It’s not a stretch for me to relate to this line, “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore?” It’s mostly a joke pompous people make, but in my case, since I used to live in Kansas, a mantra for building self-esteem. Miles from anywhere in Kansas you’d be hard-pressed to call some of the area “flyover territory” since very few planes even crisscross above. You can think about the place as either gorgeous or scary. I recall a lesson in landscapes roaming these remote rock-chalky “no-where” hills: either you find the space all about you terrifying, or relaxing. You discover if you like tight woods and small views, or long views and less forest. For myself, I’ve primarily inhabited a land known for topsoil and considered flyover territory. I’m reminded of a few words by Paul Gruchow, “the life that was prospering here when we arrived might have some instruction to offer us about how to succeed.”1 When committed to a place you learn to put the pieces together and thrive in hopes of devising an understanding of where you are. That’s my goal, here in Iowa, tending a life with topsoil.
An Iowa book publisher is a chuckle in NYC, LA, or London, sadly, even the Twin Cities anymore. A book coming out by a “writer” published in Iowa an oxymoron to their ears. Not-so-subtle digs proffered by a national media model implying regional uniqueness turns people into less thans. Less than < anything national, popular, or worthy of admiration. As if, here, where I live, we are simple, narrow, full of corn and beans, sunflowers, potatoes, or something like that, the details aren’t super important. It’s a continuation of the blind and narrow type of incursion that most of the US and Midwest have endured. Explore and exploit, enforcing grids, sections, and squares: the use of power to conquer and consume what’s deemed of value and then leave. It’s being done this very day, this very moment: our land, our water, our brains are being taken away. As though odes to Ozymandias, façades of ironic self-important ruins left behind: “Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” What was before; could be again, but the odds are very high.
I hear things like, “Oh my god I was in a small town in Iowa once and you didn’t even have to pay for parking. It was so quaint. It was just corn. I drove through and it was so flat… What do you even do?” Some 30+ years ago I found myself on the cusp of why and what I would do with my one “wild and precious life.”2 I went for place-based books and writing as my core (Ms. Oliver also wrote, “Tell me, what else should I have done?”) At once, then, I trod a path less taken, but simultaneously following the lead of prior talented Iowa and Midwestern authors and publishers before me.3 My choice caused me to crave (or maybe need) a self-sufficient life. Why make more money when you could literally earn more by simply not trying to make more money—sensical not Seussical—if you worked close to home and could walk then you didn’t need a car. Enjoy bird watching and movies are much less exciting; read and write in order to learn and discover. Appreciate natural light, not artificial light. Use bike trails and river paths to view and saunter the world intimately. Early on I also decided not to be a big small company, just small, with no answering services, employees, off-site office, or contractors. No debt reliance. I would not pretend to model my life on corporations.
I like to think I’ve listened well and mostly acted accordingly. It’s taken some fortitude and frequently avoiding the notion of being less-than to keep the pages turning here at world headquarters. So many people offer their ideas on how-to to run my company (life). I have been gracious but only taken what helped or had time for. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and spent some time wondering what was wrong with the boss 😊. I’ve trusted a single clear yes more than the many times I’ve said no. I do think part of it has been to use nature as a measure, or better stated: not being gullible to greed. The details have been sobering. Often generosity is a one-way street with detours, but on words I’ve continued. When I consider I’m a creative writer that likes trout and great blue herons; who randomly started publishing, I’d say it’s been going better than to be expected.
Back to this place. I live in a land that was, perhaps still is, one of topsoil. A symbol of the once-was turned “boomtown” through slow-motion gold rushes. They (who lack a love of metaphor) have and still are very much alive, and are panning us for resources, for nuggets of gold—all the while whispering, “we don’t care.” Our prairies were once prairie gold, not so much “wild” as we like to say, but “free.” It was a land hard to traverse. Weather taught us lessons. The oldest stories are rich, but most stories now have drifted toward a “company store” mentality, the priority of a select few tricking 99% of the people into believing what they need is provided by the very ones who most profit from them needing it. A sustainable model for some but for many it’s work seven days a week then giving it all back on Friday. Not very abundant, but hey, who’s got time to care.
Mark Twain wrote, of Tom Sawyer at the end of his book, “He plans to head out west immediately.” I grew up knowing my state of Iowa was as much a place to grow as a place to leave. I helped my mom plant tomatoes, knew to search for morels in the spring, smelled rhubarb in the dirt, settled atop a compost heap for warmth in the late fall, listened to winter silence but for the creak of snow beneath my booted feet. To intimately tend a land of topsoil is to learn the need for maintenance and restoration, but this has long been avoided. I once wrote a novella I subtitled Restoration Fiction.4 In Iowa, it seemed to me early on, the important people were either coming here to leave, or leaving as soon as they could. Working with what was left was vital.
Granted, I did this too. I left and was happy. But I also did the most radical thing I could think of after ten years away, I came back. A Wes Jackson type of game: what I called becoming a “new” native. Or as his book title suggests, I aimed at, ‘becoming native to this place.”
Matthew Fox said, and I believe it, “The environmental crisis is a crisis of the soul.” A beginner’s guide to gardening will tell you, in so many words, that topsoil is the key to healthy gardening (and environment and water and good health...). A skilled gardener creates loamy compost, letting worms and moisture, heat, and time work their natural course. Making topsoil. However, the system we declare to be feeding the world currently flings away an average of 5.2 tons of topsoil per acre every year. This part of living with topsoil is a backwards principle. A land of topsy-turvy. A good word that comes to mind would be, you guessed it, Crisis.
Iowa is where I tend words, hoping and praying they do not pollute or confuse. Iowa is a place that has never been what others wanted or thought it to be. My On The Road hero Jack Kerouac summed it up so wrong but sounded so good: “and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry.” A fairy tale of Peter Pan-style living. The long and the short of it is misdirection: overall-clad “plain folks” in carnival mirrors. American Gothic gone bad.
A bird evaporates in the sky right before your very eyes, twists we say, away. We’re being twisted and wrung out here in flyover country. Temptations of the company store are visible but always out of reach. We’re a wish and a dream, but also, real. Iowa is Deep Midwest, a Swine Republic, a horizontal life, a Road to Waubeek, a tallgrass conversation, a playbill for a sunset. We’re the heart of the heart of the country. We set apple pies on a back windowsill to cool off and a little kid named Timmy takes an uninvited bite because we’re cute like that. As the saying goes in poker, so it goes with life and place: "If you can't spot the sucker within the first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker." If you don’t know what I mean, reread the quote and remember that 5.2 tons of topsoil are being lost per acre. This is the Iowa people have turned us into. A fictitious gullible land where children are allowed to cry. What’s happening is not what the original word, Ioway, was intended to mean, but it’s what’s happening: I-away.
Finally. I was reading along in a book by Barry Lopez when I came upon the term, toujors une etrangere mostly meaning “always a stranger” and I thought, right. Geography. Place. Topsoil. Misgivings about even belonging to a place, when the place has more or less been altered away. He writes: “If a place is stripped of geography, and if geography is stripped of spirit, any destructive scheme for profit will fly.”5 This is a sentence, I admit, I read with unease. Cast the land of topsoil away, both literally and symbolically, right? Let’s send it to the Gulf rich with pollutants year after year and make the land’s spirit invisible. Doing this will create a place of nothing. A few of the symptoms are thinking summer-like days during the winter are a good thing; that a place is its resort spots—fuzzy on the surface, pain beneath the surface. Another symptom: always wondering what’s next, tending devices of artificial reality. Screens which are brought to you by the united corporations of greed and deception. Believing that the protective cover you put on your cell phone equals individuality makes you the sucker at the table. And herein is where I hoist my grand and scheming plan—my small-scale revolution if you will—the persistent, small, slow-motion goal of my mission statement6 here amidst my homeland of thinning topsoil are the words I consider shone upon by amber waves of morning light: “using the literary arts to better understand how we can best live in the Midwest.”
I’ll finish with this quote, as it really is a quote about what I do, and/or, what I battle against:
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”―George Orwell, 1984
My Ice Cube Press? I like to believe larger dreams have done less.
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Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, Roundup
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Letters from Iowans, Iowa
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Vicki Minor, Relatively Minor, Winterset
Wini Moranville: Wini’s Food Stories, Des Moines
Jeff Morrison: Between Two Rivers, Cedar Rapids
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John Naughton: My Life, in Color, Des Moines
Chuck Offenburger: Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger, Jefferson and Des Moines
Barry Piatt: Piatt on Politics Behind the Curtain, Washington, D.C.
Dave Price: Dave Price’s Perspective, Des Moines
Steve Semken, The Pulse of a Heartland Publisher, North Liberty
Macey Shofroth: The Midwest Creative, Norwalk
Larry Stone: Listening to the Land, Elkader
Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Buggy Land, Kalona
Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Emerging Voices, Kalona
Cheryl Tevis: Unfinished Business, Boone County
Ed Tibbetts: Along the Mississippi, Davenport
Jason Walsmith, The Racontourist, Earlham
Kali White VanBaale, 988: Mental Healthcare in Iowa, Bondurant
Teresa Zilk: Talking Good, Des Moines
from Grassroots
Mary Oliver
There really is a history of Iowa publishing: Alan Kornblum, Carroll Coleman, John Simmons, … and many many authors of course, Ruth Suckow, Jay Sigmund, Paul Engle…
Pick Up Stick City, River’s Bend Press
Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
Okay, I grant having a “Mission” statement is bit big businessy.
I once thought of leaving Iowa when I was younger, until I realized everything I loved was here. I try in my own small way to help my topsoil by planting native plants in my yard and by cultivating only ideas.
Nice post. I am often irritated by the disdain or patronizing comments from people on the coasts or large cities, but I also realize that it doesn’t matter. The truth is in the old quote “We have met the enemy and he is us.”