Congratulations to Little Village on its 100th issue! February is a wonderful month to celebrate this milestone. Here in the middle lands, most people moan and groan about February. Shoveling more snow, chipping more ice, wrapping up for another foray into a sub-zero morning–“Enough!” is the cry heard round the Heartland from Columbus to Wichita, […]
Thomas Dean
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UR Here: Seeing Tiny Places
Bad eyesight and new reading glasses. Just another step along the way of middle age? Yes, but last month, they also sparked in me some new thoughts on place. I’m of a largely geographic bent when it comes to place. That is, I believe a large part of “place” is what’s “out there.” When I […]
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UR Here: C'Mon Get Hokey
“Home for the Holidays.” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” It’s that time of year when the return home defines the season for many people. Songs, movies and TV specials during the holiday season relentlessly emphasize homecoming, for both comedic and dramatic effect. And our highways and airports testify to the culture’s real-life enactment of this […]
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UR Here: Connection, Consequence and Place
One of the problems we have in modern, globalized, industrialized society is that we often fail to understand, acknowledge or care about the consequences of what we do. If we really, truly cared about the environment, we would calculate the damage we inflict upon the Earth every time we start up a car or airplane, turn on a computer, throw away Styrofoam, etc.
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UR Here: Food + Sex = Place
In early August, my family and I returned from our annual sojourn to the Minnesota North Woods. Our experience this year dramatically illustrated to me that the two major ingredients of a sense of place are food and sex.
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UR Here: Keys to the City
Kudos to Mark Ginsberg and Marc Moen for putting pianos out in our public downtown walkways a la the “Play Me, I’m Yours” initiative in New York City and elsewhere. Now, anyone can share their musical talents, big or small, with everyone else. This is the truest definition of “public art,” and I hope we […]
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UR Here: Challenging Change
In the raging underage/binge drinking debate in Iowa City, a couple of familiar refrains keep singing: “You can’t change the drinking culture,” and “Downtown Iowa City’s economy will collapse,” the latter with various subpoints (the downtown economy is heavily bar-dependent, so there will be mass vacant storefronts, many jobs will be lost, tax revenue will plummet, etc., etc.). These talking points are repeated ad infinitum by many, but especially the student population. Underlying both of these arguments is a fundamental belief that things cannot change from their current state. The universe always tells us that nothing is further from the truth.
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UR Here: That Black Iowa Dirt
It’s a beautiful early spring Saturday, the day before Easter, in fact. The temperature will probably see 70 today, an early gift of the summer to come. The sunshine on my neck is warm, a feeling I’ve missed for many months. As Christians prepare to celebrate the breath of a resurrected spirit promising new life, and as Jews celebrate their people’s new breath of freedom, I work at my personal offices of spring, trying to breathe new air–and re-borning life–into the ground of my home.
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UR Here: Boundary Waters
UR Here: March 2010 – Eastern Iowans nervously watched the snow pile up in their yards and fields this winter. While we did not threaten any records, the memory of 2008 lingers like the shadow pain of a broken bone recently healed. Indeed, the news outlets are running stories that tell us forecasters are worried […]
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UR Here: Small Towns, Big Loss
In my last column, I presented some statistics demonstrating that the majority of Iowans are “urban” by U.S. Census standards and have been since 1950. With fewer farmers, the raison d’être of most small communities in Iowa—servicing the region’s agricultural economy—has disappeared. If the economic foundation of a town disappears, what’s the big deal? Close […]
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UR Here: Place in Time
For the past few years, July has been a special month for me. Since 2005, I have taught a one-week workshop in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival focused on writing about place and writing about nature. Since 2007, I have followed that up with a several-week course at the Iowa City Senior Center focused on […]
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UR Here: Remembering a Real Minnesota Viking
We’ve lost another one, too soon. On February 25, Bill Holm passed away at age 65. Bill Holm was one of our great writers of the Midwest and of place. He was literally a giant of a man—closer to seven feet than six, enormous Viking build, beard and hair—first reddish and then, over time, a […]
