Volume XI Number 1 1

voices from the

A Publication Of Humanities Iowa • Volume XI, Number 1

Voices from the Prairie2

HI Board of Directors President Valentina Fominykh, Des MoinesVice-President Moudy S. Nabulsi, Fort MadisonSecretary Fiona Valentine, Sioux CityTreasurer Tim Johnson, WashingtonPast President Rosemarie Ward, Des MoinesDirectors Harry Brod, Cedar FallsMichael Carey, FarragutFaye Clow, BettendorfJudy Combs, BloomfieldThomas Dean, Iowa CityKate Gronstal, Council BluffsJanell Hansen, Elk HornTom Morain, LamoniNeil Nakadate, AmesBarb O’Hea, PeostaDick Ramsay, Spirit LakeMary Ann Reiter, OttumwaDorothy Simpson-Taylor, Iowa CityRalph Swain, Sioux CityTracy Vance, Fort Madison

HI Staff Christopher Rossi, Executive DirectorCheryl Walsh, Grants DirectorSusan Foster, Fiscal OfficerDana McGillin, Public Affairs/ Administrative OfficerMichael Knock, Program Officer/Editor

Mission StatementThe mission of Humanities Iowa is to promote understanding and appreciation of the people, communities, cultures and stories of importance to Iowa and the nation.

Humanities Iowa is a non-profit organization funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

About the Cover Iowa was the nation’s No. 2 wheat producing state through the Civil War. Here two men cut or “cradle” the wheat while the two that follow tie the grain into bundles. Photo courtesy of the State Historical Society of Iowa-Iowa City.

Voices from the Prairie is published three times a year and distributed to the friends of Humanities Iowa and interested Iowans. To subscribe please contact us:

Humanities Iowa 100 Oakdale CampusN310 OH Iowa City, IA 52242-5000 phone: (319) 335-4153 fax: (319) 335-4154 info@humanitiesiowa.org www.humanitiesiowa.org

It’s Good toBe Back!This is the first issue of Voices from the Prairie since Spring 2007. In our absence, we’ve made a few changes. The most obvious change is the new format that took us from a tabloid newspaper layout to more of a traditional magazine look. The change was made to update the look of the publication and to make it easier to read. Along with that change, we’ve upgraded the paper and added a distinct cover.

Humanities Iowa has hardly been idle in the absence of Voices from the Prairie. In the past year, HI added three new board members, Thomas Dean, Ralph Swain and Richard “Dick” Ramsay as well as two new staff members, fiscal officer Susan Foster and program officer Michael Knock.

Nor has HI programming stopped. This fall HI has partnered with Trees Forever to sponsor the ninth annual Iowa Writers’ Celebration: Voices from the Prairie on Sept. 23 at 7 p.m. at Hoyt Sherman Place in Des Moines. This year’s event featured the writers John T. Price, author of Man Killed by Pheasant and Other Kinships, and Debra Marquart, a poet and author of the memoir The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere. Voices from the Prairie readers can read profiles of each author inside this publication.

Also exciting is a new award created by Humanities Iowa to celebrate Iowa history. The Iowa History Prize, a biennial award of up to $90,000, will honor an Iowa history scholar and promote a general public conversation about the history of the Hawkeye state. A winner will be announced in November. Inside Voices from the Prairie, readers can learn more about the prize and listen in on a conversation about public history from three of the state’s leading public historians.

Let us know what you think about our new publication.

Michael KnockHI program officer and editor,Voices from the Prairie

Join other Iowans and become a member of Humanities Iowa. We offer a variety of membership levels starting at just $45. Benefits include the option of a subscription to Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Members also receive a subscription to Voices from the Prairie. Membership is tax-deductible, minus the cost of Humanities magazine, should you opt to receive it. The magazine has an annual renewal cost of $24. Humanities Iowa also accepts gifts of stock or securities. To become a member, make a donation or receive more information, please contact our office by phone or via our website.

Contents

Iowa History Prizepage 3

9th Annual Iowa Writers Celebrationpage 6

Flood Relief Initiativespage 10

Volume XI Number 1 3

not place the Civil War in the correct half-century; only 37 percent knew the Battle of the Bulge took place during World War II; and 57 percent of high school seniors flunked a basic test of American history.

Both Walch and Horton said that a big problem is the way history is presented to students. When history is just words on the pages of a dry textbook or facts and figures written on the board, it’s no wonder that people lose interest. However, when history is presented as dynamic and relevant, people find that they want to know more.

“When history comes alive, as it does on public television in the films of Ken Burns or in the popular works by David McCullough, the public responds,” Walch said. “The key to making history more appealing is to combine the best in recent scholarship with the skills of storytelling.”

That’s the point of the Iowa History Prize —to get Iowans to become curious about their past and to show them that their own state has an amazing story to tell. Because of that, Schwieder said she thinks it is important to find someone who is extremely knowledgeable and excited about Iowa history as well as someone who is able to communicate that knowledge and excitement to groups.

Anyone who has experience in the study of Iowa history will be considered. That means history instructors in Iowa’s universities, private colleges and community colleges as well as museum directors, librarians, high school teachers, and independent scholars can apply.

Applications will be evaluated by a blue-ribbon panel chaired by Humanities Iowa board president Dr. Valentina Fominykh of Des Moines. Both Walch and Horton will be on that panel along with Dr. Leslie Schwalm, an associate professor of history, women’s studies and African-American studies at the University of Iowa. Other members will include representatives from HI.

As for Iowa’s first elected governor, it was Ansel Briggs. For the rest of Iowa’s story, hopefully the Iowa History Prize winner will be able to generate more questions to get people talking about the past.

The application deadline was Oct. 1, 2008 with a decision to be made by the following November. h

Can you name Iowa’s first elected governor?

Dr. Timothy Walch, the director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, said that his friend John Liepa, the current chair of the Iowa Historical Foundation and a longtime trustee of the State Historical Society, asks his history students at Des Moines Area Community College every semester. Liepa promises an “A” to any student who can answer it correctly.

He has yet to find a student who is able to take him up on the offer.

Humanities Iowa aims to change that, or at least to spark new interest in Iowa history with the creation of a new Iowa History Prize. The prize is a biennial award of up to $90,000 to honor an Iowa history scholar and to promote a general public conversation about Iowa history.

The public component to the prize is important. Rather than a purely academic award, the Iowa History Prize is all about public history. But what is public history? According to Dr. Loren Horton, the former senior historian for the State Historical Society of Iowa, it’s all about audience.

“Public history assumes a wider audience, with (perhaps) less specialized knowledge,” Horton said. “Public history is a relating of what people have thought and done in the past, to the present, with hopes that it may be a guide to what people think and do now.”

Dorothy Schwieder, professor emeritus of history at Iowa State, agreed, adding that just because the audience for public history is more general, it is no less rigorous in terms of research than other areas of the discipline.

The Iowa History Prize winner will face a number of challenges. Like many Americans, Iowans show a lack of interest in history, especially their own. A recent study found that 40 percent of American college students could

Iowa History PrizeHumanities Iowa Announces New

That’s the point of the

Iowa History Prize—

to get Iowans to

become curious about

their past and to show

them that their own

state has an amazing

story to tell.

Voices from the Prairie4

As HI prepares to award its first Iowa History Prize this fall, three leading historians sat down to discuss the importance and general condition of Iowa history studies. Dr. Loren Horton is the former senior historian for the State Historical Society of Iowa. Dr. Timothy Walch is the director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch. Dr. Dorothy Schwieder is a professor emeritus of history at Iowa State University. Both Horton and Walch are members of the panel that will select the Iowa History Prize winner.

Humanities Iowa: How would you describe “public history” as a field of study?

Timothy Walch: “Public history” is a relatively new concept. It is, in fact, a bridge between the work being done by scholars —academic historians—and the popular understanding of the past that is held by the general public. We find “public history” in many different places—in classrooms, public parks, conferences, museums, on the stage, in film, and on television to name just a few venues. At its core, public history is a quest to help the largest number of citizens to better understand the contours of the past.

Dorothy Schwieder: This is not to imply that public history is less rigorous in terms of research and processing. It is history done for a different audience—all facets of the general public—than for the college classroom. Of necessity, it is, therefore, probably more general than academic courses.

HI: Students often say they hate history. How does the way history is presented affect the public’s interest in it?

Loren Horton: I do agree that many people dislike history, or did while they were attending school. That is the fault of the teachers, the textbooks, the school administrators and

A Conversation About

governing boards, and the parents. Since history is simply the story of the past, it is inevitably interesting. Textbooks, in general, are not interesting because of faulty selections of what stories to present. School administrators and governing boards are at fault for not supporting and encouraging teachers who have enough imagination to depart from dependence upon textbooks and find other source materials and activities that will make history the lively story that it is. Teachers are not innocent in the matter. There are too many instances of teachers reading the textbook to students, or students reading to the class from the textbook, and never explaining that written history tends to be the triumphant story of the winners…. Explore alternative points of view, search for suppressed evidence, and allow students to read varying points of view and come to conclusions about them.

TW: Without question the manner and method of presentation has helped to shape our understanding and appreciation for the past. When history comes alive —as it does on public television in the films of Ken Burns or in the popular works by David McCullough—the public responds. The key to making history more appealing is to combine the best in recent scholarship with the skills of storytelling. We all hunger to know more about our own ancestors—this perspective helps us understand who we are; that is what has precipitated the sustained interest in history and genealogy by so many of our citizens.

HI: Texans seem to live and breathe their state’s history. Do Iowans lack such intensity and pride with regard to their past?

DS: Texans are proud of their history because they hear constantly how important Texas is and how important their past has been. Iowans do not hear that. Rather, Iowa history is often denigrated, rather than being emphasized and

Public HistoryIowa History Prizeand the

Timothy Walch

Dorothy Schwieder

Loren Horton

Volume XI Number 1 5

being presented in an enthusiastic way. I feel it is vital that Iowans (at all levels) hear more about Iowa history. Learning about the state’s past, generates pride in that state.

TW: What I have learned about this state since coming here is that Iowa is all about the relationship between families, communities, and the land. Our history is not about great battles or political contests, or industrial development; it about how we have worked together to respond to the land. I still recommend that folks read Joseph Frazier Wall’s 1978 book, Iowa: A History, which does an excellent job of developing that theme.

Perhaps the biggest challenge we face as a culture is our self-effacing attitude toward our past. We do not boast about all our state has achieved as the breadbasket of the nation. We do not congratulate ourselves on the quality of our governance and our educational system. In a way we suffer from a modesty that has undermined our appreciation for all that we have been, are now and will become in the future.

HI: What can historians do to get Iowans excited about Iowa and its past?

LH: History can be presented as a series of stories, as a series of biographies, as a series of questions and problems to be solved, and as a sequence of cause/effect relationships. As a teacher and lecturer, I have never found it to be difficult to interest people in the past. Begin with an engaging story about a person or situation. That captures attention immediately. Build upon that already existing interest to expand and flesh out the context of the original story or person. Presto! You have an interested and attentive audience. Written history can be presented in the same way.

DS: Do what [Humanities Iowa] is doing with the Iowa History Prize. Select someone who is extremely knowledgeable in Iowa history, one who is excited about Iowa history, and one who is able to communicate effectively to groups (both large and small) in presenting Iowa history. Secondly, urge colleges and universities to teach courses in Iowa history so that students (including prospective teachers) understand their own heritage. That is an important step in getting Iowans excited about Iowa history.

HI: How can the Iowa History Prize enhance the appreciation of Iowa history?

TW: An Iowa History Prize cannot but help to advance the average Iowan’s appreciation for the history of this state. The prize will encourage historians to develop innovative ideas into practical programs. The prize will provide a monetary grant and that money will generate momentum. I like to think that the momentum will be infectious and lead to more ideas and more competition for the prize. It is my hope that the prize will be something of a “blasting cap” that will trigger an explosion of interest in the history of our state.

LH: The person who is awarded the Iowa History Prize should either do original research on a topic that needs more attention, or should develop a methodology that helps ill-prepared teachers present Iowa history in a more accurate and interesting fashion. Models of using local community resources work well for this, and what students and adults see around them every day can become a “classroom on the wall”. More pride in local community, more pride in Iowa, and more understanding about what has happened and how it affects what is happening.

HI: Name something significant about Iowa’s past that most Iowans don’t know but should.

DS: In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was highly visible in Iowa with local organizations (klaverns) present in every part of the state, in both large and small communities.

LH: Most Iowans have no idea of the prominence this state and its officials had in the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. The only Iowan to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court did not die until 1890. Two Iowans held significant positions in the presidential cabinets, an Iowan was one of the four most powerful members of the U.S. Senate, Iowa congressmen chaired many important committees in the House of Representatives, an Iowan was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and an Iowan keynoted a national political party convention. An Iowan was a third party candidate for President of the United States, and won electoral votes in the campaign of 1892. Iowa was important in national politics for those two decades, in ways that it never was before and has not been since.

TW: I challenge Iowans to name the first elected governor of the State of Iowa without going to a reference book. My friend John Liepa, the current chair of the Iowa Historical Foundation and a longtime trustee of the State Historical Society, has been teaching Iowa history at the Des Moines Area Community College for more than 30 years. Each year, in the first session of the course, he tells his students that he will give an “A” to any student in that class who can name the first elected governor of the State of Iowa. Not one of the students in 30 years has been able to identify that man without further research. Clearly we have work to do! h

Iowa History Prize Selection CommitteeValentina Fominykh (Chair)Harry Brod Faye Clow

Thomas Dean Loren N. Horton Michael Knock

Christopher Rossi Leslie A. SchwalmTim Walch

Voices from the Prairie6

The 9th Annual Iowa Writers Celebration: Voices from the Prairie featured the theme “Mixing Sun and Shade.” It featured two writers with strong Iowa ties.

Price, who lives in the Loess Hills of western Iowa, is the author of two literary memoirs including Man Killed by Pheasant: And Other Kinships (2008) and Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands (2004). Both books celebrate the beauty of the Midwest’s prairie landscape in a way that often crosses over into the spiritual.

But trees? In the essay, “Moon Kitty” from Man Killed by Pheasant, he admits to calling the hackberry trees that grow in his yard “junk,” something that led neighbors to criticize him as a “prairie snob.”

On Sept. 23, Iowans had a chance to meet this “prairie snob” at the ninth annual Iowa Writers Celebration: Voices from the Prairie. The event, which is a celebration of Iowa writers, was co-sponsored by Humanities Iowa and Trees Forever and was held at Hoyt-Sherman Place in Des Moines.

This year’s theme was “Mixing Sun and Shade.” You can guess where Price’s sympathies lie.

“It’s not trees I have a problem with, it’s the prioritization of the trees…the celebration of the trees to the expense of the prairie,” Price said when we sat down for coffee one day in July in downtown Iowa City. “Arbor Day was invented just down the road from Omaha out of the belief that if you planted more trees, you would create more rain, and you’ll make a more beautiful landscape. So it’s that aesthetic element that somehow prairie isn’t beautiful and trees are that I have a problem with and have tried to write against.”

Actually, it’s a fluke that Price is writing about anything at all. The Fort Dodge native came to the University of Iowa intending to study medicine. He even got a part time job working as a nurse’s assistant while living in Iowa City. Writing hadn’t yet entered his mind.

But then while completing his undergraduate work, the future author “accidentally” took a course in non-fiction writing, and he realized it was something that he kind of liked. He was also good at it. He took another class and then another. He kept getting good feedback on his pieces, and then he realized that this was something he might want to pursue. He received his MFA in non-fiction from the Iowa Nonfiction Writing program and later earned a Ph.D. in English. Like it or not, he was a writer.

Of course, he still had to contend with his family. His grandmother, for one, was convinced that his future lay in medicine. Even after he told her that he was going to be a writer, she kept after him.

“She thought I was selling myself short. She thought that if you can be a doctor why not be a doctor. She used to drive me around to doctor’s houses. She’d point to a house and say, ‘Do you like that one?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, it’s a beautiful house.’ She’d say, ‘Well, you could have had that. There’s still time.’”

John T. Price’s literary memoirs celebrate the prairie landscape

Man Killed by Pheasant: And Other Kinships

Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands

John T. Pricedoes not hate trees. No, really.

Photo by Stephanie Strine Price

Volume XI Number 1 7

His grandmother came around. Today, in addition to his two books, Price is one of the most respected nature writers in the country. His work has appeared in Orion, the Christian Science Monitor, Creative Nonfiction, and Best Spiritual Writing. He was also awarded a 2004-05 fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1998 was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Throughout much of that time, his muse has been the prairie. It infuses his essays and seems to haunt many of his thoughts. In the essay, “On Kalsow Prairie,” for example, in Man Killed by Pheasant, he describes a small scrap of native grassland in Pocahontas County referred to as a postage stamp prairie due to its small size. Price sees it in a slightly different way: “I’ve always been intrigued by that metaphor,” Price writes, “the idea that such places convey messages across space and time, which is true in a way. To those trying to restore prairie on cultivated or otherwise disturbed ground, these postage stamps are the guardians of heritage, the deliverers of seed and ancient knowledge. If they disappear, as many do, then it may not be possible for the land to go home again.”

Still, Price admits that he hasn’t always been a “prairie snob.” Growing up in Iowa, he never gave the land much thought. But when he went to college and began to struggle with who and what he wanted to be, he said that he developed a kinship with a landscape that also seemed to be going through some kind of identity crisis. That land, long tamed from wild tall grass prairie into fields for corn and soybean, was struggling too, especially when in 1993 it was submerged beneath acre after acre of floodwater.

“I sense that I had a sort of kindred spirit with that land…a land whose identity had been largely hidden. I realized that I had a lot of empathy for the land. I saw myself in its history.”

And as Price began to find himself in the land, he found his family too. The story of his great-great-grandmother Tillie seems especially important. The Swedish immigrant arrived in America in 1902 and got on a train bound for the west. In the essay, “On Kalsow Prairie,” Price describes his attempt to find the precise spot where Tillie got off the train in Iowa for the first time at an obscure and now-abandoned train station called Tara.

Price said stories like Tillie’s resonate for him by illustrating the complicated feelings “place” can evoke. On the one hand, there’s the feeling of comfort and of home. On the other, there’s the desire to move on to somewhere, anywhere else.

“I think those stories provided for me some sense that I wasn’t alone with my feelings towards place and my feelings of disconnection…my desire to be somewhere else and to move on. I think that is why Tillie was so fascinating for me. Being in a place where you did not want to be, but maybe finding a reason to care for the community and living a life within the embrace of that place.”

Price has found that embrace. Something that comes through Man Killed by Pheasant is the author’s own complicated relationship with Iowa. In some chapters he seems completely ambivalent towards his home state. Yet, he chooses to live here with his wife and two sons.

“In general, any commitment to place is a lot like a commitment to another human being. A lot of it is accident. It’s spiritual. It’s beyond our articulation. It’s about what has been given to you, what’s out of control. There’s also a choice involved in it. It’s not always good. It’s not always perfect.”

And because the prairie was gone within 40 years of settlement with native grasses plowed under and wetlands drained for crops, what’s been given to Iowans is a landscape that they don’t even know. They can’t see the beauty of the land because it has been hidden from them. Price contrasts this with his wife’s home in Idaho where clear-cut forests stand next to old growth, illustrating the environmental change in big bold letters.

“In Idaho, you can see what is missing…you feel that pain. [Iowans] feel the pain too, I think. But it’s spiritual…it’s emotional. It chases people away to seek out that connection with wildness elsewhere. We just don’t know what that pain is coming from because we can’t see it.”

And that’s one of the reasons why he chooses to stay here writing about postage stamp prairies, the annual migration of the geese and the importance of the land. It’s why he teaches his children about the native flora and fauna of Iowa’s tall grass prairie and it’s why he regularly takes his classes on field trips to places like the DeSoto Bend Wildlife Refuge just north of Council Bluffs. These lessons and these trips show others the beauty that still lingers in Iowa’s landscape.

It’s something he describes as a form of stewardship to the land, building kinships between people and the Iowa environment one person at a time. h

Man Killed by Pheasant: And Other Kinships, Da Capo Press

Voices from the Prairie8

Author Debra Marquart grew up on a farm near the small North Dakota town southeast of the westward bend in the Missouri River. Life there was pretty ordinary. She did chores, learned how to drive the tractor, secretly smoked cigarettes, and quit college to join a rock band. Still, when Marquart sent a draft of the first 50 pages of her memoir of farm life, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of

Nowhere, to a literary agent, the agent had one complaint.

“She liked the writing, but she said there wasn’t enough going on,” Marquart remembered. “She said that in those Little House on the Prairie books there was always something happening.”

At that moment, Marquart said she realized what she was up against in trying to tell a story of life in the rural Midwest. People wanted stories of grasshopper plagues and prairie fires. They wanted blizzards and families struggling to keep their homestead against all odds.

In short, they wanted Laura Ingalls Wilder.

But Marquart is no Laura Ingalls Wilder. And, contrary to popular knowledge, the Midwest is not an area that can be easily defined through cliche or stereotype. That’s something Marquart makes clear in The Horizontal World.

“This was no little house on the prairie,” she writes in the prologue to the book. “We

smeared musky blue shadow on our eyelids and raspberry gloss on our lips. We wore platform shoes and bell-bottom jeans. It was the times. We were hip-huggered, and tight-sweatered, and navel-exposed. We walked around town like the James gang, tossing this and flashing that.”

Marquart addressed the many personalities of the Midwest in the ninth annual Iowa Writers’ Celebration: Voices from the Prairie on Sept. 23 at Hoyt Sherman Place in Des Moines. The theme for this year’s event, which was co-sponsored by Humanities Iowa and Trees Forever, was “Mixing Sun and Shade,” a nod to a region of the country that defies easy classification.

Marquart has tried to tell at least her part of the Midwestern story through her writing. The coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at Iowa State University, she is the author of The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Short Stories (2001) and two poetry collections, From Sweetness (2002) and Everything’s a Verb (1995) as well as The Horizontal World (2006).

In The Horizontal World, she describes scenes of town girls and farm girls, Lawrence Welk Saturday nights and underground rivers. It’s a world where people fight to stay close to the land and to family.

Marquart said the latter is no accident. The region around Napoleon was settled by Germans who first immigrated to the steppes of Russia in 1803 to escape the French Revolution. After a half-century of farming in the czar’s empire, they moved again to the fertile plains of North Dakota.

It wasn’t always easy. She describes her great-grandmother, who, legend has it, upon seeing her new American home for the first time in 1885, fell to the ground and cried, “It’s all earth and sky.”

TheHorizontal World

Napoleon, North Dakota

is no Walnut Grove

Debra Marquart’s memoir ofthe rural Midwest

Photo by Richard Koenig

Volume XI Number 1 9

Still, despite the hardships of beginning life anew in such a wide, hostile world, the immigrants persisted. Like the alfalfa plant that Marquart describes in the chapter “Signs and Wonders,” these people put down deep roots so that they might stay on the land. For some like Marquart’s brother Nick, those roots are physical. Nick returned to the farm after his father retired so that the land could stay in the family. For others like Marquart the roots are emotional. Even though she lives 500 miles away, she said that the land still holds her.

That feeling is not unusual.

“I have a friend who is very successful and lives in Minneapolis. Whenever a quarter section of his family’s land comes up for sale, he buys it up. He hasn’t even told his wife about it.”

Marquart said this is something people who grew up in urban areas —even midwestern cities—don’t understand. While such people might have an attachment to individual houses or streets, they didn’t grow up on the land surrounded by aunts, uncles and grandparents who tended them when they were sick and helped with harvest every fall.

It is a land that draws people back, even when it means sacrificing an easier existence in the city. That gravitational pull worked on her father who announced on Christmas Eve 1956 that he was moving his wife and children back to the family farm. The move meant the family would have to leave their home in Bismarck, which as Marquart describes in the chapter “The Land Husband,” prompted the biggest argument her mother and father ever had.

Marquart, who had not yet been born, did not hear this story until her mother told it to her 40 years later. When she asked how they resolved the argument, her mother looked at her and said, “Oh, I just gave in.”

“With that simple answer I understood more about my mother than I’d known in an entire lifetime of being her daughter,” Marquart writes. “I remember her frustration with us when we were children, the slamming cupboard doors, the rushing about, the preoccupation with polished floors. Now I realize she had been in the middle of the hardest job of her life. Every time she looked around, there was another one of us to care for. The work on the farm was endless, the stakes were unbearably high, and none of it had been her decision.”

Still, unlike her mother and father, Marquart managed to escape the pull of the land, at least for a little while. While in her 20s, she hit the road with a rock band. She started to write poems and song lyrics too. She also became intrigued with recording the stories of some of the characters she encountered while on the road. Some of those ultimately made it into her short-story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories.

When she left touring and went back to college a few years later, Marquart studied social work. Ultimately, however, she went back to writing and eventually teaching. As she describes in her memoir, her family did not initially understand her new career. Her parents were concerned that her summer breaks from teaching meant she was “unemployed.” Her father even suggested that she ask Iowa State to give her more classes after she told him she was teaching two courses a semester.

Even after her first book of poetry, Everything’s a Verb, was published, her family remained unimpressed. In the chapter “To Kill a Deer,” she talks about how the first time she visited home after that book was released, she looked for it on the coffee table in the living room or in the magazine rack. Instead, she found it in her mother’s sewing room “wedged on the shelf between the town centennial book and the Betty Crocker cookbook.”

Since then, her family has come to understand her work better. Her mother even drove to the Bismarck Barnes & Noble to look for a copy of The Hunger Bone when it was published in 2000, and she was especially interested in The Horizontal World because it told the story of her family.

“My father didn’t really get to see what I’ve done in terms of my literary production. But my mother has really paid attention to it and has become very interested in it; she’s become a pretty sophisticated reader.”

As for the land, it continues to exert a draw on those who have left it behind. Marquart said that when The Horizontal World came out, she heard from people all over the world who had left the Midwest.

“They remembered the place and wanted to be back among family. They could find better jobs somewhere else, but they remembered the landscape. They remembered the privacy and the solitude. I think that’s what probably makes people want to come back.”

And to want to stay.

“Observing my niece and nephew growing up on the same farm I grew up on, they are having a completely different experience than the one I had. But they really love that place. I feel fairly certain that the future of the place is secure.” h

The Horizontal World, Counterpoint

Voices from the Prairie10

Humanities Iowa awarded $30,000 in relief to humanities institutions across eastern Iowa following record flooding that swept the area in June.

Especially hard hit was Cedar Rapids where the swollen Cedar River swallowed much of downtown beneath more than 10 feet of water.

Included in the disaster area were several humanities-based organizations including the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library. Damage at the museum was typical with crumbling interior walls, broken windows and sludge wreaking havoc with exhibit space.

To help alleviate some of the clean-up costs in Cedar Rapids and other river communities, HI established a special $30,000 flood relief fund. That money was divided up in grants of up to $5,000 among the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library ($5,000), the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art ($5,000), the African-American Historical Museum and Cultural Center of Iowa ($5,000) and the Science Station ($5,000), all in Cedar Rapids. Other institutions that received relief funds were Old Fort Madison ($4,000) and the Northern Lee Historical Society ($2,000) in Fort Madison and the Cedar Falls Historical Society ($4,000).

“We worked hard to secure expedited review and relief from the National Endowment for the Humanities in order to safeguard invaluable historical documents detailing our cultural heritage,” said Christopher Rossi, executive director of Humanities Iowa. “We understand that this money is just beginning to meet needs. Nevertheless providing early relief can also provide critical relief as is so evident by the community’s collective response to this disaster.” h

HI Helps Communities Damaged by

Record Flooding Humanities Iowa added two new

staff members in 2008, fiscal officer Sue Foster and program officer Michael Knock.

Foster, a UI grad, started work at Humanities Iowa in February. Previously, she served as the health services administrator at University Hospitals in Iowa City. In all, Foster worked for more than 31 years at UIHC. Among her many duties at HI, Foster oversees all of the fiscal activities including the monthly reports to the fiscal committee of the HI Board of Directors. She also handles expenditure reports and ensures that federal regulations are being followed. Foster said she finds her new role at HI to be challenging but enjoyable. “I really enjoy what the program has to offer,” Foster said. “I think we have a unique role to play that most Iowans aren’t aware of.”

New program officer Michael Knock comes to Humanities Iowa from Muscatine Community College where he taught journalism, composition and American history. He also previously worked as a reporter for the Iowa City Press-Citizen and continues to write the newspaper’s weekly food column. Knock has an MA in journalism from the University of Iowa and received his Ph.D. in American history from the University of Notre Dame in 1996. He has taught courses in the history of the American West and Native American history at Notre Dame and Indiana University – South Bend and has been an adjunct in the UI journalism school. h

HI addsnew staff members

June’s record flooding affected 20 buildings at the University of Iowa causing more than $231 million in damages. Especially hard hit was the school’s arts campus where Hancher Auditorium, the UI Art Building, Art Building West, the UI Theatre Building, and Voxman Music Building were flooded. This photo shows the UI’s two-year-old Art Building West surrounded by floodwaters. Photo by Tom Jorgensen/University of Iowa

Volume XI Number 1 11

HI addsnew staff members

Dallas County Conservation BoardProject Title: Prairie Awakening—A Journey into Indigenous Learning WorkshopGrant: $5,100

Drake University, Anderson GalleryProject Title: Building a Modern Campus—Eliel and Eero Saarinen at Drake University Grant: $10,750

Iowa State University Center for Excellence in the Arts and HumanitiesProject Title: Sustaining the Earth: Public Scholarship in the Arts and Humanities Grant: $13,063

Fourth Wall Films/Kansas Public Telecommunications Services, Inc. Project Title: Country School: One Room—One Nation Grant: $15,000

Loras College Department of Communication ArtsProject Title: Man of Deeds: Mathias Loras and the Iowa Frontier Grant: $15,000

National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library Project Title: Iowa’s Czech Immigrant Experience: Documenting and Disseminating the Stories Grant: $3,815

The Sparks Fly Upward Foundation Project Title: The Sparks Fly Upward Grant: $15,000

Town and Country ArtsProject Title: From the Archives of Harrison County: Uncle Tom’s Cabin Grant: $8,293

Trees ForeverProject Title: 20 Stories Grant: $14,795

University of Iowa School of Art and Art HistoryProject Title: Introducing the Stumptown Shooters Grant: $7,500

Waterloo Center for the ArtsProject Title: Inception, Intersection, Connection, Directions: Examining Haitian and Afro-Caribbean Art Grant: $10,965

Humanities Iowa awards $119,282 in Major Grants during June meetingHumanities Iowa awarded $119,282 to 11 cultural organizations following a June 13-14 meeting of the board of directors in Arnolds Park. Grants went to 10 organizations located in Iowa and one in Moline, Ill. The awards were selected through a competitive application and review process and are made possible through Humanities Iowa and the National Endowment for the Humanities.The grants awarded are:

Humanities Iowa welcomed three new board members in June 2008 and bid farewell to past president Jeff Heland. Gov. Tom Vilsack appointed Heland, a member of the Des Moines County Board of Supervisors, to the HI board in 2002.

University of Iowa president Sally Mason appointed Thomas Dean, one of Iowa’s foremost experts on place studies, to the board. Dean, who also works as special assistant to the president for communications and research at the University of Iowa, created and teaches a course entitled “Introduction to Place Studies” through the Leisure Studies Program in the Division of Interdisciplinary Programs in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He is the author of the forthcoming book of essays titled, Under a Midland Sky from Ice Cube Press. He also is the editor of The Grace of Grass and Water: Writing in Honor of Paul Gruchow and Live Well, Live Wild, a collection of essays by Stephanie Mills and Bill McKibben.

Dick Ramsay of Spirit Lake also joined the board in June as a public appointment. Ramsay has a good record of public service in the Iowa Great Lakes region. He is a member of the Spirit Lake Protective Association and serves as counsel for the Dickinson County Water Quality Commission. He also serves on the Historic Arnolds Park Board, the Orleans Board of Adjustment, and the Steering Committee of the Dickinson County Clean Water Alliance. Finally, he is a past member of the Pearson Lakes Art Center Board.

Gov. Chet Culver appointed Ralph Swain of Sioux City to the board. Swain is the humanities division chair at Western Iowa Tech Community College. He also teaches online courses for Northwest Iowa Community College in Sheldon and Southwestern Community College in Creston. In addition, Swain has an extensive record of public service. He serves on boards for La Casa, a service agency for new immigrants in Sioux City, the Siouxland Film Institute, and the Sioux City Museum History Day Committee. He is also on the planning committee for the Iowa Latino Conference and is president of the Great Plains Radio Theatre Project. h

HI welcomes three new board members

NonprofitOrganizationU.S. Postage

PAIDPermit #36591Iowa City, IA

52240

AdelRecipient: Main Street Adel

Chamber of CommerceAmount: $3,000Project: Iowa Book Festival

2008

Belle PlaineRecipient: Belle Plaine

Community Development Corp.

Amount: $500Project: Civil War Days

BloomfieldRecipient: Davis Co. Civil War

Guerrilla Raid SocietyAmount: $1,000Project: Civil War Days

BooneRecipient: Boone Co.

Historical SocietyAmount: $2,300Project: Celebrate Suffrage

BurlingtonRecipient: City of BurlingtonAmount: $400Project: Diversity in Burlington

Recipient: Partners for Conservation Foundation

Amount: $2,780Project: Inspired by Aldo

Leopold

ClarindaRecipient: Nodaway Valley

Historical SocietyAmount: $459Project: Quilting—Every

Woman’s Story

Columbus JunctionRecipient: City of Columbus

JunctionAmount: $2,000Project: Hispanic Cultural

Festival

Recipient: City of Columbus Junction

Amount: $1,910Project: 2008 Flood Stories

CorningRecipient: French Icarian

Colony Foundation.Amount: $1,265Project: Collecting the Stories

of Icaria

Council BluffsRecipient: Historic General

Dodge HouseAmount: $1,245Project: Emily Dickinson

Recipient: Bluffs Arts CouncilAmount: $1,000Project: Studio & Vine

Recipient: Western Historic Trails Center

Amount: $500Project: Negro League Baseball

and Civil Rights

DubuqueRecipient: Loras CollegeAmount: $1,340Project: Book Art

Recipient: Alexander Levi Heritage Project

Amount: $3,000Project: From Distant Places to

Dubuque’s Shores

Iowa CityRecipient: Office of the State

ArchaeologistAmount: $3,000Project: Iowa Archaeology on

the Road

Recipient: UI Center for Human Rights

Amount: $1,250Project: One Community, One

Book

OkobojiRecipient: Iowa Lakes RC&DAmount: $825Project: Portraits of the Land

Orange CityRecipient: Northwestern

CollegeAmount: $3,000Project: Storytelling with

Antonio Sacre

OttumwaRecipient: Indian Hills

Community College Amount: $1,000Project: Many Faces, One

Vision

Recipient: Ottumwa Area Arts Council

Amount: $1,500Project: Ordinary People

Doing Extraordinary Things

PrestonRecipient: Luxembourg Society

of IowaAmount: $2,600Project: Luxembourgers in the

New World

PaullinaRecipient: Paullina

Quasquicentennial Committee

Amount: $1,000Project: Gem of the Prairie

RippeyRecipient: Friends of RippeyAmount: $3,000Project: Greene County Reads

Rock Island, IllinoisRecipient: Genesius Theatre

Foundation, Inc.Amount: $3,000Project: Classical Play Preludes

St. DonatusRecipient: St. Donatus Catholic

Church Amount: $1,000Project: 160th Anniversary

Celebration

SidneyRecipient: Fremont Co.

Historical SocietyAmount: $682Project: The Story of George

Washington Carver

Sioux CityRecipient: Briar Cliff UniversityAmount: $1,700Project: Hector Galan

West BurlingtonRecipient: Grade A PlusAmount: $500Project: Celebrate Diversity

2008 Mini-Grants through August

Humanities Iowa 100 Oakdale CampusN310 OH Iowa City, IA 52242-5000