First Fiction Tour @ Iowa City

The latest from Miranda Beverly-Whittemore and her fellow debut novelists, making their way across America...

We got to Iowa City after a very early morning flight (see the last installment, which was nearly incomprehensible!) and were picked up by David, who graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop last year. He drove us around town, which took about 4 1/2 minutes, pointing out the main sights: Prairie Lights Bookstore (our sponsor for the evening), the Sheraton (our luxurious abode), and "the best diner in town," a replica of which was apparently on a recent episode of The West Wing (and the food really was delicious). In any case, over the course of this short and lovely little drive, Matthew mentioned that he'd spent time playing in the Third World Softball league with Frank Conroy in Nantucket, and asked after him. None of us had heard the news that he was sick, so we were all quite saddened. Then David dropped us off at the hotel and we each went to our rooms and crashed out for the better part of the day.

It was with total shock that we learned just before our reading that Frank Conroy had passed away. The day before we'd spent a long time talking about Saul Bellow and his influence on all of us, only to wake up to learn that he, too, had passed. Now, I'm not saying that the First Fiction Tour is in any way cursed, and I'm certainly not going to take credit for the deaths of two of the great writers of our time. But I am going to say that in addition to it being quite sad it was also a tad, well, spooky.

Conroy's death meant that Iowa City was in a state of mourning; even the storm clouds moved in and cracked open over what had been a lovely, clear day. So our crowd at the Sanctuary was damper than usual in more than one sense of the word, and we did not get the big audience we'd been hoping for. But those who did come were very enthusiastic and supportive, and Conroy's name, and the names of Bellow, Thompson, Creeley, and even the Pope and Prince Ranier were all mentioned. It was agreed upon that Conroy would have wanted us to go on with the reading, so we did, but with no small amount of sorrow.

We've been changing around the reading order; the first night we went alphabetically, then in Ann Arbor we went: Ed, me, Marya and Matthew, and in Iowa City I read first, then Ed, then Marya, then Matthew. Each time, Marya's ended up third, which is pretty funny because in all three places the order's been suggested by the person running the reading. Last night my colleagues each read hysterically funny passages, and my book is so far from that kind of laugh-out-loud funny that I found myself, for the first time, worrying a little bit. We're hoping that the west coast will provide the more ample audiences, but I'm trying to figure out how to find a well-balanced passage that doesn't come off as too serious.

After the reading, we all had the chance to hang out a little bit, because we were dispersing in the morning to our various resting places before convening back in Seattle on Monday. There wasn't the press of the early morning flight! Matthew was heading back to LA for a pitch he had to do on Friday and a chance to see his family, Ed was heading to Albany to catch up with some work stuff, Marya was off to New York to catch a couple of shows and meet with some people, and I headed out here to Seattle early to see my family. It was nice to finally get to hang out a little bit, and to see how far we'd actually come in only three days. We've established great rapport with each other, We also got to talk about writing a little bit, which I feel we haven't done as much as I'd expected. Ed started out writing short stories, but said that after writing Responsible Men, he didn't know if he'd be able to go back to that smaller form. He's revising his collection of short stories, but doesn't know how it'll be to start from scratch. Meanwhile, Matthew's written a number of screenplays and made films, but for him, the novel is a daunting and exciting new kind of form. When he sat down to write Serpent Girl, he thought he was writing a short story, and was totally surprised when it turned into more than that. For me, the experience of writing The Effects of Light was profoundly exciting because I just knew, from minute one, that I was writing this big old novel that was insisting on being in the world. And Marya has written both fiction and nonfiction and writes as much as sixteen hours a day. When she said that, so mightily impressed and cowed were we that there was really nothing more to say.