Yes, Iowa is a State with very little going on. Not overly populated. Not a center of arts and culture and the avant garde. In fact, it is a State so literally boring that it is a perfect place for someone like me with cancer of the imagination to live. I grew up in the town of Rowan, Iowa. 275 people if you count the squirrels (and believe me, some of the squirrels are premium corn-nuts). I confess to peopling the place with the characters and creatures that welled up from the crazy, dark depths of my imagination. Yes, they were real people, but the things I knew about their secret lives as international spies and alien invaders masquerading as humans were probably not provably accurate.
There was a time when alien potato people gave me an embryo to guard that would be raised as a human being. When I showed it to my friends, they claimed it was a carved potato with spherical-headed pins for eyes. Now how were they going to pass off a carved potato as a human being when they wanted him to take his place as a Russian cosmonaut to interfere with the space programs of two countries? And how did they expect a twelve-year-old boy to make a carved potato grow up to look and act like a human being? Alien potato people never adequately explain themselves.
And Iowa girls are something else that you have to see to believe. Are they pretty? Well, I went to Moo-U, Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Why did they always call it Moo U. or Cow College? Well, more than one of my friends told me that it wasn’t because it was an agriculture and mechanics sort of college. Oh, it was definitely that. But they suggested all the girls at Moo U. were fat and desperate and at college to get an M.R.S. degree with a specialty in ball-and-chain. I must admit to being chased by a couple of cow-shaped co-eds, but I always found Iowa girls to be absolutely fascinating. I always imagined them in bikinis and nearly nude, even though, with Iowa weather, there is really only about fifteen minutes a year in August when you could really say we had bikini weather.
I was thirteen in 1969 when Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon. My dreams were space fantasies. My connections with alien invaders were nearly exposed by the potato-people’s embryo snafu, but most of my day-dreams took me to Mars alongside Alicia Stewart, the prettiest girl in my sixth-grade classroom. She was always wearing a bikini when we explored Mars… usually underneath her space suit… her see-through glass-and-plastic space suit.
So, as I claimed in the the title, space-girls come from Iowa. At least, in my mind they do. In my feverish retro teen-aged imagination they do. And if I can continue to successfully put fiction into print before I die, you will probably see a lot more of them.
Catch a Falling Star 
Reading Other Writers
Nobody who wants to be a writer gets by with just writing and never reading anything by anybody else. It is too easy to devolve into some kind of human mushroom that way, thinking only thoughts a mushroom could think, all fungus-like and having no chlorophyll of their own. You never learn to decode other people and other people’s thinking if you don’t read other people’s thoughts crystallized in writing.
And not every other writer is Robert Frost. Or even Jack Frost who thinks he’s Gene Kelly. There has to be some interpretation, some digging for understanding. What did that writer mean when she said political correctness was like a tongue disease? And what does it mean when a commenting troll calls me a nekkid poofter? Is that how he spells “exceptional genius”? I think it is. Trolls are not smart.
I know people have to make an effort to understand me. When I write, I am writing under the delusion that I can produce literary quality off the top of my head. In fact, I can barely produce hair off the top of my head, and it is gray when I do it. See what I did there? It is the kind of joke a surrealist makes, pretending the idiomatic expression you use is to be taken literally when it doesn’t literally make sense. That kind of nonsense is what my readers have to put up with, and probably also the reason why most of them just look at the pictures. If you have to think too hard when you read, your brain could over-heat and your hair could catch fire. I like that kind of purple paisley prose that folds back in on itself and makes you think in curlicues. But most people don’t. Most people don’t have fire-proof hair like I do.
Sometimes, it doesn’t even take a word to make the point. For instance, why, in the picture, is Fluttershy trying to drink out of the toilet in the dollhouse bathroom? For that matter, why does a doll house even need a bathroom? Applejack doesn’t even fit in that yellow bathtub. I know. I tried to stuff her in there for this picture. And, as you read this, doesn’t this paragraph tell you a lot about me that you probably didn’t even want to know?
When I am reading the writing of others, I am looking for a cornucopia of things. I want to not only understand their ideas, I want to detect the limping footprints across the murder scene of their paragraphs and come to know the deeper things about them as well. I spent years decoding and trying to understand the writing of preliterate kids in my middle school English classes in order to be able to teach them to write better. And I learned that no writer is a bad writer as long as they are using readable words. I also learned that very few writers are James Joyce or Marcel Proust. Thank God for that! And given enough time I can read anything by anybody and learn something from it. I read a lot. And it may not always make me a better writer to read it, but it always has value. It is always worth doing.
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