While I should be writing

Corn and country

One of my best memories from Iowa is when we set the GPS on “least use of freeways”. Country was playing on the car stereo and corn followed us along the way. In the northern part of Iowa, the corn was some one meter high and still green; the further south we got, the higher it went, and the drier it was. I played A soft place to fall and leaned back against the car seat. Now and then, the corn was interrupted by roads, always completely straight, like someone had just drawn them up with a ruler. I guess it’s possible to do that if all you’ve got is flat ground.

No other song is so intimately linked to Iowa and my book as A soft place to fall by Allison Moorer. I still love it, which is probably a good thing seeing as I have it tattooed on my shoulder. Literal people sometimes point out to me that the shoulder is not a soft place to fall on. “That may be so”, I reply, “but it just felt indignified to tattoo it on my stomach.”- “Or your ass”, some less polite people might reply.

A soft place to fall is part of the movie soundtrack to The Horse Whisperer and what might be my favorite movie dance scene ever (after Dirty Dancing, of course. No one puts Baby in a corner). It’s also the starting shot, the first flicker of an idea, to my book The Readers of Broken Wheel recommend. For a long time I used the song title as a working title (“So you used your working title as a tattoo? Shouldn’t you have waited for the final version?”)

And here I am. Amongst corn and a soft place to fall and straight roads and anti-abortion signs which shows up depressingly often in this Christian Iowa, reminding me not to idealize it too much.

I still  think all of us need it sometimes, a soft place to fall. And I still think that often, it’s all we’re ever looking for.

Corn and graveyards

Two things are notable when driving through Iowa.

The first one is of course the corn fields. Iowa ranks first in the country in corn production. They make up for almost 20 % of all the corn in America. It has to grow somewhere, and if you’re off the freeways, that’s about the only thing you find.

The second things are the graveyards. For long stretches of time, corn fields is the only thing you see, every now and then interrupted by silos. And graveyards. They appear depressingly often, in the middle of the corn, far away from the closest church or town. The farmers of Iowa who lived among the corn and now rest in it. My own theory is that the gravestones are what’s left when small communities and family farms were swallowed by industrial agriculture and bigger cities; sometimes as many as fifty, sometimes as few as six. You see them, you blink, they’re gone again.

Dewey Readmore Books

The reason we’re in Spencer is of course obvious: their library used to have a library cat named Dewey Readmore Books. By now, Carina has asked everyone we’ve met in Iowa if they’ve heard of this cat of theirs. Everyone has said “no”, so I think she’s beginning to believe I’ve made “the damn cat”, as Carina lovingly calls him, up.

But they know about him at the motel:
Carina: “So, you know about this library cat, then?”
Motel-guy: “Dewey? Sure, he’s a big deal around here.”
I may have smiled rather smugly.

Dewey Readmore Books is the world-famous library cat that was found half frozen to death in the night drop one cold January morning. He is also the protagonist in the increadibly charming books Dewey – The Small-Town Library Cat that Touched the World. It’s written by Vicki Myron, och it’s also one of two reasons why my own book The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend takes place in Iowa. He does of course have his own webpage: http://www.deweyreadmorebooks.com/ –  the touching story of “An Abandoned Kitten [that] Transforms the Spirit of an American Town.”

And here we are now. Right outside the authentic Spencer Public Library. “Look!” I say to Carina while she is arranging our photo shoot. “A completely authentic library borrower! With a book!”. Carina notes somewhat drily that we are standing outside a library (se image!)

Inside, we’re met by a rather ugly statue of Dewey/The Damned Cat. I sign their guestbook and talk to the friendly woman behind the counter. She didn’t work here in Dewey’s time, but Vicki still comes by often. She is still working on her second book, which might be a childrens book about the miracles surrounding Dewey. As a writer I deeply sympathise with her: it must feel a bit tricky to try to write another book after having written one about her self and the town that sold to tens of countries. I mean, there’s only one library cat.

The friendly woman gives us the full Dewey-tour: the drop box where Dewey was found (see image), the heater where Dewey liked to sleep (for some reason I forgot to document that one) and the memorial plaque (see image). Carine suggest I should kneel reverently by it. I think she might be ironic.

But Dewey is a big deal. When he died it was announced on the tv-news. His orbituary appeared in 250 newspapeers, including the New York Times. Tourists used to visit the small town, even though most of them did it when he was alive. He made the library a part of the community, and he was there for people when family farms were being sold, through ecomonical crisis and lack of jobs, rising oil prices and whatever the world might throw at them. And now I’ve seen his library.

The books

Some interesting facts about books in America: some 292,014 books are published every year, making the USA the country which publicize most books in the world.

Sweden is number 48, a long way down after both Finland and Denmark, which can’t reasonably be accurate. The statistical nerd in me quickly establishes that it isn’t: the numbers for Sweden is for 2010, those for Finland from 2006, and Denmark from 1996, making them strictly, statistically speaking, difficult to compare.

I’ll get to the bottom of this one day. Unfortunately not today, since I have a novel to write.

The USA of small towns, survival, corn and craziness

Helen Hanff, the great woman who wrote 84, Charing Cross Road, quoted some guy who’d said: everyone goes to London with their very own image of what they’re going to find there, and everyone find exactly the London they’re looking for. I think it’s the same with the United States.

So this is the USA I’m looking for: small towns, size, craziness, originals, books and corn.