Featured (secondary row)

Never Make Them Cry

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Steve Semken

The Beautiful Land

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Steve Semken

Lovers of historical fiction will find this new novel The Beautiful Land, The Future State of Iowa, 1835-1838 fascinating and informative. […]

Since 1974, Eulenspiegel has toured in thirty-one states and four countries around the world. All along establishing and maintaining an internationally known puppetry center in West Liberty, Iowa. A look at puppets, arts, culture, and creativity. […]

A Widow’s Guide To Becoming A Handyman

Posted on April 8, 2023 by Steve Semken

Part grief memoir, part immigrant story, and part how-to-guide. A story of premature death and emotional wreckage that uses the narrator’s old house as its foundation. […]

The River Knows

Posted on April 3, 2023 by Steve Semken

Insightful, provocative, and humorous by turns, The River Knows is a thought-provoking discussion of how industrial agriculture, conservative politics, religion, and climate change combine to challenge the legions of citizens looking for hope on the river and in nature. […]

On Common Ground

Posted on March 17, 2023 by Steve Semken

An exciting multidisciplinary, multimodal project and partnership between the arts and sciences. This convergence of writers, naturalists, artists, and various –ologists took place in the fall of 2021 in the northern Loess Hills. […]

Harry and Sue

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Steve Semken

Taxi driver Harry Mason is obsessed with the loss of his girlfriend, who left him for Hollywood and never came back. One rainy night he finds himself inside a boarded-up movie theatre, where he meets a cast of ghosts. […]

Saved By Schindler

Posted on June 19, 2022 by Steve Semken

Celina Karp Biniaz was just eight years old when the Germans invaded her homeland of Poland in 1939. Over the next six years, the child from Krakow endured the Holocaust as the Nazis took away her schooling and civil rights, then herded her and her family into a ghetto. Life grew worse when the ghetto was liquidated, […]

The Ghost Of Craven Snuggs

Posted on June 15, 2022 by Steve Semken

A novel with a serious critique of the destruction caused by modern corporate agriculture and large-scale meat production. In the tradition of greats like Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard. Mystery, CAFOs, and adventure in the Heartland. […]

In From Forever

Posted on May 21, 2022 by Steve Semken

this volume is an investigation into the forms and structure of poetry, attempting to craft with rigor an orderly enquiry into the chaos of the days we travel through (with, sometimes, a sense of wry humor and sometimes a bewildered wonder) […]

The Land Remains

Posted on February 22, 2022 by Steve Semken

Blends personal memoir, a history of Iowa land conservation, an analysis of contemporary issues of soil health, water quality, public lands, and future challenges to tell how land shapes our lives. A family farmer and expert agricultural lawyer delivers a dedicated conservationist’s assessment of the past, present and future of American soil. […]

The Long Way Home

Posted on February 20, 2022 by Steve Semken

In a world of shortcuts, a book that embraces the long way. Here are detours of discovery, a spiritual wayfinding through the wilderness of time and memory. […]

Slippery Steps

Posted on February 19, 2022 by Steve Semken

Slippery Steps isn’t your typical, hell-and-back recovery memoir. I never intended to quit drinking, rarely gave it a thought. I’d spent decades as a successful and productive journalist. I was a loving husband and father. My life worked, and worked well. Until it didn’t. Freedom from drinking has enriched my life in ways I’d never imagined. […]

Corn Poll: A Novel of the Iowa Caucuses

Posted on February 21, 2015 by Steve Semken

Every four years the United States of America’s candidates for President bend over backwards to ingratiate themselves to Iowa’s first-in-the-nation voters. Some big-name contenders uproot friends and family and move to the Hawkeye State in an attempt to win the ultimate electoral prize. Others devote six months of their lives to crisscrossing the state in […]

SCHOOLHOUSE

Posted on February 16, 2015 by Steve Semken