By Suzanne Kelsey
On the prairie, personal history and the history of the land are often so intertwined as to be indistinguishable. Suzanne Kelsey’s memoir of her husband’s family’s acreage illustrates the point.
by Thomas Dean
by Bridget Brandt
A “rubber band community” is one that, no matter how far away you go, you always want to come back. This retired teacher explains.
by Kate Edwards
by Dartanyan Brown
by Allan Moyer
There was a time for this retired farmer when Saturday night in his small prairie town was a hot car and someone to race.
by Chris Wiewora
by Kandi White, Sebastian Braun
by Tracy Harris
What’s an East Coast transplant to do when she doesn’t feel she fits in the Midwest? Fill a car with friends and head for Davenpo…
by Dan Weeks
by Shirley Moyer
A farm is many things: a business, a home, a way of life. For this farmer, it was a thing to share with the whole town.
by Sam Cox
A costume, a pillow case, a couple of friends, and a whole town to roam in: that was Halloween for this coffee shop owner.
by Randall Hotchkin
It’s a long way from Iraq’s battlefields to running a small town barbershop. But because of a little boy’s smile, maybe not so fa…
by Damian Johansson
Grief is this writer’s companion as he drives from Red Wing, Minnesota, to Minneapolis.
Helen Johnson
By Dan Weeks
When frequent contributor and native New-Englander Dan Weeks arrived on campus for his first year of college, he met Louise, a rancher’s daughter from the Sandhills of Nebraska. What followed was “ab-so-lute-ly wonderful,” but not at all what he expected.
by Beryl Clotfelter
by Mary Swander
by Jackson Menner
Driving the back roads of rural Iowa with civil rights icon John Lewis, contributor Jack Menner learned the meaning of retail politics.
by Greg Brew
by Denise O’Brien
by Agnes Ohlenbusch
by Donald Janzen
Anthropologist Don Janzen examines his own background in his essay about his father’s homesteading childhood in early 20th centur…
by John B. Teigland
by Sam Pérez
When you move into an old house in a small town, you inherit that house’s history and, sometimes, its former residents.
Musician, journalist, educator with a 40-year career in the arts–our contributor has folded together multiple extraordinary lives.
by Michele M. Brennhofer
When this Minnesota writer’s family farm became a regional park, she kept her family memories.
by Mary Richardson McBee
by Howard McDonough
by Ann P. Hall
A small-town restaurant is where the local foods movement gets real.
by Colin Lewis-Beck
Where can you find the essential Iowa? Not in a single place, as this writer found, on the road with his father and a van full of…
by Kay Henry
by Michael Burt