“Tell It Cool: On Writing with Restraint” | New Ohio Review (2020)

by marquart@iastate.edu | Sep 23, 2021 | Recent Publications

For years, I’ve encouraged students to “tell it cool” when narrating a tale that is harrowing or emotional. A cool narrator can be a buoy in rough waters. I’ve always thought this advice came from Hemingway, but at this moment as I search my bookshelves for the place...

“On the Ephemerality of Things: Thoughts on the Demise of a Small Literary Press” | High Plains Reader (2020)

by marquart@iastate.edu | Sep 23, 2021 | Recent Publications

A few years ago, I was giving a talk at the Fargo Public Library about researching and writing my book, The Horizontal World, which is a memoir about growing up a rebellious farmer’s daughter on a North Dakota wheat farm. In the 1970s, I was a college student at...

“Come November” Dear America Anthology (2020)

by marquart@iastate.edu | Sep 22, 2021 | Recent Publications

come cold eye corrective, come pendulum take wrecking ball to venerable walls   “Come November.”  Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, edited by Simmons Buntin, Elizabeth Dodd, and Derek Sheffield, Trinity University Press, 2020, pp....

“Some Things About That Day” | Best of Brevity Anthology (2020)

by marquart@iastate.edu | Sep 22, 2021 | Recent Publications

The placards I walked through. The wet raincoat on a hook. The questionnaire on a clipboard placed before me. “Some Things About that Day.” Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction, edited by Dinty Moore and Zoë Bossiere. Rose Metal Press,...

“The Unhappy Hour” | Ascent Magazine (2019)

by marquart@iastate.edu | Sep 23, 2021 | Recent Publications

We charm the waitress in her colorful sombrero at Paradiso Mexican Restaurant when our party of seven arrives. Three tables pushed together against a long booth, the scrape of metal on ceramic tile. It’s $2 margarita pitchers this afternoon, and all the chips and...