UNDER DEVELOPMENT—
STRANDED IN STONE CITY, a new musical
Book by Elaine Mattingly, music by John Mattingly, with Elaine Mattingly
It's 1973 and the battle of the sexes is is in full swing, homosexuality is no longer an offical mental health disorder, the troops are home from Viet Nam and the village of Stone City, Iowa is preparing for the first-ever American Gothic Festival and the arrival of local celebrity Nan Wood Graham, the model for the sour-faced daughter in her brother's famous painting. Siblings Anna, Vince and David Mannville are at the center of it all as complications arrive, including a trainful of stranded passengers during an unexpected April snowstorm. How will residents of tiny Stone City handle the onslaught of stranded strangers? Will the show go on? What havoc will all that snow wreak? Find out in this new musical chockfull of references to the epic year that was 1973.
COMING UP—
2026 Grant Wood Country Forum, in partnership with the Grant Wood Art Colony on the campus of the University of Iowa. Details Coming Soon for January 2026 kickoff session to the 9-week weekly online Zoom series for anyone interested in the art, life, times and influence of Iowa's iconic artist Grant Wood.
PAST EVENTS:
January 7 - February 11, 2025 Grant Wood Country Forum - See graphic at left (or on the Home or Grant Wood Country pages of this site) for session details. Following, is the publication of the next edition of the companion print project, The Grant Wood Country Chronicle.
Saturday, February 17, 2024 • Dinner by Moonlight
Dinner by Moonlight is a dinner entertainment package which includes a variety show, charcuterie and dessert. Enjoy carefully curated and created songs, sketches, music, visuals, food and drink at The Thunderdome in Newton. Ticket information coming soon! See poster below, and tell your friends. This will be an evening to remember!
August 21 - October 2, 2021: Octagon Center for the Arts in Ames presents, Image & Text: Visual Art and Creative Writing in Partnership. Elaine's poem Consumed, in partnership with artwork by Marilyn Terlouw, is selected for inclusion in this upcoming exhibit. Consumed will also be included in Elaine's upcoming recording project, Limestone Elixir, coming soon.
Wednesday, April 28, 7-9 p.m., 4/28/21— IPA LIVE! presents a special extended reading session for National Poetry Month. A variety of Iowa Poetry Society readers, including yourself truly, offered poems, especially related to the subgenre ars poetica, including Please Say When (in response to Grant Wood's painting Sultry Night) and Singing (a golden shovel poem based on a line of poetry by Emily Dickinson), If Poems Were Birds and She Flies.
December 1, 2020 through February 2, 2021, 7:00 p.m. - Grant Wood Country Writer's Forum, 10-Part Weekly Series, timed to
Saturday, October 24, 2020, 10:00 a.m. - Unlocking Your Inner Poet Grant-Wood-Country Style, A Grant Wood Through Local Eyes Presentation, virtual event series, each CST, Sept. 26 through October 24, 2020. Held in conjunction with Anamosa Public Library. Session presenters include myself as well as Dorothy Bunting Montgomery (with her historical novel Stone Fruit), Barbara Feller (with her new Grant Wood book, The Creation of an Artist: Grant Wood's Boyhood Story), and historian Paul Juhl, author of Grant Wood: Abandoned Plans and Grant Wood's Clear Lake Summer. Facebook invitations ready through Anamosa Library's Facebook page or by checking their website, www.anamosalibrary.org.
• POETRY IN THE PARK, downtown Grinnell, hosted and sponsored by Solera Wine Bar, Reading and Signing event with music. Release of Grant Wood Country Loose Leaf Poems. Select musical accompaniments by composer/pianist John Mattingly.
• POETRY ON THE LAWN, with Newton Public Library, Grant Wood Country Loose Leaf Poems release event. Select musical accompaniments by composer/pianist John Mattingly.
• POETRY ON THE PLAZA, with Gezellig Brewing Company, followed by Bob Dorr & the Limestoners. A Grant Wood Country Loose Leaf Poems release event. Select musical accompaniments by composer/pianist John Mattingly.
News—
NOW OPEN: Some American Gothic Girls poem included in Iowa's Telepoem Booth project (See this site's Poems page to listen).
I am pleased to report that this audio poem, Some American Gothic Girls is included in the Telebooth Poem Iowa project. This is a multi-state project designed to engage the public with poets and their poems. Enter a Telepoem booth, peruse the poetry directory, and dial up a poem. Some of the poems will have music under, others may be poet's voice only. I produced this selection with a power ballad feel for the music under to correspond to my take on having grown up in the hills upon which Grant Wood painted many of his now-iconic paintings.
Poetry Collection—
Grant Wood Country Poems: Loose Leaf Edition
Relying on my personal experiences as a Grant Wood Country native daughter, with two generations before me, and two behind me, I have worked to craft authentic poems that resonate to the nature of the people and places that are embedded in my very DNA. With a wide variety of poetic approaches, I have written these poems to appeal to poetry enthusiasts as well as the poetry-shy. The collection captures the allure, as well as the all-too-human responses to lives lived, across generations, in Grant Wood Country (east central Iowa, encompassing Anamosa, Stone City, Cedar Rapids and the landscapes of Linn and Jones counties). This collection, decades in the making, is offered in a loose leaf format. The format is intended to entice readers to pull out individual poems from the folio for their own enjoyment, for sharing with friends, as gifts, and for starting conversations about the special people and places of Grant Wood Country. Perhaps some will be inspired to post some on the family fridge or scatter them on coffee tables. Perhaps some will nod in recognition and others discover something they didn't realize about the character of the people and places of this most special of places. Scholars far and wide have sought to demystify the person and iconic artworks of Grant Wood. Rest assured; his influence is alive and well.