Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World | Art Cullen | $20 | 192p | ISBN 9781948509633 | Coming September, 2025
We have fouled our nest over the past half century in a way that was almost unavoidable, given our history of seeking domination — first over the Indigenous people of the Western World, then over their land. Native people for millennia lived with the land in a vital relationship. Europeans set out to transform that relationship brutally, and this destruction has reached a head. We simply cannot go on like this, washing our soil down the river while the planet bakes, ignoring our own immigration story.
As Art writes, “Fifty years around a small town amid the teeming waves of golden corn, a lot has changed, but corn remains king, just like when we were in school. But the place we knew is gone, that world of family farms and the Saturday livestock auction. We are the poorer for it. This is how it went down, or at least how I put it down, in notes compiled over this strange time from Irving Street just up from the lake in the small town we called home.”
Art Cullen is editor and co-owner with older brother John of the Storm Lake Times Pilot (www.stormlake.com) in rural Northwest Iowa. Art is a Storm Lake native, where he graduated from St. Mary’s High School with his pal Marty Case. Art barely earned a journalism degree from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. He has been a reporter and editor at newspapers in Algona, Ames and Mason City, Iowa, and helped John launch the Storm Lake Times in their hometown in 1990. They also own the Cherokee Chronicle Times, a weekly in an adjacent county.
Art won the Pulitzer Price in 2017 for a series of editorials about agricultural surface water pollution in Iowa. His columns have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian and regional publications. He authored a journalistic memoir, Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper. The Cullen family and their newspaper also were the subjects of a feature-length independent documentary film Storm Lake that aired nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens.
Art and his wife Dolores, a feature writer and photographer at the Times Pilot, have four children, including son Tom, who is the newspaper’s managing editor.