The MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment presents

Things Fall Apart: 

     Finding Beauty in a Broken World

January 29 - 31, 2010

♦ Iowa State University  ♦ Memorial Union & Ames Public Library  ♦  Ames, Iowa  ♦

A mosaic is a conversation between what is broken.
                                   --Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

FRIDAY, JANUARY 29                                                        

• 7:00 - 8:30 PM:  The Girls on the Roof: A Poetry Performance   ♦  Mary Swander

     Ames Public Library, 515 Douglas Avenue

Mary Swander and the Eulenspiegel Puppet Company will perform a poem based on selections from Mary Swander's latest book of poetry, The Girls on the Roof.  The book-length narrative poem features the story of a mother and daughter stranded on the rooftop of Crazy Eddie's Cafe on the banks of the Mississippi River for three days during the flood of 1993.  While stranded, they discover things about each other they would prefer never to have known. 

Swander and the internationally renowned Eulenspiegel Puppet Company have created a performance piece from selections of the book.  In this one-hour adult (not for children) production, Swander reads poems while puppeteer Monica Leo bring the scenes alive through the use of hand, rod, and shadow puppets.  Booksigning and Reception to follow event. 

Sponsored by Ames Public Library.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 30

• 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM:  Under Our Skin: There's No Medicine for Someone Like You  ♦  Documentary Film

     Sun Room, Memorial Union

A gripping tale of microbes, medicine & money. Under Our Skin exposes the hidden story of Lyme disease, one of the most controversial and fastest growing epidemics of our time. Each year, thousands go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, often told that their symptoms are "all in their head."  Following the stories of patients and physicians fighting for their lives and livelihoods, the film brings into focus a haunting picture of the health care system and a medical establishment all too willing to put profits ahead of patients.  Winner of Best Documentary Award at the Camden International Film Festival, the Durango Independent Film Festival, the Sonoma International Film Festival, and the Houston International Film Festival, Under Our Skin was produced and directed by Andy Abrahams Wilson for Open Eye Pictures.

• 1:00 PM  - 2:00 PM:  The Wilding:  A Fiction Reading  ♦  Benjamin Percy

     Sun Room, Memorial Union

Benjamin Percy, the author of two short story collections (The Language of Elk and Refresh, Refresh) will read from his forthcoming novel, The Wilding.   The novel features numerous interlocking plot lines, including Native American mythologies, the machinations of locksmiths, real estate schemes, miscarriages and wild bears. 

In Vox Magazine, Percy described the novel as  “Crash meets Deliverance."  He continues, The Wilding “is about expansionism in the form of war and in the form of the commercialization of the frontier, the Californication of Oregon, and the animalism that lurks within us all."   The Wilding will be published by Graywolf Press in the fall of 2010.

• 2:15 - 3:15 PM:  Writers Grow Here ♦  Flyway's "Home Voices" Reading

     Sun Room, Memorial Union 

Sponsored by Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, the Home Voices event showcases creative work focused on themes of environmental imagination  (poetry, fiction, and nonfiction)  from writers in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment. 

The Home Voices readers will be selected from a competitive pool of submissions by the staff of Flyway, and the top winners' work will be published in a forthcoming issue of Flyway in 2010.

• 3:30 - 5:00 PM:  Meaningful Work: The Writer as Citizen  ♦   Panel Discussion

     Panel:  Rick Bass, Terry Tempest Williams, Dean Bakopoulous (moderator)

     Sun Room, Memorial Union

Keynote speakers Rick Bass and Terry Tempest Williams will be joined on stage by moderator, Dean Bakopoulos, to discuss the responsibility of writers in an every-changing and imperiled environmental landscape.  

Panel discussion will feature short opening comments from invited authors, Terry Tempest Williams and Rick Bass, followed by moderated conversation led by Dean Bakopoulos and Q & A discussion with audience.

• 8:00 - 9:30 PM:   Mosaic:  Finding Beauty in a Broken World: A Nonfiction Reading  ♦ Terry Tempest Williams

     Great Hall, Memorial Union       

 
Standing on a rocky point in Maine, looking east toward the horizon at dusk, I faced the ocean.  “Give me one wild word."  It was all I asked of the sea.  . . .  And the word the sea rolled back to me was "m o s a i c."
                                                                       --Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

In her most original, provocative, and eloquently moving book since Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams gives us a luminous chronicle of finding beauty in a broken world. Always an impassioned and far-sighted advocate for a just relationship between the natural world and humankind, Williams has broadened her concerns over the past several years to include a reconfiguration of family and community in her search for a deeper understanding of what it means to be human in an era of physical and spiritual fragmentation.  

Williams begins in Ravenna, Italy, where "jeweled ceilings became lavish tales" through the art of mosaic. She discovers that mosaic is not just an art form but a form of integration, and when she returns to the American Southwest, her physical and spiritual home, and observes a clan of prairie dogs on the brink of extinction, she apprehends an ecological mosaic created by a remarkable species in the sagebrush steppes of the Colorado Plateau. And, finally, Williams travels to a small village in Rwanda, where, along with fellow artists, she joins survivors of the 1994 genocide and builds a memorial literally from the rubble of war, an act that becomes a spark for social change and healing.  

A singular meditation on how the natural and human worlds both collide and connect in violence and beauty, this is a work of uncommon perceptions that dares to find intersections between arrogance and empathy, tumult and peace, constructing a narrative of hopeful acts by taking that which is broken and creating something whole.  Booksigning and Reception to follow event.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 31  

•  10:00 AM - 12:00 PM:  Crude Independence  ♦  Documentary Film Screening & Director's Talk

  Screening Followed by Q & A with Director, Noah Hutton.  Moderated by Debra Marquart

    Sun Room, Memorial Union

Crude Independence is a documentary film about the heartland in the process of transplanting itself, and the new heart is pumping oil. In 2006, the United States Geological Survey estimated there to be more than 200 billion barrels of crude oil resting in a previously unreachable formation beneath western North Dakota. With the advent of new drilling technologies, oil companies from far and wide are descending on small rural towns across America with men and machinery in tow.

Director Noah Hutton takes us to the town of Stanley (population 1300), sitting atop the largest oil discovery in the history of the North American continent, and captures the change wrought by the unprecedented boom. Through revealing interviews and breathtaking imagery of the northern plains, Crude Independence is a rumination on the future of small town America—a tale of change at the hands of the global energy market and America’s unyielding thirst for oil. 

Winner of the 2009 Best Documentary Award at the Oxford Film Festival and the directorial debut of twenty-one year-old filmmaker, Noah Hutton, Crude Independence is at once a riveting journey through the timeline of a modern day gold rush as it is a rumination on the present state and the uncertain future of small town America.

• 1:00 PM  - 2:00 PM:  Blood Dazzler:  A Poetry Reading  ♦  Patricia Smith

     Sun Room, Memorial Union

Patricia Smith’s fifth book of poetry, Blood Dazzler, chronicles the human, physical and emotional toll exacted by Hurricane Katrina, a catastrophic natural event with lasting spiritual and political impact.  In minute-by-minute detail,  Smith's poems tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category 5 storm with its “scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,” to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched on television.

“ Hurricane Katrina has receded from the national news, but the destruction it wrought has found testimony in literature. Patricia Smith's fierce, blood-in-the-mouth collection of poems, a finalist for the National Book Award, grows out of this disaster and already has the whiff and feel of folklore. The storm, Smith reminds, was hardest on those who had the least, many of whom will never return home again. Inhabiting one voice after another, she evokes the way total loss can dignify a paucity of possessions. In other poems, she powerfully impersonates the storm itself: its bulging, seething menace; the way it flung people to all corners of America; how the loss it unleashed felt biblical, a very personal punishment.”  —Yusef Komunyakaa

• 2:15 PM  - 3:30 PM:  Aftermath: Surviving Disaster   ♦  Panel Discussion  

     Panel:  Benjamin Percy, Patricia Smith, David Zimmerman (moderator)

     Sun Room, Memorial Union

The panelists will discuss how themes of violence, destruction, and disaster—personal, cultural, environmental—factor into their writing, and how their works of art suggest strategies for facing and surviving the aftermath of catastrophic and violent events.   Panel discussion will include short opening comments from three panelists, followed by moderated conversation led by David Zimmerman and Q & A discussion with audience.

• 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM:  Sweet & Savory Reception
  

     Sun Room, Memorial Union

 Join the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment for a reception featuring sweets, savory appetizers, a cash bar, and live music.

• 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM:  The Lives of Rocks: Field Notes on Finding Home  ♦ Rick Bass

     Sun Room, Memorial Union      

The forces of nature are huge, and we are tiny, and in the mountains it’s easier to remember this.  I don’t think we’ll ever figure out for sure if the details of our lives, or even the patterns of them, are the result of intricate, foreordained design or simply the exquisitely random windblown flutterings of grace and confusion.

                                                                             –Rick Bass, “Why I Came West” 

Author and conservationist, Rick Bass will read from his latest work.  The son of a geologist, Rick Bass received a B.S. in petroleum geology at Utah State University in 1979, and then worked as a gas and oil geologist in Jackson, Mississippi.  He started writing short stories during his lunch breaks.  In 1987 he and his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes, moved to the Yaak Valley in the northern Rockies, near the Idaho-Montana-Canada border.  Since then, Bass has actively worked to protect the Yaak area from roads and logging, and serves on the board of the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies.

Sponsors

♦  MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment ♦ College of Liberal Arts & Sciences  ♦  Committee on Lectures (funded by GSB)  ♦  Creative Writers’ Milieu (CWM)  ♦  LAS Miller Lecture Fund  ♦  Center for Excellence in the Arts & Humanities  ♦  ISU Bioethics Program  ♦  Department of Ecology, Evolution & Organismal Biology  ♦  Environmental Studies  ♦  Department of Geological & Atmospheric Sciences  ♦  Department of English  ♦  The Henry A. Wallace Endowed Chair for Sustainable Agriculture  ♦ Ames Public Library  ♦  Humanities Iowa ♦

General Information

• All events are free and open to the public.

• No registration required.

• Hotel reservations:  Contact The Iowa House Bed & Breakfast (515-292-2474), the Gateway Hotel (800-For-Ames), or The Memorial Union Hotel  (800-433-3449).

• Closest airport to Ames/ISU:  Des Moines International Airport (DSM).

• Ground transportation from Des Moines to Ames/ISU:  Majestic Limousine and ISU Airport Shuttle Service.

• For questions about the symposium:  Contact Debra Marquart (marquart@iastate.edu).

• For information about the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment:  Contact Stephen Pett (spett@iastate.edu).
  

Biographical Information ♦ Participants & Keynotes

DEAN BAKOPOULOS  (fiction/nonfiction) was born and raised in metro Detroit, which is the setting of his first novel, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon, a New York Times Notable Book. He has lectured at Michigan, Cornell, UW-Madison, and other universities about the economic and environmental problems facing the post-industrial Rust Belt, and has published related essays and criticism in The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The Progressive, The Believer, and Real Simple. His one-act plays "Phonies" and "Wayside" have been produced at Alley Stage in Mineral Point, Wisconsin.

The winner of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, he is the former director of both the Wisconsin Book Festival and the Wisconsin Humanities Council. He is currently at work on a book of nonfiction, as well as a television series based on his first novel. His second novel, My American Unhappiness, will be published in late 2010.

RICK BASS (fiction/nonfiction) is the author of over twenty books including, among others, The Lives of Rocks: Stories; The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana, The Ninemile Wolves; The Book of Yaak; and The Lost Grizzlies: A Search for Survivors in the Wilderness of Colorado.  His first short story collection, The Watch, set in Texas, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award, and his 2002 collection, The Hermit’s Story, was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.

 Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.  Rick Bass continues to be an active environmentalist, a member of the Sierra Club, the Montana Wilderness Association, the Cabinet Resources Group, Round River Conservation Studies, and the Yaak Valley Forest Council.   He has published articles in magazines such as Field and Stream, Sports Afield, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Outdoor Life, and others.

EULENSPIEGEL PUPPET THEATER is a non-profit puppet company, based in West Liberty, Iowa, and organized to promote the art of puppetry by producing and presenting high-quality performances and workshops. The company is committed to educating the public about the arts, serving as a center for the exchange of ideas, and enhancing the quality of community life.

NOAH HUTTON (Director/Documentary Filmmaker) was born in Los Angeles to actors Timothy Hutton and Debra Winger.  Noah spent his childhood on and around film sets and developed a passion for filmmaking of his own at an early age. After attending the Fieldston School in the Bronx, NY, Hutton entered Wesleyan University as a freshman in 2005. In the summer of 2007, he traveled to Uganda with the Jacob Burns Film Center’s World Crew program and co-directed a documentary film entitled Shooting for Peace that tracked three pressing issues in that country: child soldiers, water treatment, and HIV/AIDS orphans. Before directing Crude Independence, Noah directed the narrative 16 mm short Knives produced by the Wesleyan Film Cooperative. 

DEBRA MARQUART (nonfiction/poetry)  is a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University. Her books include two poetry collections—Everything’s a Verb and From Sweetness—and a short story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories which draws on her experiences as a road musician. Marquart is a member of The Bone People, a jazz-poetry, rhythm & blue project, with whom she has released two CDs: Orange Parade and A Regular Dervish.   Marquart’s memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, received the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award, the Elle Lettres Award from Elle Magazine and a New York Times "Editors' Choice" commendation.  Marquart’s work has also received a Pushcart Prize, the Shelby Foote Nonfiction Prize from the Faulkner Society, the Minnesota Voices Award, the Pearl Poetry Prize, the Headwaters Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Prose Fellowship. Marquart is currently at work on a novel, set in Greece titled Among the Ruins.

BENJAMIN PERCY (fiction/nonfiction) was raised in the high desert of Central Oregon. He is the author of a novel, The Wilding (forthcoming from Graywolf, 2010), and two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk. His fiction and nonfiction have been read on National Public Radio, performed at Symphony Space, and published by Esquire, Men’s Journal, the Paris Review, the Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, and Best American Short Stories. His honors include a Whiting Award, the Plimpton Prize and a Pushcart Prize.

Percy's work has been translated into French, Italian, and German, as well as published in the UK.  Filmmaker James Ponsoldt adapted Refresh, Refresh into a screenplay, which won the Lynn Auerbach Award from the Sundance Institute and a "Fast Track" fellowship from the LA Film Festival.  In 2009, Refresh, Refresh was adapted into a graphic novel, written and illustrated by Danica Navgordoff at First, Second Books. 

PATRICIA SMITH’s fifth book of poetry, Blood Dazzler was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.  It chronicles the human, physical and emotional toll exacted by Hurricane Katrina, a catastrophic natural event with lasting spiritual and political impact.  Patricia is also the author of Teahouse of the Almighty (a National Poetry Series winner, the Best Poetry Book of 2006 on About.com, and a 2007 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and Paterson Poetry Prize winner); as well as the books, Close to Death; Big Towns, Big Talk; and Life According to Motown.   Her poems have appeared in numerous jounals including Poetry, The Paris Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, TriQuarterly, and in many groundbreaking anthologies such as The Pushcart Anthology; Gathering Ground, The Spoken Word Revolution; The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry; and Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry.  Recognized as one of the world’s most formidable performers, Patricia is a four-time national individual champion of the notorious and wildly popular Poetry Slam, the most successful competitor in slam history. She was featured in the nationally-released film “Slamnation,” and appeared on the award-winning HBO series “Def Poetry Jam.”

MARY SWANDER is the Poet Laureate of the State of Iowa and a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University where she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment. Swander’s recent books are The Girls on the Roof, a book-length poem, and two memoirs, The Desert Pilgrim and Out of this World.  Swander is the author of three additional books of poetry, Heaven-and-Earth House; Driving the Body Back; and Succession, as well as a book of literary interviews, Parsnips in the Snow. Swander has edited three books: The Healing Circle: Authors on Recovery from Illness; Bloom and Blossom, a collection of garden literature; and Land of the Fragile Giants, a book about the Loess Hills.

Ms. Swander has received numerous awards including an Iowa Author’s Award, a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, two Ingram Merrill Awards, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and the Nation-Discovery Award. Ms. Swander’s work has appeared in many journals and magazines including The Nation, National Gardening Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Poetry magazine.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS has been called "a citizen writer," a writer who speaks out eloquently on behalf of an ethical stance toward life. A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she has consistently shown us how environmental issues are social issues that ultimately become matters of justice. Williams, like her writing, cannot be categorized. Known for her impassioned and lyrical prose, Terry Tempest Williams is the author of the environmental literature classics, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy.

 Her new book Finding Beauty in a Broken World, was published in 2009.   In 2006, Ms. Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction.   Terry Tempest Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change.

DAVID ZIMMERMAN attended Emerson College for film studies and then went on to earn an MFA in creative writing at the University of Alabama. He has worked as a publicist at St. Martin’s Press in NYC and taught writing at Georgia Southern University, Dilla University College in Ethiopia, South College in Savannah and the University of Wisconsin, where he was also a fiction fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. His first novel, Socket, was published by Anvil Press, and his second, The Sandbox, is forthcoming from Soho Press in 2010.

MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment
Iowa State University
206 Ross Hall
Ames, IA 50014
www.engl.iastate.edu
Contact: englgrad@iastate.edu