In my mind, Iowa City’s Mission Creek Festival (which just kicked off its 19th year) has always fundamentally been about two things: creative place-making and wild moments of synchronicity. As such, it could have had no better opening than Thursday night’s reading by author and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib.
Let’s start with the obvious: the book that Abdurraqib is currently touring to support, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House, March 2024). Although savvy fans of Iowa women’s basketball may have long known that #22, senior Caitlin Clark, was on the verge of greatness, there is no way that festival curators could have predicted her historic season and meteoric rise way back when they booked Abdurraqib as the literary headliner for Mission Creek 2024. Yet, when he stepped on stage wearing a #22 jersey, it felt like his place at the top of the literary line-up was providence.
During the introduction, before he even entered, the festival’s literary programming director, Nina Lohman, made a point to note that “the game” would definitely be on Friday night at the Lit Walk afterparty at the Green House: the NCAA Final Four tournament, that is, which the Iowa women’s basketball team is playing in. Even at an arts festival in the City of Literature, it’s taken as a given that no one will want to risk missing it.
The synchronicities continue. The Final Four is being played in Ohio, Abdurraqib’s home state and the setting for his memoir-cum-essay collection. The day before reading here in Iowa City, his tour brought him to San Francisco, to the Sydney Goldstein Theater, less than two miles from the OG Mission Creek that gave the festival its name. There’s Always This Year centers in large part on his father, whose birthday, Abdurraqib tells the audience in Hancher Auditorium, is (you guessed it) that very day, April 4. Pointing out that 4/4 is the double of #22 is probably reaching, but I think you catch my drift by now. This festival, which for nearly two decades has been gathering people in the right places at the right times for magic to happen, began this year in its own swirl of serendipity.
Abdurraqib opened his reading with a benediction of sorts. Commenting on his book’s subtitle, “On Basketball and Ascension,” he joked that the brief time he spent as a visiting professor at the University of Iowa, January and February of 2020, immediately prior to the spring break that never ended, was the last time he felt optimistic. (He’d left his things in his apartment here, certain the threat of COVID-19 would be short-lived.) But now, at this time of his return, life has shifted.
“I hope things, emotionally at least, turn upward from here for you all,” Abdurraqib said.
It was a blessing sorely needed and deeply felt. For many in the Iowa City community, this year’s festival is bittersweet, the first since the passing of two of its cornerstones: indispensable Englert patron services manager Sarah Shonrock, who passed away late last October, and curator extraordinaire Chris Wiersema, whose death just a few weeks ago is still reverberating in unknowable ways.
In a note that went out to the Mission Creek Festival email list on Wednesday, festival director Brian Johannesen and artistic director Andre Perry paid tribute to them. “Mission Creek Festival would not be what it is today without their hard work, thoughtful dedication, and the love they brought to the community. We dedicate this year’s festival to their memories.”
“There is something to be said about having your name etched into somewhere you love,” Abdurraqib said later, during his conversation with UI Nonfiction Writing professor Tisa Bryant. Wiersema and Shonrock have certainly achieved that legacy here.
In one final nod to serendipity, the Spanish name for the waterway Mission Creek was Arroyo de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores: Our Lady of Sorrows Creek. This, too, feels deeply pertinent to both this year’s festival and Abdurraqib’s meditations on loss.
Creative place-making is also a theme that winds its way through There’s Always This Year and arose pointedly in Bryant and Abdurraqib’s conversation. Although he described the section he read as centering on “airplanes, exodus and misery,” the story about watching planes at the airport as a child with his father adamantly embraced the notion of “the return.” Abdurraqib is not quite a prodigal son, but he is someone who returned to his hometown of Columbus and now makes his life there. Loving a place, he told Bryant, is no different than loving a person: you choose it, again and again and again.
“To have an active role in the rewiring of a place is more important to me than going to a new place and finding my footing there,” Abdurraqib said. He has dedicated himself to crafting the Columbus he needs the city to be.
The mechanical metaphor of rewiring is carrying a lot of weight here. In the selection of text he read, Abdurraqib used the phrase “getting into the hood.” He was referencing self-examination via automotive analogy, but with his poet’s concision, it also became an opportunity to play with that notion of the return — to look at the ways that going back into your ‘hood and getting under the hood of a car intersect, and to explore the rewiring and repair that can happen in both places.
Iowa City, of course, is also on the cusp of our own rewiring of creative place. Last week, the Iowa City Downtown District used its monthly First Round series to announce the “X Marks the Arts” initiative, leveraging the success of the Strengthen • Grow • Evolve campaign, which branded Iowa City the “Greatest Small City for the Arts,” and a state program launched in 2020 to designate Cultural and Entertainment Districts (CEDs) in Iowa. The event was held at FilmScene in the Chauncey building, a nod to the leaps already made possible by the distinctive joint fundraising of Strengthen • Grow • Evolve.
The initial program includes 26 blocks, but co-coordinator John Schickedanz, executive director of the Englert Theatre, noted at the launch, “We have designed [the brand] to be inclusive, not exclusive.” The X Marks the Arts marketing materials, created in partnership with Meld Marketing, will be available to any arts organization in the city to incorporate into their own.
“This gives us the ability to use our voices collectively,” Schickedanz said.
Co-coordinator Tammie Walker, director of the UI School of Music, also praised the possibilities of collaboration, noting that, “The only competitive part of the arts is when everyone is striving for their personal best.”
At the close of the event, Walker and Schickedanz officially handed the reins of the initiative over to new leadership: Katie Roche, who leads the Iowa City Public Library Friends Foundation, and John Kenyon, executive director of the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature organization.
Abdurraqib, speaking to Bryant of his own creative place-making in Columbus, said, “The people are the architecture of a place.”
X Marks the Arts, by committing to diffuse and interdisciplinary leadership, is building its architecture on a firm foundation. And Mission Creek Festival, which has always sought to activate the city and both celebrate and integrate place-making, is the perfect event to follow so close on the heels of that launch — especially with Abdurraqib at the forefront. When he spoke at length about the experience of committing to love a place, it was both fresh and familiar, reflective of what Iowa Citians do day after day.
Although the collegiate version happens in the fall, Mission Creek Festival serves each spring as a sort of artistic “homecoming” — an opportunity for voices nurtured here to experience the joy of the return and to share in that creative place-making. Each of us, too, can use this festival as a chance to craft the Iowa City we need this to be, whether we launch and return or remain as architecture.
Passes for Mission Creek 2024 are still available, and there are a multitude of free events happening as well (check out the Community tab on the schedule page). I hope to see LV readers out and about this weekend — if, like me, you can’t get Abdurraqib’s performance and conversation out of your head, please corner me for a discussion.
There’s so much I haven’t even touched on here; I could write an entire article on the discussion of direct address, for example. When Bryant asked Abdurraqib about his use of that technique, praising him as “a virtuoso of the love letter,” he explained that “the ‘you’ is a door” that works beyond the individual reader to invite others into collaboration and community. Let’s open that door and create our own wild moments of synchronicity.
