Monica Leo pens Eulenspiegel Puppet memoir

Monica Leo followed celebrated Iowa writer Mary Swander down a rabbit hole, and emerged with the memoir “Hand, Shadow, Rod. The Story of Eulenspiegel Puppet Theatre.”

It’s a look at 50 years of puppetry that has shaped Leo’s life and brought joy to Eulenspiegel audiences of all ages at home and abroad since 1974.

This golden opportunity wasn’t designed to coincide with Leo’s upcoming career milestone. She was looking for a way to fill the gaps in her days during the pandemic.

“We actually kept pretty busy during the pandemic, but I still had more downtime than I usually have,” Leo, 78, said. She lives between Iowa City and West Liberty, where she set up shop in 1995 in a building her late husband, John, renovated. It’s known as Owl Glass Puppetry Center, a loose translation of “eulenspiegel.”

Leo, never one to let her creativity run on idle, discovered Swander, an award-winning writer and former Iowa Poet Laureate now living in rural Kalona, was offering a Zoom class on memoir writing.

One of 12 students who signed up, Leo thought the class “might be fun.”

“I started working on it, and I really got into it,” she said. “I really enjoyed doing it, so I just kept writing.”

The effort took about a year and a half, wrapping up in September 2022.

Rather than writing from a strictly chronological viewpoint, Leo divided the book into sections. She delves a bit into her childhood and why she became a puppeteer, but also devoted sections to the first 20 years of residencies and school programs across Iowa and Wyoming; overseas work and partnerships with puppeteers in Germany, experiencing the evolution from a divided to unified Berlin; how the puppetry center started in West Liberty; and Leo’s work with various partners, including the late Teri Jean Breitbach who joined her in 1975.

And 244 pages later, it’s been published by Steve Semken of Ice Cube Press in North Liberty.

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“I have enough friends and relatives that have published books to know how horrible that process can be, so it never even dawned on me that I wanted to do that,” Leo said. “But I really lucked out. (Semken is) the second person I submitted to, and he's just been a dream to work with.”

Swander was impressed, too, saying on the book’s back cover:

“What a thrill to see Monica Leo’s story Hand, Shadow, Rod between the covers of this memoir! Like one of the characters in her fairy tales, Leo takes the reader on an enchanting world tour of Eulenspiegel Puppet Theatre Company performances. With beautifully written prose and masterfully crafted block prints, Leo is the trickster in this narrative. A highly recognized puppeteer, partner, teacher, and mentor, Leo models not only artistry but entrepreneurship. You will delight in her story, how she founded her troupe and has kept it flourishing for fifty years. A book every aspiring artist should read.”

Aspiring artists are among Leo’s target readers, “because a lot of it is the ins and outs of just trying to survive and make a living as a freelance artist,” she said.

“And, of course, other puppeteers. Puppeteers are nice people, they're really supportive of each other. I have 50 books that have been pre-ordered that I have to sign, and I know that at least half of them — if not more — are from puppeteers around the country.

“And anybody, really, that's interested in the culture of that era, from the mid-70s, up to the present day.”

Plenty of people have remarked that puppetry is a dying art. Leo quickly counters that it’s not.

“Think about how it's come into the mainstream, (with plays) like ‘Avenue Q’ and ‘Warhorse’ and ‘Lion King.’ There's a lot of puppetry out there now,” she said.

“We’ve got some high school kids coming over because there were some parts of (an upcoming play) the drama coach thought should be done with puppets, so they’re coming over to make puppets for that. That would not have happened 15 or 20 years ago.”

Leo can’t imagine her life without puppetry, and has no intention of retiring. Her will states that upon her death, the torch will pass to her current partner, Stephanie Vallez.

In the meantime, she’ll continue pulling the strings for viewers of all ages through her life’s work.

“We have a tendency to think that imagination and fantasy are something for kids — that you outgrow or that you leave behind childish ways,” she said. “I really want kids and adults to engage their fantasy.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com