Experiencing the Eastern Iowa Floods of '08

In June of 2008, a small group of students was registered for the general elective course American Literature 1865 to the Present at Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids, IA. As the instructor, I decided to subtitle the course "Defining American Character," and one of my goals was to have the students think about the way literature has been used throughout our nation's history to chronicle and reflect upon cultural movements and historical events. Little did I know that mid-way through this course our community would be placed into one of the most challenging chapters of its own history - the catastrophic flooding of the Cedar, Iowa, and Mississippi Rivers. During the week of June 16-21, Mount Mercy cancelled classes and opened the campus to military and law enforcement personnel. With one week taken away from this five week course, I struggled as I tried to re-imagine the syllabus. Not only had we lost time, but I knew that these students, like everyone in the affected Eastern Iowan communities, would be facing loss, grief, and seemingly insurmountable task of clean-up and rebuilding. Indeed, this small group of people included those who volunteered in sandbagging and clean-up efforts, those who found ways to help family members and friends who lost everything in the floods, EMS responders & hospital workers, and those who work long shifts at the college switchboard to help facilitate the housing of emergency responders. With this knowledge, I chose to scrap most of the original syllabus. I decided to, as the proverb says, "put my money where my mouth is" and encourage these students to use literature and the arts as a way of reflecting upon these devastating floods.

We read a selection of poems about flooding, natural catastrophe, and grief as a way of examining the various emotional responses to loss and the impetus for storytelling that such disasters create. We also read an article Jerry W. Ward, Jr. published in the African American Review titled "Katrina: A Matrix of Stories." Ward, a scholar displaced by Katrina, argues that the stories that emerged out of New Orleans in the days surrounding August 29, 2005 were the stories of "bodies and psyches in pain" and that, in time, these stories would become more polished and also more suspect. Ward encourages his audience to hold onto the raw narratives. He says, "These ur-stories, I admit, may not be breathtakingly 'literary.' They are merely real. They evidence how human beings always use languages to depict stiuatedness and resilience. From sympathetic treatment of such materials we should forge our literary and cultural histories." Inspired by Ward, I altered the course's final assignment, originally a presentation on a quintessential, fictional American character, to a presentation on the American character or characters the students saw emerging around them.

Students were asked to create a response to the Eastern Iowa floods. The nature of their response was left open to their creativity and did not need to be strictly "literary." Many of these students chose to incorporate or work strictly with images (their own and those available through media sources) and audio. Many created PowerPoint presentations, which I have converted to JPEG files and posted for you. If you want to magnify any of these images (Chelsea Toll's newspaper in particular), all you need to do is click on them to receive a larger image. In addition to their responses, students were to write 1-2 page essays about the process of creating these responses - what inspired them, why they made choices they did, what they found difficult or useful in creating the response. I have included excerpts from these essays in the students' blog entries to give you a sense of their creative processes.

Our hope is that with this blog we have created an archive of raw narratives about the floods of '08. For those of you who only heard about these events through national media outlets, we hope that these narratives will provide you with a window into the chaos, devastation, community, and hope that we have experienced in the past three weeks. For those of you who have, like us, witnessed these things first hand, we hope that these entries will provide a way for us to reflect upon our common experiences and emotions.

Finally, one of the ideas we discussed in class was cathartic experience of story sharing - how, inevitably, one story will trigger another one as we come together to alleviate our pain and look for hope in these difficult times. If our responses trigger such stories in you, please feel free to share them with us so that we might add them to our archive. You can contact me at a_pleiss.whenfloodinghappens@blogger.com.

Ann Pleiss Morris
Adjunct Instructor, Mount Mercy College