Recently in Greater Midwest Category

In early October I found my way to Decorah, Iowa, an idyllic little town right on the Mississippi River. The town has a secret tourist spot that isn't well marked, but can be seen from a distance when approaching over the river from Wisconsin - a viewpoint perched on one of the upper Mississippi's many high hills.  Once I crossed into Iowa via an impressive steel bridge I set about finding the spot. Taking a left from the bridge and then an immediate right, I found a sign to a city park. I followed the sign up a steep hill behind the town and sure enough, we emerged on the viewpoint along with a number of other gawkers.

The Mississippi spreads out in marshes, island, and a thousand channels, surely a mystery to navigate but a beauty to behold from high above.

Decorah is extremely small but has a quaint main street and impressive scenery. Might be a nice spot for a writer.

I'm slowly recovering from a fantastic  weekend at the big netroots/blogger convention, YearlyKos, in Chicago. Despite increasingly pathetic volleys from Bill O'Reilly, myself and 1,500 other Kossacks participated in dozens of subject-matter sessions, social events, and other politically-themed activities. As part of the Creative Arts Alliance, a new group made up of DailyKos members interested in the arts, my main task between sessions was to sell as many copies of our arts anthology, "Art in a Liberal Frame" as possible.  We managed to get our first-edition chapbook into the hands of just about every influential blogger--and some pundits and media figures as well.  It was quite an experience. Most folks were amazed to see an overtly political literary compilation; hardcore politics is discouraged in most literary magazines, either as a matter of taste or a matter of financial survival in the age of meager grants and gunshy institutions. 

Art in a liberal frame is not a meticulously edited institutional literary magazine. It's beautiful to look at--oddly printed on waterproof paper with soy-based ink (our printer was both generous and loved to try nontraditional materials).  Photographs and political cartoons burst off the page in full, luscious color.  The poetry varies from items that wouldn't get read past the first line in a litmag slush pile (too political, too in-your-face) to elegant pieces that wouldn't be out of place in the North American Review.  It wasn't edited carefully by a committee. My lead editor, Cosmic Debris (that's her screen name) used her gut instinct to place pieces throughout the book, and to decide what to keep and what to toss. We basically violated every rule of how you are supposed to put together a literary magazine, and frankly, the result was more exciting; you genuinely don't know what bizarre/obnoxious/eloquent/combination therof/bit of art you will find from one page to the next.  As assistant editor, I helped shape the look of the book, its general artistic direction,  logos and layout, and scraped it as clean of typos as I could.

If our printer decides to do a reprint I'll post a link to his online shop, but likely we'll be looking to next year, where we can get a grant based on this year's work for a new issue and a larger printing.  But I'm proud to have been involved in a (sadly) somewhat unique literary experiment in a time.

 

Cleveland is a city that gets a lot of crap. Cleveland has sustained the careers of many middling comedians. I spent a week in Cleveland--last week, in fact--and though it appears much of what the comedians say is true, it is a unique and surprisingly dramatic place. At least the weather was dramatic.

As the storm raged offshore in Lake Erie, my coworker and I explored the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Christmas Story House, a late night comedy club, and tried to find the brighter side of this gritty, industrial city on the northern edge of the United States.