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?