Interview with Cornelia F. Mutel
Advance Praise for Family Bible

Advance Praise for Return to Warden's Grove
Grammar Lessons Selected for New York Public Library’s Books to Remember from 2007
Haunted by Waters Named the National Council on Public History Best Book

2008 Iowa Short Fiction Award Winners Announced
University of Iowa Press Announces 2007 Author of the Year Abigail Foerstner

Author Events

Interview with Cornelia F. Mutel

Interview with Cornelia Mutel, author of The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa

Q: In the course of your research, what one fact did you find about the natural history of Iowa that surprised you?

A: The fact that in addition to our rare natives, even many of our common species (e.g. blue jays, bullsnakes) are slowly declining – an event that signals that Iowa’s natural systems are being pushed to the breaking point. My gut-level depression from this knowledge was fortunately counteracted by seeing restored prairies and oak woodlands that are increasing in diversity, health, and integrity, where native species are increasing. Witnessing nature’s resilience, its willingness to return to Iowa’s overworked landscape, was perhaps my biggest surprise and joy.

Q: What one item about the natural history of Iowa would you most like people to know about?

A: That restoring the health and integrity of native communities is both possible and necessary. Native species and communities provide ecological services that we cannot survive without. They supply pollinators of flowers and crops and natural pest controls. They cleanse water and air, build and hold soil, moderate weather extremes, and provide many more benefits – sustainably and at no cost. Thus restoring native diversity and our natural landscape will not only bring joy and peace to the heart, it will also foster Iowa’s environmental quality and our economy.

Q: The Iowa River was recently named one of the most endangered waterways in America. Why is that and what can Iowans do to help rectify that?

A: Prior to Euroamerican settlement, Iowa’s waters ran crystalline clear. The plowing of the tallgrass prairie (which used to cover 80% of Iowa) removed the dense perennial vegetation and complex root systems that filtered precipitation and released water slowly into swales and creeks. Sediment (and, later, agricultural chemicals) then started to wash over the land surface, directly into streams. Returning health to our waterways depends on restoring the upland watersheds – getting a portion of the corn and soybean croplands (which now cover 2/3 of Iowa) back into healthy, preferably native, perennial vegetation.

Q: What is the impact of ethanol production on the ecosystem of Iowa? As so much of Iowa's economy is agriculturally based, how do we reach a happy medium between this potential economic boon and its ecological fallout?

A: If ethanol production increases the amount of Iowa’s land in cornfields and leads to the plowing of perennial set-aside lands (such as CRP plantings), it will increase water pollution and erosion and cause other environmental problems. Long-term environmental costs will likely exceed short-term economic gains. However, if techniques can be developed to produce ethanol from prairie plantings, this could increase the expanse of Iowa’s native perennial vegetation and improve our environment in multiple ways.

Q: What do you think of the "greening" of America? Most people are now cognizant of the basics (such as recycling, using mass transit or carpooling, organic farming) but what else can the average American do to make a difference? What's the next step, as it were?

A: Most types of environmental activism are to be applauded. But I think that people only work for what they know and love, deep in their guts. Thus we need to encourage more Iowans, and especially our children, to fall in love with nature: to spend time outside where they can see and take joy in the returning of neotropical migrants each spring, and celebrate the blooming of native wildflowers in restored oak woodlands, and nurse patches of prairie plants back to health. Recognizing these native species requires a bit of education. I hope that The Emerald Horizon will help provide that education to a broad, diverse audience.

Q: What is your hope and vision for the future of the environment of the Midwest and specifically Iowa? How can it be achieved? Conversely, what will happen to Iowa if we aren't willing to change?

A: I envision an Iowa where natural communities once again intergrade our working landscape throughout the state – and native species thrive and spread, diversifying and beautifying the landscape and fostering environmental health and stability. This is possible only through the commitment of Iowans and the dedication and support of our government. Without that commitment, we will continue to lose the species that have provided Iowa with its rich agricultural soils and culture – and we will suffer in multiple ways from that loss.

Advance Praise for Family Bible

Whether telling of her father’s circumspect “hunting trips,” her mother’s sudden, tempestuous moves across town in the middle of the night, or coming to terms with her own sexuality on the banks of the river, Melissa Delbridge's Family Bible is a stunning personal history. Check out the early praise:

“Delbridge knows sorrow like she knows the rhythm of her own heart. . . . Fans of Carson McCullers won't want to miss this one—witty, tragic, and relentlessly wise.”—Booklist, starred review

“Family Bible is a memoir that illustrates the importance of knowing ourselves and beauty of not always understanding ourselves or how we fit in or how we have survived this long. This book tells stories of love, laughter, sadness and strength while maintaining that conversational and lyrical language of those from the south.”—Feminist Review

“Melissa Delbridge's memories of her early life are dead-accurate, hilarious, and tragic and will surely prove enduring as a guide to the Deepest South—a place and a culture that continue to prove alarmingly vital. I mean to keep this book handy, for pleasure and real guidance.”—Reynolds Price

Advance Praise for Return to Warden's Grove

Based on three seasons of living in isolation conducting field research in the Canadian Arctic, with his family at home in the American Midwest, Christopher Norment’s exquisitely crafted meditation on science and nature, wildness and civilization, is marked by bottomless prose, reflection on timeless questions, and keen observations of the world and our place in it. Here’s what reviews have to say about it:

“Norment recounts his three seasons studying the Harris’s Sparrow in . . . a way that is appealing both for its ornithological insight and extraordinarily personal revelations. . . . His book will speak to all who have a passion for wild things.”—Booklist

“Norment eloquently affirms the beauty of biological fieldwork as a vital way, ‘to pay attention to the world’ and be connected with something outside the self.”—Publishers Weekly

Grammar Lessons Selected for New York Public Library’s Books to Remember from 2007

The University of Iowa Press is pleased to announce that Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain by Michele Morano has been chosen for inclusion in the New York Public Library’s Books to Remember from 2007. This is an annual list of 25 outstanding titles selected by a committee of librarians.

In the thirteen personal essays in Grammar Lessons, Michele Morano connects the rules of grammar to the stories we tell to help us understand our worlds. Living and traveling in Spain during a year of teaching English to university students, she learned to translate and interpret her past and present worlds—to study the surprising moments of communication—as a way to make sense of language and meaning, longing and memory.

Morano focuses first on her year of living in Oviedo, in the early 1990s, a time spent immersing herself in a new culture and language while working through the relationship she had left behind—a relationship with an emotionally dependent and suicidal man. Next, after subsequent trips to Spain, she explores the ways that travel sparks us to reconsider our personal histories in the context of larger historical legacies. Finally, she turns to the aftereffects of travel, to the constant negotiations involved in retelling and understanding the stories of our lives. Throughout she details one woman’s journey through vocabulary and verb tense toward a greater sense of her place in the world.

Grammar Lessons illustrates the difficulty and delight, humor and humility of living in a new language and of carrying that pivotal experience forward. Michele Morano’s beautifully constructed essays reveal the many grammars and many voices that we collect, and learn from, as we travel.

Additional Praise:
“On one level, Grammar Lessons is a vivid, compelling meditation on traveling abroad. On another, the author, Michele Morano, uses her travel experience—the exhilarations and dislocations, the unbidden surprises and disappointments—as a lens through which she examines more deeply what it means to be human.”—Michael Steinberg, founding editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction and author of Still Pitching

“I’ve never read a book quite like Michele Morano’s account of her love affair with the Spanish language and with contemporary Spain. Without pretension, Grammar Lessons accomplishes so much: it is prose poetry, a traveler’s tale, reflexive ethnography, a meditation on the possibilities of translation, and a gorgeous memoir of a woman’s search for a new language that can help her to know better who she wants to be. This book sings to me—to say it in Spanish, me encanta.”—Ruth Behar

Michele Morano is an assistant professor in the English department at DePaul University. Her essays have appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including Best American Essays 2006, Fourth Genre and The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, the Georgia Review, the Missouri Review, Under the Sun, the Crab Orchard Review, and Chicago Public Radio’s 848.

Haunted by Waters Named the National
Council on Public History Best Book

The University of Iowa Press is proud to announce that Haunted by Waters: A Journey through Race and Place in the American West by Robert T. Hayashi has been selected as the winner of the 2008 National Council on Public History Book Award for the best work published about or growing out of public history. Public history involves historical research, analysis, and presentation, with some degree of application to the needs of contemporary life.

As an easterner, researcher, angler, and third-generation Japanese American traveling across the contemporary Idaho landscape—where his grandfather died during internment during World War II—Hayashi reconstructs a landscape that lured emigrants of all races at the same time its ruling forces were developing cultural processes that excluded nonwhites. Throughout each convincing and compelling chapter, he searches for the stories of dispossessed minorities as patiently as he searches for trout.

Using a wide range of materials that include memoirs, oral interviews, poetry, legal cases, letters, government documents, and even road signs, Hayashi illustrates how Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian, all-white, and democratic West affected the Gem State’s Nez Perce, Chinese, Shoshone, Mormon, and particularly Japanese residents. Starting at the site of the Corps of Discovery’s journey into Idaho, he details the ideological, aesthetic, and material manifestations of these intertwined notions of race and place. As he fly-fishes Idaho’s fabled rivers and visits its historical sites and museums, Hayashi reads the contemporary landscape in light of this evolution.

The NCPH is a membership association dedicated to making the past useful in the present and to encouraging collaboration between historians and their publics. They work to establish professional standards, ethics, and best practices; provide professional development opportunities; recognize excellence in a diverse range of public history activities; foster networking and a sense of community among public history practitioners; and support history education.

Additional Praise:
“Luminous as Idaho’s fabled trout streams, Haunted by Waters recounts how racialized minorities, including native peoples, Hawaiians, Chinese, and Japanese, transformed spaces into places in the physical and social landscape of the American West. And in the course of this journey, we come to discover a river to ourselves.”—Gary Y. Okihiro, Columbia University

“‘It is not fly-fishing if you are not seeking answers to questions,’ says Norman Maclean’s father in A River Runs through It, and as a scholar and fly-fisherman Robert Hayashi shows us how researching and writing about his Japanese American ancestry in the American West are intimately connected to his love of fly-fishing western waters. The way the book culminates with the touching revelation of the author’s being ‘haunted by waters’ beautifully complicates that famous conclusion to A River Runs through It and makes us aware of how each of us sees the landscape through a unique personal, cultural, and historical lens and acts accordingly.”—Don Scheese, author, Mountains of Memory: A Fire Lookout’s Life in the River of No Return Wilderness

Robert T. Hayashi is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Haunted by Waters is his first book.

The award will be presented at the Presidential Luncheon/Awards Ceremony/Business Meeting during the NCPH Annual Meeting at the Brown Hotel on Friday, April 11, in Louisville, KY.

2008 Iowa Short Fiction Award Winners Announced

The University of Iowa Press is pleased to announce the winners of the 2008 Iowa Short Fiction Awards. Glen Pourciau is the winner of the 2008 Iowa Short Fiction Award for his collection Invite. Molly McNett's One Dog Happy is the winner of the 2008 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. The recipients were selected by final judge Charles D’Ambrosio, author of The Dead Fish Museum and Orphans.

Glen Pourciau’s stories have won the Carter V. Cooper Memorial Prize and the Brazos Bookstore Award for Best Short Story from the Texas Institute of Letters, and they have been cited in Best American Short Stories and nominated for Pushcart Prizes. He has published stories in such magazines as the New England Review, Ontario Review, Mississippi Review, New Orleans Review, Cimarron Review, and Quarterly West. He lives in Plano, Texas.

Intense inner and outer monologues resonate through the lives of Glen Pourciau’s characters. We hear the voice of a man who will not stop talking, the voice of a man who does not want to talk, the voice of a man stunned into silence by his sudden awareness of a desire he did not know he felt, and the voice of a man struggling to accept his imminent death.

Inhabiting an outwardly bland landscape that overlays internal questions and recurring confusion, the narrators of these ten intensely felt stories strive to understand their varied predicaments. Conflicts with neighbors arise, troubling memories return, suspicions and fears lead people into isolated corners as distances open up inside them and around them. And in those open spaces, the sometimes humorous, sometimes obsessive voices continue their quest. In the final story, “Deep Wilderness,” the voices seem to fragment as a family comes apart.

While his characters struggle to come to terms with their inner wilderness, Glen Pourciau’s spare, riveting voice maintains a constant presence. Invite is a debut collection that speaks volumes.
Molly McNett’s work has appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005, Brain Child magazine, the Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, New England Review, New Letters, Crazyhorse, and Other Voices. She lives on a farm in northern Illinois with her husband and children.

In One Dog Happy, McNett couples laugh-out-loud dialogue and wry observation reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor with disquieting strains of dashed hope, troubled sexuality, and disillusionment. The adults in these stories can seem as hapless and helpless as the younger characters. Two neglected daughters use the language of clothes to cope with their parents’ divorce and their father’s mail-order bride. A young girl’s bizarre sexual fantasies help her gain control over the chaos of her family life. A gang of teenagers accuse a farmer of bestiality. A divorced father tries to create a pony-filled world that might appeal to his daughters. In the title story, Mr. Bob, the minister’s housesitter, loses a dog but finds someone to believe in. And in “Helping,” the darkest story in this amazing collection, Ruthie’s anger conquers her religious faith when she takes care of a severely disabled child.

We meet McNett’s endearing, often foolish characters at a point when their minds are open to manipulation by the people and events around them, and the conclusions they draw are heartbreaking: I am not allowed weakness; life treats people unequally; perhaps there is no God. Yet throughout they find quiet moments of possibility, courage, and a return to faith and comfort.

The short fiction awards are given to a first collection of fiction in English and are administered through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The honors are national in scope and have been given since 1969. The John Simmons Short Fiction Award (named for the first director of the University of Iowa Press) was created in 1988 to complement the existing Iowa Short Fiction Award.

Recent winners include Whose World Is This? by Lee Montgomery, Desert Gothic by Don Waters, Permanent Visitors by Kevin Moffett, Things Kept, Things Left Behind by Jim Tomlinson, A Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space by Douglas Trevor, and This Day in History by Anthony Varallo.

University of Iowa Press Announces 2007 Author of the Year Abigail Foerstner

The University of Iowa Press is proud to announce that due to our grateful appreciation for her boundless and infectious enthusiasm for her subject, her intelligent ability to unravel the mysteries of space travel, her dedication throughout many months and years of research and writing, her authorial conscientiousness, the close to eight billion earthbound miles “through sleet and snow”—not to mention ice—that she traveled between Iowa and Illinois, her wholehearted exuberance during each stage of publication, the gracious hospitality of her entire family, her tireless and inspiring energy, and the warmth of her collegial personality, Abigail Foerstner has been named Author of the Year 2007.

Abigail Foerstner teaches science writing and news writing in the graduate program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. As a staff reporter for the suburban sections of the Chicago Tribune, she covered science and the environment for nearly ten years. She spent seven years researching and writing James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles.

Often called the father of space science, James Van Allen led the way to mapping a new solar system based on the solar wind, massive solar storms, and cosmic rays. Pioneer 10 alone sent him more than thirty years of readings that helped push our recognition of the boundary of the solar system billions of miles past Pluto. Abigail Foerstner’s compelling biography charts the eventful life and time of this trailblazing physicist.

Drawing on Van Allen’s correspondence and publications, years of interviews with him as well as with more than a hundred other scientists, and declassified documents from such archives as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Kennedy Space Center, and the Applied Physics Laboratory, Foerstner describes Van Allen’s life from his Iowa childhood to his first experiments at White Sands to the years of Explorer I until his death in 2006.

James Van Allen is not the first book that Foerstner has published with the University of Iowa Press; in 2000, in conjunction with the Amana Colonies’ sesquicentennial celebration, the paperback edition of Picturing Utopia: Bertha Shambaugh and the Amana Photographers hit the shelves of bookstores across the country. Foerstner, whose great uncle was one of the Amana photographers included in this book, brought together this stunning collection of photographs along with the stories of the photographers who took them. Together the pictures and text fill in an untold chapter in American photographic history and provide an insider’s view of life in Amana.