New places, familiar faces

Amish Mennonites

Italian food in Amish Country? Yep. I was in eastern Iowa this past weekend for the annual board meeting of the Quill and Scroll Society, an honorary society for high school journalists that's based at the University of Iowa. We board members went out to dinner Saturday night and found ourselves in Kalona, 20 miles southwest of Iowa City, at an upscale restaurant called Tuscan Moon Grill. Kalona is the largest Amish community west of the Mississippi River and is known as the quilt capital of Iowa. En route to the restaurant, we passed a couple of families in traditional clothing and their horse-drawn buggies, which explained the road apples and pungent smell wafting into our car.

Who would have guessed I'd sit down to grilled scallops and shrimp, with garlic polenta and sauteed vegetables, washed down by a Sapporo beer in a place like that? (Especially when the place next door, the Kalona Bakery, was selling brats for $2.50 and and pork burgers for $3.50.) Believe me, it was the equal of any restaurant in Portland. Consider another Iowa stereotype busted for this West Coast boy.

Adjusting to Iowa City.  The following morning, I met with Inara Verzemnieks, a former staff writer at The Oregonian, for breakfast and conversation at the Bluebird Diner in Iowa City. I had the privilege of recruiting Inara to the newspaper, just a few months after she'd graduated from the University of Washington and completed a summer internship at The Washington Post. In the 14 years since, I have marveled at the reporter and elegant writer she has become. (She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing in 2006.)

Inara took a buyout last year and, with husband Nick, moved to Iowa City this summer to pursue an  an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing, an English Department program that's separate from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She's just begun the three-year program, but she thinks she'd like to teach, possibly at the community college level. I've seen her around high school students and other young people and I think she'd be marvelous in that role. Inara is fiercely intelligent and a woman whose emotions are never far from the surface, whether talking about a visit to Latvia to see relatives or the multiple adjustments she and Nick are making to their new life in Middle America.


Settling in to Pittsburgh. A week earlier, when I was in Pittsburgh, I reconnected with another young journalist with Oregon ties. Lori joined me as I met with Moriah Balingit for drinks at a bar in the Shadyside neighborhood. Moriah was a student at the University of Oregon when I met her, and she did an internship at The Oregonian in the spring of 2006, working out of a suburban bureau.

She landed an entry-level reporting job at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and has been there going on three years. She covers night cops, so she's got a brutal schedule working from 4 p.m. to midnight and beyond. She's originally from Sacramento, but seems to enjoy her new city -- the so-called Paris of Appalachia. Moriah has quickly become part of Steeler Nation, though she retains a passion for her Oregon Ducks (ranked No. 1 in the nation as of this writing!). Journalistically, she's had to adapt to the new media environment and now files a majority of her stories directly to the newspaper's web site -- par for the course these days, throughout the industry, when it comes to breaking news.

I'm glad I got to see these two friends and former colleagues. To see them fulfilling the promise they displayed as young journalists, while still in or barely out of college, is inspiring. To see them genuinely happy in their new environments, embracing new situations and challenges, is satisfying. And to know they are just two among the hundreds of aspiring journalists I've helped or encouraged, well, that's  immensely gratifying.

Photo credit: Kalona Historical Group Tours

The writer's life

How appropriate that I've come to Iowa City, just having finished "Mentor: A Memoir" on the flight out from Portland.

The Iowa Writers' Workshop is the only university-based organization to be honored with the National Humanities Medal and, as the nation's first creative writing degree program, has become the model for similar writing programs across the country. Graduates of the two-year residency program at the University of Iowa have won 17 Pulitzer Prizes and numerous other literary awards. The long list of notable alumni no doubt includes authors whose work is on your bookshelf: Michael Cunningham, Kim Edwards, Adam Haslett, John Irving, Ann Patchett, Jane Smiley, Wallace Stegner, John Edgar Wideman, just to name a few.

You get the picture.

So I pick up this memoir, knowing about the program's reputation but not knowing the author, Tom Grimes, or its subject, Frank Conroy, who directed the workshop for 18 years and died in 2005.

Understand, the memoir is one of my favorite literary genres; there's no question it brings you up close and personal with the writer and often takes you deep inside an unfamiliar culture or set of formative experiences. But it also can have its flaws as an inherently biased (or perhaps incomplete) point of view, since it is, after all, one person's version of events. How truthful the writer is determines the memoir's credibility. It's not just what the writer says but also what he or she omits.

That said, I'll say I appreciated this memoir for its literary qualities. Grimes, the author of five books and director of the creative writing program at Texas State University in San Marcos, obviously knows how to write a sentence, how to construct a scene, how to draw meaning from an event or conversation. He is insightful and candid about his insecurities, bordering on the irrational. But he's also a little too adoring of his subject (at times uncomfortably so), too quick to draw parallels between his life and Conroy's, though respectful of the gaps in accomplishment and recognition between himself and his mentor.

Grimes as a young man was an aspiring writer working as a waiter in Florida when Conroy rescued him by choosing him for the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The older man nurtured him, singling him out for attention even as he seemed to ignore other students, and became his friend and a father figure, even inviting him to live in his house during summers when Conroy and his wife vacationed in Nantucket.

The deeper I got into the book, the less I liked the two main characters, with Grimes appearing to fawn over his mentor, seemingly unable to submit a manuscript or make a career move without Conroy's blessing or, worse, opening a door for him.

To his credit, Grimes is incredibly forthright about all this. And I have to say, the final third did redeem the book as Grimes reflects on what he has learned about himself.

"Every great novel, it's been said, is a 'long story with a flaw in it.' Well, I've mastered the flaws and have diligently produced long stories to contain them. But something all along was missing -- me. And this book redresses that absence. For twenty years, I believed Frank filled that absence. But he didn't; my idolization of him did; moreover, my fictionalizing of him did. Frank is the protagonist of my best novel, and my best novel is this memoir. In the end, my memoir about Frank is a memoir about me. By writing about Frank, I could no longer turn away from myself, which is what I've done all of my life. Now, I'm gazing at myself."

That's a pretty piece of writing. As is this passage, which strikes me as absolutely true:

"While writing this memoir, I believed I knew Frank completely. The illusion was necessary. But the truth is: like all of us, Frank was a mosaic. We know a person not only by what we observe and what he or she says or tells us but also by what we infer, imagine, and are told by others. Toward the end of his life, the latter is how I knew Frank."

The book ends with Grimes' eulogy for his friend, a succinct and welcome note of grace.

The land of pork and corn

Yes, I'm talking about Iowa. And if you're lugging around stereotypes of a state full of hicks, let me tell you it isn't all what you think. At least not when it comes to Iowa City.

I've been coming to this university town for several years as a result of my membership on the Quill & Scroll Society board of trustees. (See next post.) Admittedly, I pop in for a weekend and then I'm gone. And I'm coming during the fall, not during the dead of winter or the humidity of summer. But these are a few facts, impressions and things to keep in mind:

-- When you think of Iowa City, think of other college towns like Ann Arbor, Mich., Bloomington, Ind., Evanston, Ill. -- or even Eugene. It's got an international flavor due to the university, a student district with a pedestrian mall (above), and a more liberal voting population than the rest of the state.

-- Because of those influences it might surprise you to find Indian, Ethiopian, Korean and Japanese restaurants clustered downtown. It's also got a classic greasy spoon -- Hamburg Inn No. 2 -- which would hold its own with any slacker-friendly breakfast joint in Portland.

-- The famed Iowa Writers Workshop, the first creative writing degree program in the U.S., is based here. Its graduates have won 16 Pulitzer Prizes, numerous National Book Awards and many other literary prizes. Among the Pulitzer winners: John Cheever, Jane Smiley, Marilynne Robinson and Tracy Kidder. (Plus, I also like Ann Patchett and Kim Edwards.)

-- The city has a Midwestern politeness that never loses its charm. Just as in Portland, motorists stop for you and insist on having you cross in front of them. Sales clerks, by and large, look you in the eye, make small talk and say "thank you." And everybody loves the Hawks -- the University of Iowa Hawkeyes who, as of this writing, are the No. 7-ranked football team in the country with a perfect 7-0 record.

-- The Iowa River runs through town, giving a scenic quality to the city -- that is, unless it's flooding, as did last year. The newly constructed Philip D. Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building (at right), where Quill & Scroll now has its offices, was among a number of buildings on campus and throughout the city to suffer flood damage. I suppose it's something city residents just deal with, as they do tornado warnings.

-- Every time I come here, I make time for an afternoon run, from the Iowa House Hotel to City Park (left). I'm able to run on paths alongside the Iowa River that eventually take me by riverfront homes and through leafy neighborhoods reminiscent of Northeast Portland's Irvington, Grant Park and Laurelhurst.

-- Lastly, don't forget that Iowa, despite its skewed demographics (94 percent white!), gave Barack Obama his first crucial victory in the Democratic caucuses back in January 2008, thereby establishing him as a legitimate candidate. Iowa also went for Obama over McCain in the general election. And, most recently, the Iowa Supreme Court, in a unanimous ruling, became the third state (and the first in the heartland) to legalize gay marriage.

Sure, there are lots of tractors and cornfields, and you'll see plenty of pork chops and spaetzel on local menus, but there's plenty more here than meets the eye.