Writing in Iowa City

We found out today that Iowa City has been named by UNESCO as a "City of Literature," joining Edinburgh and Melbourne as the only cities with this designation.  This is a significant distinction and goes along with Rick's decision to move here to be in a writing-rich environment.  With this designation, Iowa City joins the Creative Cities Network, a group of cities with rich creative environments.  We're delighted with this designation, and we're glad to be able to participate in our own small way.  (My co-author and I recently completed the review of the copyedits for our forthcoming Shaders book, and today I saw the book listed in the AK Peters online catalog.  Not exactly literature, but I claim that it's still creative!)

Books we made

This fall we're in a bookbinding class, part of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UI. Technically it's called "Adventures in Book Conservation" but "adventure" may not be quite accurate ;^} . The class instructors are from the Iowa Book Works, and the lead instructor is a conservator with the University library.Last night our class made books, using an ancient Ethiopian sewn-book technique. It was quite interesting and not too difficult, but the class members who knit, crochet, or sew seemed to find it easier than the others. The photo shows the books we made -- Judy's is upright and mine is reclining. If you can download and zoom into the photo you may see the pattern of the lock stitches on the spine; they can be quite nice.

The Oxford Project

This evening Judy, Rick, and I went to the Englert Theater in downtown Iowa City for a reading from The Oxford Project, a new book from Peter Feldstein and Stephen Bloom. Peter is a friend of ours, and has been a friend of Judy's for years. The book gives an intimate and honest portrait of the small town of Oxford, Iowa, through photographs of people taken 21 years apart and through candid interviews with them. The reading tonight was in a theatrical style, with individuals reading the things that townspeople have said. Very effective, quite touching, and a wonderful look at small-town America. As Bloom said this evening, when you want to understand the real history of America, you won't get it from Sarah Palin or Barack Obama -- you'll get it from understanding the lives of people like these. A remarkable project about a very real town and the very real people in it.

Genre fiction, take two

So, no sooner do I write an entry about genre fiction and mention the culinary whodunit than I pick up another book -- from the same book sale where we got "Sticks and Scones" -- and its cover says that it's the first in a brand new series of Sudoku mysteries. Once again, there seems to be only one author in the series, Kaye Morgan. It never ends, I guess, but it seems kind of like a racket to create your own genre...

Genre fiction

I knew that there were certain broad categories that fiction writing falls into, such as western, romance, adventure, mystery, fantasy, horror, historical, and science fiction. I'd even heard of some subcategories, such as police procedural mysteries. But at a book sale recently Judy picked up a book that was categorized (by Entertainment Weekly) as a "culinary whodunit" -- a category that seems to be populated almost entirely by one author, Diane Mott Davidson, at least as shown by a Google search. I don't draw any conclusions here, just a bit of amusement...