{"id":1976,"date":"2020-03-24T17:06:33","date_gmt":"2020-03-24T17:06:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2020\/03\/24\/writing-the-character-contradictions-and-soul-of-a-place\/"},"modified":"2025-01-08T19:48:16","modified_gmt":"2025-01-08T19:48:16","slug":"writing-the-character-contradictions-and-soul-of-a-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2020\/03\/24\/writing-the-character-contradictions-and-soul-of-a-place\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing the character, contradictions and soul of a place"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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America\u2019s quadrennial obsession with Iowa has passed like the season\u2019s last snow storm, there for a turbulent moment but forgotten three days later. The nail-biting over bad election apps and inadequate phone banks and questions of a weird caucus process have migrated to other states, other primaries. And now all that has been clouded over by our latest obsession: coronavirus.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What remains?<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Washington Post reporter Dan Zak<\/a> went to find Iowa before its citizens met on Feb. 3 for the first in the nation popularity poll for presidential candidates. His task: find the soul of a state, or at least define its character.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What he found was a place that\u2019s much like many of us: full of deep pride and confusion about its past, present and future, about whether it deserves its moment in the sunshine, about what it means to be an Iowan and what being an Iowan means to the rest of us.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In “Why Iowa?,”<\/a> published Jan. 30, 2020, Zak found a story with a long tail. It\u2019s as good a read now as it was in February. It’s a valuable study for anyone writing about place, history and culture; politics is, in this case, the convenient excuse but far from the end game.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It\u2019s hard to write a story when the main character is 3 million people scattered over 56,000 square miles. Zak traveled 800 of those miles in five days, and found people in towns with names most people outside the state never heard of. (That is, except for the throngs who make it to the pedaling mecca, the Des Moines Register\u2019s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, or RAGBRAI<\/a>. If the 2020 version goes forward this July, be sure to say hi as you zip past me.) This is not his Zak’s first rodeo. He has done news and features across the globe, including some outstanding writing about place. Consider this lead from his 2015 story about the Marshall Islands, which was the site of extended nuclear-weapons testing in the years after World War II<\/a>: <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It\u2019s March 2 at an event marking Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day, and the boy in the shallows is now the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, which has entered the 21st century as part trust-fund baby, part welfare state. Its elders have endured burns that reached to the bone, forced relocation, nightmarish birth defects, cancers in the short and long term. Its young people have inherited a world unmade, remade and then virtually forgotten by Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Nothing so dramatic in Iowa. But the job is the same. Find story where fly-in, fly-by, fly-over reports lie scattered like corn stalks after the fall harvest. I\u2019m a Midwesterner by birth (Illinois) and residence (Missouri). I have two siblings who live in Iowa, both who reported in from their caucuses on election night. I entered to Zak’s story braced for the expected scenes of farmers with GEDs drinking coffee in the local Casey\u2019s (where you can get gas and surprisingly good pizza), griping about Trump haters. Zak sees those, and gives them a twist, like the java-drinking resident with an opinion \u2014 and a PhD from Yale. <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Some of the things I like about Zak\u2019s work. It: <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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