I don't know what kind of time we have.
Or it's--
Want to do questions?
I'd be happy to if there's time, yeah.
Yeah, sure.
Absolutely.
Of course, there are books on sale for him to sign.
One of your family members asked a question.
The pressure's on.
They know the scoop.
We couldn't ask the right questions.
[INAUDIBLE] would never forgive it.
That's true.
When is the new book coming out?
It'll be out next spring.
2013.
I have to finish it first.
And that's due June, so I'm a little nervous.
Yeah.
So you were going to be this pre-med student,
and then you decided to be a writer?
Yeah.
I mean, what happened?
Well, organic chemistry was part of it.
But a lot of it was that I was taking these religion courses.
Back then they encouraged--
they may now encourage people who
are pre-medicine to get humanities majors because they
thought it would look better, diverse,
you know, because of the ethical issues involved.
And so I chose a religion major largely
because I took a couple of courses in which literature
was featured prominently and the ethical dimensions
of literature.
And took a course called Quest for Human Destiny.
What a great-- what a great course.
I mean-- and I just fell in love with the literature,
and that professor was very dynamic.
And took more courses.
Tolstoy played a big role in that.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which is
a short story that completely seduced me when I read it.
So there was a lot of things that kind of
combined that I just knew that's where I wanted to go.
Also, I was working--
I write about this in here.
I was working as a night nursing assistant
in a hospital that included a lot of terminally ill children.
And I knew I wasn't going to be able to maintain
the kind of distance that was necessary to be
a successful physician.
So I instead decided to write about those experiences.
That was my way into it.
And luckily, I was at the University of Iowa.
Writing was in the air.
And no one asked questions like, what kind of job
you're going to get, and--
because everyone was a writer.
And so it was just a combination of accident and choice.
But, yeah, that's what happened.
My grandmother went to her grave, still
thought that maybe I could go back.
There was still time.
I think my mom is still holding out hope for that.
I'm only 45, you know?
How long does it take to get a medical degree?
Why did you incorporate so much of nature into it?
That was unexpected.
I always was interested in science,
and I think that's what drew me into pre-medicine
to begin with.
I was just in love with the poetry of it--
the way the body worked, the way the universe works.
I love-- math was a bit of an issue for me, which
was a problem, moving on to the more advanced classes.
So I was always kind of enthralled by that,
but did not think of myself as a nature writer until the floods
and I started writing about that transformative experience
and sharing it with friends at conferences.
And suddenly that emerged as a passion.
It was completely unexpected.
It really was the land itself that drew me
to that kind of writing.
So I haven't read this book [INAUDIBLE]
about the prairie grassland [INAUDIBLE]
to see the desert grassland.
Well, yes.
I haven't done much here.
Of course, I have a lot of family here.
And I think this place was my first experience of what
I consider to be wilderness.
I absolutely fell in love with the Sonoran Desert
when I first visited it, when I went down to Green Valley
to visit my grandparents down there, and up to Tucson
to visit my grandmother here.
Loved the-- I never been around a place
like that, where you could get lost, where there were
mountains on the horizon, where these amazingly
exotic plants, and animals, and coyotes howling.
I fell in love with it.
I really did.
And love Tucson.
Going out to Gary's house and the adobe
houses that seem to come right out of the Earth itself.
It was a different kind of living than I-- different kind
of connection to the natural environment than I was used to.
So it's always been a part of the way I--
I think it helped me move towards a love of that.
And the goal to try to restore some of it
to the Midwest, that's what that book is about.
Yeah.
It's a conversion story.
It's the way I look at it.
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
You know, I've written bad poetry.
You know?
But that actually was my way into creative nonfiction.
I took a poetry class at Iowa with Paul Diehl.
Steve and I were talking about a really beloved teacher
at the University of Iowa that had a course called
Lyric Structures.
Not really-- it wasn't Quest for Human Destiny,
that title, but somehow I ended up in that course.
And my relationship to language had always been one of fear.
I'm terrified of public speaking since I was a kid,
and I was terrible at grammar.
I got my first composition paper back in college
and it was a D. He said, A for good ideas,
but "grammatically illiterate" was the comment that I got.
So I bought books and had to re-educate myself.
But poetry showed me what language can do,
this other possibility.
The way it can be manipulated to express
not some grammatical rule, but the rules of the heart.
And that was completely revelatory to me.
And Paul Diehl is the one that introduced me to that.
And from there, I moved into creative nonfiction.
So I think the two are very closely linked.
I think creative nonfiction and poetry
are closer than they are to fiction because
of that close attention to imagery,
and detail, and the music of language.
Not that that isn't possible in fiction.
I'm going to make that clear.
I don't have much of a link to Iowa [INAUDIBLE]
but from a distance, it [INAUDIBLE]
Iowa has a reputation in the literature
of being a center for writing and fiction in various forms.
[INAUDIBLE] literature.
It also has a reputation from different sources
as being a political hotbed, particularly in the Middle
East.
Are you aware of that?
Particularly what?
I'm sorry.
The Middle East.
Uh-huh.
It's a political hotbed for that?
Yeah.
At least-- well, as I say, from what I read.
But I'm not from In Iowa, so I don't have the boots
on the ground experience.
But I know that a periodical that I subscribe to
titled The Washington Report of the Middle
East, which really concentrates itself
on Israel and Palestine--
which we read all the time about in the newspapers,
but the point of view is quite different
than in The Washington Report.
And many-- one of the sections of the magazine each month is
regional--
New York City, San Francisco, and so forth.
But Iowa appears very often.
So apparently that's something new to you.
It is new to me.
I had no clue.
Of course, it's aside from the purpose here.
But it's the Iowa link, and I was curious
if you are aware of the--
well, why don't we [INAUDIBLE] just as the writing
and the literature part of it.
How important or influential do you
feel it is in American writing?
Huge.
I mean, it was the first MFA, first degree program
in creative nonfiction--
or in creative writing, which brought writers
into the Academy.
Before, they were out in the streets, starving.
You know?
And they could actually draw a salary
and get healthcare and things like that, which is--
that was a huge, huge shift and it continues to be influential.
It was just named one of the international cities
of literature.
I can't remember the official term of that.
Yeah.
Very, very proud of that.
And some people talk about it as if it
does that in spite of its location,
or despite its location, in Iowa.
I think it's because of it.
I really do.
It's a place where people can go,
they're free to explore their creative interests
in a place that's nurturing.
It's small enough, again, where you feel that.
It's a tangible presence in the city.
Literature matters.
Books matter.
Writing matters.
[INAUDIBLE]
Oh yeah.
I mean, again, I didn't appreciate it
when I was an undergraduate.
We had Nobel Prize winners coming through,
and it was just an embarrassment of riches.
And now I look back and regret on all the things I missed out
on and didn't--
but it was every week.
Every week there was some amazing writer coming through.
And I think that just kind of sunk in.
It just wasn't on the radar for me
professionally until I was in Iowa City, which
is unapologetically literary.
And that's nice.
It's a little unexploited, but maybe that's
because you don't want to exploit it.
Well, no, it's in here.
I write about it.
Yeah, I do.
We should call it a night.
John's going to be here to sell books and sign books.
And thank you very much.
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]