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Iowa Cityscapes: January 2009

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Friday, January 30, 2009. Does Opinion writing have a future? It’s an easy enough assignment — lord knows I can talk endlessly about my job — but I’m struggling over how to begin the discussion. In order to frame what I actually do at the Press-Citizen, I think it’s necessary to talk about the constraints of a one-person Opinion shop — especially given that there are many more one-person (or even less-than-one-person) Opinion shops than there were just a few months ago. State the main point clearly,.

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Iowa Cityscapes: April 2009

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Tuesday, April 14, 2009. Eula Biss's ‘perverse’ take on ‘wholesome’ Iowa City. If you miss Eula Biss’s 7 pm reading Wednesday at Prairie Lights Books, you can always catch it on CSPAN. That’s just one example of the national attention Biss has attracted since the University of Iowa graduate won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Only toward the end of the essay does Biss explain her autobiographical connection to this uncanny history of such familiar objects. Her grandfather was a lineman who broke...

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Iowa Cityscapes: Novel takes 'till death do us part' seriously

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Wednesday, July 18, 2012. Novel takes 'till death do us part' seriously. Originally printed July 18, 2012, in the Iowa City Press-Citizen. I didn't know Ann Bauer by name during her time at the University of Iowa last decade, but I did see her often enough in the halls of the English Philosophy Building that I could recognize the photo on her new novel, "The Forever Marriage.". Three times and to write up a short response after each time through. So when Brently Mallard appears very much alive at the end...

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Iowa Cityscapes: July 2009

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Wednesday, July 29, 2009. Our View - Board inches toward changing school boundaries. Iowa City Press-Citizen "Our View," July 20, 2009). Lest anyone mistakenly think the Iowa City School Board already has made up its mind about the plan, every page of the document has the word "DRAFT" scrawled across it. Yet only a few of the five boundary-change scenarios offered in the document seem to fit best within the district's "Secondary School Attendance Area Parameters.". If the school board is going to start t...

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Iowa Cityscapes: September 2009

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Tuesday, September 22, 2009. Pay honor to Bob Brown. Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Sept. 8, 2009. If the Press-Citizen chose its Person of the Year only by the number of nominations received, then Bob Brown would have been awarded the recognition posthumously in 2007. For weeks after the beloved Regina cross-country coach's death from pancreatic cancer, hundreds of people sent in their testimonies about how his life changed theirs. Instead, McCue is honest about the limitations of the relations...

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Iowa Cityscapes: August 2010

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Monday, August 9, 2010. Our View - BarbouRoskes changed how the world looks at Iowa. Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Jan. 1, 2010. Our View - BarbouRoskes changed how the world looks at Iowa. And perhaps trusting the discernment of a judge — or a group of justices — is preferable to trusting a majority of lawmakers to make some beneficial legislative sausage out of your cause. But the process of working through the courts still takes much, much longer than any legislative session. Such was the ca...

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Iowa Cityscapes: At the edge of the world, you'll want to have this book

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Wednesday, June 27, 2012. At the edge of the world, you'll want to have this book. Originally printed June 10, 2012 in the Iowa City Press-Citizen. The final lines of Adam Clay's poem, "Scientific Method," have been haunting me for weeks."When left alone / long enough," he writes, "the prisoners / began to interrogate themselves.". But few people could write a better poetic line than Adam Clay does. At his best, Clay has trained his lines to jump out and demand attention by themselves. And in Clay's long...

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Iowa Cityscapes: September 2010

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Thursday, September 30, 2010. Our View - Boundaries are now dynamic, no longer static. Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Jan. 30, 2010. Whatever recommendations the 38-member redistricting committee makes next month - and however the Iowa City School Board decides to redraw school boundaries - one thing is certain: The Iowa City School District is at the beginning of a cultural shift in how it determines and updates school attendance areas. For decades, the only times that district officials would ...

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Iowa Cityscapes: February 2012

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Wednesday, February 29, 2012. Measuring the lifespan of a fact is no easy task. Originally printed Feb. 22, 2012. When my kids force me to watch "Dinosaur Train" with them on PBS, the most redeeming feature is "Dr. Scott," the real life paleontologist Scott Sampson who ends every episode with a quick, kid-friendly account of all science featured on the show. Dinosaur Train" scripts, of course, are a far cry from the type of quality writing associated with the faculty of the University of Iowa Nonfiction ...