College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

No rhyme or reason

Long-time and award-winning poet stepping out as a novelist.
For as long as he can remember, Neal Bowers has been a poet.

The distinguished professor of English has published poems in dozens of journals, including The New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry, and The American Scholar.

His poetry collections have won critical acclaim, including his latest, Out of the South (published in 2002), a volume "rooted in the red clay of middle Tennessee and in the lives of working-class people who exalt their southern heritage."

"It's a collection about growing up in Tennessee in the 1950s and '60s," Bowers said. "I had what I considered to be a happy childhood, but I look back on those times in terms of society itself and see how wrong everything was."

Out of the South has been honored by the Society of Midland Authors with their 2002-03 Poetry Prize. The Society annually honors the best books published by writers living and working in 12 midwestern states.

But in recent years, Bowers has turned away from poetry to a more long-form style of writing.

His first effort, Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist, a non-fiction account of having his poems plagiarized, was internationally acclaimed and has become standard reading in university classrooms where intellectual property is discussed.

"I found I had this weird story to tell," Bowers says of Words for the Taking, "a true story that resembled a novel in some ways. I guess that's why a lot of people who read the book told me I should write a novel."

Although he had never before written even a short story, Bowers decided to take a chance with the longer form.

"I thought if I'm going to fall, I might as well fall from a pretty good height," he said.

The result of that "fall" was his first novel Loose Ends, a book published by Random House in 2001.

Loose Ends is the story of a Midwest poet who returns to his boyhood home in Tennessee to attend his mother's funeral and discovers that he never truly knew her.

"It was a couple of years until the novel was at a place where I could show it to someone," Bowers said. "I was astonished that a publishing house actually bought the book."

With the success and satisfaction of publishing his first novel, Bowers has turned to writing novels almost exclusively. The man who until the millennium devoted his life to poetry now has two novels going simultaneously.

His second novel, As Good as Dead, is a murder mystery set very close to home.

"When you look at classical murder mysteries, they are set in contained societies in a limited area," Bowers says. "It struck me how much that was like the English Department in Ross Hall. We all bump into each other daily, and we make excellent fictional victims and suspects."

The action of As Good as Dead is set in an English Department much like Iowa State's. A group of disaffected English professors form a writing club where they write tales of how they would kill off individuals on campus they don't like.

As the novel progresses, people in the fictional stories actually start dying, and the writing club members themselves are put at risk.

"The professors in the club realize that someone is using the narrative to kill people," Bowers said. "They have to find a way to stop what they inadvertently set in motion."

Like any good novelist, Bowers borrows from his own life to produce the novel's characters and some of its plot elements.

"I do draw liberally from my colleagues and myself," he says. "But, in fairness to everyone else, I kill myself off in this novel."

The third novel, with the working title of No Good Deed, follows a man who thinks of himself as a good guy. Even though things never work out well for him, he always tries to do what he feels is right.

"All of a sudden he's in a terrible jam because he's done the right thing," Bowers said. "He becomes the victim of misperception and desperately needs to make others see him the way he views himself. His life depends on it."

Bowers spent last summer overhauling No Good Deed to the point where it isn't even the same story as his original draft.

"I probably wrote the original version for the wrong reason, slanting it toward a specific audience," he said. "I've learned the only way for me to proceed is to produce something I would be interested in reading. Then, with a little luck, a larger audience will follow."

Like his poetry collections, which are all interrelated in some way, Bowers says his novels also have a connection.

"The thing that ties these three novels together is the question of identity - who a person believes himself to be as opposed to how a person is regarded by others. The fiction of identity is a daily reality for all of us," he said.