It’s a long drive from Iowa City to Lake Okoboji. Like most of my colleagues, I’ve never been to Northwest Iowa, and I was curious to visit this red and rural section of our former swing state. The scenery was serenely flat in all directions, punctuated by silos, windmills, telegraph poles, fenceposts, Trump signs and church spires. The cornfields were brown and barren in the September sun.
There are in fact a string of lakes in this region, collectively known as the Great Lakes of Iowa, formed by the Des Moines lobe ice sheet 13,500 years ago. The indigenous inhabitants were Dakota Sioux, and they are mainly memorialized by a monument to the “Spirit Lake Massacre of 1857” when Inkpaduta, in revenge for the killing of his family by a whiskey trader, circled the lakes capturing and killing all the white settlers he could find. One survivor of the ordeal, Abbie Gardner Sharp, repurchased her homestead, commissioned the monument and, according to the Visitor’s Guide in my hotel room, created “the Iowa Great Lakes’ first major tourist attraction.”
The region now teems with tourist attractions, from boating to camping to fishing to miniature golf. But our schedule runs from 8 to 5 every day, jampacked with panels and workshops scattered across the ramshackle campus of the Iowa Lakeside Labs. Other than the sunset cruise scheduled for Tuesday evening, I won’t have any time for leisure activities. I’m attending the sold-out, four-day, third-annual Okoboji Writers’ Retreat.
As the participants trickle into the main tent for the opening meeting on Monday morning, “I’m So Excited” by the Pointer Sisters pumps out of the rented PA system; it will become something of a theme song for the entire event.
Julie Gammick certainly seems excited as she calls us to order and energetically introduces the faculty. The one-time talk radio host and former Des Moines Register columnist founded this retreat three years ago, and she’s been co-facilitating it with her husband Richard Gilbert, former president of the Des Moines Register and Tribune Company. Many of the faculty are also refugees and retirees of the Register, now owned by Gannett, alongside writers and editors from a variety of small-town Iowa newspapers, some defunct and some barely surviving as they deal with the decline of local legacy journalism. They are represented by the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation, to which we are all encouraged to donate.
The hero of this group, looking like a lanky Sam Clemens, is Art Cullen, Pulitzer Prize-winning owner of the Storm Lake Times. Cullen’s paper is going strong, but only because, as I learned in the panel over which he presided, entitled “Even If You Win a Pulitzer You Still Have to Put Out a Paper,” it had been saved by a Chinese tech billionaire, whose funding enabled Cullen to buy out his competition.
If Cullen is the local hero, the villains are the transnational media conglomerates, in both books and journalism. Only a handful of the faculty here work for Gannett papers or publish with the Big Five. Rather, grassroots entrepreneurialism reigns. Everyone has or is being encouraged to have a Substack account, and advice on branding and self-promotion is doled out every day both formally and informally. The academic world is also mostly absent; I’m one of only three college professors in attendance, and there are remarkably few writers with MFAs. Kelsey Bigelow, one of two poets on the faculty, has an MA in Strategic Communications and supplements her poetry workshops with motivational speeches.
The success story of the event is the publication of Michelle Cowan’s memoir of dealing with her husband’s death in a car accident, Better, Not Bitter: A Journey from Heartbreak to Healing, which she had begun at the first retreat and published through returning panelist Polly Letofsky’s company My Word Publishing, which facilitates a self-publishing model that enables authors to retain all their rights.
I had expected to be surrounded by elderly white women looking for ways to publish their memoirs, and while that demographic and that genre are generously represented, the faculty and attendees are refreshingly diverse and the ethos reassuringly democratic. Ty Rushing, senior editor of the Iowa Starting Line and President of the Iowa Association of Black Journalists, proves that you can survive and thrive in rural Iowa as a journalist of color. Along with Rachel Jones (Director of Journalism Initiatives for the National Press Foundation), Rachelle Chase (romance writer, Register columnist and author of Creating the Black Utopia of Buxton, Iowa) and Claudia Schabel (a Latinx Diversity and Inclusion consultant based in Des Moines), he participated in a revelatory panel chaired by legendary (and recently retired) Register columnist Rekha Basu on “Respecting Cultural Differences and Why It Matters.”
The younger generation is also generously represented by a cohort of diverse journeyperson journalists here on scholarship, including the 15-year-old prodigy Allegra Blackwood from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who at the age of 13 published a piece on the launch of the all-electric Ford F-150 for the Detroit Free Press. Young writers of color are vocal and visible, and the entire event is both opened and closed with spoken word performances by Caleb “The Negro Artist” Rainey, a recent recipient of a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Iowa, whose powerful words provide a potent combination of truth to power and love to people. Many of the participants of color publicly emphasized how warm and welcome they felt in the predominantly white group. There was a rare sense of community and common purpose.
Part of that purpose is to use writing to help protect Iowa’s threatened ecosystem, especially its lakes and rivers, which are being polluted and destroyed by agribusiness’s unstainable hog-corn complex. The Lakeside Laboratory where the retreat is held was founded by University of Iowa Professor Thomas Macbride in 1909 for the “study of nature in nature,” to quote the pamphlet I received in my binder of materials. Under the executive directorship of Mary Skopec, it continues to operate as an Environmental Education Center, focusing especially on Water Quality Monitoring Research, which is in turn the subject of many panels and workshops.
Cullen reminds us that, in the end, nothing was done about the nitrate pollution that had been the subject of his prize-winning journalism. Former University of Iowa Research Engineer Chris Jones, for his panel “Write Like It Might Get You Fired!”, tells the story of how he was forced to resign by Republican members of the Iowa Legislature for using his UI-hosted blog to share the facts about the quality of the water downstream from their agricultural facilities. And Skopec, along with Jones, outdoor writer/photographer Larry Stone, and intrepid world explorer David Thoresen, hosts an experiential learning panel on kayaks and canoes entitled “Listen to the Lake,” providing us with a history of Dickinson County’s efforts to manage and protect the complex ecosystem of these glacially formed and spiritually significant lakes.
Like the term “avant-garde,” “retreat” has residual military connotations, and as I drove home from Okoboji I felt as though I had just participated in a kind of strategic reconnoitering of veterans from the culture wars, scrappy soldiers committed to continuing to fight for fact-based journalism, participatory democracy, governmental transparency, anti-racism and environmental activism during a time when, especially in Iowa, representatives of these values are on the defensive. But they’re not defeated and, joining them in retreat, I felt hope for the future.
The third-annual Okoboji Writers’ Retreat took place Sept. 17-20, 2023. Registration is currently open for the 2024 retreat, with a $100 deposit.
Loren Glass is an English professor at the University of Iowa. This article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2023 issue as a part of Peak Iowa, a collection of fascinating state stories, sites and people.