I may be vulgar, but this is a rank pile of …

Please excuse my slutty self-promotion, but a book by Art Cullen will be released in late September.

Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World is scheduled to be released by Ice Cube Press of North Liberty on Sept. 22.

The absurdity is not lost on me. I can barely read a book, much less write one. This is 183 pages in fairly large type for old folks. A book designed for your bathroom.

Seems like it started as a pandemic project. The newspaper was going under. I had nothing to do but talk on the phone with Marty Case, my St. Mary’s High School buddy now living in the Twin Cities. I thought we could make some money.

We tried to combine his research into Native American treaties with my understanding of contemporary rural life. It was supposed to be a treatise on how we approach the landscape — from a position of domination, or one of living with the land. Our Manifest Destiny will be our undoing. We are losing soil at alarming rates, polluting the water and fouling our nest with tons of manure while farmers can barely make a go of it. Rural communities are falling by the wayside.

It’s corroding our politics.

Marty and I together wrote a tremendous sample chapter called “The Corn Gospel” along with a book summary and outline, and had an agent pitch it to a half-dozen New York editors.

“Rural doesn’t sell,” one editor said in his rejection.

It was a clean sweep of No.

That would have to do. The only way to make money on a book is through the oligopoly of New York publishers. We gave up. The Corn Gospel would not see the light of day.

I had been writing essays all along with that theme in mind, hoping to repurpose them spun around that core chapter.

By now I was steeped in rejection and … who, me bitter? … Steve Semken, the publisher and one-man band that is Ice Cube Press had been bugging me about doing a book. I believed what I thought I heard: This is crap. I told him so last September at the Okoboji Writers Retreat where I spoke on the craft of navel-gazing. Fellow newspaper devotee Phoebe Wall Howard of the Detroit News was listening and told me that this was a fantastic idea.

Flattery is all the inspiration I need, since I know I will never make money at this. I truly hope Semken does because he at least understands where Iowa is, unlike the consolidated book publishers in Manhattan. So I finished the book, and framed it as letter to Marty about how we screwed everything up so bad it gave rise to the likes of Donald Trump. Remember that the first armed insurrections occurred at the state capitols in Minnesota and Michigan, before they stormed the US Capitol. The revolution has its roots in flyover country, seeded in the dominion of corporate consolidation and loss.

“Fifty years around a small town amid the teeming waves of golden corn, a lot has changed, but corn remains king, just like when we were in school. But the place we knew is gone, that world of family farms and the Saturday livestock auction. We are the poorer for it. This is how it went down, or at least how I put it down, in notes compiled over this strange time from Irving Street just up from the lake in the small town we called home.”

The pandemic laid a lot bare. The isolation made it easier to see how the ties that bind us unraveled, and how the fabric of tightly-knit Iowa had become frayed. That’s how I saw it through my window to the world.

We could have an agriculture that sustains solid rural communities. We could have a robust civic debate based on facts and science. Canada is on fire. Water is the new oil. We might not be able to grow a decent crop of corn south of Omaha in 30 years. Disease is inside the threshold of our protein machine. It does not have to be this way.

That corrosion of our culture leads to a corruption of our politics. Iowa is a one-party state feeding on propaganda played on a loop composed in Virginia a half-century ago. It makes us crazy.

The fragility of our food supply and the tenuous nature of politics in isolation is of little apparent interest much beyond the confines of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. You might be interested. If so, you can pre-order We Crapped In Our Nest at www.icecubepress.com. Just $20 is all, less than a plate of spaghetti in an overpriced Des Moines restaurant. Marty could use a plate of spaghetti and so could I. A woman told me the title is vulgar. I reply that these are vulgar times. Hence, my self-promotion.