Voices from the Prairie
A publication of Humanities Iowa • Fall / Winter2019 A Conversation with Peter Balestrieri
Sara Maniscalc0 - Robinson On Iowa Veterans
Voices from the Prairie Fall / Winter Voices from the Prairie Contents
Humanities Iowa Board of Directors & Staff
Humanities Iowa Mission Statement
Title: A Conversation with Peter Balestrieri 3
President Kurt Meyer, St. Ansgar
The mission of Humanities Iowa is to promote understanding and appreciation of the people, communities, cultures, and stories of importance to Iowa and the nation.
Sara Maniscalco Robinson On Iowa Veterans
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Grants Awarded in 2019
11
New Board Members
12
Statement of Activity
14
2019 Donors
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Cover: Deer River, Iowa 1985 Photograph © David Plowden
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Vice - President Charissa Menefee, Ames Secretary Jack Wertzberger, Dubuque Directors Jose Amaya, Ames Courtney Craig, Winterset Rick Crowl, Council Bluffs Thomas Dean, Iowa City Peter Drahozal, Eldridge Mark Felderman, Polk City Jeff Heland, Burlington Kenneth Lyftogt, Cedar Falls Marianne Mickelson, West Des Moines Karen Mitchell, Cedar Falls Dick Moeller, Sioux City Ric Nelson, Ames Amy Nolan, Waterloo Marina Sandquist, Des Moines Linda Shenk, Ames Steve Siegel, Ottumwa Rosemarie Ward, Des Moines Paxton Williamd (Ex Officio), Des Moines
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Peter Balestrieri
An Conversation with Peter Balestrieri
Peter Balestrieri is the curator of is the curator of Science Fiction and Popular Culture Collections in the Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries in Iowa City. Prior to his career in library sciences, he was a member of the rock band Violent Femmes, earning a Gold Record for the band’s 1983 self-titled album. Though an accomplished musician who has performed internationally, Balestrieri has worked in libraries in one way or another since he was a teenager. Humanities Iowa recently sat down with Peter to take up a topic not historically treated with due seriousness in the humanities: the literary genre of science fiction.
(SF) brings to mind galactic playgrounds of nifty inventions and speculations on future technologies. We think Star Wars, Star Trek, Starship Troopers, anything with “stars” in the title. But, of course, SF is so much more than this. Can you trace a lineage of SF that can broaden the idea of the genre for us? Peter Balestrieri: If we pick a moment for a beginning, we can pick Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: mad scientist creates an experiment,
Image: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea By Jules Verne 1873
Humanities Iowa: For some readers, even well-read readers, science fiction
Image courtesy of University of Iowa Special Collections and University Archives
the experiment goes wrong, people suffer from it, and the experiment is shut down, killed, contained.
Image:
Franstein By Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Image courtesy of University of Iowa Special Collections and University Archives
Then come the science romances like those written by Jules Verne. He looks at the world and extrapolates a futuristic vehicle. There had already been submarines. There was a Revolutionary War submarine called The Turtle. There were submarines during the Civil War. So for Verne to imagine a bigger, better, more serviceable submarine is not the greatest leap in the world, but it makes sense. And after Verne, you see an enormous number of futuristic vehicles. Fast forward to H.G. Wells. While Verne had imagined a trip to a comet, Wells imagines a scientist who invents an antigravity element and uses that element to construct a craft that can go to the moon and back. What else? Aliens. War of the Worlds. And now we have stories about invasion. Fall 2019 · 3
A Conversation With Peter Balestrieri Continued
name writers like Dashiell Hammett, but you’d also have Faulkner trying to write these kinds of stories too. Faulkner at the height of his powers but he ain’t doing it as well as Hammett and those fully dedicated to the genre.
Image: The Final Men By H.G. Wells;
the missing chapter from The Time Machine discovered by fans in the 1940s and not returned to the text until the 1960s - Image courtesy of University of Iowa Special Collections and University Archives
So now we’ve got stock stories of the mad scientist, of people messing around in outer space, and of invasion. And these ideas are just going to be repeated by many different authors, and each one will put a different spin on it. But over and over again, the same kinds of stories are being written. And that has a lot to do with where a lot of these stories were appearing to begin with. After Verne, the stories are mainly short stories appearing in magazines and newspapers. But it’s not until the 1920s that there’s actually a magazine specifically devoted to SF stories - and the term SF wasn’t even being used yet. This is when lots of different types of writers began trying to write these kinds of stories. Because suddenly there was a need. The result was that not the greatest stories in the world were bought and published. Because they needed content. Humanities Iowa: That makes me think of Ellery Queen’s Mystery magazine other detective fiction magazines. You’d have big 4 · Voices from the Prairie
Top Image: Peter Balestrieri
Bottom Image: Gene Roddenberry’s pitch for Star Trek Peter Balestrieri: Right. he carried around to studios, trying to sell the idea for a And yet, the sense that television series - Image courtesy of University of Iowa Special they’re professional writers Collections and University Archives and there is a market suggests to so many writers, “Well, I could sell in that market.” Lots of people are unaware that Upton Sinclair was really interested in SF. He wrote a very, very good essay on SF and how it related to everyday life. And that was published in The Masses, a communist magazine out of New York. It’s interesting that you bring up Faulkner. Now is when we get into the idea that you have an enormous number of people writing this new kind of story for a handful of magazines, and really great writers begin to emerge. And those writers begin to take this new writing into areas no one else is looking at. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, who was he? He was a Hollywood writer, a television writer whose experience was on
shows like Wagon Train and Have Gun Will Travel. So when he pitched Star Trek to the studios,
lot of people who don’t love science, why would you want to read SF? Maybe they’ll talk about math a lot.
in the pitch, he said it was Wagon Train in outer space. Because Wagon Train was about men taking wagons from Missouri to California and Oregon. Each episode was the same group with different people in the wagons, so there were always new people to deal with, new adventures, always at a different place on the journey. And that’s Star Trek. The crew is the same. They’re flying around having adventures in new places with different people, but you have the continuity of the crew and the ship. And that kind of a journey-in-a-vehicle story. What is that? That goes all the way back to Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick. Starting in the 60s, innovators fill the field and bring some interesting changes and perspectives. Women and openly gay writers find acceptance by editors and fans. As the 60s end, SF and Fantasy, changing with the changing times, finds a new audience of fans, readers, and filmgoers that in coming decades gives birth to today’s revenge of the nerds. Humanities Iowa: Let’s talk about SF and reality for a moment. What would you say to those readers who would dismiss SF due to its lack of connection to “reality”? What makes SF so special? Do you think it’s possible that some of us who are not necessarily fans of the genre might be taking the idea of “reality” a bit too seriously? Peter Balestrieri: That’s a really good place to start. SF has always been a lens through which we see who we are now and think about how we’re living now, what our
Image: Amazing Stories Magazine, editor Hugo
Gernsback, August 1928; the first all-science fiction magazine - Image courtesy of University of Iowa Special Collections and University Archives attitudes and philosophies are now, and we use SF to test that against the imagination. For example, we use it to think about how we’re inextricably linked to technology, and where we’re going with this technology and what is it doing to us and what will it do to us as it progresses in the future. SF tries to answer those questions not for the people of the future but for people of right now. But all of the genres nowadays are blending and blurring so that we’re always dealing with a mix and mash-up of things. So if in the past there was a really strong division between SF and realism, they’re blurring and coming together more. Hugo Gernsback, who published that very first magazine of SF, was a science popularizer. His idea was to have a magazine like Science or Popular Mechanics. And when he began to publish SF, he was trying to create a cash cow that would fund his other magazines which were all realist and based not on fiction but scientific development, experimentation, science in the home, gadgets. Because we still have a
When you see the creatures that live at the bottom of the oceans that have illumination and angler fish and all these things that are luminous at crushing depths, or tardigrades that can live in outer space, or these huge cones that grow up out of the sea and poisonous gasses pour out of them and creatures live among them and flourish. Tell me that realism isn’t wilder than anything that we can imagine. If what was in the realist stories was absolutely real life, and everything the SF stories was truly not real life, maybe we’d have something. But we don’t. So the gulf is illusory. If people thought about it more, the realist would realize there’s probably a lot of SF they would really like, and the SF people might take a break from outer space and read something about real politik. Humanities Iowa: In my understanding, historically a lot of SF has been the product of the minds of white, heterosexual men. Can you talk about how that’s been challenged? Peter Balestrieri: There’s no doubt that SF has been predominately written and filmed by heterosexual white men. While that’s true, the reality is that, as research continues and more and more scholars are looking into who was actually doing this kind of writing and when, we’re beginning to see there were more women writing in pulp magazines than anyone thought. There were more women writing under psuedonyms and being published in book form than Fall 2019 · 5
A Conversation With Peter Balestrieri Continued
people thought. There are a few big names that can be pointed to, but there are a lot of little names that no one is talking about that published and had careers. The change started after World War II. By the time we get to the 60s and 70s everything begins to change. Because we have women’s liberation, black liberation, gay liberation. We have underrepresented constituencies and marginalized groups demanding a seat at the table. And they begin to demand it in SF as well. Is there a lot of push-back? Yeah. Are there a lot of male authors that still believe that, even if they read a Le Guinn or Octavia Butler or Andre Norton, they might still say, “Well, she’s a good writer for a woman?” Yeah. Even saying that now makes my lips burn, because we like to think we don’t think that way anymore. But what we know is that there are still major struggles going on within SF fandom. Not so much in publishing. SF publishing, unlike fandom, has definitely within the last 50 years said, “Women can write and sell books. African Americans can too. So can Asian Americans. And we will publish their books and make a lot of money with them.” So that’s a huge change. But even as recently as a few years ago, you had an enormous number of SF fans who were willing to argue that the Hugo Awards were rigged to exclude white, heterosexual men. That from now on all the awards were going to go to women and people of color and diverse sexual orientation because social justice warriors were enforcing a fascist-like strangle-hold over all aspects of the genre. Humanities Iowa: That’s interesting 6 · Voices from the Prairie
because it seems like the alterity of the subject matter of SF seems like it’s primed to explore all sorts of identities, almost like it was built for that. Peter Balestrieri: Right. And that’s the argument that the non-binary, women, and African American authors are making. And now an old guard of angry, feeling-dispossessed, white, heterosexual males are saying other authors don’t deserve their successes, their awards, to see their work published as much as it is.
Image: Space Police, By Andre Norton (Alice Mary
Again, we’re talking about Norton); self-published chapbook from the author’s SF, but this is real life. All personal library - Image courtesy of University of across this country we’ve got Iowa Special Collections and University Archives generations of white males that are deathly afraid they about how SF fandom works, as opposed are going to lose what they see as their to other critical communities like the rights not as their unfair advantage. Our ones that have historically lived in English politics is spinning all of this now. We’ve Departments at colleges and universities? got mass shootings by young men who feel that their race is being betrayed and that Peter Balestrieri: With the earliest they’re under attack in a country where SF magazines in the 1920s, you had their race is still the majority, still the accompanying fandoms and clubs majority of people in the government, still springing up for this new literary form. the majority of people with great wealth. There was complicity with the magazines. The one percent is not non-binary, not The creators of the magazines started the transgender. first clubs, who began letter columns, and began printing the addresses of fans so that So we’re back in this place of reality vs. the fans could write to each other and say SF. These attitudes of white supremacists. how much they love the magazine, which What could be further from reality than sold more magazines. Again, this is Hugo what they believe? Gernback. He’s selling magazines. He’s not trying to spread SF throughout the world. Humanities Iowa: Can you talk more
He’s trying to fund his other magazines he thinks are more important. So other magazines follow suit. It’s a marketing ploy, and it’s great. Fans want to get together with other fans, so they formed these clubs. This is the 20s and 30s during the heyday of clubs and fraternal organizations. It’s where all of the tropes of conventions begin. These are guys from small towns that end up in big cities and they drink and go wild and wear funny hats and funny clothes. Bingo: SF conventions. It’s all coming up at the same time. The fans are – then and now – a very small percentage of the people who actually buy that literature or watch those movies. The number of people who actually belong to a club, put out their own magazine, go to conventions, create costumes compared to all of the people who are consuming that, in one scholar’s research, is about five percent. The fans are just like the majority in the different countries where they live. If the majority of the people are white and the power in their country is in the hands of white males and most of those white males are heterosexual, then that has been the makeup of the fans as well. So that’s why you have somebody like N.K. Jemisin who won a Hugo Award for each of the novels in her trilogy. Unprecedented. She’s African-American. When she accepted the last one at the World SF Convention, she laid it all on the line and said: I’m still getting so much hate mail. I’m still getting death threats. I’m still being called unspeakable things. And
fandom says nothing. Many fans and authors have come forward to say she shouldn’t have done that. It wasn’t the right forum for that conversation. She should have accepted the award and saved those remarks for an essay. But for Jimisin and other writers of color, there was no better forum. This was her opportunity to speak to the industry and to fandom to say, “You’ve got to do a better job of making this a fair and level playing field.”
Image: Fantasy Book, Magazine , 1947; first issue
Fans are that small percentage of consumers of SF and fantasy that go beyond simply liking Star Wars or Superhero movies and get involved in fan activity, like attending conventions, cosplay, fan fiction, etc. Take “Trekkies.” That’s a dirty word for the people being described; they call themselves “Trekkers.” And though that seems like splitting hairs, there’s so much history behind that. “Trekkies” was the name they were given when people wanted to make fun of them. Now that more people want to be them than to make fun of them – including people like William Shatner – they insist on being called “Trekkers” and never want the negative tag to ever be used. SF fans, going back a long way, call nonfans “mundanes.” In the 1940s there was a notorious fan named Claude Degler who put forward the idea that if you enjoyed SF, it meant that your brain had evolved beyond the brain of normal human beings. He came up with a whole plan to first take over a rural township or village, then take over a county, then a city, then a whole state where SF fans would control the
Image courtesy of University of Iowa Special Collections and University Archives government, the police. The schools would study science, and so on. Humanities Iowa: How far did he get? Peter Balestrieri: He didn’t get anywhere because he was an incredible pathological liar. He wore out his welcome wherever he went. He was involved more than once with underage women. Consensual, but still underage. He cut a wide swath through fandom at one time then disappeared. But even after he was gone, for all of his faults, people put forth the idea that he was one of the greatest fans who ever lived, because his whole life revolved around the fantasies of fandom and what it could be and what it could do. Now, we’re living through a period where we probably pay way too much attention to the power that fans have. When you have film and television directors saying they did this or that “for the fans” or they’re concerned about their interpretation because it seems the fans might hate it, that’s a huge shift in anything that’s come before. Fall 2019 · 7
A Conversation With Peter Balestrieri Continued
In the old days, the Star Trek fans did a letter-writing campaign, and they saved the second and third seasons of the series. That’s true. But the idea that if enough fans write enough letters to a film studio, it will result in changes they want to see. Since the 90s, mainstream culture has stopped laughing at fans and academia has focused on fandoms, creating the new discipline of fan studies. It has blossomed with scholars studying film, television, and social media, using fandoms as a lens to view continuing changes in popular culture and the greater culture at large. Humanities Iowa: You maintain the Science Fiction and Popular Culture Collections at The University of Iowa Special Collections and University Archives. Can you talk about that collection? What goes into acquiring and selecting items for inclusion? How do you, rather can you, determine the “staying power” of a particular object? And what are some of the rarer, or just plain interesting items in the collection you think we should know about? Peter Balestrieri: I curate dozens of collections that relate to these fields, not just one. They come from donations and purchases. I am constantly contacted by collectors looking for a home for their books, magazines, fanzines, art, etc. I am also contacted by dealers of materials in these areas. I buy far less than I accept through donation. I make purchases based on student requests, faculty requests, upcoming classes, trends I’m following in the different genres, what’s hot in academia, and often I follow my own hunches as to what we should have, for the present and the future. Sometimes I fill in gaps and sometimes I strike out in new collecting areas. We have over 5,000 pulp 8 · Voices from the Prairie
Image:
A pair of foam ears worn by Leonard Nimoy on the set of the original Star Trek series; Jennara Wenk Collection - Image courtesy of University of Iowa Special Collections and University Archives magazines from the early Twentieth Century in every genre; a pair of foam ears worn by Leonard Nimoy as Spock in the original Star Trek series; tens of thousands of fanzines of all kinds and descriptions; over 30,000 collectible SF, fantasy, and horror books going back to the beginnings of the genres; world-class collections of Edgar Allan Poe, Clark Ashton Smith, and a complete run of the cooking magazine, Lucky Peach. Humanities Iowa: Can you talk about a moment when your research and curatorial efforts have led you into an interesting or unexpected area of literary scholarship? Peter Balestrieri: When I was still a library student working in [University of Iowa] Special Collections, our former Head and my mentor, Greg Prickman, asked me to search our collections for whatever we had relating to the history of Frankenstein, as a book, not a text. That means not about the story, but about how the book came to be. I found wonderful materials relating to the author, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; her husband, Percy Blythe Shelley; Mary’s half-sister, Claire Claremont; her sometime lover, Lord Byron; his personal physician, John Polidori; Mary’s father, William
Godwin; and the publisher of Frankenstein, Lackington and Sons. These are in the form of original letters, books (first editions), and magazines of the period. I have a presentation that goes into detail about these findings, a special kind of show-and-tell that helps the history come alive. I cover a lot of ground ranging from Mary Shelley’s life to the life of the book with great stories I guarantee you won’t hear from anyone else, such as how Mary’s father, the prophet of “free love,” was upset by his teenage daughter running off with a married man and didn’t reconcile until he saw the book was making money. Or, how the history behind the writing of Frankenstein connects to the Holocaust and how John Polidori wrote the first English vampire story, seventy-eight years before Bram Stoker’s, Dracula. Because I like to ramble, I often have trouble fitting in all the things I’d like to say, but audiences always get more than they expected and are happy they came. To read the full, unedited interview with Peter Balestrieri, please visit www.humanitiesiowa.org.
Sara Maniscalco - Robinson On Iowa Veterans Spwakers Bureau
What started as a volunteer project 10 years ago at the Iowa Gold Star Military Museum on Camp Dodge in Johnston, Iowa has blossomed into a nonprofit organization founded by Sara Maniscalco Robinson. Robinson has a knack for conversation and with her veteran status it makes it easy to talk with other veterans about their experiences regardless of what generation they are from.
Image:
WASP pilot Madelon M. Burcham, of Des Moines, earned a private pilot license before entering the WASPs in 1943. She became an instructor pilor and logged hours in B-17, B-26, and B-29 bombers at Las Vegas Army Airfield. Image courtesy of Iowa Gold Star Military Museum, Johnson, IA. Sara Maniscalco-Robinson is a native of Boone, Iowa. She has served in the Iowa National Guard since 1997 as a broadcast journalist, traveling the world and learning about story telling in some of the world’s harshest climates, including winters in Germany and Kosovo and summers in El Salvador and Egypt. Sara founded the Iowa Veterans’ Perspective in 2017, a storytelling program for veterans. She often presents to churches, veteran’s groups, youth camps and much more, focusing on allowing the veterans to tell their own stories through powerful videos using historical photos and video to aid the storytelling. She is a current member of the Humanities Iowa Speakers Bureau and is actively booking events with non-profit organizations around the state. We talked briefly with Sara to learn more about her project, Iowa Veterans Perspective.
Humanities Iowa: Why did you start Veterans’ Perspective? Sara Maniscalco Robinson: It all started quite accidentally. I was working on Camp Dodge full-time as a videographer and was asked to volunteer at the Iowa gold star Military Museum to help them create an exhibit highlighting Iowa’s POW survivors. Of course I agreed to volunteer my services and the next year was life changing for me. Not only did I get to meet some amazing men who survived atrocities during war but also I got the privilege of helping them tell that story to a larger audience. During that time, I also realized that there were a lot of misconceptions about what it is to be a veteran and what the general public actually knows about war and how each veteran processes their own experiences. Each person has their own perspective. I volunteered to conduct more interviews. This was about ten years ago. I learn more every day from our veterans. About two years ago I decided to make my passion project into an official nonprofit organization called Iowa Veterans Perspective. I want to share these stories I’ve collected with a broader audience and teach others how to interview Veterans. Humanities Iowa: Why did you agree
to do speaking engagements for the HI Speakers Bureau? Sara Maniscalco Robinson: I like to call myself The Lorax for veterans. I’m willing to do something that most people find extremely stressful: standing in front of a room of strangers and talking. For some this is the stuff nightmares are made of. I am not immune to the butterflies that happen right before public speaking. I think of the veterans who came before me and how they rely on me to tell their stories. They went through what is truly the thing of nightmares and the least that I can do is put myself out there to represent them in a way that they cannot do for themselves. Humanities Iowa: What is a typical day for you? Sara Maniscalco Robinson: There is no typical day in my world. Some days I’m on the road before the sun comes up to visit a school in Northwest Iowa. Other days I am leaving home after dinner to present at a VFW in Urbandale only minutes my house. There is one constant that remains a priority: my duty to my family. I attend baseball games, parentteacher conferences, drive the kids to things they need to go to and I’m here for them. Humanities Iowa: Do you have a favorite veteran whom you’ve interviewed? Sara Maniscalco Robinson: Actually I get asked that question lot. Choosing a favorite veteran would be like choosing a favorite child. Each of them is Fall 2019 · 9
Sara Maniscalco - Robinson On Iowa Veterans Continued
Image: Puerto Rican Women’s Army Corps Members at Fort Des Moines. Blanca Vasquez, center, Fort Des Moines, Iowa, undated (ca. 1945) Blanca Vasquez Gaines Papers, Iowa Women’s Archives, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City.
unique, but I cannot choose a favorite. I learn something new every time I interview someone, so the person I am interviewing at the moment is my favorite. I give them my full attention while I conduct the interview and can already start to see the story coming together in my mind of how I would like to share that story. Humanities Iowa: Since you don’t have a favorite veteran , can you share a story that has made a lasting impression? I’m sure there are many, but perhaps you can give us a brief snippet that could give readers an idea of what they might expect in 10 · Voices from the Prairie
your presentation? Sara Maniscalco Robinson: I had an opportunity a few years back to interview a group of veterans up in the Sioux City area. They all served in the Iowa National Guard and were deployed to Vietnam in 1968. I was asked to interview about a dozen of them and then make a video about their experiences in Vietnam. This group of veterans made a very big impact on my life because I not only saw what it was to be a veteran, but also an Iowan. This group deployed together 50 years ago and they still keep in touch.
The stories of this group impacted me so greatly that I dedicated the next year of my life making a one-hour documentary about their experience. It is called Men of the 2nd Mech: To Vietnam and Home Again. Hearing their stories really inspired me to do more with speaking out about veterans’ issues and being a part of my home community of Iowa.. For more information on booking Sara Maniscalco Robinson, please visit: www.humanitiesiowa.org/speakers-bureau
Grants Awarded 2018 - 2019
Ames Iowa State University—$24,642
Des Moines Des Moines Art Center— $10,060
Belle Plaine Wallace Winkie Foundation—$485
Des Moines Drake University— $4,850
Boone Iowa Railroad Historical Society—$7,500 Cedar Falls North American Review—$15,500 Cedar Falls University of Northern Iowa—$1,540 Cedar Rapids African American Museum of Iowa—$9,000 Cedar Rapid National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library—$,500 Council Bluffs Pottawattamie County Conservation Board—$1,500
Des Moines Des Moines Public Library Foundation— $5,000 Des Moines Downtown Events Group— $10,000 Dubuque Dubuque Museum of Art— $2,300 Elk Horn Museum of Danish America—$20,000 Harlan
Mason City River City Society for Historic Preservation—$770 Milford Friends of Lakeside Lab—$1,000 Moline, IL The Moline Foundation—$10,375 Muscatine Muscatine Art Center — $3,000 Pella Central College—$18,630 Sioux City Sioux City Public Musuem—$3,000 Sioux City Siouxland Institute of Film —$7,500
Shebly County Historical Society—$2,750
Council Bluffs Union Pacific Museum Association—$10,000
Harlan
Davenport St. Ambrose Women— $3,000
Iowa City
Davenport Putnam Museum of History and Natural Science— $10,000
Iowa City
Harlan Community Library—$1,061
CARTHA—$20,000
Iowa Writer’s House—$500
St. Ansgar St. Ansgar Community Betterment — $2,500 West Branch Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Association— $6,354 West Des Moines Central Iowa Community Museum— $3,000 Fall 2019 · 11
Humanities Iowa Welcomes New Board and Staff Members
New Board Member: Courtney Craig Courtney Craig is from Winterset, Iowa. She is a student at Simpson College where she majors in Political Science and Human Services with a concentration in Women Studies and Public Policy. She is a member of the national title-winning Simpson College Debate and attended the Iowa N.E.W leadership conference, a residential institute designed to empower women across the political spectrum and increase the participation of underrepresented groups in public leadership. She was a member of the 2016 Iowa class of Distinguished Young Women. In her free time Courtney enjoys photography and has displayed her work at the Iowa State Fair in the open class division.
New Board Member: Jeff Heland Jeff Heland is an insurance agent and financial service advisor for the New York Life Insurance Company with his office in Burlington. He is a member of the Southeast Iowa Association of Insurance and 12 · Voices from the Prairie
Financial Advisors. Prior to this Mr. Heland worked as a Railroad machinist for the Burlington and Northern Railroad (1979-200). Mr. Heland has a long history of public service including: Solid Waste Commissioner of Burlington (19901997), Burlington’s Mayor Pro Temp (1990-1994), Mayor of Burlington (1994-1996), and President of the Iowa League of Cities (1997). Currently he chairs the Human Rights Commission in Burlington and is a trustee for Southeastern Community College. Mr. Heland and his wife, Cindy, have two daughters, Allison and Dustin Jane.
New Board Member: Amy Nolan Amy Nolan is Professor of English at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, and lives in Waterloo with her husband and soul-cat, Squeak. She teaches screenwriting, poetry, fiction writing, and film studies courses. Her platform for reserach and writing is to express and examine the connections between our treatment of our bodies and our treatment of the earth, with a focus on weaving together scholarship with personal storytelling. Her
essay, “My Mother’s Hips,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Ruminate Literary Magazine. Other creative nonfiction and scholarly essays appear in Cultural Critique, Bellvue Literary Review, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, The Examined Life, and in the anthologies, Shift: And Anthology of Women’s Growth Through Change, Parts Unbound: Narratives of Mental Illness and Health and Critical Innovations: Reading and Writing Experimental Texts. Most recently her essay, “Seeking a Language that Heals: Teaching and Writing from a Ruined Landscape,” was published in Encountering the Natural World: Environmental Education in the Arts and Humanities, a special issue of the Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning. Dr. Nolan earned her Ph.D. in contemporary American literature from Michigan State University, where she wrote a dissertation called “Re-envisioning the MindBody Labyrinth: Transformations in the Contemporary Narratives of Stanley Kubrick, Paul Auster, Christopher Nolan, and K athy Acker.” She earned an M. A . from Centera l Michigan Universit y, and a B. A . from A lma College.
Council Conducted Partnerships 2019
Dubuque Dubuque Museum of Art African American Art —$27,000
New Board Member: (Ex Offcio) Paxton Williams Elected to a four-year term on the Board of Directors for the Federation of State Humanities Councils in November 2018, Pa xton Willia ms holds an ex of f icio seat on the HI Board of Directors. Pa xton is an attorney, former non-prof it executive, and actor/play wright who believes in the power of stories to inspire, connect, and transform. In 2000, he wrote a one-man play on the life of George Washing ton Car ver that he has performed more than 400 times in 24 U.S. States and England. From 2005-2009, Pa xton was executive director of the George Washing ton Car ver Birthplace A ssociation. Recently, he ser ved as associate producer for the Iowa Public Television documentar y on Car ver and was the content expert on the Nationa l Geographic Reader series book on Car ver. Pa xton holds degrees in politica l
science, communication studies, and public polic y from Iowa State Universit y, the Universit y of Michigan, and the Universit y of Birmingha m (England), where he studies under the auspices of a Rotar y A mbassadoria l Fellowship. He ser ved on sta f f at The Drum, the U K’s largest arts centre devoted to the promotion of A frican, A fro-Caribbean, and A sian arts and culture. In addition to his portraya l of Car ver, Pa xton has written a play on the life and words of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar that premiered in 2014 in Chicago at The Poetr y Foundation. A proponent of the law and literature movement, Pa xton wrote a chapter for A merican Guy: Masculinit y in A merican Law and Literature (2014), edited by Martha Nussbaum and Saul L evmore and published by Oxford Universit y Press. A graduate of the Universit y of Chicago Law School, he lives in Des Moines, where he is an assistant attorney genera l in the Iowa Department of Justice, Of f ice of the Attorney Genera l.
Dubuque Clarke University Evolution Weekend—$2,543 Dubuque Voices Productions Dubuque Mural Project—$15,000 Coon R apids Whiterock Conservancy K-60 Anniversary—$5,000 Fort Dodge Blanden Charitable Foundation Our Town—$6,000 Okoboji Okoboji Summer Theater Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—$7,500
Iowa City SHTLIC Media Hot Tamale Louie—$10,000 Iowa City Combined Efforts The Three Penny Opera—$7,000 Fall 2019 · 13
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Statement of Activity for the year ended October 31, 2018
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donation s through
N e t work
U nrestricted Temporarily R estricted
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Total
NEH & private grants Gifts & membership Dividends & interest Fees In-Kind Contributions Net Assets released
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546,800 1120,190 11,688
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122,000 848,946
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the su m of h u man e xperience ,
Total Expenses 678,678 0 678,678 Increase in Net Assets 50,568 26,539 122,000 171,268 for the year
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14 · Voices from the Prairie
26,539
128,000 1,186,069
1,082,098 25,239 250,000
Donors 2018-2019
Pat Anderson Wayne Anderson Anonymous Violet M. Barker Sue Berger Ferenc Beiwel Tom and Liz Boyd Willard Boyd III Richard Burton Richard Carlson Hal Chase Rick Crowl Thomas Dean Duffy De France J.P. Dietrich DNE Caplan Family Foundation James Dooley Ron and Bard Eckhoff Glenn Ehrstine George and Lois Eichacker James Erb Mark Felderman Sonja Ferrell Susan Frye Elizabeth Garst Carol Gronstal William Hamm Voanne Hansen Barbara Haring Ellen Hay James P. Hayes Jeff and Cindy Heland Beverly Hinds Marsha Hucke Samuel and Karen Hunt Sidney and Elizabeth Huttner Doug and Sheila Johnson
Jay Kacena David Ketterer Dr. James and Mary Ellen Kimball Robin Kline Maurice Lee Randall Lengeling Henry and Sherry Lippert Cedric and Marcia Lofdahl Marcia Lohmann Esther Mackintosh Mary Markwalter Charissa Menefee John Menninger Kurt Meyer Tom Milligan Dick Moeller Henry Moyer Ric Nelson Mary Noble Carrie Z. Norton Sandra Norvell N.J. Novick Russell Noyes Armond and Polly Pagliai Shirley Pfeifer Chris and Heather Plucar Alta L. Price Walter Pyper Thomas Rockafellow Christopher Rossi Gerard and Carolyn Rushton Marilyn Schnittjer Robert and Anna Mae Schnucker Linda Shenk William Sherman Gary Sheppard Steven Siegel
Dale Simon Larry Simons Cynthia Smith Eldon and Mary Snyder Rosa Snyder Rebecca Soglin Bruce Sorrell Elizabeth Stevens Larry Stone Alan Swanson Richard and Nancy Thomas Dr. John Van Ness Rhoda Vernon Brian and Vicki Walshire Rose Marie Ward Robert Weiland Michael Welsh Paxton Williams
2018-2019 Partners Tolerance Week, Souix City Fullhart/Carnegie Charitable Trust Iowa Rock n’ Roll Music Association Mississippi River Museum, Dubuque Voices Productions, Dubuque Cedar County Historical Society, Tipton Okoboji Summer Theater, Okoboji Dubuque Museum of Art, Dubuque HTLIC Media, Iowa City Combined Efforts, Iowa City Whiterock Conservancy, Coon Rapids Blanden Art Museum, Fort Dodge Fall 2019 · 15
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Mrs. Wagner’s General Store Kirkville, IA, 2004 Photograph © David Plowden