Recent events in Minneapolis have demonstrated the by-now-obvious entrenchment of American Christianity in the nation’s fascist movement. Demonstrators at Cities Church were right to see David Easterwood — simultaneously a pastor at the church and the director of an ICE field office — as a potent symbol of fascist and evangelical lamination. Given the breadth […]
Plain Spoken
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: More than 40 million pigs are slaughtered in Iowa annually. This author has a word for that.
Are the hills of Iowa enmeshed with a vast network of death camps, comparable in moral terms to those of the Holocaust? This is one of the questions raised, indeed hurled, by Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals (1999), a novella-of-ideas by the Afrikaner-Australian and Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. In 1997, Coetzee was invited […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: How the Planned Parenthood Book Sale made me the man I am today
My mother and I love each other dearly and we are both capable Christmas gift-givers. Ceramic chicken knick-knacks or matching salt and pepper shakers never fail to bring a gleam to Mom’s keen antiquer’s eye, brightening the tree’s particolored twinkles already refracted in her gaze.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: The accidental poetry of Chuck Grassley’s Twitter
You could make a decent argument that the most experimental poetry coming out of Iowa for the past 15 years had nothing to do with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and everything to do with Chuck Grassley’s thumbs. His Twitter/X account is nearing 15,000 tweets. His signature, unorthodox approach to punctuation, abbreviation and spelling makes clear […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: This ever-evolving American anthem recalls Iowa’s abolitionist glory days
In keeping with tradition, one dramatic beat of the presidential inauguration in January was the Naval Academy Glee Club’s performance of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” While it was standard inaugural fare, it was also, of course, a nauseating co-optation. A song of solidarity, bravery and liberation — an alternative national anthem — was […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Plain Spoken: Casual lust and barbaric violence mingle in the minds of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s narrators
Horacio Castellanos Moya is one of the writers Iowa City is luckiest to have. He was born in Honduras but raised in El Salvador, where he lived and worked for many years—in addition to Mexico City, his address during the Salvadoran civil war of the 1980s—as a journalist and influential newspaper editor.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: Iowa’s conservative despots police the power of song-flight in this 1979 sci-fi fantasia
When you crack open a ’70s sci-fi/fantasy paperback like On Wings of Song, you expect to slip into a world wholly unlike your own. For an Iowan living through Inauguration Week 2025, this particular novel isn’t too much of an escape — and not just because it’s set in Iowa and penned by a Des […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: Listening to ‘God’s Trombones’ (1927), a tribute to Black preaching with Midwest origins
Today’s readers tend to associate poetry with the intense evocation of an individual speaker’s thoughts and feelings. Poems are short, usually no more than a few pages. They entail the cultivation of a distinct poetic “voice.” They put language to the otherwise private domain of the poet’s mental life. In doing so, they forge a personal connection between poet and reader.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: Revisiting ‘Iowa,’ Patrick Moore’s neglected gay novel
This monthly column will explore the long and diverse history of literature’s Midwestern engagements. There is an established canon of American literature in which the Midwest plays heavily, as a both physical and social place.
