Final Thursday Reading Series

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FINAL THURSDAY READING SERIES

Thursday, September 24, 2009
Hearst Center for the Arts
Cedar Falls, Iowa

Featured Reader:
Loree Rackstraw

Loree Rackstraw

The Hearst Center is located at 304 W. Seerley Blvd. in Cedar Falls. Enjoy the art on your way back to the reading. Open mic signup begins at 7:00 p.m. Bring your best five minutes of poetry, fiction, or creative non-fiction. Singer-songwriters are also welcome, and now we have access to the Hearst's grand piano. The open mic begins at 7:15. Luke Pingel takes the stage at 8:00. There will be a short question and answer period as time allows.

Loree Rackstraw is the author of Love As Always, Kurt: Vonnegut As I Knew Him (Da Capo Press), a memoir based on Rackstraw's life-long friendship with Kurt Vonnegut. She taught fiction writing, literature, mythology and humanities at UNI for 30 years, and she also served as fiction editor and reviewer for the North American Review. Copies of Rackstraw's book and work by other local authors will be available for purchase at the reading. You can read a sample of Rackstraw's work below.

Patrick Irelan, who was originally scheduled to read this month, has had to postpone his visit. He will be rescheduled for a reading in Spring 2010.

Hearst Center for the Arts

The James & Meryl Hearst Center for the Arts is located at 304 West Seerley Blvd. in Cedar Falls. Stop by early to check out the current exhibitions.

excerpt from Love As Always, Kurt: Vonnegut As I Knew Him
by Loree Rackstraw

It was a hot September afternoon in 1965 when I joined other writing students in our Quonset hut classroom at the University of Iowa. This was my second year of graduate work at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and I was torn between anger and anxiety about the new person who’d be teaching our fiction writing section this semester.
I was a single mom with two kids and the usual pressures of limited time and money. My former mentor, the novelist Verlin Cassill, who’d approved my admission into the writing program the year before, had rather abruptly accepted another position after a disagreement about the Workshop’s administration. We former students had only recently received announcement of his replacement, and so far I’d not found anyone who’d heard of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I had found a copy of a novel he had published a couple years earlier called Cat’s Cradle and had given it a fast read. It was compelling but far removed from books and stories I’d been studying the past year. Henry James he was not.
So it was with considerable apprehension that I trudged across Madison Street from my half-time job at the University of Iowa’s public relations office, to the Workshop Quonsets for the first meeting with our new writing coach. What none of us knew was that Kurt Vonnegut was as apprehensive as we were. He’d been trained in the sciences and had done graduate work in anthropology. And he’d never taken, never mind taught, a college course in fiction writing.

            He was a great bear of a man with an elongated boyish face, cropped hair, and almost-protruding hazel-blue eyes. He surveyed the room of young writers, myself the exception in my mid-thirties. I saw lots of smile lines around his eyes and a nice grin. He ground out a cigarette and pulled another from the Pall Mall pack in his shirt pocket. His hands were those of a pianist, with unusually long fingers. Lighting the cigarette, he told a joke and laughed profusely through the smoke, coughing just as much. A couple of students glanced at each other with rolled eyes. He would say later that “following Verlin Cassill in front of this audience was like following Judy Garland.”
            His message that day was not profound, but it was clear: He hadn’t been educated in an English department, but he knew the most important thing a writer had to remember was the reader. He drew some murmurs when he said he didn’t see any reason for working on a story unless you wanted to sell it. (Some of us still considered financial reward beneath one’s dignity.)
            But his was another take on the craft: “what do you need to be a writer in America? An audience!”

The Fall 2009 Lineup
Final Thursday Reading Series

August 27: Luke Pingel
September 24: Loree Rackstraw
October 29: Adrianne Finlay
November 19: Grant Tracey

Read Work By Featured Readers

Chaveevah Banks Ferguson

Eula Biss

John Bresland

Scott Cawelti
Bill Chene

Rebecca Dunham
frje Echeverria