Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World | Art Cullen | $20 | 192p | ISBN 9781948509633
This is the right book at the right time. Read it. Share it. Use it.
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.”
Upcoming media & events:
9/27 Heartland Politics with Robin Johnson, WVIK/NPR
9/29 Zachary Oren Smith/Iowa Starting Line News
9/29 Radio Iowa, Morning Drive
coming soon: NPR/Talk of Iowa with Charity Nebbe
10/1 Jim Acosta Show, substack 3:30cst & youtube
10/11 Iowa City Book Fest, 1 pm, Iowa City, IA
10/17 Farm to Table Talk podcast
10/20 Dragonfly Books, Decorah, IA in conversation with Chris Jones
11/7 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle
11/12 Harkin Center, Des Moines, Iowa with Tom Harkin and Chris Jones.
“Art Cullen is a great journalist–and this is a great account of what the biggest crisis in human history looks like from the most fertile farmland on our planet. Read it, feel it, and get to work.”–Bill McKibben, author Here Comes the Sun
“There’s truly no voice like Art’s in American journalism. From his perch in Storm Lake, Iowa, he has spent decades capturing the soul of rural America with rare honesty, heart, and clarity. This book is both a personal journey through Art’s memories and a mirror for so many who will see their own experiences reflected in his words. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of our country.” – Congressman Ro Khanna
“Art Cullen has seen, and helped shape, different versions of Iowa. In his direct and rousing style, he tells us here why he thinks the present Iowa has come about, and he spurs Iowa and Iowans to do better. As a born and bred Iowan who has covered, analyzed, and commented on daily developments in his home state for decades, no one can compare to Art in his use of acid insight and command of homespun Iowa idioms. He fully delivers on the expectation of the current fashion in political discourse: telling it like it is—no matter who and how much it hurts. Get comfortable when you turn the cover on this one. Whether you agree with Art on every detail or not, he will fire you up. You won’t be able to put the book down anytime soon.”—Ricardo Salvador, Co-founder and board member, HEAL Food Alliance
“The poet laureate of common values and common sense is back to help us make sense of the mess we’re in.”
—Beto O’Rourke, Texas
“In Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest, you get Art Cullen at his wise and witty best as he takes on our incessant, often destructive need to bend–and often break–the land, its people, and cultures for Big Ag to make a buck and ‘feed the world.’ It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s honest, heartfelt, and deeply reported. Cullen is a once-a-generation truth teller, and we’d all be better served listening to this Pulitzer-winning writer and reporter.”—Alan Guebert, Farm and Food File
“Cullen weaves nostalgia, human frailties, and a love of Iowa with unchecked corporate greed and power that has left our ‘beautiful land’ despoiled with contaminated lakes and streams, topsoil washed down the Mississippi River, and hollowed-out rural communities void of schools and healthcare services. He is clear that it doesn’t have to be this way.”
—US Sen. Tom & Ruth Harkin
“Storm Lake has a place on all maps (and my heart) thanks to the dogged determination of Art Cullen. I never know what he is going to say—but I always know that I will come away smarter from any conversation with Art.”
—Stephanie Ruhle, The 11th Hour, MSNBC
“Art Cullen lets you know from the title Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest, that his new book won’t be a simple feel-good read. He’s blunt in his indignation about monumental forces that have derailed his beloved Iowa, and you likely will be too. Yet Cullen’s folksy, impertinent voice may have you cackling out loud even as you cringe. There’s genius in that. You may have lived through and absorbed some of the changes in stages, but Cullen connects the dots that led to the Iowa he sees today: A one-party state owned by Koch Enterprises and Bayer, topping the US in cancer, childhood respiratory disease and binge drinking. A home to 3 million folks and 25 million hogs enduring the sewage output of 124 million people. He describes the ‘Ioway’ that for thousands of years practiced responsible land management, to be replaced by an imperialist ‘Manifest Destiny’ mantra. Family farming fell into the grip of corporate agriculture amid the quest for higher yields and profits. These changes, as he chronicles, brought societal costs. The union-busting that stole decent jobs and wages from rural Iowans led to their replacement by immigrant labor. That, in turn, prompted racism against them. Churches, long the center of rural life, reinforced those sentiments. Iowa Right to Life became ‘one of the most influential outfits in Des Moines.’ The gun lobby flourishes while a once stellar education system is sacrificed through vouchers to private, parochial schools. Still, scapegoating DEI and transgender people helped seal the deal for a Republican trifecta in government. Cullen’s blend of wit, insight and enduring Iove for and belief in his home state should keep you engaged and rooting for a happy ending. Read this book before it’s banned.”—Rekha Basu, nationally syndicated columnist who retired in 2022 from The Des Moines Register. Her column, Rekha Shouts and Whispers, is at basurekha.substack.com.
“In a voice both fierce and tender, Art Cullen captures the soul of rural America in all its contradictions, and crisis. In Dear Marty, We’ve Crapped in Our Nest, the Pulitzer Prize–winning editor of The Storm Lake Times delivers a powerful collection of writing that cuts through political soundbites with moral clarity and dry wit. From Big Ag to clean water, climate change to small-town resilience. Cullen writes with the urgency of someone who knows his community—and country—are at a crossroads. Cullen offer a front-row seat to the respect he holds for the land and people of Iowa—and the frustration at how they’ve treated both. This book is both a chronicle and a call to action from one of America’s most essential journalistic voices.”
—Julie Gammack, Founder of the Iowa Writers’
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.