Iowa Gov. Chet Culver recently appointed the Iowa State University professor the state's poet laureate. Her most recent work is a quirky, book-length narrative poem (The Girls on the Roof) about a mother and daughter trapped on the roof of Crazy Eddy's café during the 1993 flooding of the Mississippi River. She will be reading from the book July 23 at 7 p.m. at the Kalona Public Library.
Swander's introduction to the Kalona area began after acquiring an illness that required a diet that excluded commercially grown or processed foods. In 1983 it was almost impossible to find organic foods, she noted. Then an Iowa City resident, she quickly took advantage of living close to one of the few places in the state where there are farmers still growing food free of chemicals and drugs - the Amish.
"I'd get a post card saying the asparagus is in," she remembers, which would send her down the back gravel roads to stock up on what ever produce was in season.
It was on one of these shopping trips that she first noticed a for-sale sign in the yard of the former schoolhouse.
"I thought it looked like a fun place to live, but I had no intention of buying it," she recalled. Still, Swander couldn't get the place out of her mind and the evident outcome was she soon found herself with a rural Kalona address. The acreage also provides space for her own vegetable garden - and young billy goats that will find their way to her freeze in the fall.
Inside the former schoolhouse is an airy room lit by large windows with a northern exposure - furnished in primitive except for a fancy black desk best described as French provincial.
For someone who has found large cities a bleak landscape for writing material, the Amish neighborhood was a perfect fit. Swander enjoys looking out her window and seeing buggies passing by or hay still being square-baled as in the memories of her youth. It also recalls a grandmother, who after finding herself the owner of the family farm in Western Iowa, continued to farm it the old-fashion way with four-way crop rotation and manure spreaders.
It's also obvious that she both loves and admires the lifestyle of her Amish neighbors.
Swander's rural roots influence many of her projects. She tours with her play, "Farmscape," a docudrama that captures the changing rural environment. She is a co-founder of Agarts, a national group connecting the arts and agriculture.
Swander begins her summer mornings by usually answering correspondence, both by snail mail and e-mail. Depending upon how hot it is, Iowa's poet laureate will then garden from one to two hours. She then retreats to a small cabin and its air conditioning to write - "removed from the world," as she describes her isolation.
Her evenings begin with a "leisurely dinner," followed by connecting with friends by telephone or personal visits. This can include another of her pursuits in the arts - playing her banjo.
During the school year, the Iowa State University professor resides through the week at a small Ames home. She has been on the ISU faculty for 23 years.
Just what does a poet laureate do? According to the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs, the two-year renewable appointment is intended to recognize the importance of poetry in Iowans' everyday life. By this description, Swander has been in practice for the position most of her life. She has taught poetry from elementary classrooms to colleges. As a former member of an Iowa Touring Arts team, she traveled with literary, visual arts and theater artists to communities with populations under 1,500 promoting the arts. Workshop participants would include a wide range of ages, often grandparents with their grandchildren.
Swander says she especially loves exposing younger students to poetry - and though she says she is unlikely to find a Yeats in the high schools, she hopes to be able to instill a love of poetry that will continue through their entire lives.
Current projects include developing an Iowa Literary Community website, Iowalit.com. It will provide a place for Iowa writers to share their works and offer feedback, as well as a centralized source of writing events in the state.
Swander's accomplishments are too many to list in this story, but her website, maryswanger.com, recounts writing her history.
A performance piece of her latest work, "The Girls on the Roof," has also been created with the Eulenspiegel Puppet Theatre.
The book, itself, begins:
The day the levee broke, the day the Mighty Mississippi washed Maggie and Pearl, mother and daughter, up on top of their catfish dive, the river rushed through our tiny town
of Pompeii (pronounced Pom¢pee), with a whoosh, crack, bam-boom, a power so Herculean that with one swift slap of its hand, the water knocked out all the windows and tore the door right off the hinges of Crazy Eddy's Café.
The very gates of hell opened and the Great Flood of the Twentieth Century came crashing, dashing through. Maggie and Pearl had been warned. Sure, the whole town knew. Any fool could've seen it coming.
Yup, and now ten years out
we're all back here at the Great Flood Reunion. We sit in the café,
landlubbers and river rollers,
shaking our heads and clucking
our tongues about those bad waters, the flow that carries us
back to a different time when the very ground under our feet gave way and every twig we clung to
floated off beyond our reach. And now ten years out, we struggle to remember that summer, think about where we were and where we went when the big wall hit.
We gather here together once again, the living and the dead, the seen and the unseen, the genuine and the ghosts--all who've come and gone, each taking a place at a table, in a booth or on a stool, duct tape stuck to vinyl.
We gather once again to piece together a tall tale, a story too long and wide for a single person to spin. We tilt back our chairs,
watch turkey gizzards swimming in the Mason jar on the counter, hear the waves lap at the banks outside the door and realize just how lucky we are to be here on dry land.
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