Publications

Articles

• My autistic son vanishes (again), Salon: January 25, 2011

• Attraction: Not just for the birds, Christian Science Monitor: April 1, 2010

• For the Boy Who Makes Waves, New York Times: October 9, 2009

• Filters, Iowa Review: Fall 2009

• Sandbagged, New York Times: June 21, 2008

• Iowa Writes, Iowa Review: July 18, 2005

 

Publication date: March 2012

By the Iowa Sea

A Memoir of Disaster and Love

by Joe Blair

Excerpt:
IT BEGINS WITH RAIN.
An innocent enough thing. Rain and rain and rain. Day after day of it. Through February and March and April and May. Forcing us to seek out those shelters that will soon, in some cases, be transformed into pontoon boats. While the rain beats down on the roofs of Iowa City and Cedar Rapids and Marengo and Oxford Junction like bouncing hammers, the unstoppable thing is happening. The rivers rise up out of their banks, lifting our neat little split-entry lives from their foundations, tearing away electrical hookups and gas hookups and phone lines, bringing us to a place where there are no riverbanks and no street names and nothing else that resembles a city. The rivers will become oceans. And Deb and I will become not lost in the oceans but a part of them: suddenly vast. Subordinate to none. Scooping and hungry.