Cedar Rapids, IA, USA  
Digital Edition Digital Edition
Log in Log In My Account My Account
Subscribe Today
The Gazette The Gazette
The Gazette The Gazette
  • COVID-19
  • News
  • Sports
  • Opinion
  • Food and Drink
  • Business
Digital Edition Digital Edition
Log in Log In My Account My Account
Subscribe
CLOSE
The Gazette
Subscribe
My Account
  • News
    • All News
    • Election 2020
    • Coronavirus
    • Business News
    • Community
    • Crime and Courts
    • Education
    • Government
    • Health
    • Nation and World
    • Time Machine
    • Search Archive

    Our Journalists

    • Rod Boshart
    • Lee Hermiston
    • Erin Jordan
    • James Q. Lynch
    • Trish Mehaffey
    • Vanessa Miller
    • Kat Russell
    • Grace King
    • John Steppe
    • Gage Miskimen
    • Marissa Payne
  • Sports
    • All Sports
    • Iowa Hawkeyes
    • Hawkeye Football
    • Hawkeye Basketball
    • Prep Sports
    • Prep Volleyball
    • Prep Football
    • Prep Basketball
    • Prep Wrestling
    • Iowa State Cyclones
    • UNI Panthers
    • Small College Sports
    • Minor League Sports
    • Outdoors

    Sports Desk

    • Mike Hlas
    • Jeff Johnson
    • Jeff Linder
    • J.R. Ogden
    • K.J. Pilcher
    • Leah Vann
  • Opinion
    • All Opinion
    • Editorial Mission
    • Guest Columnists
    • Letters to the Editor
    • Political Cartoons
    • Staff Columnists
    • Staff Editorials
    • Submit a Letter or Column

    Our Columnists

    • Todd Dorman
    • Adam Sullivan
  • Food and Drink
    • All Food and Drink
    • Chew on This
    • Recipes
    • Restaurants
  • Business
    • All Business
    • Agriculture
    • Business Notes
    • Companies
    • Personal Finance
    • Economy
    • Employment
    • Energy
    • Manufacturing
    • Openings & Closures
    • Real Estate
    • Retail
    • Small Business
    • Transportation

    Our Journalists

    • Rod Boshart
    • Erin Jordan
    • John Steppe
  • Obituaries
    • All Obituaries
    • In Memory Of
    • Submit an Obituary
  • Podcasts
    • All Podcasts
    • Daily News Podcast
    • Fact Checker
    • Hlastradamus Odds
    • Iowa Prep Sports
    • On Iowa
    • On Iowa Politics
    • On UNI
    • Pinning Combination
  • Entertainment
    • All Entertainment
    • Art
    • Books
    • Museums & Galleries
    • Music
    • Theater
    • Things To Do
  • Living
    • All Living
    • Health & Wellness
    • Home & Garden
    • Milestones
    • People & Places
    • Pets & Animals
    • Recreation
    • Religion & Belief
    • Travel

    Our Writers

    • Diana Nollen
    • Elijah Decious
  • Kids Gazette
    • See All
    • Kids Cooking Series
    • Kids Galleries
    • Printables
    • Activities
    • Articles
    • Submissions
    • Resources
  • Photos
    • All Photos and Videos
    • The Iowa Photo
    • Photo Store

    Our Photojournalists

    • Andy Abeyta
    • Liz Martin
    • Rebecca Miller
    • Jim Slosiarek
    • Gazette Visuals
  • Milestones
    • All Milestones
    • Anniversaries
    • Days To Remember
    • Engagements
    • Holidays
    • In Remembrance
    • New Arrivals
    • Thank Yous
    • Submit a Milestone
  • Data
    • Arrests
    • Building Permits
    • Interactive Maps & Charts
    • Salaries
  • Gazette Sites
    • Classifieds
    • Corridor Careers
    • Garage Sales
    • Gazette Gives Back
    • Gazette Rewards
    • Gazette Store
    • Green Gazette
    • HER
    • Iowa Wedding Experience
    • Holiday Light Finder
    • Hoopla
    • Iowa Ideas
    • Photo Store
  • Special Events
  • Special Sections
  • Other
    • About The Gazette
    • Archives
    • Article Removal
    • Business Directory
    • CR Arrest Database
    • Mobile Apps
    • Customer Care
    • Order Back Issues
    • Privacy Policies
    • Puzzle Answers
    • Sponsorship Requests
    • Submit a Letter
    • Weather
  • Digital Edition
Daily News PodcastDaily News Podcast
Daily NewslettersDaily Newsletters
Log out

FOLLOW US

The Gazette
  • News
  • Sports
  • Opinion
  • Food and Drink
  • Business
  • Obituaries
  • Podcasts
  • Entertainment
  • Living
  • Kids Gazette
  • Photos
  • Milestones
  • Data
  • Gazette Sites
  • Special Events
  • Special Sections
  • Other
  • Digital Edition
  • All News
  • Election 2020
  • Coronavirus
  • Business News
  • Community
  • Crime and Courts
  • Education
  • Government
  • Health
  • Nation and World
  • Time Machine
  • Search Archive

Our Journalists

  • Rod Boshart
  • Lee Hermiston
  • Erin Jordan
  • James Q. Lynch
  • Trish Mehaffey
  • Vanessa Miller
  • Kat Russell
  • Grace King
  • John Steppe
  • Gage Miskimen
  • Marissa Payne
  • All Sports
  • Iowa Hawkeyes
  • Hawkeye Football
  • Hawkeye Basketball
  • Prep Sports
  • Prep Volleyball
  • Prep Football
  • Prep Basketball
  • Prep Wrestling
  • Iowa State Cyclones
  • UNI Panthers
  • Small College Sports
  • Minor League Sports
  • Outdoors

Sports Desk

  • Mike Hlas
  • Jeff Johnson
  • Jeff Linder
  • J.R. Ogden
  • K.J. Pilcher
  • Leah Vann
  • All Opinion
  • Editorial Mission
  • Guest Columnists
  • Letters to the Editor
  • Political Cartoons
  • Staff Columnists
  • Staff Editorials
  • Submit a Letter or Column

Our Columnists

  • Todd Dorman
  • Adam Sullivan
  • All Food and Drink
  • Chew on This
  • Recipes
  • Restaurants
  • All Business
  • Agriculture
  • Business Notes
  • Companies
  • Personal Finance
  • Economy
  • Employment
  • Energy
  • Manufacturing
  • Openings & Closures
  • Real Estate
  • Retail
  • Small Business
  • Transportation

Our Journalists

  • Rod Boshart
  • Erin Jordan
  • John Steppe
  • All Obituaries
  • In Memory Of
  • Submit an Obituary
  • All Podcasts
  • Daily News Podcast
  • Fact Checker
  • Hlastradamus Odds
  • Iowa Prep Sports
  • On Iowa
  • On Iowa Politics
  • On UNI
  • Pinning Combination
  • All Entertainment
  • Art
  • Books
  • Museums & Galleries
  • Music
  • Theater
  • Things To Do
  • All Living
  • Health & Wellness
  • Home & Garden
  • Milestones
  • People & Places
  • Pets & Animals
  • Recreation
  • Religion & Belief
  • Travel

Our Writers

  • Diana Nollen
  • Elijah Decious
  • See All
  • Kids Cooking Series
  • Kids Galleries
  • Printables
  • Activities
  • Articles
  • Submissions
  • Resources
  • All Photos and Videos
  • The Iowa Photo
  • Photo Store

Our Photojournalists

  • Andy Abeyta
  • Liz Martin
  • Rebecca Miller
  • Jim Slosiarek
  • Gazette Visuals
  • All Milestones
  • Anniversaries
  • Days To Remember
  • Engagements
  • Holidays
  • In Remembrance
  • New Arrivals
  • Thank Yous
  • Submit a Milestone
  • Arrests
  • Building Permits
  • Interactive Maps & Charts
  • Salaries
  • Classifieds
  • Corridor Careers
  • Garage Sales
  • Gazette Gives Back
  • Gazette Rewards
  • Gazette Store
  • Green Gazette
  • HER
  • Iowa Wedding Experience
  • Holiday Light Finder
  • Hoopla
  • Iowa Ideas
  • Photo Store
  • About The Gazette
  • Archives
  • Article Removal
  • Business Directory
  • CR Arrest Database
  • Mobile Apps
  • Customer Care
  • Order Back Issues
  • Privacy Policies
  • Puzzle Answers
  • Sponsorship Requests
  • Submit a Letter
  • Weather
Daily News PodcastDaily News Podcast Daily NewslettersDaily Newsletters
LOG OUT

FOLLOW US

More Stories

Brucemore celebrates 40 years of being open to the public

IMU COVID vaccine clinic coming

Meet the Iowan behind the Vaccine Hunter website

Wellington Heights home gutted in 2017 fire finally coming down

26-year-old man killed in shooting in NE Cedar Rapids

Peggy Whitson to be keynote speaker for Iowa Ideas 2021

Here’s how to get rid of your derecho tree debris

Livestream: Funeral for Iowa state trooper Jim Smith

Home / Arts & Entertainment / Books

Author Profile: D. Wystan Owen focuses on small English coastal town, relationships in short story collection

By Rob Cline, correspondent Sep. 22, 2018 4:06 pm Updated: Sep. 22, 2018 4:06 pm
Author Profile: D. Wystan Owen focuses on small English coastal town, relationships in short story collection

D. Wystan Owen didn't know he was composing a collection of linked short stories when he first wrote many of the pieces that make up his debut collection, 'Other People's Love Affairs.”

'During the drafting period of the stories, I hadn't really given a lot of thought for a long time to the fact that they might be linked even by place,” he said. 'There was a long period when I was writing these disparate short stories, and at some point I realized that many of them were set in this little coastal community that seemed to be the same coastal community. And at that point I think I started exploring that to see if they might coalesce around that place.”

That place is Glass, a small town on the English coast. Owen, whose father is British and whose mother is American, grew up in United States, but brings a kind of hybrid English to his writing.

'I grew up in a household where we spoke a kind of English that was not British English, but not quite American English. I didn't realize that, of course, as a child,” he said.

In fact, it wasn't until he was in a graduate program in California - where he studies before attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop - that he realized his speech patterns were subtly different from many of his peers.

'One of my classmates gave me a piece of advice that seemed cryptic to me at the time. She said, ‘David, you need write the way you speak.' And I didn't really know what she meant because I thought I just spoke like everyone else... Reflecting about that I began to recognize the ways that certain syntax and certain emphases or avoidances or the cadences of speech were slightly strained in my household. Strained might be a strong word... but something almost uncanny, like one degree, one click of the dial, was sort of off in what I would hear at home and what I would hear out in the world.”

He found he could make good use of this on the page.

'For me, that resonated with other types of displacement or disconnections that occur between people when they tried to communicate,” he said. 'It made a linguistic problem out of what can be an emotional type of isolation. That felt important to the book on some level.”

In much the same way he wasn't cognizant of the links between his stories in the early going, he also didn't have a clear sense of where they were set.

'I didn't really give a lot of thought as to whether they were set in the UK or in the United States. They seemed to me to be set in the world of the imagination. These are the kinds of things that, when finishing the book, became important to pin down, but while you're drafting a book it can be important or not. There was a period when it didn't feel as important, and it became important when I started to recognized that this landscape was a linguistic landscape as much as a physical terrain.”

The stories in 'Other People's Love Affairs” are linked loosely, but also purposefully.

'Even though the characters don't really reappear as significant players in subsequent stories in the collection - you may catch a glimpse of someone or someone may be referred to obliquely, but they don't act particularly powerfully except in the stories where they're central - I felt that, in and of itself, did a little bit of work,” Owen said. 'The fact that we have this community where people know each other but they also are isolated from one another by virtue of appearing in these separate stories and only catching each other in glimpses, that felt somehow important to the project, as well.”

Isolation and loneliness, Owen acknowledged, are prominent themes in the stories.

'It is not the thesis of this book that people are unable to connect with one another. That is not what I think,” he said. 'But I do think that the effort to make connections, to expose oneself to others, is one that's really fraught and feels like it demands a tremendous amount of courage to me. And I don't feel like I see the summoning of that courage depicted in fiction as much as I think it is relevant in life. I wanted this book, not to be about the impossibility of human connection, but about the difficulty and the effort that is required and the courage that has to be summoned.”

He describes the simultaneous need for and fear of connection as 'friction.”

'I wanted the kind of friction that underlies that to be present in the book. And that happens on a plot level but also linguistically,” he said.

There may be friction in the collection, but he didn't encounter anything of the kind in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Owen had 'a pretty unambiguously wonderful time at the Workshop.” He fell in love with Iowa City and was impressed and inspired not just by Workshop faculty, but by his peers, as well. Those peers, including Garth Greenwell with whom Owen will be in conversation at Prairie Lights, didn't evince the stereotypical 'cultivated jadedness” often associated with workshops.

'One thing I had not experienced that was almost universally the case at Iowa was being in a workshop with people who just loved books as deeply as my classmates did. They read really rigorously and didn't let you get away with lazy writing, but they were also really excited about the work... I found a much more open-hearted readership there, and that taught me a lot about writing and reading.

His was a diverse class, with writers from Zimbabwe, South Sudan, India, elsewhere, but in this diversity was also a unity of purpose and passion.

'It didn't feel like I'd gone to a place where people were putting their own books at the center of their lives,” Owen said. 'It felt like a place where books and literature in general were at the center of life. And that was just so important for me.”

Book Reading

' What: David Wystan Owen will discusss his book, 'Other People's Love Affairs,” in conversation with Garth Greenwell

' When: 7 p.m. Monday

' Where: Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City

' Cost: Free

Trending

  • Drake Relays 2021 form chart, after Thursday’s qualification deadline

    Jeff Linder

  • Suspect in Iowa trooper Jim Smith’s fatal shooting had run…

    Ap

  • University of Iowa bookstore changes strip alternative book vendors from…

    Vanessa Miller

  • Brucemore marks 40-year milestone with celebration of the arts

    Diana Nollen

  • Tyrone Tracy Jr. next in line of Kelton Copeland’s vision…

    Leah Vann

Give us feedback

We work hard to provide fair, accurate coverage because we value your trust. If you find an error or omission in our reporting, please tell us here.

Submit a story idea

Do you have a story idea that we should look into? Please tell us here.

Related Stories

Book explores rarely told African American history rooted in Grinnell

Book explores rarely told African American history rooted in Grinnell

Alison Gowans Art Feb. 26, 2020 5:34 pm

UI alum Garth Greenwell explores the mysteries of love and…

UI alum Garth Greenwell explores the mysteries of love and…

Ron Charles, Washington Post Books Jan. 18, 2020 2:17 pm

Meet the UI Writers’ Workshop grad whose novel is about…

Meet the UI Writers’ Workshop grad whose novel is about…

By Brandon T. Harden, Philadelphia Inquirer Books Jan. 18, 2020 12:29 pm

Books

Who should translate Amanda Gorman’s work?

Who should translate Amanda Gorman’s work?

By Sindya Bhanoo, Washington Post

Books Apr. 2, 2021 6:54 pm

Beverly Cleary, beloved author who chronicled schoolyard scrapes and feisty…

Beverly Cleary, beloved author who chronicled schoolyard scrapes and feisty…

Harrison Smith and Becky Krystal, the Washington Post

Books Mar. 29, 2021 12:29 pm

Iowa City author Erik Therme slows the pace in his…

Iowa City author Erik Therme slows the pace in his…

By Rob Cline, correspondent

Books Mar. 19, 2021 7:11 pm

Browsing returns to Iowa City Public Library next week

Browsing returns to Iowa City Public Library next week

Lee Hermiston

Government & Politics Mar. 19, 2021 9:56 am

Arts & Entertainment

Brucemore celebrates 40 years of being open to the public

Brucemore celebrates 40 years of being open to the public

Diana Nollen

Living Apr. 16, 2021 10:33 am

Donors help replace Orchestra Iowa music ruined in derecho

Donors help replace Orchestra Iowa music ruined in derecho

Diana Nollen

Music Apr. 9, 2021 1:27 pm

Iowa posts sports betting record of $161.44M in March

Iowa posts sports betting record of $161.44M in March

Rod Boshart

Government & Politics Apr. 9, 2021 1:31 pm

Mark and Leslie Nolte creating community arts center in former…

Mark and Leslie Nolte creating community arts center in former…

Diana Nollen

Community Apr. 4, 2021 12:09 pm

News

NewBoCo to offer zero-interest loans to minority-owned businesses

NewBoCo to offer zero-interest loans to minority-owned businesses

John Steppe

Small Business News 31m ago

IMU COVID vaccine clinic coming

IMU COVID vaccine clinic coming

Vanessa Miller

Higher Ed 47m ago

Cedar Rapids man sentenced to 20 years for meth distribution

Cedar Rapids man sentenced to 20 years for meth distribution

Trish Mehaffey

Crime and Courts 2h ago

UI bookstore changes strip alternative book vendors from website

UI bookstore changes strip alternative book vendors from website

Vanessa Miller

Higher Ed Apr. 16, 2021 10:07 am

Sports

Keeping fit during quarantine is important

Keeping fit during quarantine is important

By Max Berry-Stoelzle

Iowa Prep Sports 2h ago

State-qualifying track and field assignments are released

State-qualifying track and field assignments are released

Jeff Linder

High School Track and Field Apr. 16, 2021 10:34 am

Iowa’s magical soccer season continuing

Iowa’s magical soccer season continuing

Iowa Hawkeyes 4h ago

Drake Relays 2021 form chart, after Thursday’s qualification deadline

Drake Relays 2021 form chart, after Thursday’s qualification deadline

Jeff Linder

High School Track and Field Apr. 16, 2021 8:07 am

FOLLOW US

The Gazette is Iowa’s independent, employee-owned source for local, state, and national news coverage.

© 2021 The Gazette

All Rights Reserved.

  • Advertise with us
  • Privacy
  • Web Accessibility

Contact Us

  • 116 3rd St SE
    Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
  • customercare@thegazette.com
  • (319) 398-8333
  • Live Chat

Links

  • Puzzle Answers
  • CR Arrest Database
  • Article Removal Request
  • Gazette Archives
  • Green Gazette
  • Corridor Careers Jobs
  • Work at The Gazette
  • Customer Care

© 2021 The Gazette

All Rights Reserved.

  • Advertise with us
  • Privacy
  • Web Accessibility
Folience A Folience Company