I still clearly remember the day I met Iowa poet James Hearst and his wife Meryl Hearst for the first time. I remember it in part because I have a
photograph of it. It took place during my freshman year at the University of Northern Iowa (known as the State College of Iowa in those days). I was an
art student, and I had just returned to Iowa from a summer in
California, where I had the fortune to study pottery with a person who had been among the first women students at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. The UNI Department of Art hosted an on-campus event in which non-art members of the faculty were invited to a gathering at the ceramics studio quonset hut, where they painted their designs on greenware pots that had been wheel-thrown by the students. In that surviving photo, I am quietly standing beside music professor Don Wendt and Meryl Hearst. James Hearst is not in the photo, but he was nearby in his wheelchair. …more>>>
