I'm Charity Nebbe.

And this is Greetings from Iowa, telling stories is one of the most powerful means that we have to influence, teach and inspire.

It helps us forge connections among people and ideas.

Coming up on this episode will meet a New York Times bestselling author who lives in northwest Iowa.

And I'll talk with Caleb Rainey, an inspirational poet and performer Join me as we explore the incredible stories of our state.

Next on Greetings from Iowa.

Funding for Greetings from Iowa is provided by: With our Iowa roots and Midwestern values Farmers Mutual Hail is committed to offering innovative farm insurance for America's farmers, just as we have for six generations.

Farmers Mutual Hail America's crop insurance company.

The Pella Roll Screen Foundation is a proud supporter of Iowa PBS.

Pella Windows and Doors strives to better our communities and build a better tomorrow.

[music] Iowa has over 800 miles of interstate highways, over 3800 miles of U.S. highways, over 5100 miles of state highways, and over 65,000 miles of gravel roads.

And the stories of how these roads came to be is sometimes equally as impressive.

.

Just off of i-80, between Council Bluffs and Des Moines, sits a 26 mile stretch of road with these.

White painted telephone poles.

Hundreds of them connect five communites between Adair and Dexter.

While these might look like a novel roadside attraction, it's actually an historically significant part of Iowa's highway system.

And it was once part of the road that connected America from coast to coast.

At the turn of the twentieth century Iowa's road system was a mess.

The majority of raods were no more than dirt paths.

And very few were paved.

Attempting to cross the state during inclament weather, might mean being stranded in mud or snow sometimes for days.

The roads were so bad, Iowa was once called the gumbo state, referring to the thick, dark soil, which for agriculture is great but for road material... is pretty poor.

As automobiles became more and more popular throughout the country, and the need for intrastate travel increased, Governor B.F. Carroll assembled delegates from all over the state, for the "Good Roads Convention" in Des Moines.

Delegates decided that a River to River road from Davenport to Council Bluffs would be the solution to Iowa's road woes.

Towns fought fiercely during the early days of road development.

Where the roads went, money would follow.

Many Iowa towns began to build roads at an incredible pace at this time.

After the Good Roads Convention, the original White Pole Road was designated, and followed along a rail road route from Des Moines to Council Bluffs.

Poles along this route were painted white.

This helped motorists know that they were still on the correct route.

Kind of like an early form of GPS.

The communities that were a part of this Great White Way, as it was then called, promised motorists a straighter, leveler, and shorter route across the state, with a town every five to six miles along the way.

The Great White Way Association plotted their Davenport to Council Bluffs route on country maps, and submitted their registration with a five dollar fee.

The commision then awarded a certificate to the route on July 1914.

Making it the first certified route in Iowa.

After various mergers with other roads, and name changes, sections of the Great White Way became part of US Highway 6.

Which at one point was the longest, continuous East to West route in the United States.

Stretching from Cape Cod, MA to Long Beach, CA.

But by the mid 1960s, something changed.

The act is the Interstate Highway System A forty-one thousand mile network of our most important roads.

After the passage of the federal aid highway act, the new Interstate highway system connected the country in a new way.

By 1965, Interstate-80 saw completion.

This new four lane route would fundamentally change the way Americans traveled.

And the Great White Way, like so many highways in the country, diminished in popularity.

In 2002, this old highway was renamed to White Pole Road as a tribute to the original Great White Way.

and poles along this 26 mile stretch, have once again been painted white.

This highway is a small piece of Iowa transportation history.

And really is a microcosm of the tenacity that Iowa towns had during the automobile boom of the 20th century.

If there's ever a time when you're driving from Des Moines to Council Bluffs It might be worth it to pull off one of the exits to experience this small stretch of road and get a sense of what it was like to drive the Great White Way.

My name is Nicole Baart and I'm a novelist.

♪♪ Nicole Baart: I have wanted to be a writer ever since I was a little girl.

I was born with a birth defect and ended up in the hospital a lot when I was young, I had lots of surgeries, and it was just really traumatic.

And truly the only thing that got me through is my parents would pick up a big bag of books from the library and I would sit on my dad's lap or my mom, whoever was with me and they would just kind of tent a blanket around me and read and it was escape and comfort and just a way to deal with what was happening.

So I learned really early on that books could take me to a different place.

And it didn't take me very long to realize that I wanted to write them too.

♪♪ So, welcome to Beaverdale Books.

Thank you, Jan.

Thank you, Alice, for hosting.

Tonight I am super pleased to be introducing best-selling author Nicole Baart and her 10th, yes I said 10th, novel, Everything We Didn't Say, a family drama that follows a mother who must confront the dark, life changing summer of the infamous Murphy murders in order to reclaim the daughter she left behind.

Nicole Baart: I realized that what was on my nightstand, what I was reading and enjoying were mysteries.

And so I was a little intimidated to write in that genre, it is really hard and takes just a lot of work to hold all of those things together, the red herrings and the foreshadowing and you have to have twists and it all needs to make sense at the end.

And it just was really, it was really intimidating.

So I started putting elements of mystery into my books and in the last couple I have just really gone for domestic suspense, mystery, thriller and have really enjoyed it.

♪♪ Nicole Baart: All of my books are rooted in the Midwest.

This is where I grew up and it is where I live now.

I think that writing novels based in this area gives me the opportunity to really explore characters and the way that they interact with each other and the way that, both sides of the coin, things that are really beautiful about the area and things that are a little bit harder.

And I love wrestling with that, I love looking at the way that this affects communities and the way that it affects my individual characters.

I think it is just an especially rich place to set the mystery.

♪♪ Nicole Baart: What's so neat about Everything We Didn't Say is it is almost the book that wasn't.

I started it over three years ago.

I thought I had a fantastic idea, handed it into my agent and she really quickly emailed me back and said, oh honey, this is not done.

It's a great first draft, it's a good beginning, but it needs to be rewritten.

So I rewrote it a second time and turned it into my agent again.

And she very promptly called me back and said oh honey, good job, nice second try.

So I started over again and wrote the book a third time.

And finally that is when it worked.

But I also went back to my roots.

So, when I started writing books for publication I would always go buy a five-pack of legal pads and my favorite pens and sit down in a room and write it longhand.

And I wrote my first nine books longhand.

And I tried to type this book twice and it didn't work.

And it wasn't until I sat down with a pen and paper and kind of started all over again, went back to my roots and wrote it out that it started to make sense and the book came to be.

Nicole Baart: I did it from the very beginning.

I find that I'm not creative that way.

It silences my inner critic.

So, instead of typing a word and then having the opportunity to delete, delete, delete, delete, I just keep going.

And you can't erase it.

I'm writing with pen, so if there's something I don't like I might run a line through it.

But more often than not when I go back to that I realize that there was something in there that I might want to keep, it's actually pretty good.

So it allows me to just keep going, to silence my inner critic and I think that it completely accesses a different part of my brain.

I don't know why.

But I'm far more just creative and the words flow better when I write longhand.

♪♪ Nicole Baart: I have five kids ranging in age from 11 to 19.

My husband is the Dean of Chapel and Chief of Staff at a university in our area.

We have biological children, we have adopted children.

And yeah, it has just been a really big part of our lives weaving our family together from lots of different places.

My husband is Canadian, I'm American, so we are all just a mish-mash of citizenships, we're from all sorts of different places.

♪♪ Nicole Baart: After the adoption of our second son, we were in Ethiopia for three weeks, my husband and I and our new son, and we stayed in a missionary guest house across the hall from a gentleman that we became really good friends with.

So we were there for about three weeks and in that time we just developed a relationship that we didn't want to end.

So when we took off and he went home to Liberia and we went home to the United States, we stayed in contact.

Liberia had just come out of the civil, its second civil war and they really needed help.

So our friends' brother had taken in 35 war orphans and was trying to provide for them and didn't really know how.

So we started with a child sponsorship program for those 35 kids and in the, boy it's been 15 years now, in the years in between it has turned into a commercial farm, 20 some churches, 6 schools, 3 children's homes that serve over 150 kids.

We do community redevelopment projects and just wherever God leads us.

♪♪ She asked if you think you're going to move on from mysteries into a different genre.

♪♪ Nicole Baart: So, I'm kind of an odd person or an odd author in that I have way more ideas than I will probably ever be able to publish.

I would love to write fantasy.

Nicole Baart: I still pinch myself every day.

I have wanted to do this my whole life and just never imagined that it would happen and it did.

And when I was a little girl my dad used to introduce me to people by saying, this is my daughter Nicole, she's going to be a published author someday.

And it embarrassed me so much, especially when I was in my teens, he did it when I was in my teens.

I found it really embarrassing.

And yet at the same time there was never a point in my life where somebody told me, you can't do that, or you're from a small town in Iowa, this isn't going to happen for you, just give that up and do something else.

And it gave me the confidence and the encouragement that I needed to seize that opportunity when it came.

♪♪ performer, mostly musical theatre.

♪♪ Amy Burgmaier: Long story short, I ended up moving to New York about 10 years ago.

As it turned out my career path changed for various reasons and I felt like there was nothing else to do than to move to New York.

Amy Burgmaier: I had to learn everything just by grit and resilience and sort of climb my way to the top.

And the competition there is indescribable.

I mean, you have to be in line on the sidewalk at four o'clock in the morning and hope to be one of the two people in your group of non-union talent that gets seen that day.

And I did that for about a year before I started getting callbacks and finally getting the chance to hone my craft.

And then it was sort of, it just all dominoed from there.

♪♪ Amy Burgmaier: Nearly 99.9% of all the actors in New York City, unless they are from New York City, fled just like I did.

It is so expensive to live there and without a job for over a year not very many people can handle that.

♪♪ Amy Burgmaier: While I was in New York I feel like I was in a place where I could thrive.

I had all of the artistic and creative outlets where I could tap into.

And although I love Iowa, the pace here is so different, especially on my parents' farm literally in the middle of a corn field.

The stillness and the quiet sometimes is deafening.

I went sort of in a tailspin.

I'm not going to lie, it was really, I went through some grim times, I did.

It was hard.

I just wanted to be, I just wanted to be able to be creative in ways that I didn't feel like I could be here.

I didn't feel like I was understood here.

And what I bring to the table, I didn't feel like it was valued.

I lost my apartment, I lost my home, I lost my livelihood, I lost my dreams.

I lost everything and in some ways it felt like I lost my identity.

And I had to really embrace the quiet and find how I could cope with that.

Amy Burgmaier: I had friends that were like me that went into great depressions because their lives were flipped upside down.

I had others that pivoted with purpose right out of the shoot and have flipped into parallel careers in other complete different things that are still creative but like in a coffee shop, they have changed in that direction, or teaching.

A lot of people have gone into voice coaching and things like that.

And a lot of people went back to school too.

♪♪ Amy Burgmaier: I just knew inside of me that I needed to find people and be with people that I felt were creative and that also defined themselves as being creative.

And so I look around in Creston, Iowa.

Where do you find such a group of people?

And it just dawned on me, I remembered they have a music program.

So I contacted Dr. Fox, Dr. Jeremy Fox at SWCC and we ended up having I think a two hour phone conversation the week before classes were to start.

I was just inquiring about the studio here and by the end of that conversation I signed up to be a student again.

Amy Burgmaier: Pre-pandemic I had already had some of these thoughts in my head about rolling into voice acting.

Amy Burgmaier: So I had already started taking some special classes and different workshops with special coaches and people in New York.

So I had some of that.

And in New York pre-pandemic I would just be the actor that walks in and talks behind a microphone and there would be an engineer in that studio that would just hit all the buttons and edit my audio together and viola.

That's not how it is anymore.

You have to have a professional home studio to be competitive in this field because of the pandemic.

♪♪ Amy Burgmaier: Well, little did they know they were going to get me for so long.

I mean, at age 43 a child of theirs is moving back in with them.

I mean, it's kind of crazy, right?

And thank God I have parents who are able to accept me back into their home like that.

And they just wanted the best for me too and if it was something, that I could kind of pivot into a different direction and eventually rejoin the workforce and have employment again they were in support of that.

It's to the point now that I am able to put my education into action.

And I am mentally in a better place and have accepted this is where I'm going to be for a while and I'm able to kind of roll forward.

I will resume musical theatre when that time allows but it is a good idea for me to have a parallel career.

♪♪ So you don't move too far stage left, if you could end up somewhere around zero to two to do your hop and your circle, -- Amy Burgmaier: Here in Des Moines, or here in Iowa rather, theatre has been halted as well and I had the chance to audition for the first production in 14 months in Des Moines called Some Enchanted Evening and it's at the Des Moines Playhouse and that is where I got started, right, that's where I was Roxie Hart in Chicago and a number of other shows that kind of really cemented this acting bug inside of me.

And it has just meant so much to be back on this stage.

♪♪ Amy Burgmaier: I am so much stronger than I ever knew and I was put to the test.

I feel like my resilience is at the core of who I am, it always has been.

What I learned about myself is how desperate I am to sing and to be on stage and how deep that is inside of me.

It is I believe my purpose on this Earth.

There is nothing else I would rather do.

Sure, I could go into advertising, I have a degree in that.

I could go into journalism, I have a degree in that.

I could go in these different directions.

But at the end of the day what is going to satisfy my soul the most is singing and acting and being on stage and in commercial venues across America or on Broadway, all of those specialty -- I love the polish of commercial theatre and what it is all about.

That is really special to me.

♪♪ Caleb Raine is a poet, spoken word artist, educator and activist.

He has published two collections of poetry, including Look Black Boy and Heart Notes.

And he is here with me right now.

Caleb, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.

For having me.

I want to start by going back in time to when you fell in love with poetry.

Can you tell me what it was that just really grabbed you?

For me, it was really the power of the words, right?

There's this vulnerability that's in poetry that I really, really was attached to I first performed my poetry on a stage, and so I was with people.

I was experiencing poetry in this very live active moment.

And so it was really, really fun to just be vulnerable with people.

So when you published this collection, Look, Black Boy, it's a lot about growing up as a black boy, a black man in the Midwest.

You grew up in Missouri.

You've been in Iowa City for quite a while.

And this book is it's so powerful.

But part of what makes it so powerful is that you've written it in two different perspectives.

You've written it for me for the outsider to try to understand your feelings and you've written it for yourself and for people who share your experience putting these these poems on paper and sending them out into the world.

What has that allowed you to do?

It is allowed me to have some of the most world changing conversations.

It is also taught me a lot of things.

But what it's done is it's given me a space to talk with other black students and black young people who are trying to figure out what it means to be black in America, in the Midwest, what it means to be growing up in this time.

Also, where race is being talked about.

I would love for you to perform for us.

One of your poems from this collection from Look Black Boy and tell me a little bit about the poem you're going to do for us.

So I'm going to do if you give a Black Boy a dollar, which I used to work with young children.

And so this was derived from the idea of if you give a mouse, a muffin or a pig, a pancake, reading those kinds of things and then know them well.

Oh, yeah.

And for me, I was thinking, I love that structure.

Now what do you what can I do in commenting on blackness and what it looks like to have young blackness?

What does that look like?

And so this piece is really going to be talking about the progression of young black thought and hopes and also kind of the cyclical nature that our system works with.

And kind of the problem there to this is if you give a black boy a dollar by Caleb Raine.

if you give a black boy a dollar, he's going to want to shop.

He'll think of Hot Wheels and video games, new kicks and a bike to do tricks with his wish list is limitless, but will settle for food.

If you let a black boy shop for food he's going to want to eat, he'll think of fried chicken, collard greens, mama's mac and cheese, granddad's black eyed peas and granny's banana pudding.

The hunger inside of him growing soul food, dream but he'll settle for McDonald's.

If you let a black boy eat, he's going to want a drink.

He'll imagine Kool-Aid and lemonade.

And on a special day, grape soda, the thirst will make his mouth dry, tongue twisting itself, desperate rain dance waiting for a drop.

But he'll settle for water.

Pray it's clean this time If you let a black boy drink, he's going to want to live.

He'll see himself playing ball, winning rings and trophies, leaving a legacy he'll see himself designing skyscrapers, creating a clouds rival, reaching for the sun.

He'll see himself in space, stepping on to planets, discovering the beyond.

He'll see himself paint a galaxy constellations on a cotton canvas capturing magnificence.

He'll see his future.

He's going to want to live but he'll settle for a dollar.

All that you're willing to give thanks for joining us as we explore the people, communities and culture of our state.

We'll see you next time for another.

Greetings from Iowa.

[music] Funding for greetings from Iowa is provided by: With our Iowa roots.

And Midwestern values Farmers Mutual Hail is committed to offering innovative farm insurance for America's farmers, just as we have for six generations.

Farmers mutual hail America's crop insurance company the Pella Roll Screen Foundation is a proud supporter of Iowa PBS Pella Windows and Doors strives to better our communities and build a better tomorrow.