Mission Creek Festival on Film
Little Engines and me in Iowa City
How are you? What are you doing? What are you reading and listening to? What weird sleeping positions have you found your cat in lately? Can you tell I miss Twitter?
Below, you’ll find photos and notes from another literary excursion with Little Engines, this time to Iowa City for Mission Creek Festival.
You should ask me for a copy of Issue Eight. It’s free to your mailbox, and prettier in person. I’ve also made a print version of my own story, Regarding the Howlers, and I’ll include that in the package, too.
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Best,
Adam
Mission Creek Festival’s got the secret sauce. With one foot in music and the other planted firmly in lit, the off-the-radar festival has punched above its weight for 18 years. It pushes my buttons by combining my two favorite things.
I’ve wanted to go back since I first attended in 2017, when I’d just begun writing and publishing again. I went with copies of a fresh zine I’d made with a new story, my first in a long time. I passed it out to a handful of people I met over the weekend, sheepishly, which felt exactly like stuffing my high school zine into people’s hands at newly-discovered punk shows in Indianapolis in 1991. Awkward. Shoulders tense and held too close to my ears. Chicken shit.
When the festival booked Kevin Morby this year, I decided to drive up for the gig, hit the lit events and readings, and get a table for Little Engines at the Mission Creek book fair.
In 2017, I didn’t grasp the sanctified place Iowa City holds in American writing. It’s possible I didn’t really know what the Writer’s Workshop was five or six years ago. I definitely wasn’t aware that it was the OG, or of its pedigree. I could maybe have come up with: That’s an MFA program, yeah?
I knew Iowa City as a reliable routing point for club tours moving through the midwest. Artists might be coming from Louisville, making one or two stops on the way to Denver. Maybe they’re leaving Minneapolis aiming for Texas, and breaking up the drive. It might be the connective tissue between Chicago and KC.
There are any number of small towns—agents call them tertiaries—to route through on fill dates. For a few years, it’ll be happening in Fayetteville, then things will start to suck there again, and suddenly everyone’s hitting Norman, Oklahoma. We’re always looking for college towns with sturdy appetites for live music. It can come and go in four or five-year cycles of new student bodies, but sometimes a town will begin to rule, and keep on ruling. Andre Perry has made Iowa City a sticky stop in my routings for a long time now.
Beyond Mission Creek Festival (which he helmed until passing the baton to the worthy Brian Johannesen recently), Andre has booked countless shows in various venues in Iowa City; small clubs, the Englert, and he’s now the executive director of Hancher Auditorium and the Office of Performing Arts and Engagement at the University of Iowa. That’s a killer title, isn’t it? It’s a fancy way to say what those who have worked with Andre have always known: He’s committed himself to art, and to Iowa City. Oh, and he’s got a great book out, too.
Here’s our guy. I’ve mostly known Photo #1 Andre, the calm and serious professional, but always good to see him in Photo #2 mode, as well.
I thoroughly enjoyed booth-life at AWP last month, and it was no different at Mission Creek. It puts me back in my old merch-guy zone, which was a safe and comfy place when I was younger and touring with bands. A little station of my own, something to talk about, something to do, to sell.
I wish I had a better photo, or even another bad photo but with me behind the table. If I did, you’d see I was wearing a long-sleeve HAIM shirt. At one point, an older man in a yarmulke and oversized sport coat shuffled over, looked at the shirt and asked, “Are you HAIM?”
I told him that I was not, that it was a band.
“Are you celebrating Passover?” he asked me.
“I”m not,” I said.
He shrugged, scanned the table, and made note of the Peeps I’d used to add color to my display. “Oh I see, different kind of party,” he said, grinning.
“Oh, no, no,” I said, “I’m not celebrating Easter either. These are secular Peeps.” I told him about Little Engines, and that the Howlers story was about religious trauma.
“Well I need that one,” he said, grabbing a copy.
This piece of machinery surely must have followed me up from Nashville. It was the one and only extremely stupid thing I came across in Iowa City.
Erin Rae, one of a few good things from Nashville, was opening for Morby on the mini-tour we routed around the festival. We hung harder in Iowa City than any day in our shared hometown.
All the photos in this post were shot with a Kyocera SlimT 35mm point & shoot. It’s got a button on the back which adds a date-stamp to the negative. I always leave the setting off, but must have accidentally turned it on for this late-night shot from George’s. I never set the correct date, it’s a default from 1990, the year the camera launched. If I didn’t tell you, you might think it’s accurate. No cell phones or other current signifiers in the frame giving it away.
I’ve been thinking about a new protagonist, an architect. I’ve ordered some books for research. I dug this building on the IC campus.
Gabe’s. A rock club.
Caleb, who I first met at Mission Creek in 2017. He’s got a book of poems coming later this year. I’ve read it. It’s a good one.
When Morby played “Beautiful Strangers” Saturday night at the Englert, I wept in the theater thinking about Nashville, a city I mostly hate, which was reeling from the Covenant School shooting days before and boiling in the bullshit politics that showed up just after. The school is walking distance from my house. My son goes to church there with his mom and step-dad. Some friends and colleagues had kids in the building.
I happened to near the school when the shit was going down in real-time. The street was suddenly overrun by a thousand cop cars and ambulances, and they quickly shut Hillsboro Pike down. Eventually, I got out of my car and stood on the side of the road with clumps of panicked parents who had arrived and gathered, glued to their phones, waiting for updates, eventually speed walking en masse to the reunification point a few blocks away as soon as word spread of the address.
If you ever hear that gunshot You may think 'bout what you do but you don't got Say a prayer think of mother I am a rock If you ever hear that sound now If the door gets kicked in, here they come now Think of others be their cover I am what they're not Pray for Paris they cannot scare us Or stop the music You got a sweet voice, child Why don't you use it? And if I die too young or if the gunmen come I'm full of love So release me every piece of me Up above - from "Beautiful Strangers" by Kevin Morby
I saw Andre standing in the center aisle during the tune. I bumped my way past the folks standing in my row to get to him and gave him a tight, extended hug. One of the best hugs I’ve had.
Morby & Me
I'm biased, but isn't that a great post ?
Your photos are great!