Vouchers were the talk of our Zoom town hall

...featuring Iowa Writers' Collaborative columnists Laura Belin and Ed Tibbetts

Jan 17, 2023

Oh my, last Monday’s Zoom call was a doozy. Watch for yourself.

If you’ve not participated in one of our Monday Zoom lunch sessions, you will see when you watch the video above it’s as if you were attending a dinner party with some of the most intelligent, most engaged citizens of Iowa.

Our featured guests were Iowa Writers’ Collaborative columnists Ed Tibbetts and Laura Belin. If you don’t already, subscribe to Tibbett’s and Belin's columns.

In our assembled ‘Hollywood Squares’ Zoom menagerie, you’ll spot several former legislators, activists, business leaders, thought leaders, and influencers. J. Ann Selzer is a regular attendee, which is handy when a subject related to the Iowa Poll comes up (her work is often called the ‘gold standard of polling’). Brice Oakley is also a regular. He’s a former legislator and lobbyist with insights into the legislative process.

We can always count on Ambassador Ken Quinn, Chuck Offenburger, Mary Riche, Artis Reiss, Mary Swander, Diane Prichard, and Laura Belin to make the calls rich. This past Monday, Rekha Basu, Ralph Rosenburg, Bob Rush, Richard Bender, and Norm Brewer were on the call to liven up the discussion.

And - oh my gosh - every one of the 50+ participants was equally interesting, so if your name wasn’t mentioned here, it’s a space limitation only.

Lesson learned

woman walking beside wall with the best gift is you graffiti — You are invited to attend Monday's Zoom Lunch sessions/Photo by Dakota Corbin on Unsplash, thanks to Substack.

Because the topic of what’s going on in the Iowa Legislature is so doggone timely, I opened the call to all subscribers, not just those who are paid. That doubled the number of participants, so I evaluated my intentions in these efforts and concluded that I am more interested in being inclusive in these discussions than in generating revenue for the Okoboji Writers’ Retreat scholarship fund. Thanks to the paid subscribers, we were able to offer scholarships to 20+ attendees last year and are halfway there for OWR III, being held September 17-20, 2023.

This is a gamble, but I’m betting there are plenty of generous souls in our midst who are aligned with the mission and will continue to support emerging writers this way. You can still become a paid subscriber, or if you’d rather make an outright donation, there is a link below to do just that.*

Our Monday Zoom Lunch guest for January 23 is Grant Faulkner. He graduated from Grinnell College and holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.

His work has been published in the New York Times, Poets and Writers, LitHub, Writer’s Digest, The Writer, The Southwest Review, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, Five Points, The Rumpus, Gargoyle, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Puerto del Sol, PANK, Superstition Review, and The Green Mountain Review, among others. His stories have been nominated for the Pushcart prize and included in such collections as W.W. Norton’s New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and Best Small Fictions 2016.

Grant Faulkner has presented at such shindigs as the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Associated Writing Programs Conference, Book Expo America, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the Oakland Book Festival, the Bay Area Book Festival, Poets & Writers Live, the San Francisco Writers Conference, the Commonwealth Club, the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit, Writers Digest West, the Porchlight storytelling series, Litquake, Lit Crawl, the Mendocino Writers Conference, CreativeLive, the Arizona State Library Association’s YA Summit, and the Sierra Writers Conference.

And, on Sunday, September 17, he will join us around the first hot dog campfire roast for the Okoboji Writers’ Retreat, where he will be a featured speaker over the following three days. Lucky us.

Currently, he is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Check it out: NANOWRIMO

If you know of anyone you think would like to hear what Grant Faulkner has to say, please share this post with them.

To enroll in the Okoboji Writers’ Retreat, click this link: OWR III.

And mark your calendar to attend our next Monday Zoom session!

*We no longer require Zoom participants to become paid subscribers to this Potluck column. If you would like to support the Okoboji Writers’ Retreat scholarship fund, click here on this link: Okoboji Scholarship Fund