Iowa City

Life has a strange way of revealing itself to me. The serendipitous flow that my life often takes makes me wonder if I do indeed possess special magical skills that make anything I wish for manifest.

On my trip to Cedar Rapids for an amateur radio conference where my husband was presenting, I decided to visit Iowa City and coincidentally found myself there during the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. I didn’t know about the festival beforehand, and it was inspiring to be in the literary hub of Iowa City during the festival days. This experience made me hope to study there one day and participate in workshops with great writers.

While walking downtown, I came across the famous historical marker for “Writers in a Café” and read the poem written by Marvin Bell as Iowa City bid to become a UNESCO city of literature in 2008.

“Amid semi-trailers hauling produce grown in the deep blue-black topsoil left mid-country by an inexpressible Ice Age, there is known to be a place where words have dirt on their shoes. Where sky reaches to girdle the globe, the earth is etched by signs and portents. Many have bowed to their writing in attics and basements, at rest by the river or paused on a bridge, in the shadow of winter or eclipse, voicing local lives and affairs of state — as much by the reflections of leaves and the glow of prairie grasses left to live in the mind as by shapes in clouds or the dark news. They were here who made the sentence behave and misbehave, who added chapter and verse, and recast the myths. The café grows quiet as they write. The espresso machine lets go the steam someone may write in on the mirror. It is an impulse that survives disaster. The guns fail when surrounded by writing.”