Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Growing up, award-winning author Tobias Wolff always knew that he wanted to join the military and be a writer one day. He accomplished both, joining the military when he was 18 and publishing his first short story collection, “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” in 1981.“I did have a literary impulse to join the military,” Wolff told the Iowa Independent during a telephone interview. “I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was 16, and I joined the Army when I was 18. I was very 
aware that many of the writers I most admired had drawn on this type of experience, although I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were saying in their work — which was to stay away from it.”
Wolff, who currently teaches with the writing program at Stanford University, will be a guest of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop Thursday and will read from his new collection of short stories, “Our Story Begins: New and Selected Short Stories.” The reading is free and open to the public and will be held at 8 p.m. in Lecture Room 2 of UI Van Allen Hall.
Wolff, who also has worked as an editor and journalist, is known as a master of the short-story form as well as for his memoirs. “This Boy’s Life” describes his turbulent childhood, and the National Book Award nominee “In Pharaoh’s Army” is an account of his tour of duty as an officer in the Vietnam War.
His most recent novel is “Old School,” published in 2003, a book that a Publishers Weekly review described as “a delicate, pointed meditation on the treacherous charms of art.” Critic Keir Graff wrote for Booklist, “His storytelling is economical, his prose is elegant, and his meditations are utterly timeless. Some readers may wish to turn from the last page to the first and begin again.”
Fellow author and Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien said of Wolff’s collection “Back in the World”: “Tobias Wolff is dynamic. In his spare, cool, lucid prose, without gimmicks or artifice, he tells terrific stories. Terrific, I mean, in the classic sense — he isn’t afraid of drama. … The magic of his fiction cannot be explained. It is the ancient art of the master storyteller.”
The late Raymond Carver, a UI alumnus and former faculty member, called Wolff’s collection “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” “The work of a young master
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