Tag Archive | Grinnell

Cats of Grinnell

A post on a Tuesday, look at that! I had to, because today is the last day of February, a month in which I have yet to post, and I’m stubbornly refusing to break my streak of posting at least once a month. And so today I give you an incomplete list of some cats of Grinnell.

Grinnell has many cats. From what I observe, overhear, and am told, not a few residents are feeding stray cats or wind up adopting cats that walked into or otherwise appeared in their lives. My personal experience of the cats of Grinnell derives mainly from the circuit I regularly walk around the center of town. Many cats have their usual haunts, and so I encounter them repeatedly and come to recognize (some of) them by their distinguishing marks. All of the cats except the first one on this list are pretty skittish and will flee if I come too close, so I’ll spare you the photos of blobs in the brush or grainy cats on windowsills. Without further ado, here is a partial dramatis personae:

Mama Kitty

Mama Kitty is a bar cat, specifically the cat of the bar around the corner from my place. Some friendly patron standing outside the entrance to the bar told me her name soon after I moved to Grinnell. She has a little cat house and dishes for food and water outside, and she spends a lot of time on or under the patio furniture against the bar’s façade or between the wheels of pickup trucks parked at an angle to the sidewalk in front of the bar. Mama Kitty is very sweet and friendly, and I try to say hello to her whenever I’m passing by.

Baby Void

Southeast of the historic downtown, two sets of railroad tracks intersect. A bit north of where they cross perpendicularly, there are some brick apartment buildings near the north-south railroad tracks. There are quite a few cats that hang out around these apartment buildings, probably in part because sometimes residents set food out for them. There are several black cats in this area, and I can’t tell them all apart (I know there are several because I’ve seen multiple black cats at once), but one cat I do know is Baby Void. (Note: Mama Kitty’s real name is Mama Kitty; otherwise, all these cats’ names were made up by me.) Baby Void was a little cat when I first identified him several years ago. By now, he’s no longer a baby, but the name stuck. Baby Void is all black except for a circle of white at his throat. It looks like a round tag on a collar, but after years of observation, I think it’s just a patch of white fur.

Queue Cassée

Another black cat I used to see in these same parts is Queue Cassée (Broken Tail), so named after I noticed a black cat whose tail hung somewhat stiffly behind him instead of swishing the way a cat’s tail usually does, however faintly. I think I’d probably seen Queue Cassée before he became Queue Cassée, but the state of his tail made him distinguishable from the other black cats. There was a sort of hump where his tail joined his body. Despite this apparent tail injury, Queue Cassée seemed to be getting along fine, and in fact I’ve seen no sign of him for ages, so maybe his tail got better on its own?

Mr. Floofy

Yet another black cat I see in this vicinity is Mr. Floofy, so named because he’s a long-haired cat. He also has rather short legs. I just saw him on Saturday, against a west-facing brick wall illuminated by the afternoon sun, in the company of another black cat. They both took off at my approach, though Mr. Floofy held his ground longer.

Other Railway Cats

This is my cat hotspot. In addition to the aforementioned denizens, there’s also a white-and-gray cat (who’s a she in my head for some reason), a stocky orange tabby with a white-tipped tail, and several large gray tabbies. I’ll often see some combination of these and the black cats lounging between the west side of a certain apartment building and the railroad tracks. They like to sit on the sills of the windows just above ground level there, and I believe someone sets food (and windowsill cushions?) out for them. On a couple of occasions I may even have seen someone interacting with the cats through an open window. And once I was coming up the road and noticed an odd silhouette/gait belonging to a vaguely cat-sized creature sidling along the building’s exterior wall. It was a raccoon! There were two of them! And they were eating the cat food while several cats sitting nearby looked placidly on!

Tortie

All right, last cat. Tortie is a smaller (I think) tortoiseshell cat whom I’ve sometimes seen behind the chain link fence blocking off the empty lot by my apartment building. The space was formerly occupied by a Mexican restaurant that burned down before I moved to Grinnell. Now there’s a gap, and the ground is planked over with warped wooden boards. Tortie mysteriously appears in this vacant lot; I don’t know how she comes and goes. Through a secret underground tunnel? Over the roof of the building backing the empty lot? Tortie is usually sitting very tidily relatively far back from the chain link fence. She’s in a different spot every time, still and watching.

One more picture of Mama Kitty!

Michelle Zauner at Grinnell

Jun29

Back in May, the Grinnell Asian American Association hosted a reading and Q & A by Michelle Zauner, the author of the bestselling memoir Crying in H Mart. Zauner was also on campus to perform with her band, Japanese Breakfast, which I personally did not know of but which seems to be kind of a big deal? I had heard of Crying in H Mart, though pandemic time being what it is, I somehow thought it had come out before the pandemic rather than in April 2021. I wasn’t originally planning to attend the reading, but then my friend Laura, a colleague who also comes from a Taishanese-speaking family, asked if I wanted to go with her, so I did. It was well worth it.

The event drew a crowd that filled the auditorium. When Zauner walked out of the wings, I was surprised to realize she was mixed race. Somehow I had assumed she was just Korean; maybe Zauner was her married name. But the chapter she read from her memoir made her background pretty clear. Crying in H Mart is generally about her Korean mother’s death from cancer. I haven’t read it, though I’d definitely like to now. Zauner read the chapter about her and her white father’s vacation in Vietnam after her mother had passed away. They had thought to take a trip for a change of scene, to take their minds off things, and they decided on Vietnam. Unfortunately, Southeast Asia did not furnish an escape from the fog of grief, and the trip was not exactly fabulous. The chapter describes some of their sightseeing and then relates a fight she and her father had a Franco-Vietnamese restaurant, which culminated in her father telling her her mother had warned him not to let her, their daughter, take advantage of him after she was gone and Zauner saying to her father that she was exercising great self-control in not telling him all the things she could be. She then stormed out of the restaurant and wandered around the town. She ended up in a karaoke bar frequented by locals, where she met a young Vietnamese woman. They each told the other they were sad. When the Vietnamese woman asked Zauner why she was sad, she said because her mother had died. The Vietnamese woman was sad because she wanted to be a singer but her parents didn’t support this. She encouraged Zauner to sing a song, and by the sound of it, everyone in the bar did.

The chapter was very well written and funny in places, and Zauner read it compellingly. Afterward, the floor was opened for audience questions. I don’t remember all the questions and their answers, but Zauner was great at this part too. There were some questions about her dual careers as a writer and a musician. Zauner said that, funnily enough, when she was growing up, becoming a rockstar seemed more possible than becoming an author. I believe she said she wasn’t much supported in artistic pursuits. In college, she took all the creative writing classes available to her except creative nonfiction because she didn’t think someone like her (a mixed race person) could write nonfiction that anyone would be interested in reading. It sounded like she hadn’t seen any examples of this, that is, she hadn’t had any mirrors, so she didn’t think it was a possibility.

Someone asked her if her father had read Crying in H Mart and what he thought of it. By the sound of it, the memoir may not have been the most flattering portrait of him. Zauner said he claims to have read it, though she’s not sure if that’s true. He did object to her having written that he’d sold used cars to the military because actually the cars had been new. She found it funny that it was this of all things that he’d complain about.

Another thing Zauner brought up, although I can’t remember what prompted it, is a notion a fair number of mixed race people subscribe to, namely, that we aren’t “half” anything. I might not be recalling how she expressed it exactly right, but she said that a lot of mixed people nowadays see themselves or at least choose to describe themselves as whole: wholly X and wholly Y (rather than half-X and half-Y). And she thinks that’s great, but for her personally, that doesn’t really resonate or feel authentic to her own experience. She does feel half-Korean, and I think she also said it felt like an asset, in some way? (This is what comes of writing blog posts a month after the fact!) Maybe that it had helped her in her musical career somehow, this feeling of not being fully one thing or the other? I was struck by her comment because I count myself among those who try not to use “half-X” language when talking about their own identities. But adjusting your language is one thing, and how you actually feel is another. That’s not to say I feel “half,” but being mixed is definitely a disinct experience. I liked how Zauner addressed that head on and shared what she actually thought, even if it perhaps didn’t fit into recent prevailing sentiments.

A Harpsichord Lecture Recital

May25

Toward the end of April, I attended an unusual concert at Grinnell. Technically speaking, it was a lecture recital, which was not a genre I was familiar with but is basically exactly what it sounds like. The speaker and musician was Dr. Heidi Tsai, a Taiwanese-born keyboardist who lives in France and has taught and performed extensively on both sides of the Pyréneées. (She has a doctorate in historical keyboards–how cool does that sound?) The lecture recital was described thusly on the program: “A Transgenre Tale…from the cross-dressing Abbot François-Timoléon de Choisy (1644-1724) and the celebration of 17th-transcriptions [I think that should say 17th century?] for the harpsichord in France”.

I hadn’t heard of de Choisy before I learned of this event, nor was I familiar with most of the composers on the program (the exceptions were Lully and Couperin). I arrived a bit on the early side, wanting to get a good seat, and at first the audience looked extremely sparse, but the concert hall did fill up. Before Dr. Tsai began her lecture recital, one of Grinnell’s French professors, a specialist in 17th and 18th century French literature, gave an introduction to some of de Choisy’s writings. He focused particularly on Histoire de la marquise-marquis de Banneville, a story about a young marquise who falls in love with a young marquis (and he with her). If I recall correctly, the marquise’s mother has to tell her that her anatomy is actually characteristically male (not sure how the young woman is unaware of this), and at first it appears this might spell the end of her courtship. But affection prevails, the two get married, it turns out the young marquis is also transgender (possibly–I’m not clear on how this is presented in the story). And they have a happy union, enjoying the best of both worlds. So, there’s a lot to unpack there! But I have neither read nor studied this text.

Dr. Tsai then took the stage. The lecture recital consisted of remarks on the life of de Choisy (his upbringing, his relationships with the family of Louis XIV, his female alter egos and cross-dressing adventures), the expectations of 17th century French high society (the harpsichord was the perfect instrument for young women because it didn’t involve contortions of the mouth and face, wild gestures of the arms, or anything placed between the legs!), transpositions of musical works between instruments (e.g. transcriptions for harpsichord), and other background on the composers, instruments, and pieces. I enjoyed the music more than anything else, though the lecture was interesting as well.

Dr. Tsai performed on a double-manual harpsichord that belongs to the college; it was built in the 20th century but modeled on 18th century French instruments. It has a lovely sound! I mean, I love the timbre of the harpsichord. As mentioned above, there were some works by Jean-Baptiste Lully and François Couperin, two French Baroque composers whose music I like very much. Part of the conceit of the concert was that some French composers of the time had written pieces inspired by de Choisy. The theme of crossing over was also realized in the performance of harpsichord transcriptions of music originally composed for different instruments or ensembles. The transcribers were Jean-Henri d’Anglebert, Jean Baptiste Forqueray, and Dr. Tsai herself. Other composers included Jacques-Champion de Chambonnières, René Mesangeau (alternatively Mézangeot?), Louis de Caix d’Hervelois, Jean-Baptiste Barrière, and Antoine Forqueray. Don’t they all sound fancy? (And wasn’t John the Baptist a popular namesake?)

One of the last pieces on the program was Antoine Forqueray’s “Le carillon de Passy” (which for some reason always seems to be paired with “La Latour”? Oh, maybe it’s because they’re part of the same suite in G minor). Dr. Tsai explained that Passy was a tony neighborhood in Paris, and I was thinking to myself, I know, it still is!

The program ended with three pieces by Couperin. The first, “La Régente ou la Minerve,” was familiar, probably because this past year I went through some phases of listening to entire albums of Scott Ross’s recording of the complete harpsichord works of Couperin. The last two pieces were both musettes, that is, works meant to imitate the sound of the small French bagpipe called the musette. And they were certainly imitative! Couperin really leaned into capturing the musette’s drones.

Sheree Renée Thomas and Zine Making at Grinnell

Nov24

Every year, the Grinnell College Innovator for Social Justice Prize recognizes “individuals who have demonstrated leadership in their fields and who show creativity, commitment, and extraordinary accomplishment in effecting positive social change.” The prize is awarded in October, when the recipient visits campus for Grinnell Prize Week. I know the prize has gone to many cool people doing amazing things to make the world a better place, but I’ve never actually paid much attention to the Grinnell Prize Week events, until this year. The 2021 recipient of the Grinnell Prize is Victoria Jones of Memphis, who founded and is the executive director of TONE, an organization that “support[s] and uplift[s] Black artists and Memphis by incubating Black arts innovation, challenging the status quo of the Memphis art scene, and mobilizing Black land ownership, and economic independence.” In perusing the e-mail describing the Grinnell Prize Week events on campus, I noticed a panel entitled Conjuring Futures: Black Women Writers Reimagining the World. One of the panelists was Sheree Renée Thomas, an SFF author and the new editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction, a major speculative fiction magazine. My reaction was, OMG, Sheree Renée Thomas is coming to Grinnell?! I immediately put this panel on my calendar, along with a zine-making workshop the next day.

On Saturday, I arrived at the panel early, hoping to get a good seat. In fact, I was the first to arrive! The panel ended up starting very late because the previous event, a workshop on local community and movement building, ran over by a lot. Sheree Renée Thomas was actually the first panelist to arrive, and she asked students to raise their hands by class year before asking whether there were any faculty present. I was the only one to raise my hand, and she asked me what I taught. That said, the president of the college also attended the panel, so it wasn’t as though I was the only non-student. Victoria Jones, the Grinnell Prize winner, arrived from the workshop, and the third panelist, author Jamey Hatley, joined by video conferencing.

Jones named right off the bat that she was emotionally devastated from the previous session, and maybe that set the tone for the whole panel, I don’t know. It wasn’t quite what the label on the tin said (though Thomas talked a bit about Octavia Butler’s work and her own relationship to and friendship with Butler), but it was still good. After some readings from Thomas and Hatley, the panelists took turns talking at length, evoking the history of Black Americans and the traditions they grew up with and the present ills of our racism-riddled country. They also talked to each other: during the panel, Thomas and Hatley, who have been close for decades, discovered they both had connections to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, an independent Black community I had never heard of before. Thomas held forth about how absolutely vital it was for Black creators and movement builders to fireproof what they brought into the world because if history tells us anything it’s that the oppressors will tear down anything good they make, leaving them to start over again. There was this narrative of fitful progress, of Black success meeting with destructive backlash, making fireproofing crucial. I found the session wholly worthwhile, but it was heavy; there was a weight in that space.

On Sunday, I returned to campus for Scraps: A Workshop on Zine Making and Visual Storytelling with Nubia Yasin, another Memphis-based artist and activist. Regular readers of this blog know that I have a fondness for zines, and I hadn’t been to a zine-making workshop since the last one Isabelle and I participated in at the West LA public library. The session took place in the rotunda of the performing arts center, and this time I believe I was the only non-student in attendance, at least from the Grinnell College community. Victoria Jones, Sheree Renée Thomas, and other Grinnell Prize Week presenters also came to the workshop. Nubia Yasin, the leader of the session, first had us write down our answers to three questions: Who are you? What story are you wanting to tell? What does that story look like? Then she set us loose on the table of art supplies, though not before clarifying that our stories didn’t need to be about who we were but would inevitably be shaped by our identities.

On and around the table were markers, colored pencils, glue sticks, and bins of collage materials, including magazines, street maps, calendars, wallpaper, cardstock, scrapbooking paper, and a bin of irregular triangles cut from thin metallic gold or silver cardboard. I’d been considering making a one-page zine about how I ended up becoming a linguist, but Yasin told us that we actually weren’t going to be making the whole zine but rather just one page of a zine, which would clearly communicate what the whole zine was about. I wasn’t so sure about this, and I considered ignoring the workshop directions and just making a whole zine, but in the end I decided to just go with it.

I found a piece of folded white cardstock, like a blank greeting card, and I took some colored pencils in shades of blue, green, and purple, and I started drawing overlapping clouds in different shapes and orientations. I decided my zine “page” would be a sort of identity/geneaology piece, so I wrote the surnames of my eight great-grandparents (four in English, four in Chinese) around the four sides of the front of my card. Then I went bin diving again and happened upon a street map of the Twin Cities suburbs. What were the odds! I found the street I grew up on and carefully tore out a thumbprint-sized piece of map including that street. Then I glued it in the center of my card. I still had some time, so I opened the card and started to draw some colored pencil flowers inside. I started with a lotus, but I drew it in blue, and I was working on some forget-me-nots when Yasin announced that it was time to display our zine pages at our tables and walk around to take in everyone’s work. It was fun to see what everyone had created. A lot of people had gone with a larger format than me, and there were a lot of collages, which made sense, given the available materials. Someone, a student, I think, even asked to take a picture of my zine/card!

I’d also been hoping to talk to Sheree Renée Thomas, however briefly, over the course of the weekend, so I finally mustered the courage to approach her. I did tell her I was a writer as well as a linguist and had thus been very excited the editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction was coming to Grinnell, but after our short conversation, I realized I’d forgotten to introduce myself! Ah, well. I just need to write some new short stories to submit to her.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi@Grinnell

Sep30

Writers@Grinnell is back with quite the fall line-up! Earlier this month, I attended poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s roundtable with the Grinnell College community. Times being what they are, this was a virtual event, and it was my first time attending a virtual author event (although I have done virtual events myself, before they became an absolute necessity). I don’t know if Calvocoressi is just exceptionally good at setting the tone and making a mosaic of faces on a screen feel somewhat like an intimate gathering, but the roundtable was great.

They started off by asking everyone to write in the chat what they could see from their window. Or if there was no window, what they could see where they were. The responses started accumulating, and soon after Calvocoressi began reading the chat transcript as though it were a poem (you know, with those poetry reading cadences and intonation). As they read, answers were still popping up, but I was dithering about whether or not I wanted to participate. In my hobbit hole of an apartment, there is exactly one window on the outside world, and all I ever see through it is a square of sky (or, as I learned this week, workmen and their ladders on the roof). But then the responses stopped, and the poet was reading their way down, and I knew if I submitted my patch of sky now, it would be the last line of the poem, which sounded like way too much. So I never said anything. Maybe I was the only one! In any case, I thought this was such a neat idea: it was the first reading of the evening, and the poem was a collective act of creation, and now somehow we were all bound together by how magical and atmospheric they’d made the views from our windows sound.

What followed was a sometimes meandering discussion, punctuated by poems and questions from the audience (“Gender, poetry, and God–are they friends or something else?”). Calvocoressi was always genuine and open and thoughtful. They talked about growing up in New England, raised with the rigidity of the Pilgrims (the first person to fall off the Mayflower was in their family). The inner Pilgrim was a recurring motif during the roundtable, a part of yourself that you know is wrong but that can still reprimand you and make you feel shame. Calvocoressi said the work of their life was to not be ashamed of themself all the time.

In recalling how they started writing, they talked about their writing coming from a place of silence. Their poems always start as fantasy and in daydreaming. And they compared writing poems to playing the saxophone (they’d played music for many years). Someone asked whether they kept a journal, and they said they kept a notebook but not a journal (and they use their phone a lot for poetry purposes!). They also like to draw and have a watercolor pad, and they find art very helpful to writing. They added that sometimes their brain is their notebook, as they have a better memory than they should. Someone else asked how to stop the stream of consciousness in writing a poem, and Calvocoressi said they actually use stream of consciousness a lot in their poems. They like a poem that feels like it never ends, that keeps leaping and leaping along associative connections, and the only way to get that is if the connections are really tight. Calvocoressi also teaches poetry writing and explained that they teach from a place of praise, which can be hard for some of their students. This is an approach they learned from their first poetry teachers.

They had some interesting things to say about revising poems too. They’ve tried to stop thinking of it as revision and to think of it as variation instead. What else does the poem seem to want to do? What are the other things the poem can do? One thing they’ve tried is making variations of a poem without changing any of the words, instead changing only the punctuation and seeing whether they can change the power dynamics or priorities of the poem.

Finally, I scribbled down a quote from towards the end of the roundtable: “I was hugely popular with the gravestones.” But to be honest, I’ve forgotten what this was about. Hanging out in graveyards? I suppose that’s a good way to usher in October.

Hello again, Grinnell!

Sep9

First, here is a very nice review of Sparkers in French! To be clear, the review is in French; the reviewer listened to the English audiobook. There is no French translation of Sparkers, but I was delighted to discover a foreign language review I could read.

It’s been just over a year since I moved to small town Iowa from the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles. But although I have been an Iowa resident for a year, I spent almost half of that time away from Grinnell because pandemic. Recently, I returned for the start of the new academic year, and I’m wondering if there’s a word for the nostalgia you feel for a place upon coming back to it. I liked Grinnell well enough in my aborted first year here, but now I’m discovering a charm that feels more bewitching than before.

An old brick façade downtown

The water tower seen down an alley

The mural on the north wall of the Grinnell Railroad Club, beside the tracks

The setting sun illumating the stained glass windows of the Methodist church

Garth Greenwell and Brandon Taylor@Grinnell

Mar25

Earlier this month I attended the Writers@Grinnell afternoon roundtable with novelists Garth Greenwell and Brandon Taylor. Greenwell’s latest novel is Cleanness, and Taylor’s debut novel is Real Life. I first saw Greenwell last fall in conversation with Carmen Maria Machado at her reading at Praire Lights in Iowa City.

I took notes at the event, but I don’t have them with me now, so this will be from memory, and not entirely chronological. The roundtable began with Greenwell and Taylor asking each other a couple of questions. Greenwell asked Taylor how he’d decided on the compressed time frame of his novel (a long weekend), as well as the structure and the shifting tense (present vs. past) and POV (first person vs. third person). The tense and POV came naturally, almost subconsciously, and once Taylor realized what he was writing in he didn’t want to go back and change it. This line of questioning also led to musing on one’s weaknesses as a writer and writing–indeed, creating art–from one’s infirmities (I think).

Both authors’ novels seem to mirror their own lives in a lot of ways, but I was drawn to Taylor’s because its protagonist is trying to survive grad school (I think he has it a lot worse than I did). Taylor himself wrote the novel in grad school, I believe, and in the Q & A a student asked him about his interest in both science (he studied biochemistry) and writing and literature. Taylor saw lots of commonalities between these two fields or pursuits. For instance, both as a scientist and as a novelist you can spend years of your life working on something and not know whether it’ll come to anything (how reassuring).

Greenwell and Taylor both talked about not being able to watch TV shows because they’re uninterested in serial stories that just continue and never end. It’s boring when every episode ends in a cliffhanger intended to lure you back for more. Greenwell said that a story can only have a shape if it has an ending, and I suppose the serial nature of TV, and the perpetual hope of another season, makes that impossible. (I wouldn’t really know; I don’t watch TV either, though not for that reason.) He said he liked works of literature that laid out the whole plot at the beginning, so you knew the shape of the story. My interpretation was that he was much more interested in execution than plot or even storytelling (in a conventional sense).

Another student asked Greenwell how he could write so bravely and unflinchingly; this student sometimes wrote things and then was filled with the sense that they should never write about such things again. In his response, Greenwell talked about shame as an intrinsic aspect of growing up gay, or queer, in the U.S. I think he meant one should do something with that shame rather than deny it? I believe both authors concluded that writers shouldn’t let anyone else hold them back from writing what they want to express.

The most heartwarming aspect of the roundtable were their comments about their friendship, to which they returned again and again. Basically, they seem to have the ideal literary friendship. Greenwell alluded to Taylor making living in Iowa City bearable for him. It sounds as though they meet up in coffee shops almost daily. Taylor also talked about the importance of having that one friend who will instantly get your Jane Austen reference, who will know just what obscure character you mean and share your feelings about them. In fact, they ended the whole roundtable by saying, “Friendship!” in unison, with a kind of ironically sentimental intonation. But at the same time you knew at some level they really meant it.

Writers@Grinnell

Mar4

After I blogged about a number of the fall Writers@Grinnell events, Dean Bakopoulos of the English Department invited me to do my own Writers@Grinnell event. It took place last month in the Mears Cottage Living Room. I was quite surprised–pleasantly so!–by the turnout. There were so many people that some of them had to sit on the floor behind the sofa where I was seated. There were a lot of students, most of whom I didn’t know (I did have one former student and one current student in attendance). There were some of my fellow speculative fiction reading group members. And there were some English Department faculty.

Hosting me was Paula V. Smith, also of the English Department. She gave me a lovely introduction and then revealed (to the audience and to me) that she had a surprise gift for me. It was a copy of Small CraftWarnings Vol. 1 No. 2, which she and her best friend had co-edited in 1981. Jonathan Franzen was also on staff at the time. Small Craft Warnings is one of Swarthmore College’s literary magazines; when I was there, I served on the editorial board for three years. The issue Paula gave me was one of the first under the magazine’s new name. I was delighted to receive it. The issue consists of poetry and photography, and a number of the poems are translations, from Chinese, Spanish, and French.

I spoke briefly about how Sparkers and Wildings came to be (the long journey for Sparkers and the much quicker crafting of Wildings), and then I took questions. They were all interesting! A couple had to do with my approach to writing specifically for middle grade readers: whether I thought about my audience or how I’d had to revise my books to make them suited to young readers (the political machinations can only be so twisty!). Someone asked about how to balance exposition and action when you have a lot of worldbuilding to do. Somehow the subject of what I’m writing next came up, so I gave away a couple of details about the project I hope will be my next book. My current student asked me about the languages in my fantasy worlds, and I explained that there were no full-fledged conlangs behind the languages in Sparkers and Wildings. But the language in my next book actually has a sketched-out grammar and a deeper vocabulary beyond what little makes it onto the page. Paula asked me about the names in Sparkers and Wildings, a topic I’ve thought about and get asked about relatively often.

Afterwards, I signed a few books, breaking out Isabelle’s stamp again, and chatted with a few students. One of them asked me about story ideas and length. That is, how do you generate enough stuff for a whole novel but not so much that it becomes too much? I wasn’t sure how to answer at first because I always write too long and then embark on epic word-cutting sessions. I’m not very good at writing short stories that are actually short. But upon reflection, I think it’s best, at least when drafting, to let a story grow to the length it wants to be, even if it’s awkward. Novellas exist! Then you can always revise, fleshing out bare bones or carving away excess until you have the story you intended.

My First Iowa Caucus

Feb12

Iowa is, of course, famous for its first-in-the-nation caucuses, the subject of intense attention on the part of candidates and the media in presidential election years when multiple contenders are vying for a party’s nomination. Last year, when I accepted my current job at Grinnell, I realized I’d be an Iowan for the 2020 caucuses. And more generally, I’d be living in Iowa for the remainder of the presidential race.

Many candidates made campaign stops in Grinnell (and many downtown storefronts were converted to campaign offices), but I didn’t actually see any of them. Either I found out about their visit only when it was already happening (Pete Buttigieg), or I didn’t try to get into their CNN town hall on campus (Joe Biden, Tom Steyer), or I just didn’t try to go (Elizabeth Warren). Bernie Sanders came to our local coffee shop, Saints Rest, with Ilhan Omar and Pramila Jayapal the Saturday before caucus night; I found out a few hours earlier on Facebook and later heard there’d only been room for 60 people inside. I kind of regret not seeing any candidate give their stump speech to an Iowa crowd, but ah, well.

I was looking forward to the caucus because I figured it was probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I could participate in a political event that the eyes of the nation were glued to! (For the record, I don’t think it makes sense that Iowa plays this outsized role in the presidential nomination process, but that’s another discussion.) At 6:30, I walked the few blocks to my caucus site. Now, it had already crossed my mind that I wasn’t temperamentally suited to caucusing (as opposed to voting in a primary). I don’t really like talking to people I don’t know, especially about my political views. Consider this: I had contemplated going into the caucus uncommitted. When I arrived, a young campaign worker in a Pete t-shirt asked me who I was supporting that night, and I demurred, partly out of that lingering indecision and partly because I was not there to caucus for Pete. He immediately asked me what I was looking for in a candidate, and I started looking for the quickest way out of this interaction. I mean, the whole point of caucusing is to talk to your neighbors about why you’re supporting who, but I am clearly not meant for this type of gathering. But I at least wanted to witness it and be in the same room as people having those conversations. (Also, as far as I could tell, nobody was uncommitted in the first alignment at our caucus, so if I had been, I’m sure I would’ve been swarmed by representatives from every other candidate’s huddle, and that would’ve been an introvert’s nightmare.)

There were quite a few other new faculty in my precinct, most, if not all, of us caucusing for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. It was gratifying that everyone respected one another’s choice. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about one’s vote being public; I mean, now we all know who supports who. I’m a pretty big believer in voter privacy. But respect for political differences is supposed to be a hallmark of the Iowa caucuses, I’m told, and I felt it was observed at my caucus. There were also some new faculty in the observer section; they must not be registered to vote locally. We were not in the same precinct as the college students, and I believe our caucus was smaller than at least a couple of the other Grinnell caucuses. I was definitely reminded I now live in a small town (like most Iowans): one of the check-in volunteers was a former president of the college who attends the same church I do and whose name is on the local public library, and I also saw my landlord. The other day, I stopped by the grocery store, and one of the clerks at my register looked incredibly familiar. I knew I’d seen her somewhere recently, but I couldn’t figure out where, until it hit me: she’d been the precinct captain for our candidate’s group at the caucus.

After the election of the chair and secretary, we all lined up to receive a preference card (and be counted). The chair announced that there were 132 of us caucusing, and so the number of supporters a candidate had to reach in the first alignment to be viable was 20. Looking around the room, only Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg looked to have that much support. Indeed, after the first alignment, they were the only candidates to have passed the threshold (Sanders: 48, Warren: 33, Buttigieg: 25). Next, each precinct captain made a one-minute timed speech in support of their candidate. They spoke for Sanders, Gabbard (literally one guy), Yang, Warren, Klobuchar, Biden, and Buttigieg. Then everyone whose candidate was no longer viable had to find a new group. People in viable groups were not allowed to change allegiances. I thought it looked like most people flocked to Warren.

After the second alignment and a little math, our caucus was ultimately to send to the county party convention 5 delegates for Sanders, 4 for Warren, and 3 for Buttigieg. The chair was pleased to report that exactly 132 preference cards had been collected. Precinct captains recruited actual delegates and alternates, and then after a little business it was over. The whole thing had taken a little over an hour. We new Iowans left the caucus feeling pretty happy about our role in participatory democracy.

Later that night, national news outlets began wringing their hands: where were the results from Iowa? I was puzzled and a bit worried. Our caucus had gone so smoothly, so what was going on? I wasn’t too troubled, though, and I went to bed assuming I’d learn who the winner had been in the morning. Well. We all know how that went. At least the part about there being a winner.

But here’s where it got interesting for me. Despite being an Iowan on paper, I don’t actually think of myself as an Iowan. But I did caucus in Iowa last week, and I do live here. And suddenly it was really weird to me to be seeing all these opinion pieces in The New York Times about Iowa, mostly written, I believe, by columnists who haven’t actually been here, at least not for this caucus season. I had a bit of a What do they know? reaction, which should probably make me think harder when I read those same columnists on other parts of the country they may not have been to (I read The New York Times a lot). The caucuses were being portrayed in the media as a train wreck, with talk of the “debacle” and the “fiasco”; #IowaCaucusDisaster was trending on Twitter when I got up the next morning. And it was just so dissonant with my own caucus experience of orderliness, efficiency, and clear results. I’ve heard other Grinnell folks emphasize that the caucus process itself did work, and a lot of volunteers worked very hard to make sure it did.

My initial take was that the caucuses had gone just fine and it was the reporting that was the problem: an app that crashed and swamped phone lines. (Trying to implement the app without adequate training and testing was clearly a mistake.) But I didn’t think the rest of the country was making this distinction; from the headlines in the papers, they were probably concluding that the whole thing had been a horror show. And I knew from direct experience that this just wasn’t true. Moreover, there was a paper trail, so we’d know the real results in the end. I did think the reporting issues and the fact that there was no winner to report to a nation on tenterhooks was very unfortunate. I think it will undermine people’s trust in our electoral systems and make people more skeptical of and cynical about our democratic processes. And the last thing we need is for people to be discouraged from voting because they don’t think their vote will be counted properly. I was chagrined that the optics were so bad for Iowa when my caucus experience had been entirely positive, and I knew the Democrats’ nomination process was off to a very rocky start.

Later, I read a more worrisome report (yes, in The New York Times) about caucus numbers that didn’t add up or were internally inconsistent. If this report is true, that is bad. (The New York Times has since reported even more.) Caucus officers did have to report more sets of numbers this year, and I can imagine how this might’ve led to confusion. As far as I know, the caucuses are basically run by volunteers, many of whom probably have years of experience and are very competent. I would hope that there’s careful training and built-in safeguards to ensure that caucus results are reported accurately. I hope that the final Iowa results will express what happened on caucus night because with all the other flaws in our electoral system, at the very least we need well-run local elections.

Dangerous Instruments

Feb5

Last Friday I went to the opening reception of the Stewart Gallery exhibit “Dangerous Instruments.” The Stewart Gallery, run by the Grinnell Area Arts Council, is inside the old Stewart library, now the Grinnell Arts Center, next door to the post office. The Arts Council runs all sorts of interesting activities that would probably be worth checking out. There’s even a pipe band. As in Scottish bagpipes. Am I missing my chance to realize my childhood ambition of learning to play the bagpipes? (Am I also missing my chance to learn to play viola da gamba through the Collegium Musicum?)

I digress.

“Dangerous Instruments” featured the creations of Eric McIntyre, hornist, composer, professor of music, and conductor of the Grinnell College orchestra. He built his musical instruments-cum-works of art from excavated pianos, horn bells, saw blades, axe heads, used munitions, bedpans, pitchforks, a tractor fuel pump, a mailbox, gun barrels, and more. Many of them were beautiful (with a certain rustic-ness) and elegant, and some of them literally had teeth.

A Dangerous Piano

The reception was crowded, and I think there was good representation from the ranks of the college orchestra. Gallery visitors were invited to play many of the instruments (gently), using little metal implements, beaters of various types, or giant washers. I tapped tentatively at a few things myself.

The Schlüsselspiel, one of the more melodious instruments

Around 7:00pm, the artist gave a little talk introducing all of his instruments and explaining how he’d made them. He goes to auctions to buy things like the equipment from an old sawmill. He performed on some of the instruments or demonstrated the kinds of sounds they could make. He seemed really interested in different types of resonances and showing how you could pluck or strum the tines of a pitchfork. He’d made a bow out of an old lightning rod and some bicycle part and used it to bow his “mailbox bass.” Honestly, I was not always particularly taken with the sounds these instruments made; they weren’t very musical to me (though I guess music is in the ear of the beholder). But other instruments had more delightful surprises: suspended wrenches and axe heads make surprisingly sweet bell-like sounds.

He also performed on some of the instruments, playing a Saint-Saëns romance on a horn with a bedpan for a bell and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on a double-belled horn built with the double barrels from an old rifle. He’d composed a piece for horn and these three motorized saw blade-and-bullet casings instruments, each of which made a perpetual tinkling sound.