Des Moines Register
08-31-06
Literary hero tills prairie’s bards
Writer and publisher Steve Semken finds the words to describe the natural
environment's sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic, impact.
By MIKE KILEN
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
Steve Semken worked in sales. Then he was a fish packer, substitute teacher
and customer service rep for a cable company.
His resume went nowhere.
Rejected by several graduate school writing programs in 1991, he punched the
daytime clock, wrote a newsletter at night and started his own little publishing
outfit called Ice Cube Press.
He sent the newsletter to famed environmental writer Gary Snyder, who wrote
back that he liked it.
"Because of those letters I realized I wasn't a crackpot," Semken said.
He published his own book in 1996, and four years later, after moving back to his
native Iowa from Kansas and settling in North Liberty, he's no longer in job hell.
He is considered one of Iowa's treasures by others in the literary community.
His ascent from the depths was helped by a revelatory moment in 1997 while
working in his last non-writing job — as a church secretary.
No, he wasn't saved.
He simply realized he had to meet Gary Holthaus, an admired poet who grew up
in Iowa.
"I know," he schemed. "I'm going to have an event!"
Semken persuaded Holthaus to read from his poetry. He set up 200 chairs for a
public reading.
Ten people showed up. Semken didn't care. He got to hear Holthaus read, and
the Harvest Lecture Series was born. This marks the series' ninth year.
Iowa's rivers, the two that form the state's natural borders, are the focus this
year. Chosen authors provided essays. Semken compiled and published them.
Semken, 42, is now the author of five books, a publisher and an organizer of
lectures. He's called one of the rare people keeping Iowa stories alive.
"There's a Jim Harrison (poet and novelist) quote that I like to remind myself of,"
said Semken.
"'It only gradually occurred to me that it's not people's problems that are
interesting, but their solutions to their problems.'"
Semken found the solution was all around him.
He gathers and tells stories steeped in the environment, a genre that often defies
description. Most just call it sense of place.
The stories aren't just a naturalist's jottings on Iowa's rich soil and vast skies,
murky rivers and volatile weather. They burrow beneath the surface to expose
how Iowans are affected by their environment.
"It's about understanding how we live, where we live," Semken said.
HE RECALLS boyhood trips with his brother to the woods near Iowa City. They
carried sticks, made mud balls, painted their foreheads and declared a decayed
tree trunk their throne. They were the rulers of the forest, he would later write in
an essay in "Living With Topsoil," the 2004 Harvest Book Series collection.
"Each of us, in Iowa and elsewhere, are made of clay and so, I believe, are forms
of living topsoil," he wrote. "I search and cherish mushrooms, berries and
flowers. I worship, without any question the cycles and legends and stories which
come to full bloom through the Earth ..."
Iowa stories, he said one recent day while sitting in his 1901 home, are in the
details — the tone of voice, the landscape and weather, the humidity and dust of
the fields.
"I've always thought it isn't quite as hard to make a story when you live along the
ocean or in the mountains. Iowans are able to take subtle details and create
stories with them."
Every year, he summons the writers of Iowa, academics and published writers
such as Mary Swander and Debra Marquart, English professors at Iowa
State University, and David Hamilton, editor of the Iowa Review. He calls on
poets such as Michael Carey and award-winning essayists such as Amy Kolen.
He asks them to write on a theme, such as topsoil, weather, prairie roots or this
year's "River East, River West: Iowa's Natural Borders," available at bookstores
in mid-September. The lectures follow in the coming months.
To his great surprise, only one author in nine years has turned him down.
"People are really proud of their Iowa lives," he said.
Swander ties her experience of living with the Amish, for example, to
observations about peace and community during a time of war. Marquart writes
of Midwesterners' deep and often irrational connection with weather. Hamilton
contemplates the river and the words his father underlined in his copy of
Thoreau's "Walden."
"Steve is a literary alchemist," said Chris Rossi, executive director of Humanities
Iowa, which helps fund Harvest Lectures, operated by Semken's nonprofit
Standing By Words Center. "He's mixing together the elements of the literary
tradition, including academia, readings and publications. This is a special kind of
alloy that just isn't found elsewhere in our state or many others.
"He's a quiet, unsung hero in Iowa's accomplished literary world, " Rossi said.
With a Semken project, Iowa's settings are just the framework. Top soil blows
away, after all, and underneath lies what he calls the "value of the invisible."
"Too many people," Semken said in his soft-spoken way, "are literal readers."
Read his 2005 novel "Pick Up Stick City." Many would label it inventive magical
realism. His main character finds tiny people pods in the pond of an Iowa ghost
town. The main character summons those citizens back to life.
"Learning to live where we live requires restoration and maintenance," he said.
SEMKEN TENDS a small prairie plot in his yard and often ventures out to the
nearby lake and nature preserves.
"It's anything but calm," he said of his study of what is around him.
"How does the landscape," he asks, "affect the way we live?"
Contemplating the deeper meaning of topsoil may send some readers scurrying
to the latest bestseller or People magazine. But good sense-of-place writing isn't
a boring list of bugs and descriptions of clouds.
"The most skillful writing about place, of course, connects place to both character
and theme in a tightly-wound web," said Thomas Dean, director of the Iowa
Project on Place Studies at the University of Iowa. He has also written for
Semken's publications.
Semken is a humble man but comes to the heart of it near the end of a long
conversation in his dining room.
As the country's vast regions all begin to look alike, with Gaps and Wal-Marts in
every city, and as our oral storytelling traditions get lost, the unique stories of
living in Iowa need to be restored, he said.
Not bad work for a former fish packer who found the inspiration to write in the
woods and rivers around him.