The Iowa Stater
May 2001
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Behind the fiction
English profs draw on own lives for new books
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| Debra Marquart and Neal Bowers have both entered the world of fiction with their new books. Photo by Bob Elbert |
Dunlop's The Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the Century New York, is a meticulously researched, social history of the entertaining, and sometimes scandalous, doings of New York City's rich and famous. The book has received favorable reviews in national press, including the Washington Post. Publishers Weekly called the book "captivating and enlightening."
Bowers and Marquart, meanwhile, go the fictional route. Bower's Loose Ends is the poet's first novel. Marquart's The Hunger Bone is a collection of rock and roll stories. Both have autobiographical angles.
Struggle for life
Bowers is a distinguished professor of English, a native of Tennessee and a diabetic. Davis Banks, the complex protagonist of Loose Ends, is an English professor at a small Midwestern college, a native of Tennessee and a diabetic. But don't read too much into the parallels, Bowers warns.
"Davis Banks, in a certain sense, is my opposite," Bowers said. "He's a bad diabetic because he doesn't try to control things. I try. It's hard, but I try. My fingertips are callused from all the blood checks."
When Banks returns home for his mother's funeral, he is swept up in a series of mysteries, among them an unsolved murder. Meanwhile, his relationships with people, including a woman who may have feelings for him, are affected by his unwillingness to control his disease. Loose Ends, in the end, is an intriguing portrait of a man struggling to find himself in a world of secrecy and deception, and fighting to stay alive with a chronic disease.
"Coping with diabetes is a high-wire act, and it's easy to fall off," Bowers said. "For Davis, the disease is one of many truths he's unwilling to face, including the reality of his own life and aspects of his parents' lives that contradict his comfortable preconceptions."
Bowers has written several books of poetry and the non-fiction work, Words for the Taking, which chronicles his search for a man who plagiarized his poetry. Encouraged by the success of Words, Bowers decided to try his hand at fiction.
"I sat down not really knowing how novels get written," Bowers said. "It was enormously fun to write a novel, but fun at a terrible price because you have to revise, revise, revise, revise."
He sent the final draft of Loose Ends to publishing agents, but got little response. So he sent it around again, but this time with the positive comments Words received from critics. Recognition of that non-fiction book helped Bowers land a contract with an agent and a deal with Random House. Bowers, who is on medical leave and unsure whether he will return to the classroom, now is at work on a second novel.
On the road
In 1977, Marquart dropped out of college just a few credits shy of her degree and joined a rock and roll band. For the next seven years, her life was the road.
"It freaked out my parents," she said.
It also inspired The Hunger Bone, a collection of short fiction pieces that capture the big dreams, minor tragedies, humor and spirit of the rock and roll life. The Hunger Bone won the Capricorn Novel Award from the Westside Y in New York City prior to being accepted for publication by New Rivers Press.
"The world of the road is a world unto itself and I wanted to get it down onto the page," said Marquart, who sings with an Ames-based group called The Bone People.
Marquart's stories are sometimes funny (a band accidentally starting a fire at a high school prom); sometimes heartbreaking (a burned-out singer hoping she can go home again). They all grew out of her experiences on the road and the stories she's heard from other musicians. They also grew out of her desire to paint an honest picture of a musician's life.
"Everybody knows about sex and drugs. I'm interested in what people don't know about being on the road," Marquart said. "Poverty is a given of the road. Getting cheated by promoters and bar owners is an everyday occurrence."
To create the rock and roll world of The Hunger Bone, Marquart drew on her talents as musician and writer.
"That was the toughest part, bringing the two together," Marquart said. "There's a sort of membrane that separates the writer and the musician. I had to permeate that boundary and transfer knowledge learned as a writer to the music side, and what was learned as a musician to the writer side."
She drew from her past for the book, but The Hunger Bone also plays a big role in her present life as a teacher.
"It's practicing what you teach. I'm showing my students that I'm actually working on the same types of things I'm teaching them to do," said Marquart, who admits she still dreams of running off and joining a rock and roll band.
—Steve Sullivan
News Service