Lucy's People Iowa Writes Jackie Jackson
I don't know if I was good for her or not. Maybe we helped each other through a bad patch in our lives. I was just out of prison and she was just out of Utah. She was a beautiful woman, a nice armful. She could make a freight train take a dirt road. I hoped we'd be together forever but knew we'd be doing good to last six months. She softened me up. But she could go away inside herself like nobody I'd ever seen. It was like an iron gate dropped and a concrete wall went up. You couldn't shoot your way in.
She had a great laugh, but never used it. Things weren't funny to her like they were for everyone else. Comedy movies, jokes, cartoons. She said knowing it was supposed to be funny ruined it. The hardest I ever saw her laugh was drunk. She was the first woman I trusted in a long time. If I asked her to meet me at the bus station with a bag of money and a pistol, I knew she'd be there.
The night she left, I robbed a liquor store. They never caught me and I never stole again. I'm living on the square now. I believe I owe that to her.
Allie Houston
Lucy waited tables with me at a diner in Casper. She was a good twenty years older and showed me how to smile enough to get a tip but not so much it give the men ideas. She was like a Mom to me. Eat before you drink, she said. Don't get mixed up with married men. Don't answer every question just because somebody asks.
That time in my life was bad. I felt like my insides were dissolving, and I decided to get it over with. I took sleeping pills, then I got scared and called Lucy. She took me to the hospital and came to visit every day. She told me that living was the best thing there was in life, and didn't even think that was funny when I laughed. She gave me little presents, just cheap stuff, but nice. I still have the stuffed dog. I call it Lucy. Not because it looks like her or anything, but so I can say her name sometimes.
2006-10-18 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=362 Sydney Cohen Cohen received a MFA in Painting and Drawing in 2002. Untitled oil on canvas 18" x 24" 2002 artimages/10182006.jpg 400 301 The Graduate Archive
2006-10-19 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=767 Doug Russell Doug Russell moved to Kansas City in 1999 after a two year teaching position in Bursa, Turkey. He holds an MFA in printmaking from the University of Iowa and a BFA in painting from Columbia College. He has shown in Kansas City at The Michael Cross Gallery, The Morgan Gallery, The Late Show Gallery, and at The Framing Girl Gallery. He currently teaches at Central Missouri State University and Maple Woods Community College. When not working, he's out exploring the world on his bicycle or puttering in his garden. Remnant 08 (Fallen Page) mixed media 40" x 36" artimages/10192006.jpg 359 400
2006-10-20 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=729 Roman Antopolsky Romn Antopolsky, from Buenos Aires, Argentina, is a ground-breaking translator and an increasingly prominent figure in South American avant-garde poetry. He is participating in the 2006 International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
Michelle Gil-Montero graduated from Brown University in 2002 and is now an MFA candidate in Poetry at the Iowa Writers Workshop. She received an Academy of American Poets' Prize in 2006. Hombre del arroyo (Man from the Arroyo) Iowa Writes Si lluevellvia. Quin no podr or ah el verbo? Lluviar. El no personal llueve ya hace tiempo no acude a nada otro que no sea la accin definida. Lluviar; llvia.Es bello. Llvia en la ciudad, y llvia en los parques. La secreta palabra que acompasa (desmaraa) al mar,es su orilla. Y si llueve en el marlas gotas, si llvia, arredran la costa. El vapor la acorrala; la nieve la exuda. Mar. Si llviael asfalto esplandece; el verde en las plazas se hace al fin pleno, no neutro; el agua en las veredas, sudor ya compacto, lquido casi, se abalanza por fin;lava la acera, refleja luces, acaba en el goce de la vertiente en la vertical alcantarilla. Acequia, si llvia, desplaza el mojn del intelecto y liga los sentidos al ruido, en orillas de lo audible. Aguasi odacosta en la oreja (costa al concepto)consta testigo en la humedad en la calle, en la tierra, en el fruto. Aguaarrojo; quien recoge su humedad, recorre los sentidos,paladn de sus reflejos.
Agua.
en arroyos.
Man from the Arroyo (A translation of Hombre del arroyo by Michelle Gil-Montero)
If it rainsit rainfalls. Who wouldnt hear the verb in that? To rainfall. Too long has the dispassionate it rains landed on nothing more definite than being an indefinite act. To rainfall; rainfall. Its beautiful. It rainfalls in the city and rainfalls in the parks. The secret word orchestrates (unravels) the sea,is its shore. And if it rains into the seathe drops, if it rainfalls, scare away the coast. The steam corners it; the snow exudes it. Sea. If it rainfallsthe asphalt refulges; in the plazas, the green is at last replete, not neutral; the water on the sidewalks, sweat just condensed, almost liquid, finally rushes onit washes the pavement, reflects the lights, and ends in glee with the slope of a vertical drain. The drain ditch, if it rainfalls, dislodges the boundary stone of the intellect and links senses to sounds, along the shores of the audible. Waterif hearda coastline in the ear (a concepts coastline)bears witness to the dampness in the street, in the earth, in the fruit. Waterarrogating; whoever recovers its humanity, covers the ground of the senseschampion of its reflections.
Water.
in arroyos.
2006-10-21 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=730 Rafael Courtoisie Poet, fiction writer, essayist, and screenwriter, Rafael Courtoisie is one of Uruguays leading writers. He is participating in the 2006 International Writing Program this fall. Insecticide (Chapter VII of Caras extraas) Iowa Writes According to Charles Darwin, a wise Englishman, ants are communists, a scientific advisor confidentially informed General Pesano, Commander in Chief of the Army.
Destroy the anthills, ordered the general.
Goodbye ants.
*
They killed all the ants; not an ant could be found in the entire country.
If I see an ant, Ill have you shot, understand me, Fagndez?
Fagndez, Minister of the Interior, snapped to attention: Understood, General: not one ant.
*
They made students write:
Traitor ants
Death to the ants
Be patriotic: kill an ant.
The only good ant is a dead ant.
*
They imported four thousand ant-eating bears from all parts of the world, of various species. An army brigade adopted the ant-eating bear as the insignia for its shield and the protective patron of its squadrons.
ANTS ARE THE ENEMIES OF PUBLIC WELFARE...said the billboards.
For their part, the insurgents created the Ant column, our principal pride.
*
Support commandos painted enormous ants of tar on the city walls of Salvo and also in the capital, Montenegro.
Victory ant was a slogan and an emblem of war.
2006-10-22 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=768 Ae Ree Han Ae Ree Han received an MA in Printmaking in 2003 Untitled etching, lithography 23" x 30" 2002 artimages/10222006.jpg 302 400 The Graduate Archive
2006-10-23 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=770 William Barnes Growing up in California, William Barnes attended UCLA before studying painting at Drake with Jules Kirschenbaum. He then studied with Byron Burford in Iowa City, whose course in materials and techniques introduced him to egg tempera and casein, his major media since. Soon after his Iowa City period, signs appeared of what has become Barnes' signature style - landscapes noted for their "loneliness" by a local critic alternated with still-life studies of odd combinations of small objects. Recently, after sojourns in Tucson and Santa Fe, Barnes is bringing a warmer, more relaxed ambience to his exotic works. Above The Din collage & acrylic on paper 8 x 9 artimages/10232006.jpg 400 376
2006-10-24 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=731 Laksmi Pamuntjak Laksmi Pamuntjak is a columnist, translator, bookstore owner, and award-winning poet from Jakarta, Indonesia. She is participating in the 2006 International Writing Program. from Lives Iowa Writes 5.
She is the one who crunches numbers and traces the arc of company progress till her eyes give way at midnight and there is nothing in the fridge. She is unabashed about being a right-winger, about her two-minute attention span, about her preference for airport bestsellers. She is skittish, demanding, terrifies both men and women, but what earns her our respect is that she is not scared of being hated.
This is because in a lot of ways we want to be her. Hers has been the sort of post-college release into the world most people dream ofan effortless unspooling, as it were, into the best in the best of possible worlds: a seven-digit salary, upward mobility, and a doting but relaxed family. OK, so that was the 90s, when the word manager was ones ticket to anything from hotel discounts and round trips around the world to house mortgages and marriage proposals, but were always around twenty years behind anyway.
The thing is: most people are also so wrong about her. The only thing that she has going for her really is the doting but relaxed family bit. The rest is not so much all the best in the best of possible worlds as a simple, alienating, dogged single-mindedness. In that she is like Singapore, that peculiar island state whose trees, so methodical, so in place, are almost a put-on, whose sky is so formal that its structures of light and dark might well have been concocted indoors: the loneliest set-up on the planet. And now were five years into the millennium and people are cheating the system right left and centre, collecting a paycheck while staying at home, the true rent of life being the one that lies between job and children. Yet she has chosen her mold and keeps at farthest bay any illusion that the fire will not burn her. Having your cake and eating it too may be the currency of the day, but not hers.
Like yesterday: it was only four days into the New Year, and while all of us were sipping G and Ts in some island resort, she was talking about having five episodes in the can, shouting down all four corners to winnow down the long list of topics. Stay on message! I told them, she told us, failing as usual to see the irony. But its all there: television, PR, marketing, all those 90s buzzwords. She talks in terms of what is appropriate and what is not while batting nary an eyelash at spending nine million rupiahs on a Manolo. And the tube is not even her fieldits just a spinoff of the core business.
But sometime just around midnight the voice that called out from the other end of the line was stricken. She told me, as anyone who appreciates fruit knows when handed a mango by the moon, she has always known what to expect. The age difference. What people think. But its not as if shes known how to keep them as most women who have been kept seem to be adept atdemanding as she pleases both their erections and their nurturing warmth. She has no cunning to keep them in sweet suspense, or to rout another female, no children to sell off as she was once sold. She has nothing else to call green, not pea, not olive, not viridian.
The next morning when I called her, though, she was at the gym. All they want, these boys, is your body. she said with no trace of last nights vulnerability. Like black soldier flies, you know. In Week 28, after they have had enough of you, they leave their pupa casings and disappear. So I have 19 weeks left in which to recuperate my losses, which is really not so badthree weeks to whip myself into shape, give and take a week for the imponderables, and another sixteen to even out the balance sheet.
2006-10-25 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=732 Partaw Naderi Partaw Naderi has published five poetry collections and several prose books on modern Afghan literature. He heads the media division of the Afghan Civil Society Forum in Kabul. He is participating in the 2006 International Writing Program. Lucky Men Iowa Writes When your star is unseen in this desolate sky,
your despair itself becomes a star.
My twin, the steadfast sun, and I
both grasp its far-flung brilliance.
* * * *
In a land where water is locked up
in the very depths of desiccated rocks,
the trees are ashamed of their wizened fruits.
The honest orchard is laid waste
such a bloodied carpet
is spread before the future.
* * * *
Yesterday, leaning on my cane,
I returned from the trees cremation.
Today, I search the ashes
for my lost, homeless phoenix.
Perhaps it was you who shadowed me,
perhaps it was only my shadow.
Even though the lucky men in my land
lack stars in the heavens, lack shadows on the earth
they welcome any stars
that grace their devastated sky.
O, my friend, my only friend,
turn your anguish into constellations!
Peshawar City
November, 2002
Translated from the Dari by Sarah Maguire and Yama Yari
2006-10-26 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=769 Jody Boyer Jody Boyer is an intermedia artist originally from Portland, Oregon. She received her B.A. from Reed College and her M.A. in Intermedia and Video Art fromt he University of Iowa. Her work has been shown nationally, including at the Des Moines Art Center, Womanmade Gallery in Chicago, and the bemis UNDERGROUND at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.
She is the co-founder of Echotrope, a nomadic arts organization in the midwest. Echotrope curates experimental video, film and new media in traditional and non-traditional venues alike. She also collaborates with her husband, Russ Nordman, Assistant Professor of Intermedia and Digital Art at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. Jody Boyer's website http://www.jodyboyer.com/ Untitled (Man on Wire) pigment print 12" x 18" 2002 In her work, she explores the interdisciplinary possibilities of photography and new media with a specific interest in landscape, memory, and perception. artimages/10262006.jpg 400 264
2006-10-27 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=777 Jose Eugenio Sanchez Jos Eugenio Snchez, an award-winning poet from Monterrey, Mexico, is participating in the 2006 International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. MY LANDLADIES Iowa Writes although the three are unmarried,
the youngest is 62,
they requested no references:
one told me I looked
like christ.
I hope the day does not come
when they ask me to fix the door
the flyswatter the shower
I can already imagine myself
with a wrench going into the bathroom
witness to a sad and painful tragedy:
a woman with dust rag skin
and soapy hair saying:
come here little boy,
or if you're afraid of the water
let's go to the bedroom,
just pass me the walking stick,
you can hit me with it.
Translation from the Spanish by Indran Amirthanayagam
2006-10-28 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=773 Ulfert Wilke Ulfert Wilke was born in Bavaria, Germany in 1907. He immigrated to
the United States in 1938 and died in Solon, IA in 1987. Wilke
received his MA from the University of Iowa and later became the
University of Iowa Museum of Art's first director. Ulfert Wilke was
director from 1968- 1975. 009 ink on paper 20.5" x 15" Wilke had a passion and fascination for the written language, drawing
most of his inspiration from it to create an abstract view of shape,
color, and texture. Wilke found inspiration in the calligraphy of the
Japanese Zen masters and in the numerical symbols of ancient people.
Studying each writing style to further develop his own from of
calligraphy, Wilke saw beauty in all forms of written language,
whether it was found in poetry, on plates, or as engravings. He
utilized acrylics, ink and watercolor to represent his abstract view
of language, space and time. Wilke was a painter who also collected
paintings throughout his pursuit of artistry. artimages/10282006.jpg 292 400
2006-10-29 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=776 Elias Simpson Elias Simpson grew up in Ames, Iowa, and recently finished his first year at the University of Iowa: "I hope to continue writing, although there is a great possibility of distraction." His majors are English and French. Processions Iowa Writes The ocean comprehends sea turtles,
its gnawing waves accept them.
I would turn out my velvet pockets,
but turtles only bawl for water.
Climbing gray grass mountains
spider ears reflect a streetlight glare,
scrambling in eight directions as my fingers ladle one,
I clasp it in my hands, and push air in whisper
Window men click sharply into line,
hidden in stained suspenders and masked by squeegees.
Black tires splash in mud-tinted potholes;
birds mutter mob-like ploys behind an empty park.
A ripple leaps from dented trash lids onto drainpipes,
my head rotates and heels angle pivots the same.
The trees are forging a path, moonless and fortified.
There is a smell of water: a long walk home.
2006-10-30 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=774 Nicole Timmins Nicole Timmins received an MA in Design in 2003. Map lithograph on state map & acrylic 23.5" x 37" 2002 artimages/10302006.jpg 400 259 The Graduate Archive
2006-10-31 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=778 Kodi Scheer Kodi Scheer, an Iowa native, received her B.A. in Literature, Science, and the Arts from the University of Iowa. She is currently a Colby fellow in the M.F.A. program at the University of Michigan. "Three Minutes" is based on her experiences as a research assistant in neurology at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Three Minutes Iowa Writes A light dusting of snow covers the playground adjacent to the emergency room. In the six months I've worked here, I've never seen children playing—just an old man smoking a Marlboro on the blue swingset. Maybe the cancer kids are too weak to run around and play.
I begin my day on the second floor in Neurology. Since I work in research, I test subjects who've experienced some kind of brain injury: stroke, head trauma, encephalitis. Today I'll be seeing Elizabeth J., a forty-two-year old woman with severe amnesia. She was normal for the first three decades of her life, until she developed herpes simplex encephalitis, a rare type of brain infection. Her file says she has a working memory of approximately three minutes.
When I greet her geriatric parents in the waiting room, they want to take a picture of Elizabeth and me, so maybe she'll remember me when they come back next year. Elizabeth smiles, the Polaroid camera clicks, and Mrs. J. shakes the photograph. If Liz has to go to the bathroom, Mrs. J. says, go with her and stand outside the door because she won't remember where she is.
I lead Elizabeth to a testing room, my office really, a plain room with two desks, two chairs, and two fluorescent lights. Thick neuroscience books line the overhead shelves. There's a shaded window with a view of more windows and a small courtyard below. I begin with some preliminary questions.
"What year is it, Elizabeth?"
"1991? I have to warn you, my memory is very bad." Elizabeth fidgets with the buttons on her pale green cardigan. Her champagne blond hair is bobbed. I wonder if her mother takes her to the salon and specifies the haircut.
"Where are we?"
"A hospital?"
"Can you be more specific about city and state?"
"Illinois somewhere? This hospital looks nice, so maybe Chicago." Her parents live in central Illinois, and they drive here for her annual research visits. To Elizabeth, it doesn't matter—she could be in any hospital. It happens to be the largest teaching hospital in the world, with excellent patient care and groundbreaking research. But there's nothing we can do for her.
"Who's the president?" I say.
"George Bush, I think," Elizabeth says. She studies my white coat. "Doctor, your hair is very pretty."
"Thank you," I blush, "but I'm not a doctor. Please, call me Kodi."
"Okay," she says. Her memory problems point to a damaged hippocampus, a small part of the brain shaped like a seahorse. Scientists believe the hippocampus helps us learn new information and make permanent records of it. There's no clinical treatment for Elizabeth's condition.
"How have you been feeling?" I ask.
"I'm well. Sometimes I get anxious because I can't remember anything. I won't even remember this conversation. Ask me questions faster."
"What have you been up to? Any hobbies?"
"Oh, I don't know. Next question." Elizabeth glances out the window. The snow falls in heavy flakes, drifting to the ground.
"Can you think of anything you like to do in your free time?"
"Oh, yes," she straightens in her chair, "I like to play the piano. I play in recitals sometimes." She hums a tune I'm not familiar with and plays an imaginary piano. Her fingers are agile.
I realize I've forgotten a data sheet in another testing room. Since I can't continue without it, I have to leave. Three minutes, I remind myself.
"I'll be right back, Elizabeth," I say. "One minute."
"Be quick," she says.
When I return with the paperwork, she doesn't recognize me. I'd taken too long—the file cabinet had been locked and I had to track down the key. I've failed her. I wonder where she is now, in any hospital, any doctor's office. The place you go to get better.
"Hello, Doctor," she says. "I'm Elizabeth."
"Hi. I'm Kodi."
"Nice to meet you. I have to warn you, my memory is very bad." She begins to hum the same melody, the song I couldn't place, but that I now recognize.
We finish testing about two hours later. For Elizabeth, that's one hundred twenty minutes, forty new beginnings, or maybe forty lifetimes. We return to the waiting room and I tell Elizabeth's parents about the grand piano in the lobby. They're thrilled.
I stand near the railing on the second floor to watch. Elizabeth sits down to the piano and plays the song with gusto, never faltering. She remembers every note.
2006-11-01 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=779 The Moving Crew The Boat Parade event, PedMall, Iowa City, IA March 3rd 2006 The Moving Crew art collective believes in a constant exchange of critical, confusing, exciting, or redundant thoughts on transition, transformation and transfer-mation of persons, places and things, both locally and globally.
The Moving Crew launched a regatta of hand-made cardboard boats, ships, and canoes with the help of participating public. All sightseers, vacationers, pirates, pleasure cruisers, colonizers, conquistadors, explorers, warriors, refugees, nomads, shipwreck survivors, captains, sailors, navy soldiers, drifters, fishermen and other boat experts were invited to join in, assemble boats on the spot and participate in moving them around the city, inventing their own boat narrative. Messages have been collected in the bottle on the spot and by mail or e-mail during and prior to the event. artimages/11012006.jpg 400 490
2006-11-02 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=780 The Moving Crew Passport-Home event, PedMall, Iowa City, IA June 2nd 2006 "The Moving Crew is an amorphous art colletive working on enlivening the public sphere. Not quite theater, not quite performance, not quite circus, not quite gallery art, not run-of-the-mill, The Moving Crew thinks of themselves as cultural animators hoping to engage the public in fun interactive art activities that surround ideas of community, movement and transformation.
Examining both humorous and serious issues on local and global scales, The Moving Crew playfully filters them through their sensibilities of profound absurdity. The Moving Crew invites the public to look at things from unusual vantage points and to join in the fun and play of making things. Through the use of inexpensive or found objects and materials, The Moving Crew hopes to invite people into a new space where the normal rules of the world do not quite apply and where the public is welcome to collaborate."
Get your
Passport - Home !
For continuous travel towards home - across all borders.
artimages/11022006.jpg 350 552
2006-11-03 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=781 Toby Dimmitt Toby Dimmitt, who graduated from the University of Iowa in May 2006, writes, "Soy de Fairfield, IA . . . Soy muy curioso y me gusta encontrar y aprender nuevas cosas que me hacen crecer intelectual y espiritualmente. Especialmente me gusta hacer ejercicio, leer, pasar tiempo con mi familia, los amigos y estar al aire libre. Quiero en el futuro viajar y siempre estar contento conmigo mismo."
"El cisne negro" appeared originally in second volume of NOSOTROS, a chapbook of creative work in Spanish produced each semester by Roberto Ampuero's class Taller de Escritura Creativa (35:108). Roberto Ampuero is a lecturer in the UI Department of Spanish and Portugeuse and the internationally published author of nine novels.
El cisne negro Iowa Writes En un pueblo pequeo y pobre hay un chico que lucha contra todo en su vida. l es bajo, y huesudo con ojos curiosos, pero solemnes. No tiene amigos tampoco. No importa la fuerza con que el chico trata de hacer las cosas, parece que l siempre falla.
- Si quieres ser un estudiante bueno, estudia!
- Seora, yo estudi tres horas.
Suena la campana del receso y todos los estudiantes corren delante del chico y por la puerta una nube de polvo a travs del piso viejo de madera. l se arrastra lentamente detrs del grupo. En el patio de recreo, el viento sopla por los rboles y crea un gemido a lo lejos. Se puede probar el sabor terroso del polvo en la boca. No ha llovido por un mes.
- Tal vez me permitirn jugar con ellos - piensa el chico.
- Puedo jugar?! - grita al grupo que juega ftbol.
- Si quieres la bola en tu cara, otra vez?si, est bien - responde el mejor y ms popular de los jugadores.
l es el jugador ms vigoroso pero no logra nada, como es usual. Cae tres veces y queda con la nariz sangrienta. Por el rabillo de su ojo l ve algo en el cielo.
- Mira, mira! - grita el chico apuntando al cielo.
- Es el cisne negro!
Todos paran inmediatamente y miran hacia el cielo. Reina la tranquilidad sobre todo, salvo el sonido del aleteo de las alas del mtico cisne negro mientras l vuela encima de las cabezas de los chicos.
La leyenda del pueblo dice que el primero que toca la pluma del cisne negro siempre tendr madera para el fuego y ropas para cubrir su espalda.
Mientras el cisne negro desaparece en la distancia, una pluma cae lentamente por el cielo encima de los jugadores. Todava no hay viento. Todos miran asombrados. El mejor y ms popular jugador empieza a correr primero, y el resto lo sigue con furia. El chico corre tambin, pero inmediatamente cae en el grupo cerrado, luchando por coger la pluma.
La pluma se acerca y los brazos se alzan para cogerla. Pero la pluma con su densidad liviana se balancea con la circulacin del aire de la tormenta de todos los brazos que sacuden el aire. Pasa por los brazos del grupo, por las piernas y aterriza en la cara del chico que est inconsciente. Todos se calman y miran la pluma en la cara del chico huesudo.
2006-11-04 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=782 Matthew Hopson-Walker Matthew Hopson-Walker received an MFA in Printmaking in 2003. Free Range Raised, Speared, and empty handed lithography 18.5" x 30" 2002 artimages/11042006.jpg 237 400 The Graduate Archive
2006-11-05 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=787 Jack Wilkes Dedicated and restlessly searching, Jack Wilkes is a teacher, painter, and explorer in concrete images and abstract ideas. After studying at the Cleveland Art Institute, Jack finished his BFA in Art Education at Drake which included a Certificate in Art Therapy; and he was both painting and teaching before he completed work for his MFA in painting from Drake in 1983. Teaching at Simpson College, Iowa State University, serving as Artist-in-Residence at the Des Moines Art Center, then Drake, he exhibited the first of his series of paintings and served in residencies, special projects, and workshops, some as far away as New Smyna Beach, Florida and Verenna, Italy. Now painting full time, Wilkes heads an active family and participates in school/community affairs when he isn't in his studio. Fine Line pastel 22" x 30" As Wilkes summarizes: My work . . .has revolved around sign, symbol, allegory, and architecture. I gravitate to historical, social, and spiritual references in both object and architecture in trying to understand the power these objects . . .possess and provide. artimages/11052006.jpg 400 295
2006-11-06 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=783 Grace Van Voorhis Grace Van Voorhis writes, "Soy un estudiante de Washington University en St. Louis, donde estudio relaciones internacionales. Tom la clase Taller de escritura creativa con el maravilloso Profesor Ampuero durante mi cuarto ano del colegio porque quera explorar mi imaginacin escribiendo en espaol, una lengua que me ama mucho."
"Las palabras vacas" appeared originally in second volume of NOSOTROS, a chapbook of creative work in Spanish produced each semester by Roberto Ampuero's class Taller de Escritura Creativa (35:108). Roberto Ampuero is a lecturer in the UI Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the internationally published author of nine novels. Las palabras vacas Iowa Writes Esta maana, el sacerdote ley unos versos familiares de la Biblia,y, por primera vez en mis diecisiete aos, no sent nada. Absolutamente nada. Antes de hoy, el sacerdote siempre me haba parecido fuerte y sabio, pero hoy me pareci dbil e inseguro. Sus palabras sonaron quebradizas, huecas, metlicas, pero mi madre estaba asintiendo con la cabeza despus de cada verso, e hizo la seal de la cruz espordicamente. Ella estaba al lado de la tumba nueva de mi hermano menor, cogiendo mi mano. Mir fijamente la tumba y despus a mi madre, y derram solamente dos lgrimas debajo de mi velo negro: una por la prdida de mi hermano, y otra por la prdida de la fe que tuve durante mi niez.
Cada noche de mi vida desde que aprend a leer, haba ledo unas pginas de mi Biblia usada. Y cuando era demasiado joven para leer, mi madre me haba ledo a mi cuentos como "David y Goliat," "Jons y la ballena," y "El arca de No." Ella siempre dijo:
- Las palabras de Dios nutren el espritu para que nunca tengas hambre.
Mi familia no tena mucho, pero tena la proteccin de Dios. Pero . . . La proteccin? Mi hermano est muerto. Solamente tena once aos, era apenas un beb, y ya est muerto. Cmo puedo creer en este impostor? Cmo, cmo? Se dice que las personas de fe no tienen preguntas, que son los sujetos del rey y nada ms. Pero ahora yo s que la fe es una fabricacin para obstruir la realidad cruel: que no hay "un plan divino," que nuestras vidas son simplemente casualidades.
Pero hice la seal de la cruz con mis manos entumecidas. Tuve que fingir para mi madre, porque nunca me entendera si le dijera la verdad. Ella siempre dijo:
- No le di mucho a mis hijos, pero les di la fe impenetrable.
Pero la vida brutal la haba penetrado. Con cada pala llena de tierra, el sacerdote enterr no solamente a mi hermanito sino tambin, mi fe. Y ahora, qu tengo yo?
2006-11-07 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=784 Douglas Trevor Douglas Trevor is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. His fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006. "Fellowship of the Bereaved" is the final story in The Thin Tear of the Fabric of Space (University of Iowa Press, 2005).
Established in 1969 and housed in the historic Kuhl House, the oldest house still standing in Iowa City, the University of Iowa Press publishes scholarly books and a range of titles for general readers. As the only university press in the state, it is dedicated in part to preserving the literature, history, culture, wildlife, and natural areas of the region. From "Fellowship of the Bereaved" Iowa Writes Jared drove home cautiously, through the familiar streets of his childhood. He didn't have a car in Boston and figured he hadn't driven in the snow since high school. He checked his watch. It was barely eleven o'clock.
Having someone in your family die prematurely ushered you into the fellowship of the bereaved, Jared thought. People who had not similarly suffered stayed away from this fellowship as best they could because they didn't know what to say to a person grieving. But in fact, the horrible truth was that the people within this fellowship didn't know what to say to one another either; each mourner was consumed by his or her own grief, so the group of sufferers that wandered through the social world like emotional lepers wasn't a group at all; it was just made up of crippled people, none of whom could help anyone else.
After Ann died, Jared filled his apartment in Boston with plants: ficuses, ferns, hoyas, bromeliads, and other houseplants that he couldn't even identify. He bought the plants at Bread and Circus, the upscale grocery store two blocks from his apartment, and carried them back one at a time. He didn't know how to care for plants and systematically over-watered every one of them but that didn't stop him; he kept on buying them, stubbornly waiting for the little greenery they provided to make him feel better.
After Ann died, Jared also began to stockpile nonperishables: detergent, trash bags, canned foods. He had never cared for beans but he bought dozens of different kinds. He filled the once empty cupboards of his kitchen with boxes of coffee filters, family sized packs of paper towels, liters of olive oil. He didn't know what he was doing. He wasn't aware that he was afraid to go outside, where people died.
He became accident phobic. He worried about slipping in the shower, or electrocuting himself somehowby mishandling the coffee maker, for example, or the toaster. At the same time he felt so cautious and paranoid, he also wanted to die, or at least he thought he did, so he came up with complicated suicide plans, like the one involving his laundry bag and a first edition of Biathanatos that he had mentioned to Dave earlier in the evening.
Stopped at a light, Jared watched a man carefully cross in front of him, balancing a pie tin in his arms. Living, breathing, keeping our hearts beating, our fingernails growing: we'll do anything to stay alive, Jared thought. We'll say goodbye to our favorite people and go on with our mundane routines because we want so fiercely to fill our lungs with air. In the face of death, we become greedy for life: selfish and hoarding. When he considered how tightly he had held on since Ann died he was filled with self-disgust and considered for a moment steering his father's car sharply to the right, into a storefront on Downing Street. But I'll never do that, he said to himself, and that's pathetic. To hold onto life like this . . . it isn't right. I should be dead. I want to be dead, but I'm too weak to do anything about it.
His eyes filled with tears. At the corner of Seventh Avenue, just a few blocks from home, he thought of the timeduring a snowstormwhen Ann had taken him out in the old Buick and they had done donuts in the Safeway parking lot. It was unlike her to be so reckless, but it was like her too, to be silly and fun. I'll never be able to describe her to people who didn't know her, he realized. To them, she will never seem real. To them, she will always be my dead sister.
2006-11-08 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=788 Laura Young Laura Young is a landscape and still life painter and currently lives in Iowa City, Iowa where she is an Associate Adjunct Professor in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa. She has won numerous fellowships and awards and has been shown across the United States in museums, commercial galleries, juried and group shows, as well as internationally in Denmark and Nigeria. Field oil on canvas 20" x 30" artimages/11082006.jpg 400 265
2006-11-09 http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=785 Kerry Egan Kerry Egan grew up in Long Island, New York, and received her B.A. from Washington and Lee University and her master's of divinity from Harvard University Divinity School. A year after her father died, she walked through northern Spain on a medieval pilgrimage road called the Camino de Santiago. Fumbling is the journal of her experiences.
