By Cheryl Olsen
How many Pulitzer Prize winners does it take to make a great impromptu party? We can definitively say: 2.5.
As the Workshop events wound down and the band fired up Saturday night at the Iowa Memorial Union, we commenced distributing Eric’s WW2BW cards with Glenn’s condo address on the back to a few folks who’d missed our first gathering, and in the magical, mystical way of such convergences, people started drifting over to the condo, where the New Zealand pinot noir was flowing freely.
Marilynne Robinson (Pulitzer for Gilead) and Paul Harding (Pulitzer for Tinkers) were among the first to arrive. The other .5 of our riddle answer were Jane Smiley (Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres), and Michael Cunningham (Pulitzer for The Hours). Jane said she would come, but we gave her special dispensation because she was in town with her Workshop daughter, YA author Lucy Silag, and we know what mischief hangin’ with twenty-somethings can wreak. We were all pretty sure Michael would attend after Sandra Cisneros’ multiple titillating mentions of him in We Wanted to Be Writers. Unfortunately, we never caught up with him to extend an invitation.
But there were plenty of other colorful characters (and writers thereof) to go around, among them Dan Guenther, former bartender at Joe’s, decorated Vietnam vet, author of China Wind, Dodge City Blues, and Townsend Solitaire (his Lost Vietnam Trilogy), and Glossy Black Cockatoos, 2010 Colorado Authors’ League Award selection for genre fiction. He had endeared himself earlier by publicly corroborating Glenn’s boxing anecdote that featured man-about-town Jack (no one seemed to recall a last name) a sparring partner and “tough sumbitch,” as Dan put it.
Rebecca Kimmons (Becky Browning when we knew her) and her husband Bill—two thirds of Bare Bones (along with tenor Mark Davis), an old time music a’cappella group based in West Virginia—came bearing their latest CD, “Put your Loving Arms All Around Me.” Many of us remember Becky grabbing the mic every chance she got at The Mill and other Iowa City venues when we were in the Workshop. She was good even then.
Consummate southern gentleman Ross Howell showed up, well recuperated from their 16-hour drive from Greensboro, NC and eager to show his wife Mary Leigh what all the fuss was about.
Prairie Lights Bookstore co-owners Jan Weissmiller and Jane Mead, and Jan’s husband John delighted us with local literary lore. Prairie Lights founder Jim Harris had primed the pump at our first party two nights earlier. Jan was kind enough to take the cumbersome WW2BW poster and book a reading for September 26!
Poet Robert Monroe, who’s been at Trinity College in Ireland the past several years working on a PhD on Yeats, is writing a novel about Yeats. He also has a screenplay in the works that’s “sort of like Shakespeare in Love.” He lives in Charlottesville, VA.
There were repeaters, from the first party, and since I haven’t been in the right time zone for two weeks now, I’m probably forgetting people. For that, I am truly sorry. But I won’t soon forget how great it was to talk waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay past my bedtime with fascinating word-ies about what it means to be a writer.
It makes me smile to see that, all these years later, we’re still at it, and to see that Becky Browning is recalled as the mic-hungry chanteuse at The Mill. To be remembered at all is, of course, flattering to some degree. For lo, these many years, I have faltered at the blank page like a jumping horse that refuses to take the jump, but so far, I have escaped the fate of non-jumping jumping horses, the dogfood can–although some of my Iowa colleagues may dispute that. I was amused to note last Saturday night that four out of six of us in the room at one moment had West Virginia roots. “But they moved on,” my old friends noted of their grandparents, parents, etc. I meant to move on, but I can’t seem to escape the place, no matter where I am. There’s so much work to be done here that it seems like copping out to leave. Did I neglect to mention that I have founded the Transcendent New Nation of Appalachia? The heart of the Transcendent New Nation is a cafe/bar called Dirt in the Transcendent New Nation’s capitol city, The Diamond, that happens to share coordinates with Charleston, West Virginia. You can read some about the Diamond and the Transcendent New Nation at http://www.appalachiatoday.com, but be sure to go back to the early posts, before the April 5 mine disaster that killed 29 men. After that, I have tended to be angry and ernest. At any rate, Dirt will have a mic and a great sound system, yes, and lights to illuminate those who choose to share their latest imaginative works–fiction, poems, songs. I’ll let you know when the doors open, and then it will be ‘Y’all come.”
Great reporting from the frontlines Cheryl! Can’t wait to see the interviews cut together.