Writing home from Iowa City

TT writer, editor and stand-up comedian Lisa Allen-Agostini is in Iowa City from September 2-November 17 as a writer-in-residence in the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa. This is the first of three dispatches from her trip.

THE first friend I made in Iowa City (IC) is an African-American policeman. He’s one of the people who have become part of my life since I touched down in the American Midwest on September 2. I am here as a Fall Fellow of the International Writing Program (IWP), a longstanding soft-diplomacy project of the University of Iowa and the US State Department.

I was nominated for the IWP by the US Embassy in TT, and my visit is sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the State Department.

Annually, the IWP brings published authors to this college town on the American plains to be writers-in-residence for roughly three months. Trinis Earl Lovelace and the late Sam Selvon, Wayne Brown and Michael Anthony were here. So were Jamaicans Barbara Gloudon, Lorna Goodison, Kwame Dawes and Kei Miller; Barbadian Cherie Jones; and Grenadian Oonya Kempadoo, among a handful of other Caribbean writers. I’m in big shoes.

My cohort of 32 fellows includes writers from Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Mauritius, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, New Zealand, Ukraine, Germany, Denmark, Hungary, Portugal, Spain, Armenia, Argentina, El Salvador, Brazil, Malawi, Botswana, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Morocco.

We meet up for some events, like the weekly panel discussion at the Iowa City Public Library (ICPL), in which fellows talk turkey about the writing life. We’re encouraged to attend cultural events and visit tourist attractions in and around this striving college town, but it’s not mandatory. We fellows are largely left to our own devices; mine have taken me to interesting places.

The Old Capitol Town Center is less than a block away from my home-away-from-home, the Graduate Hotel, in the heart of downtown IC. While shopping for some essentials that I hadn’t flown with, I asked Michelle, a CVS worker at Old Capitol, where I could easily donate some of my IWP stipend towards the city’s homeless.

“Oh, you need to meet Alton, he’s the perfect guy for this,” she said, waving over a red man. With funky glasses and a man-bun, he was wearing a hot pink plaid shirt and tight jeans. He walked me over to his office in what I eventually understood to be a police station. Alton is also known as University of Iowa Police Officer Poole.

We bonded while he tried to connect me with Shelter House, a non-profit providing housing and services to unhoused people. He ended up driving me over there to donate and sign up to volunteer. We talked about active shooters, cop culture, mental illness, attitudes towards the homeless, and racism in the US.

(IC’s mayor Bruce Teague is African-American but IC’s stridently liberal population is largely white. Particularly in this US presidential election season—in which a candidate intimated that black immigrants eat dogs – I was braced for overt racism.)

The IWP common room at the Graduate Hotel overlooks the Ped Mall, a four-block pedestrian shopping and entertainment area. Both the Ped Mall and shopping mall are magnets for the many unhoused people who walk IC’s streets with their worlds in their backpacks. A growing crisis in IC, the unhoused population has ballooned in recent years. It’s intertwined with a mental illness crisis as well as economic push factors, like high housing costs and joblessness.

As fall begins and searing summer temperatures drop to the low teens, Shelter House and other organisations are preparing for the coming coldest months. In January gone, an encampment close to the Iowa River went up in flames. Camps have been torn down by civilians who’ve tossed away as trash people’s essential documents, medications and treasured personal possessions.

I haven’t yet begun my volunteer work but I’ve met some street characters. One’s Andrew, who rolls a five-foot tower speaker around and does his own YouTube karaoke with his phone and a mic for anybody who’ll listen and plenty who don’t. I sang Michael Jackson with him one Saturday, before he gave the mic to some university youths who flawlessly rapped along to the hip-hop he favours.

From the balcony outside the IWP common room I can see the ICPL. I love libraries and librarians, and I wasted no time in volunteering to give a talk on editing to the Teen Library’s publications committee. I borrow books and framed artwork from the ICPL collections, but I also went there one day for a workshop on Failure Machines led by Singapore fellow Daryl Li. While on a break, I spotted Andrew through the window and ran outside to hail him out. I hope he stays warm as fall begins.

I was still on the break when James, a middle-aged white guy I’d never met, said to me quite out of the blue, “I’m not a bike thief.” He began to tell me about the vintage Bridgestone Kabuki SuperLight bicycle locked in the nearby bike stand, at my request pointing out minute details of the Japanese-made American-branded frame. It was surreal, made even more so when he told me his last name was Allen. We could be distant cousins, maybe. We certainly found kinship in our mutual weirdness and intense special interests. My greatest special interest is in writing, but I will follow any rabbit down a hole when I get the urge to do so, and I often do.

I left my hermitage in the Graduate Hotel to take in African-American writer and musician Meshell Ndegeocello’s No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin during the Hancher Auditorium’s Infinite Dream Festival. Days later I went to hear celebrated Chicana poet Sandra Cisneros and former US poet laureates Joy Harjo and Juan Felipe Herrera read their work at the Iowa Memorial Union.

Afterwards, I bounced up Ms Cisneros and Ms Harjo in the lobby at the Graduate. Ms Cisneros was kind enough to insist on buying one of my books. Fortunately, I had copies of my new historical crime novella Death in the Dry River; I also presented one to Ms Harjo, a member of the Muscogee Nation and the first Native American US Poet Laureate.

Their enthusiastic reception of me was partly due to borrowed shine because they had both been MFA creative writing students in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Ms Cisneros emphasised what a boon the IWP writers were to them then. It was a timely reminder that, while we’re only here for three months, our IWP legacy will continue long after we’re gone. I hope to make the most of mine.