An Interview with Yasmina Din Madden

The Final Thursday Reading Series takes place one week earlier this month (on November 19 due to Thanksgiving). The featured reader will be Yasmina Din Madden, author of the short story collection You Know Nothing (Northwestern University Press). She is a past winner of the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize and an Associate Professor of English at Drake University. 

The FTRS creative writing open mic starts at 7:00. Come a few minutes early to sign up to read, and bring your best five minutes of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. The featured reading starts at 7:30. Books by regional authors will be available for purchase at the event. FTRS returns on January 28, 2027, with novelist Darby Harn.  


Interview by Ty Helmon.

TY HELMON: Though the stories in You Know Nothing all stand on their own, I noticed recurring characters, places, relationship types, and professions in multiple stories. How did you think about these stories as individual works vs. as part of a collection?
YASMINA DIN MADDEN: Great question, Ty, and to be honest, I only thought about them as individual works for quite some time before deciding they should be part of You Know Nothing. These characters are ones I kept returning to, enough so that when I started to consider a collection of stories and what belonged or did not belong, these recurring characters and the stories they inhabit became a natural through-line and connective thread in terms of tensions in the collection. They served, I think, in terms of the collection, as a kind of anchoring mechanism. In the same way, I think of the longform stories in this collection as a kind of anchoring mechanism for the book. 


TH: In a lot of the stories in this collection, the relationships characters have with their mothers is often fraught with stress, which may be a universal experience. How, if at all, are you drawing on your experience as a daughter or a mother, and where else does inspiration come from for you?
YDM: Like a lot of writers, there are seeds of my own experience in some of my stories, and certainly, being a mother and a daughter has informed some of the writing in this collection. However, I’d say that while some part of my lived experience might be what gets a story brewing, I must leave that reality behind quickly to offer the story in the most engaging, effective, and precise way possible. So, for example, I think the story that comes closest to my own feelings of and about motherhood and womanhood, or the truest version of motherhood for me, is one of the speculative stories in which a mother eats her baby. And just for the record, I have not eaten a baby. 


TH: Many authors do not intentionally put symbolism into their stories, but for others it is an intentional part of their writing. One of the pieces of symbolism that I picked up on in your story “A Woman of Appetites” was the presence of cannibalism. In feminist and queer literature, cannibalism is often used as a representation of taking back power or as an encompassing love, subverting the norm of being seen as “meat” to being the carnivore themselves, or representing the closeness they feel with a person and their complete oneness. Was this something you did intentionally, or was it just what felt right while writing the story?

YDM:  Wow, I love this question and your reading of this story. For me, this is what felt right while writing this story. As in, there was never any question that this mother would eat her baby. It was in the cards from the start. I did not come at this story, consciously anyway, with a specific feminist angle in mind. My stories are born of image, character, and action or dialogue first. What the story might telegraph to a reader comes out of or after these elements, not before them, if that makes sense. 
 Many stories in the collection involve the complexity of the multiple identities characters have.

TH: Intersectionality, especially involving race and gender, seems to be a huge part of the themes in your stories. How intentional was that in your writing?
YDM: I’m going to sound like the least intentional writer of all time, but many of these stories were written at distinctively different times in my life, and the motif and overarching tension of intersectionality only became fully apparent to me when I started to think of what might make it into a collection. So, kind of like in my answer to your previous questions, where image or character led to feminist representations rather than a feminist angle shaping character and imagery, the many stories rooted in the tensions of competing or conflicting, or just complex identities created the theme of intersectionality within the collection as a whole. 
 

TH: Which of the stories in this collection was your easy kid and which one was its evil twin? That is to say, which story did you write with ease and which story almost killed you? 
YDM: My answer for this collection: "At the Dog Park" was my easy kid. "Rococo" was the evil twin. Thanks for the great questions, Ty. 

The Inaugural Reading of the University of Northern Iowa Sesquicentennial Poem by Vince Gotera

 

Click here to find out more about this special event.

An Interview with Jonna Higgins-Freese

The 2026-27 season of the Final Thursday Reading Series slides into September with a featured reading by Jonna Higgins-Freese. Higgins-Freese is the author of the forthcoming memoir All We Can Do: A Memoir of Parenting and Illness (Bell House Press). She is also a UNI alumna and the author of Fearless: a Novel of Frances Perkins and Social Security. 

The FTRS creative writing open mic starts at 7:00. Come a few minutes early to sign up to read, and bring your best five minutes of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. Higgins-Freese’s featured reading starts at 7:30. Books by regional authors will be available for purchase at the event. FTRS takes place on the final Thursday of the month at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls. 

Interview by Jim O’Loughlin. 

JIM O’LOUGHLIN: Can you talk about the decision to write about your personal experiences in All We Can Do: A Memoir of Parenting and Illness? Was there a moment when you felt you needed to write a memoir, or was this a project that emerged gradually?

JONNA HIGGINS-FREESE: In the very first days, I certainly couldn’t write; I couldn’t even read. I don’t mean that I didn’t enjoy reading at that time, but that I lost the ability to decode words. It turns out this happens to me when calamity strikes, as part of a fight/flight/freeze response. That inability to read or speak may also just be a natural reaction to pain – Elaine Scarry certainly makes a compelling case that speechlessness is key to the experience and meaning of pain in her book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. When Reuben was a few months old, Tim Fay, who at that time was editing The Wapsipinicon Almanac, asked me to write an essay. He’d been thinking a lot about old Iowa cemeteries and how they’re filled with the graves of infants and toddlers, and so I connected Reuben’s story with that. By that time I knew I wanted to write the larger story as a way to get my mind around it, to try to understand what just happened to me? What does it mean about me, and how should I live now? 

JO: Writing about personal experiences like that can be both rewarding and extremely difficult. How was this process different than writing a novel?

JH-F:Writing a memoir required less research, though there was still some. In both cases, there’s much more research than shows up overtly in the finished text - the research often becomes a kind of collective unconscious underlying the writing, rather than (I hope) something the reader would notice directly. At the same time, memoir requires all the same techniques as fiction - plot, characters, sequence of the narrative - what should be part of the main story and what is backstory. In both books those were all things that needed to be figured out and revised, versus things that I naturally figured out on the first try. 

In both cases, it was a struggle for me to create the narrative arc of a traditional western story, and I’m not completely satisfied with the “story” I shaped. I have a conflicted relationship with the requirements of story - just because our brains are wired for them, as neuroscience is showing, doesn’t mean that they’re particularly good for us or helpful. Our brains also like sugar and heroin, and no one argues these things are an unmitigated good. I’m interested in kishotenketsu, which is the Japanese word for the four-act structure common in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and other ways of thinking about story. In certain ways, I think Buddhism itself can be seen as an argument against the whole idea of storytelling, and that’s one reason it was so helpful to me as a practice and shows up so much in the form of the book. 

JO: Your prior book, Fearless: A Novel of Frances Perkins and Social Security, balanced the personal and the political parts of Perkins’s life really effectively. Was that something that the subject lent herself to, or did you have to do a lot of research to put the pieces together?

JH-F: I chose to write about the time period when the Social Security Act was being written and passed because that is one of the most critical things that Frances did in her public life (and it’s critical for the lives of pretty much every American), but also because it was such a key time in her personal life. Her husband had been ill for a long time, but the death of her best friend Mary during that time, which left Frances briefly homeless, and her daughter’s first symptoms of bipolar illness at that same time just seemed to me ripe for novelistic treatment. To weave together the personal and political strands, I had everything from Frances’s desk calendar to daily letters about office activities written by one of her staff to dozens of books about the New Deal, the testimony in the Congressional Record, and many more sources. I pulled all that information together into a chronology, sometimes on a daily basis, and then I could see the moments when things got intense. 

As one example, both biographies say that a key meeting to hammer out the draft bill, which was months overdue, happened at Frances’s house on December 23rd or 24th, 1934, just a few days after Mary had died. But her dear friend Henry Wallace was from Iowa, and his papers are at the University of Iowa, so one of the very first things I found was his desk diary, which showed that the meeting had been on Friday, December 21. And that was key in showing how Frances never had any time to deal with things, she just had to keep going. 

Mary died at 10:50 PM on Tuesday, December 18 - and remember that they’d thought for weeks that she was going to get better, and only knew for a week or so at the end that she was going to die. Then at 11:30 the next morning,Wednesday, after being at her best friend’s deathbed until after midnight, Frances chaired a meeting of the Committee on Economic Security. That very afternoon, there was a service for Mary for her friends in Washington, before they all went to New York for the funeral and burial there on Thursday, December 20. And then on Friday, December 21, Frances was back in Washington for the meeting at Mary’s house at 8:30 PM, where she locked the door, put a bottle of whiskey on the table, and told them they weren’t leaving until the draft was done. They again worked until after midnight, and then she took the train back to New York for Susannah’s coming out party back in New York on Saturday night. 

JO: I’ve heard you tell the story of seeking an agent. Danielle Svetcov, of Levine Greenberg, was the only one who responded. She said, “You’re a superb writer, but stories on this subject are a tough sell (to editors and to the public).” Why publish a book that experts agree will have a limited audience?

JH-F: It’s true that it can be a difficult read; Eric and my dad haven’t read it. They found it too painful to revisit that time. 

But the more general theme is that we all get what we don’t want in this life, and we don’t get what we want. It might not look exactly like this, but it happens to everyone. If how we responded is of benefit to someone else, I wanted to share it. 

Also, telling it is maybe part of my Buddhist sense of something Kim Stanley Robinson expresses as, “These things happened.” The original author’s note quotes James Baldwin. Of course my problems and suffering as a white, middle class person in the US are of a different kind than those with less privileged backgrounds or experiences. But I still find that his words speak to my condition, “While the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

New FTP Book! Iowa Interiors Release Events This Week

Final Thursday Press is excited to announce the publication of Iowa Interiors: A Centennial Edition by Ruth Suckow.  Check out all of the events happening this week!

An Interview with Paul M. Hedeen

The 2026-27 season of the Final Thursday Reading Series starts with a return visit by Paul M. Hedeen, author of The Killing (Atmosphere Press), a book that moves from Long Beach to the killing fields of Cambodia to offer a tense, elegiac exploration of truth, guilt, and the intergenerational wounds of war. Hedeen’s other publications include the novel The Butterfly and the poetry collections Under a Night Sky and When I Think about Rain.

The FTRS creative writing open mic starts at 7:00. Come a few minutes early to sign up to read, and bring your best five minutes of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. Hedeen’s featured reading starts at 7:30. Books by regional authors will be available for purchase at the event. FTRS takes place on the final Thursday of the month at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls.

Interview by Jim O’Loughlin.

JIM O’LOUGHLIN: The Killing has a really unusual composition history. Can you say a little about how it came together in its published form?

PAUL M. HEDEEN: I began the novel in the year it depicts militarily: 1979. In its first form (under a different title), it was a military adventure novel and an allegorical critique of American imperialism in SE Asia. While I mention "allegory," the book was a straightforward allegory with the characters taking on fairly obvious symbolic roles--like a cinema treatment. While it attracted the attention of an agent (the only title of mine ever to do so), he was unsuccessful in placing it, though Bantam sat on it for a while. I put it in the proverbial drawer, but not the proverbial bin. Though in a drawer, it still glowed for me like the contents of Tarantino's briefcase in Pulp Fiction (a detail Tarantino stole from a fairly famous film noir, btw). So I went back to it after grad degrees, other books, children, second wives (you name it). By then, the current news of 1979 was way old, and it needed refreshing. Hence the generational family narrative about the effects of war on wives and children (Like Faulkner, I'm drawn to the sins of fathers theme). It just so happened that in 2014 (when I dusted off the early ms) the worm had already turned for Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge leader I focus upon. His trial ended, and then a few years later so did his life. So for people paying attention, it was a semi-current event once again. I added a frame narrative—Juliette, Austin Guthrie, Luke, Marco, Nolan, Col. Charlie Brown, etc. While the military narrative, with changes in POV and main characters, was extensively rewritten, it became the "inner" narrative and Jack Spot, AKA Uncle Jack, its creator. 

JO: Within the context of the Vietnam War, the conflict in Cambodia in the 1970s is given less historical and literary attention. What drew you to this subject?

PMH: There was a famous film—thought to be good at the time—that revived the Vietnam narrative, but in Cambodia: The Killing Fields (1984). At the time, it was popular enough to extend the Vietnam war genre, and Cambodia was in the news. What drew me back to the story was the frame narrative. After all, a new generation (Juliette's) had emerged between 1979 and 2014, but it was not a generation of warriors, but victims. Too often, we ignore the people who are on the periphery of war. It seems that wars serially eclipse the victims and survivors. This allows us to forget the lessons. An attraction of the Cambodia war was for me how the imperial war morphed into a regional atrocity, and it was almost completely borne by the civilians. Also, the Cambodia war was fought mostly by irregulars and, therefore, created opportunities for exploitation: the Stephen Psalters, Nathan Depreyes, Mr. Yees, and Johnny Spots, who are meant to be realistic but also allegorical. There is also the attraction of the Cambodian idealists, the murderous Pol Pot and Nuon Chea. They had tremendous will but were wholly evil in their inhumanity. Then again, so were Psalter and Depreye. None of these men believed they were evil. It is interesting that, like Hitler and Stalin, Pot and Chea were not very interested in material wealth. 

JO: In The Killing, it initially seems like the character of Juliette just wants very straightforward details about the past and about the fate of her father. But none of that information is easy to come by. How much of this is particular to the “fog of war,” and how much is endemic to any search for information about the past? 

PMH: The latter more than the former. I want to show the effect of dishonesty and greed, but to show it in very particular ways. Also, I want to suggest how motives mix and how easily intentions are co-opted by greed and self-interest. Look at Marko. As soon as he thinks he can get a little for himself, he jumps at it. Also, Charlie Brown is there to demonstrate allegorically how killing destroys all nobility. He is actually a character extended from The Butterfly and is meant to show how the novel's issues are intergenerational. That his motives seem muddled is intentional. Wars even destroy their stated reasons for being. One can see this also in Austin Guthrie. His tapes are confessions, an attempt at purging himself of guilt. Julliette understands this, and this accounts for her anger and frustration. 

JO: I was struck by a moment in one of the Jack Spot sections, when “the killing” describes an erasure of meaning, “to see people reduced to nothing.” While the aftermath of such events is not quite PTSD in this book, is it fair to say that characters spend the rest of their lives trying to find meaning after experiences that erase meaning? 

PMH: Quite fair. As the book says, wars create little "dust devils" across time and space. Ordinary people never recover what they lose. Juliette only thinks she knows enough at the end. Luke is there to remind her of her parents' mistakes. Her father's name on the wall will never bring her solace or honor. Even though she knows almost everything, there is not much there to bring her peace.

An Interview with Sean Thomas Dougherty & J.D. Schraffenberger

The 25th Anniversary Season of the Final Thursday Reading Series concludes with a special book release reading. Sean Thomas Dougherty and J.D. Schraffenberger will be launching their new co-written chapbook from Final Thursday Press, Dueling Shovels. This collection of golden shovel poems was inspired by the work of James Hearst. Sean Thomas Dougherty is UNI’s inaugural David C. & Patricia A. Meyer Visiting Writer and the author of many collections of poetry, including Death Prefers the Minor Keys (BOA Editions, 2023) and The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions, 2018). J.D. Schraffenberger is a UNI Professor of English and Editor of the North American Review. His work includes American Sad (Main Street Rag, 2024) and The Waxen Poor (Twelve Winters Press, 2014). 

As always, open mic at 7:00 and featured reading at 7:30 at the Hearst Center for the Arts. The featured reading also will be live Zoomcast. Click to sign up for a link. You can pre-order a signed copy of Dueling Shovels now.

Interview by Jim O’Loughlin. 

JIM O’LOUGHLIN: You two go way back. Talk about how you got to know each other and what were your connections over the years. 
J.D. SCHRAFFENBERGER: We do go way back, don’t we! Has it been twenty years? I remember first meeting Sean when he came to Binghamton, New York, where I was doing a PhD, and we were hosting a writing conference. Man, he was such a terrific reader, so affecting. I remember that we also published a lot of his prose poems in the journal I was helping to edit, Harpur Palate. It’s funny that a former student of mine here at UNI, Hannah Carr-Murphy, ended up doing her PhD there, too, and she was responsible for digitizing all of Harpur Palate’s back issues. So you can read all of those old pieces by Sean if you want to. 
SEAN THOMAS DOUGHERTY: Yes, we met at Writing by Degrees, a graduate student creative writing conference in the 2000s. Jeremy was a student there, and I was teaching as a lecturer in Erie and working on my PhD dissertation for Syracuse University (sadly, I never finished it). I had a friend there, too: Cody Todd, who ended up dying a few years ago, and Joe Weil and Maria Mazziotti Gillan taught in the Binghamton program and advocated a poetry of life and dignity. I went back a number of years, and Jeremy and I ate, drank, and conversated. It was a nice time to be growing professionals. Jeremy was erudite and passionate about poetry and wrote in a day that I recognized the people in his poems from life. He was straight up and kind, as he still is. You could tell immediately from him a love of language and art and a belief in the idea that art can help us, teach us. That art could believe in us as much as we believe in it. 

Sean Thomas Dougherty

JO: Sean, I think it was your idea to write a collection of golden shovel poems. Can you explain the form and why you are drawn to it? 
STD: I was fascinated by the form ever since Terrance Hayes first published his invented form as an ode to the great Gwendolyn Brooks. Jeremy and I had been going through a list of possible ways to collaborate. We discussed a theme, the use of sonnets, etc. I can’t remember exactly how we decided on the golden shovels and Hearst. I think it just came out of brainstorming. I am also attracted to rigorous forms that require right line repetitions, such as sestina or canzone, forms I’d written in extensively. But the golden shovel is different, as it is also dialogic. It asks to use the source material of the end lines but not to erase them, but to speak to them. I approached the lines I used for each shovel as a kind of epigram. The end words become a kind of ghost epigram in dialogue with the poem we write, as well as part of the poem itself. I also love how it asks at the end to read that line vertically, which isn’t a usual way to read in English. 

JO: Jeremy, you were probably as surprised as I was when Sean sent us a fully conceptualized draft of this half of the collection. What was your initial response, and how did his writing inspire your own work on Dueling Shovels? 
JDS: Yeah, I have always been blown away by Sean’s writing, not just how quickly he seems to tap into his own kind of poetic genius, but how everything in his imagination accrues meaning and culminates into a revelation or deep insight about the world. When he shared his poems, I admit I was intimidated, but I was also inspired. I saw how his poems were so daring and humane. I didn’t want to try to mimic his style because, well, I think it would only turn out as a paltry imitation. But at the core, I felt like I needed to embrace poetry as sympathy, poetry as compassion and care. I was also really impressed with how he navigated the formal challenges of the golden shovel. It felt like he was almost confronting the form, daring it to keep his words from moving freely and fluently into the next line. It gave me courage to face the form myself. 

J.D. Schraffenberger

JO: Most of the source poems in this collection come from the work of Iowa farmer-poet James Hearst. Though the content of your poems is very different from Hearst’s, how did his work play a role in the poems that you wrote? 
JDS: I’ve taught Hearst’s poems a number of times over the years. I’ve read all of his poems, some of them many times. So I had a deep familiarity with what his work is doing. I also know about Hearst’s life, the context of his poems, and the role writing poetry played in his life. So it took a lot, actually, to distance myself from some of that analysis for the sake of making art. Because I was writing mainly about the death of my mother in these poems, it allowed me to work thematically away from Hearst’s life and work while also, oddly, honoring and integrating it in ways that might be subconscious. There are some poems I chose to quote from that are directly related to what I wanted to write about myself. “Mother,” for instance, spoke to me immediately. “End of the Game” is another because Hearst wrote it for his brother, who had died quite young. It also happens to end with a reference to their mother, so that worked out nicely. I was tempted to use Hearst’s poem “Man with a Shovel” as a nod to the form, but I ended up thinking that that would be too cute and might undermine the poem. 
STD: So many of Hearst’s poems at the core are tensions between landscape and human. So even though they are agrarian and my work is urban, it is actually quite complementary. Also, the language Hearst uses is a language of small words, often Anglo-Saxon in lineage, and devoid of much abstraction. His spiritual poems are not didactic but rise from the occasion of the moment. All of these elements speak to me deeply. So I approached the project as a dialogue with those themes of land and labor, birds and people, and beneath it all, the human spirit. 

JO: I’m looking forward to your joint reading on April 30 at the Final Thursday Reading Series (in the former house of James Hearst), and I know you both to be great performers of spoken poetry (fun fact: many years ago, when I was living in Boston, Sean was a regular at an open mic and poetry slam I used to attend. We didn’t know each other at the time, but I have vivid memories of his slam poetry.). How do you both think differently about your work when you are selecting and preparing poems for the stage? 
SD: I did not know that about the Cantab. How small the world is. That was a good time to be a young writer. Cambridge, Massachusetts, was such a vibrant space in the late 80s and early 90s. There was such energy and dialogue there at the Cantab, TT the Bears, the Middle East club, and good pints of Guinness and music at the Plow and the Stars pub. I rarely think of reading when I write but only afterwards. When I am preparing for a reading, I think of how to get to a place where the word opens the air. I think I’m more concerned with getting to the place where the veil is thin, where the language can take us to a place between word and breath that opens a door in the room, and together we all walk right through it. 

The Cantab Lounge

JO: Though I regularly went to the Cantab to see the house band, Little Joe Cook and the Thrillers, I actually saw you perform at this bookstore in Somerville, where the poet Patricia Smith co-ran a series with a poetry slam. What was the name of that place? You just ran down some of my favorite watering holes back in the day. I can't believe we never got into a good bar brawl together. I'm also pretty sure at least one of us was also hanging out at these bars with David Foster Wallace and didn't know it. 
SD: Jim that was The Bookcellar Cafe. They had the best selection of small press journals around. I used to spend so much time there. More people we probably drank with during that time: Ben Affleck’s father, who bartended at the Cantab. 
JDS: Oh, man, that’s so cool. I had no idea you saw Sean in Boston back in the day! Sean, your reading here in Cedar Falls a decade ago or so was my all-time favorite. You are such a great reader and performer. I can’t claim to be a great reader myself. I’m much more a poet of the page, but I am attracted to the stage, I guess. I like arranging a reading as an event, including music. For my last reading, in fact, as you know, Jim, I played piano and had a couple of friends playing sax and singing. I was also struck, years ago, reading the essay “Can Poetry Matter?” by Dana Gioia. He recommended that if we wanted to make poetry more vital in American culture, we should include other art forms in our readings. He also said that more poets should read other poets’ poems as part of their program. I’ve tried to do that over the years. In fact, the golden shovel form offers a perfect opportunity to acknowledge the past and the tradition while reading new work. 

JO: Are there any questions you want to ask each other? 
JDS: Yeah, I’d like to ask Sean what he thought the most challenging thing about writing in the golden shovel form is. To my mind, the hardest thing was trying to make my line breaks feel natural, or at least…comfortable. I was recently talking with my friend Eric Paul Shafer, a really terrific poet whom I’ve published a number of times in the North American Review. We were discussing line breaks and how you control them, how you can use them to your advantage. The golden shovel completely upends what I normally think about with line breaks! It’s similar to my aversion, or my inability to write sestinas. In that case, however, you get to choose your end words more carefully. 
STD: Jeremy, for me, the hardest part was not erasing the form, you know, working within the rigid confines of those end words. We couldn’t even add much variance. I find Sestinas and Canzones easier because you can vary the end words with words that rhyme or have the same sound or variance that includes a word. For example, in a sestina, if an end word is “city,” the next stanza it repeats, and I might use “multiplicity” as a word. But the golden shovel asks you not to do that so you can honor the sentence you chose from the poet’s work. So, I agree completely, it asks us to see the line breaks and end lines in a completely new way. As such, I found it generative as I had to open a new place in my imagination to find new tensions I hadn’t worked before between line, line break, and narrative propulsion and pause. Jeremy, how did this collaboration or form open you up to write such intimate poems about one of life’s greatest losses? In some ways, the project has such artificial parameters. What was it about those—or being in Mexico? Or both, that pushed you to write so powerfully about your mother’s passing?
JDS: You’re right to put it that way, Sean. I mean, the form really did open me up. I think it was exactly the artificial parameters that allowed me to hold grief and still be able to write, still be able to work at the craft of it. And then being in Mexico City was, in some ways, just happenstance. I had planned long before to go but had no intention of writing about my mother’s death. There’s something about being in a different country where you don’t really know the language, even if you know enough to get by. You end up being in your head a lot, which I think definitely contributed to these poems.

An Interview with Art Cullen

The March 2026 Final Thursday Reading Series features Art Cullen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Storm Lake Times. He is also the author of the new book, Dear Marty, We Crapped in Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World (Ice Cube Press). 

The Final Thursday Reading Series takes place at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls, Iowa. There will be an open mic at 7:00 p.m. (bring your best five minutes of original creative writing). The featured reading starts at 7:30, and it will also be simulcast on Zoom. Click to register for a link. 

Interview by Sara Shannon. 

SARA SHANNON: Let’s start with the title of your book, which is a bit blunt and quite humorous, to say the least, but is perfectly in tone with your journalistic style. How did you decide on that title? 
ART CULLEN: Well, I was talking with another writer named Phoebe Wall Howard. We were at the Okoboji Writers' Retreat in Iowa, and she was urging me, along with Steve Semken, the publisher of the Ice Cube Press in North Liberty, Iowa, to write a book. We were talking about what the subject would be, and I said, “Well, Phoebe, we s____ in our nest.” We turned that subject into the title, “We Crapped in our Nest.” It became Dear Marty, We Crapped in Our Nest because I framed it as a letter to my old high school buddy, Marty Case, about how the town we grew up in 50 years ago is a much different place. 

SS: As Iowans, we are all too familiar with corn as our main cash crop, but this economic dependence on corn has led to overfarming the soil without properly returning the nitrates. In your book, you talk about the history of the Corn Gospel. Can you talk a little bit about how Iowans became economically dependent on corn? Do you think it is possible for a change in the crop market? 
AC: It is possible. In fact, it's going to be necessary for us to lessen our reliance on corn production in the Corn Belt, because of climate change. We simply won't be able to grow as much corn because it will be too hot during the tasseling period, so we will have to be comfortable with lower yields. We are already struggling with a large amount of 90 degree days during the detasseling season. Maybe we’ll plant oats, or grass for grazing, but we're gonna have to reduce our corn acreage by quite a bit just to stop the pollution of the Gulf of Mexico alone. Furthermore, we became dependent on corn because it's the most amenable crop to this climate. The tallgrass prairie is the ideal habitat to grow corn, which is a descendant of a grass plant called teosinte that was bred in Mexico 10,000 years ago and has been domesticated ever since. We became dependent on it because our climate and soils are especially well-suited to corn. But, following World War II, we were growing so much of it in such abundance that we had to figure out a way to get rid of it. Now, we're selling it into ethanol and export markets even though the price of corn keeps declining. We just keep chasing our tail because growing corn is all we know how to do, or it's all we're encouraged to do, by the agrochemical complex. But soon, we’re going to have to do something differently. 

SS: In your book, you talk about how Big Ag and the government is contributing to the decline in farmland, but you also talk about individual efforts in sustainable farming. How does independent farming fit into Iowa within the agricultural system? How does the system impact the environment? 
AC: You can operate as an independent farmer at the margins of this system. You can scrape by, kind of like we just barely scrape by as independent newspaper owners here in Storm Lake. You can have your small cow-calf herd and get by. But to prosper, you've got to participate in the ag supply chain, and if you're in Iowa, you're wrapped up in the hog, corn ethanol, and now egg complex. Iowa is now the number one producer of eggs. To really cash in, you have to participate in the system, whether it's through federal farm programs or contract payments with meatpackers or corn delivery with ethanol plants. That's where the money is. Not in selling lettuce at a farmer's market, but in hogs and corn. The problem is, we're producing so many hogs in Iowa, we just can't get rid of all the hog manure. It is a valuable fertilizer source, but it’s ending up in the Mississippi River. That’s the real environmental problem with us, hog manure and our insistence on chasing the pot of corn gold at the end of the rainbow. We could grow oats, sweet sorghum along rivers that soaks up nitrogen, grass or hemp for ethanol production. But we don't, because there's no money in it for Bayer, Pioneer, or Corteva. The money is in corn and herbicides and fertilizer for that corn. There's an entire complex built around the corn seed and hogs, and it needs both to survive. 

SS: This book is, as Ice Cube Press puts it, “the right book at the right time,” as it deals with some fairly complex topics such as political polarization, racism, climate change, and monopolies. How do you approach pacing when dealing with such a large topic? 
AC: What I try to do is concentrate on a place. In this case, I focused on Storm Lake, Iowa. It helps me frame all the discussions. All these big macro forces are at play in Storm Lake: immigration (Storm Lake is majority Latino now because of immigration to meat-packing plants), the strength of the dollar against other foreign currencies, hog production, food production, the pandemic, etc. That’s how I pace or frame stories: through the lens of Storm Lake, because that's how I understand the world. 

SS: Finally, this book has a call-to-action element. Many people today feel overwhelmed or despairing in our current political state and could use a good call-to-action. Keeping that in mind, what is one message you hope everyone takes away from reading your book? 
AC: Iowa is at an inflection point in a political, economic, and environmental crisis that's been building for the last 50 years. We've been hollowing out rural communities, polluting the water and the air, and consolidating all our economic enterprises so there's no independent ownership left. And I think people are actually getting fed up with it. They're getting fed up with walking out the door in the morning and smelling hog manure in the air. They're getting fed up with making half of what somebody makes in Minnesota or Illinois. They're getting fed up with book bans, and people treating gay people like they're criminals. I think we are seeing this on the national level as well. The fact that people are fed up with not getting their fair share is why Donald Trump got elected, and it will ultimately be his demise. Now, we're talking about how we can turn back and restore Iowa to what it was. This should be the richest, most prosperous place on Earth just by natural resources alone. And we've managed to crap in our nest. How can we recover what we've lost in Iowa? How can we restore that so that all Iowans share in this prosperity, rather than just a few?