Iowa City is a fairly charming place as far as small liberal arts college towns go.


The campus of the University of Iowa includes three museums - the Old Capitol Building, which is at this moment featuring an exhibition of Phillipino Village artifacts from the St. Louis World Fair.


There is also the natural history museum in the anthropology building, which looks truly as if nothing has changed in at least 50-70 years.


Many of the taxidermied specimens were posed in unnatural postures, to enhance cute or human factor. The informational text cites place of collection/capture, as well as a name which I can only presume to be the donor or the captor.


And while the general displays struck me as odd, I did like the robin's egg blue of the backdrops.


My trip to Iowa was for the second part of my IWP/Life of Discovery Fellowship and not anything related to the Iowa Writers Workshop, which has at best, a contentious relationship with its neighbor on the other side of Clinton Street. Very little dialogue going on across writing organizations, though both were founded by writer Paul Engle. I got to tour the new Glen Schaeffer library and archive which was built through a financial donation from a Las Vegas casino mogul who's also invested quite a bit of money in UNLV. This is the "new" workshop, where students now sit around the table talking about their work.


And this is a library that collects only the work of Iowa Workshop Grads. When I checked out the main older building, I noticed postings from agents scheduled to visit campus. One can understand how students still in the program secure book contracts. It's a small and insular program and back when I applied for creative writing programs, Iowa was nowhere on my mental map. Chicago, the nearest city, is about 3 hours away.

Very little anonymity in this town that identifies itself as a city. While lunching in an Italian-themed cafe, I recognized a prematurely graying Matthew K from Buffalo, who seems to have relocated to Iowa City for some grad program no doubt. It brought back memories of young Cambridge poets and insidious literary associations.


As one can picture, Iowa City is interesting from Western China in a very different way. We went on a tour of the book arts center where the U of Iowa's resident MacArthur Genius gave a simple Western papermaking demo - emphasizing that papermaking came from the Occident.


Another trip highlight was the journey to the Iowa-Wisconsin border and the Mississippi River where we viewed Ho'chunk effigy mounds.


While it's not at all obvious from the ground, from the sky it's possible to see how centuries ago, the land's inhabitants created reliquary and effigy mounds in the shapes of birds, bears, and other organic shapes that contained funerary and sacred objects. This is an image of the little bear mound. One can see the form with the imagination.


Being in Iowa meant that I missed the grand reopening of the Wittliff Collections which was difficult for me. Especially, when I learned that Sam Shepard came out to the opening. But I will say that I was grateful for the time with my Chinese friends and colleagues, to have another opportunity to talk about writing, to write together, and to talk about how politics can inform one's practice. And given how well the American delegates were hosted and welcomed in China, I have no regrets about keeping my commitment to my colleagues. I will miss these beautiful friends, for many of which, Iowa was their first trip to the U.S.