If I didn’t know I was in Iowa City, I would swear I had closed my eyes and woken up in Boulder, Colorado.  If you’ve never been to Colorado you won’t understand, but the motto for Boulder is “25 square miles surrounded by reality.”  Boulder is the Grateful Dead, Birkenstocks, beads, braids and granola frozen forever in time. 

Iowa City has that artsy flavor, particularly when you fill it with hundreds of aging wanna be writers. Add to that the local eccentrics and a thousand college freshman going through Hawkeye orientation, and the sidewalks in this small town are a parade of people trying to find themselves.  I’m feeling a bit square.

This is a week at the Summer Writing Festival of playing with metaphors, mastering synecdoches (look it up, I had to) and hearing the instructor say “show us don’t tell us” and “quit piling up the adverbs”.  It is a bit unnerving and a lot of fun.

I’m not here to write the next great American novel.  It’s about learning how to write what I really want to say, and getting a hearing when the average person has never been more distracted.

In the meantime there’s plenty more from Europe I’d like to share.  I might even post a “synecdoche” or two.