By the Iowa Sea: A Memoir

A Conversation with Joe Blair
How did you come up with the title, By the Iowa Sea?
It took me two years to write the book. And then another two years to write the title. I’d come up with a title and love it for a day, and then hate it exuberantly thereafter. I can’t tell you how many titles this book had. I tried cute titles: My Darling Flood. I tried biblical titles: Vanity of Vanities. Ironic titles:Beautiful Disaster. Simple, Cormac McCarthyesqe titles: The Flood. I tried paging through the book and looking for a collection of words that sounded cool together, but I couldn’t find any. I recalled a friend of mine who, about ten years ago, threw a title party. She invited a bunch of friends over and the whole aim of the party was to come up with at title for her book. Of course it didn’t work. We spent the time getting drunk. In regard to my title, I was lost. I wanted someone else to simply name my book for me. Just like my wife named our kids. Couldn’t editors name books? Wasn’t that the sort of thing they did?
One morning, I was lying in bed trying to put off the inevitable throwing off of the blankets and I was thinking about the Salton Sea. Ever since I saw the John Waters documentary on that forsaken body of water, I’d been obsessed with it. If only, I thought, I could entitle my book, The Salton Sea. That would be awesome. Unfortunately, my book had nothing to do with the Salton Sea. It had to do with a sea in Iowa that had been created when the Iowa River flooded in the spring of 2008. And of course there were the metaphorical floods. (Flood of passion. Joy. You name it.) And the metaphorical seas. (Sea of heartbreak. Lost love. Loneliness.) And I thought, how about By the Iowa Sea? I could call it that! I pictured a beautiful woman in an old fashioned bikini sitting under a sun umbrella on the edge of a raging, threatening body of water. I loved By the Iowa Sea. I loved it so much, I sent it to my editor immediately. Then, the next day, right on schedule, I hated the title exuberantly. But it was too late. My editor was running with it.
What set you on the path to publish your writing?
At the time of the flood, I was writing every day in that doomed way unpublished authors do. I punished my keyboard every morning in a coffee shop called Terrapin, which was run by two insane Italian brothers who talked too loudly but didn’t seem to mind me clogging up one of their tables for hours at a time. The same people were always there. The smiley woman who would read the book of Psalms in her window seat. The old guys who would do their crosswords while sitting around the table by the gas fireplace. They’d do the Times first and then work their way downhill to the Des Moines Register. I sat near them, maybe so I could pretend to be a part of their daily successes. They’d always ask me questions. Usually about sports. Sometimes about books or movies or geography. And I’d almost never know the answer.
One day, when the lens of the nation was focused on the Iowa floods, I got a call from The New York Times. A friend of mine, a well-known author whom they had already approached, had given them my number, telling them I might be able to lend my “blue collar perspective” to the tragedy. The woman from the Timeswanted something for the op-ed, a “letter,” they called it “From the Flood Plain.” Was I interested? Um…yes. I was. Could I have something for them tomorrow? Sure. I didn’t see why not. “We’re not saying we’re going to publish it,” she warned me. “But we’ll take a look tomorrow and see.” That evening, after work, I drove down to the coffee shop and tried to write something poignant about the flood, but the place was too quiet. The crazy brothers weren’t there. Neither was the smiley Bible woman, nor the old crossword guys. After an hour of flailing failure, I returned home. This, I supposed, was what separated published writers from unpublished writers like myself. Published writers could write. I didn’t sleep much, having missed my big chance. Next morning, I drove to the coffee shop. Said hello to the crazy brothers. Said hello to the smiley Bible woman. Said hello to the old crossword guys. And wrote a short essay about our failed sandbagging efforts on Normandy Drive, where I had lived for seven years. The Times ran the piece the following day. A few weeks later, they sent me a check for three hundred dollars. I don’t know what I spent it on.
Tell us about the process of writing By the Iowa Sea—do you keep a journal? Do you write every day? How did you try to stay true to your memory of the events in the book?
Deb and I had been arguing quite a bit. We were very dramatic. And it always drove me crazy when she’d say something during an argument and then, just minutes later, deny having said it. It also drove me crazy the way, during a fight, we’d both simply repeat our sides of the same argument over and over again without ever resolving anything. I began transcribing our arguments because whipping out a tape recorder seemed crass. Minutes after an argument would end, I’d rush to the basement and scribble down what we each said, at least the way I recalled it. Then, in an act of…I guess you could call it “hubris” or “stupidity” or “vanity”…I’d read the argument back to my wife. I learned that this was not the way to go. Because a new and fiercer argument would inevitably ensue. Memory is faulty. Deb never recalls the arguments the way I do. If she were to transcribe them, I’d be the one fumbling through the crucial stages. Or saying the insensitive thing. The more I transcribed arguments, however, the more I tried, in the midst of our battles, to be fair and compassionate. Not for any moral reason, but simply to look good in the written version. This awareness, on both our parts, of the impending transcription changed the way we communicated. (In this instance, for the better.)
That’s the way with nonfiction writing. You think you’re simply recording things that happen, but your recording of events begins to change the events themselves and before you know it, you get confused as to causality. And purpose. This is the tangle you begin to recognize. The recording of events and then the drawing of conclusions from these recordings of events (AKA “essay writing”) is a real drag for the people I come in contact with. There are dozens of instances, in the recent past, when Deb has turned to me (in the car, in bed, at a restaurant) and said, “You will not use this in one of your essays.” To her, if I were to consider the following essay, I might say, “Of course, sweetheart. I would never do that to you.” But, in the interest of the truth, I have to tell you this would be a lie.
Why did you write By the Iowa Sea? Did you set out to achieve something specific?
Well, I’ll tell you. There was no great, God-inspired reason. What happened was, Dan Jones at The Times accepted an essay I wrote for Modern Love. I had been trying to get a piece in there for over a year, and it was a big thrill for me. For one thing, I really liked the piece he was going to run. It was one of the first essays I had written which dealt with my feelings toward my son, Michael, who happens to be severely and profoundly autistic. I’d had a hard time approaching the topic on paper because it’s such a large and difficult part of our family life and I hadn’t worked out how to accept the heavy responsibility of twenty-four-hour-a-day care for him without self-pity or resentment or that ugly, narcissistic, long-suffering, heroic tone you sometimes read in parental writings on the topic of their special needs children. When I finally did begin to directly address the topic of my special needs son on paper is when I began to grow as a father and a human being in that respect. So, the essay, which The Times entitled For the Boy Who Makes Waves, was very important to me and I also thought it might be important to other fathers or mothers who had a son like my son.
After the essay was published, I heard from a few different agents and they all wanted to know what I “had.” “Well,” I said, “I have a bunch of essays. In fact, I have hundreds of them.” But the agents didn’t much care about essays. They wanted a book. Which, by the way, is much longer than an essay. I realized, with a hint of panic, that what I needed to do, if I ever wanted to be an actual honest-to-God author, was come up with some idea for a book. The straws I snatched at immediately were the two essays of mine that had seen the light of day: the flood piece, and the Michael piece. There was also another line I had been pursuing in my essays, regarding my marriage, which had recently gone through a stern test. I had already written, dozens (maybe hundreds) of essays on these three topics, all of which were firWho have you discovered lately?
Most recently, I read the terrific book You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik. When I discovered that this book was based on Camus’ The Stranger, I drove to the bookstore to buy a copy. I had read Camus before, but I was only a kid, and all I could remember was the voice of the narrator, which was limber and verbose and chilling. I remembered, in particular, the narrator addressing his listener, some guy in a bar, and mentioning something about the subjunctive mood. This bothered me when I was a kid because I didn’t know what the subjunctive mood was. When I arrived at the bookstore a few days ago, I discovered they were out of The Stranger, so I bought The Fall instead. I just finished it. I’m thunderstruck. Truth be told, I feel as though I have just fallen in love.st person / present tense, when I began to piece together a single, cohesive, and (I hoped) compelling story at the center of what I came (eventually) to call By the Iowa Sea.