own "pet theory" as to why the stories in his Katherine Anne Porter Prize-winning collection are so "dark": Because his first novel, "Never So Green" had been published as a young adult novel.

"There's nothing wrong with that," Johnson said. "But at the time, I had labored on a novel I hoped would be appreciated by adults. It was, but it just wasn't marketed that way. ... And I guess I was really trying my damnedest to not write another young adult work."

While trying to avoid being pigeon-holed in the young adult section, the 1980 West High graduate still has some of his strongest narrative voices come from his teenage and pre-teen characters. None of Johnston's characters allow the author to wrap up his stories in neat and tidy epiphanies, but the adolescents seem particularly aware that they can't be trusted and that they're not being honest with themselves, let alone with the reader.

Johnston said he was always aware of his hometown's literary history. His mother, in fact, had taken poetry classes in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. But by the time he decided he wanted to be a writer and to start applying for MFA programs, he thought it was time to get out of town and go somewhere else. In his case, he went to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Yet Iowa City itself plays an extended role in "Lucky Gorseman." The shooting described in the quote above is none other than the Gang Lu shooting of 1991. Johnston said that he was back living in Iowa City at the time, but the story is told from the point of view of Gorseman as a 27-year-old in an creative writing class, who is remembering back to when he was 11 and when his physicist father, who happened to be in the bathroom at the time, barely escaped being killed by Lu.

"The story began having nothing to do with Iowa City," Johnston said. "Just a boy and his father traveling around."

Johnston said he wrote draft after draft without quite getting it right. But then he read an article about large-body objects in space and the potential for earth collisions.

"That struck a chord with me, and I began rewriting the story so that the father was a scientist," Johnston explained. "Suddenly I placed the scientist in Iowa City, and the random violence of a local nature seemed to connect with the violence of a celestial nature."

Because the 1991 shootings play such a small role in this story about a boy coming to terms with his father's imperfections, it's not likely to be compared to the other writings on the shootings, such as Jo Ann Beard's "The Fourth State of Matter" or Edwin Chen's "Deadly Scholarship." Nor is it a crass, insensitive exploitation of those tragic events, such as the 2007 film "Dark Matter."

But "Lucky Gorseman" and the other stories of this collection do show that Johnston now has become a part of his hometown's literary history.

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

Baker earns readers' trust with 'A Good Man'

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Nov. 19, 2009

Baker earns readers' trust with 'A Good Man'

By Jeff Charis-Carlson

Iowa Cityscapes

Last year, former Iowa City Councilor Larry Baker confided in me that he was working on a novel that he feared might be "too crazy" -- too much of a wild romp through American religious, political and literary themes.

Having been blown away by Baker's first novel, "Flamingo Rising" -- and having appreciated the many insights into Iowa City politics he provided in his second novel, "Athens, America" -- I asked if I could sneak a peek at the manuscript for this new novel.

After a few weeks -- and after being sworn to secrecy -- Baker finally agreed to e-mail me a draft of "A Good Man." He said he was hesitant because he wasn't sure if the novel was brilliant (an effective political and social satire of America between 2000 and 2008) or just self-indulgent prose by an English major. (Lucky for him -- and for me -- the novel was a lot of the former and had only bits of the latter.)

When reading "A Good Man," it gradually becomes obvious that Baker expects a lot from his readers. The main character, Harry Ducharme, is a late-night radio host in Florida who, in response to the tragedy of 9/11, begins preaching on the air. But it's a preaching that takes all of American literature -- rather than any specific religious book -- as its sacred text. It's a preaching that attracts the attention of Nora, the reclusive and enigmatic cooking show host who finally invites Harry into her inner social circle. And it's a preaching that begins to resonate with a new religious movement about to burst on the national scene.

Baker does a fine job telling Harry's story, showing how this middle-aged, functioning alcoholic tries to come to terms with his inner demons and eventually rebuilds his career and personal life. But Baker also interrupts Harry's fictional story with snippets from actual newspapers, magazines and blogs -- articles and columns that explore America's fascination with its home-grown religious movements. He also throws in historic vignettes that range from the Stonewall riots of 1969, to 9/11, to the 2008 presidential election.

And if all that wasn't enough for readers to keep in mind, Baker also offers "A Good Man" as a sequel to "Flamingo Rising." While it's not necessary to have read the earlier novel to appreciate "A Good Man," the new novel does answer many of the questions about what happened to those earlier characters after their chaotic summer spent in the biggest drive-in theater in Florida.

After reading the earlier draft, I told Baker that the novel was brilliant and exciting to read, but I agreed that it probably was all but unpublishable in today's literary marketplace.

Luckily, Steve Semken at Ice Cube Press disagreed with my assessment and decided to accept the publishing challenge. Baker then began to focus on showing how Harry's story ties together his many disparate themes.

In short, the final version of "A Good Man" comes across as the product of a tragic-comic imagination as religiously haunted as Flannery O'Connor's and as "this world"-oriented as a Harry Chapin song.

That's why it's important to know know that Baker lifted his main character straight out of an O'Connor short story that features its own blend of dysfunctional families, religious tent meetings and untimely death.

"If you want to see who Harry really is, read O'Connor's 'The River,'" Baker told me. "He was created by her, killed off and resurrected by me. Trust me, I think, it all makes sense."

Baker not only earns his readers' and his publisher's trust, but he also has attracted attention from filmmakers interested in documenting the process by which this book was written, published, marketed and received. Anyone who attends his Prairie Lights reading at 7 p.m. today should be prepared to ask a lot of questions and to smile for the cameras.

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Nov. 13, 2009

Our View - Starting to grow Iowa's Ciudad de al Literatura

Iowa City has well earned its prominent role in the history of American literature. And the city also has served well as a special gathering point where writers from around the globe can inspire one another as they learn more about America in the classrooms and coffeehouses of one over-educated, Midwestern college town.

But Iowa City also has begun to establish itself as a prominent location in la historia de la literatura estadounidense. Alongside the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the International Writing Program, a growing number of Spanish-speaking writers and poets have been coming to town and staying for much longer than a three-month residency.

Whether they are here to teach, to study -- or even for some non-academic purpose -- writers like Ana Merino, Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez and Roberto Ampuero are putting down roots in the community and are helping to establish Iowa City as a more dual-lingual City of Literature.

Local residents can experience a small sampling of this movement at 6 p.m. today when the professors and students in the University of Iowa undergraduate Spanish creative writing classes read from their work at Prairie Lights Books. The classes have been taken and taught by ex-patriots from Spain and Latin America, by American citizens who learned Spanish as their mother tongue as well as by Anglophones who are interested in a more personal and less academic relationship with the language.

"They say the best way to learn a language is to fall in love," said Merino, a UI associate professor of Spanish who moved to Iowa City just a few months ago. "Creative writing is like falling in love. It's a way to develop your skills for the emotional side of the language."

It's not surprising that the work produced by the students is a mezcla of the already fertile mixing of Spanish and English -- moving back and forth from Spanglish, to Espanglés, to more formally precise literary Castilian, to the modismos spoken in Chile, the U.S./Mexican borderlands and other places throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

Tonight's reading also is being advertised as an event "to celebrate the development of a future MFA in Spanish Creative Writing." But given the recent budget crisis in the state, the usually long process of a establishing a new graduate-level program has become even longer. It probably will be quite a while before Hispanophones come to Iowa specifically to earn an MFA in Spanish-language fiction, poetry or nonfiction. But the writers and scholars who are creating the groundswell support for such a program say they aren't going anywhere any time soon.

Instead, they'll be working hard to enhance their small but growing part of our very international -- and yet very Iowan -- Ciudad de la Literatura.

Visiting nonfiction writers

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Nov. 11, 2009

Visiting nonfiction writers

By Jeff Charis-Carlson

Iowa Cityscapes

Tonight the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program will host its final visiting writer for the fall semester: Gretel Ehrlich, the author of 13 books and the recipient of this year's PEN/Thoreau Award for "innovative environmental writing."

John D'Agata, UI associate professor of nonfiction, described Ehrlich as "a nature writer, but it's a nature writing that isn't sanctimonious. It's deeply felt, and even highly spiritual, yet it's also grounded in science and the diamond-sharp scrutiny of a naturalist."

Ehrlich will be the latest in a series of visiting writers the program is bringing in to help assure its students -- as well as to persuade the City of Literature at large -- that nonfiction writing is a creative process on par with fiction writing and poetry. Beholden neither to a journalist's commitment to veracity nor to the strictures of academic argument, the creative nonfiction writer is free to produce essays that allow readers to experience the world -- essays that can bridge the spiritual, the natural and the scientific.

As with visiting writer John McPhee earlier this year, Erlich offers local residents a chance to hear from a nonfiction writer who has helped to shape how the genre has evolved. Her first book, "The Solace of Open Spaces," especially has been hailed as a modern classic of nonfiction writing.

Erlich will read at 7 p.m. today in 101 Becker Communication Studies Building. In addition to the Nonfiction Writing Program, her reading is being sponsored by UI's English Department, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Provost's Office.

Fantasy, gaming: Not just for geeks anymore

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Oct. 16, 2009

Fantasy, gaming: Not just for geeks anymore

By Jeff Charis-Carlson

Iowa Cityscapes

In the 1970s and 1980s, author Ethan Gilsdorf used to play Dungeons & Dragons and read J.R.R. Tolkien. But when he went off to college, he put aside those childish things because he didn't want to be a geek anymore.

In the past few decades, however, "geek" has ceased to be a four-letter word. After the commercial success of the "Lord of the Rings" films and the Harry Potter industry -- as well as the huge popularity of World of Warcraft (nearly 12 million online subscribers and climbing) -- Gilsdorf started feeling confident enough to get out his old D&D gear and started getting hooked all over again.

But Gilsdorf saw a big difference between the face-to-face gaming he used to do in his friends' basements as a teenager and the virtual gaming that allows millions of people to interact through a variety of worlds in cyberspace. The experience lead the poet and writer to explore whether it was healthy for adults to devote so much time and energy to a fantasy world. The 40-something-year-old also wanted to see the long-term effects of game-playing on his pre-Internet compatriots.

So he decided to explore how the fantasy landscape has changed in the 21st century.

"I started with some prejudices," Gilsdorf said in a phone interview Thursday. "I couldn't imagine that online gaming could stretch your imagination like good old-fashioned, paper-and-pencil D&D."

Gilsdorf traveled the country and the world -- perhaps occasionally slipping into other worlds here and there -- trying out new gaming experiences. He also started interviewing people who build hobbit holes or who have spent years learning to speak and write in Elvish.

The result of all this exploration is Gilsdorf's newest book, "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms." In it, Gilsdorf manages to blend the best of cultural criticism, travel writing and memoir -- with some insightful Tolkien scholarship thrown in -- to provide some fascinating answers to his fantasy-driven questions.

"I've always hoped that the book would help debunk some stereotypes about the people who are into fantasy," Gilsdorf said. "(At a reading) just over the weekend, I had one girl who came up and said, 'I want to buy this book and show it to my parents so they can understand why I love this.'"

Anyone wanting to learn more about fantasy and geek culture -- both in this world and in multiple others -- can ask Gilsdorf about it face-to-face at 7 p.m. today in Prairie Lights Bookstore.

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

Caption(s): Jeff Charis-Carlson

Dana links poetry, politics and the everyday world

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Oct. 8, 2009

Dana links poetry, politics and the everyday world

By Jeff Charis-Carlson

Iowa Cityscapes

I think every public official -- especially those serving on boards, commissions and committees -- would benefit from reading Robert Dana's "Selling the Earth and Everything on It." The poem can be found in the former Iowa poet laureate's 2000 collection, "Summer," and Dana gave permission for the organizers of the 2008 Tallgrass Bioneers Conference to make it available online (http://gotoplanb.net/sellingtheearth.pdf ).

Although not everyone will agree with the eco-politics at the heart of the poem, far too many everyday readers will able to identify with the experience of standing before a government body in which "One council / member dozed; the other four / were glassy eyed; bored with / the arguments they'd disposed of / months before." Many readers likewise will agree readily with the poem's translation of a quote from Paul Valery, "Politics is the art of keeping / out of the process those who / will be most affected by it."

While "Selling the Earth" is more overtly political than much of Dana's work, it also showcases those poetic practices that Dana has been honing since graduating from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1954. With a fine appreciation for Midwestern plain-spokenness and for the mystery of nature, Dana manages to pull poetry out of otherwise mundane objects, people and relationships.

"And blessed be the pacemakers and the peacemakers," Dana proclaims in "Beach Attitudes," a poem included in his most recent collection, "The Other" (2008).

In his four years as Iowa poetic laureate, Dana enacted his inclusive poetic vision both on and off the page as he served as an energetic and engaging liaison between poets and the general population.

"He helped get the poet off the pedestal," said Mary Swander, who earlier this year succeeded Dana in the state's catbird seat of poetry. "He was a very gracious presence as a poet laureate ... and an extremely good role model for other writers. He had a demanding day job teaching all those classes (at Cornell College), but he kept writing all these great books of poetry one after another. He never slacked off."

Local residents can see the 80-year-old Dana read behind a podium -- though not on a pedestal -- at 7 p.m. today at Prairie Lights Books.

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

Do UI and Iowa City appreciate nonfiction writers?

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Sept. 29, 2009

Do UI and Iowa City appreciate nonfiction writers?

By Jeff Charis-Carlson

Iowa Cityscapes

"This is not an easy town to be a nonfiction writer in," University of Iowa professor John D'Agata told me.

D'Agata's observation was a small part of a meandering but still intriguing answer (what else would one expect from an essayist?) to a straightforward question about why the UI Nonfiction Writing Program decided to invite Pulitzer Prize-winning author John McPhee and longtime radio host Michael Silverblatt to come to The Englert Theatre tonight.

"The university doesn't celebrate the genre like we do poetry and fiction," D'Agata said. "Yet I don't have a single student who doesn't believe that they aren't creating literature."

With the nonfiction program separated from the Writers' Workshop, D'Agata said his students sometimes feel cut off from their fellow creative writers. And our local UNESCO-recognized City of Literature likewise downplays the accomplishments of the many creative nonfiction writers with Iowa City ties.

That's why the Nonfiction Writing Program has developed a new lecture series and invited a number of writers to help assure students -- as well as persuade the city at large -- that nonfiction writing is a creative process. Beholden neither to a journalist's commitment to veracity nor to the strictures of academic argument, the creative nonfiction writer is free to produce essays that allow readers to experience the world -- essays that strive to "enact the world."

"If the critic fails to prove his case, then his essay is a failure," D'Agata said. "For us, it's quite the opposite. There are no promises made. No guarantees that answers will be found or that problems will be solved."

Yet these writers still have something to say about topics that go beyond their personal experiences. That's why McPhee -- author of more than 30 books of nonfiction -- is an ideal big-name author to help kick off a lecture series about the craft of creative nonfiction writing.

"Most of the writers in this field who try to integrate a certain kind of research probably do use McPhee as a model," D'Agata said. "He was writing something different than the literary journalists, the gonzo journalists, the Hunter S. Thompsons. ... The style of his long-form narrative, which he models after fiction, proceeds less journalistically than processionally."

Because tonight's event will combine McPhee, as a pioneer of the genre, and Siverblatt, as an expert literary interviewer, it's sure to provide some good literary conversation. But we'll have to wait and see if the event does anything to help the residents of our City of Literature -- not to mention the university -- to better appreciate the full range of the writers in their midst.

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

Calling out your inner-nerd

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Aug. 22, 2009.

Nerds, geeks, dweebs and dorks have been warring for decades now. Although most people use the terms interchangeably, the few who proudly claim such labels usually draw very clear distinctions.

• Nerds typically show some degree of blending between intelligence, obsession and social ineptitude.

• Geeks usually show their intelligence and obsession, but are not necessarily socially inept.

• Dweebs usually show their social ineptitude and intelligence, but are necessarily obsessive.

• And dorks are obsessive and socially inept without being necessarily intelligent.

However you may fall on the nerd-geek-dweeb-dork spectrum -- and we all fall somewhere on it -- Prairie Lights Bookstore is giving several opportunities for some inner-nerd soul-searching this season.

• The fall reading list kicks off Sept. 2 with Benjamin Nugent, author of the "American Nerd: The Story of My People." In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls it "a charming and disarmingly serious study of the history of the nerd in popular culture and throughout modern history." Nugent moves beyond the expected sci-fi fandom to dismantle many of the Jewish and Asian stereotypes attached to the term. (Beware: Nugent also dismisses hipster nerds as posers who have co-opted authentic nerdiness for their own sake.)

• A geek-nerd summit of sorts can take place Sept. 14 when Nicholas Meyer reads from his new memoir, "The View from the Bridge: Memories of Star Trek and a Life in Hollywood."

Meyer reportedly wrote the best Star Trek film of all time -- "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" -- in a mere 12 days. And his involvement with several other Star Trek projects will allow him to provide interesting answers to questions from even the most obsessive fan.

• On Oct. 16, the spectrum moves beyond its American context when Ethan Gilsdorf reads from his study of fantasy role games played around the world, "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks." Fellow author A.J. Jacobs calls it "a delightful book -- more fun than being a Dungeon Master to a group of high-level mages and thieves."

• On Oct. 19, Lawrence Sutin, author of "Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick," comes to read from his new novel, "When to Go into the Water: A Novel." The short book is being described as "experimental fiction" -- Prairie Lights book guru Paul Ingram said it doesn't even look like a novel -- but Booklist calls it "quite accessible and drolly absorbing."

• And on Nov. 2, Prairie Lights will hold a celebration for the 50th anniversary of William S. Burroughs' still controversial novel, "Naked Lunch" -- one of the landmark publications in the history of American literature. The book was originally banned in many regions of the United States because of its "obscene" language, but it's gone on to become an important cultural touchstone for anyone who refuses to fit into the dominant, consumerist social order.

Although all the authors and poets on the Prairie Lights schedule will fall somewhere on the spectrum, these five readings will help make the denizens of our City of Literature uncomfortably aware of just how nerdy, geeky, dweeby and dorky we all can be.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com or 319-887-5435. A full list of readings at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., can be found at www.prairielights.com.