He started calling square dances-he eventually became a professional square dance caller. He worked there for a long time, until about the time I went off to boarding school. My mother taught second grade and my father was a pressman at the Des Moines Register, so he was down there with the big rolls of paper and making the presses run. My mother was quite insistent, though neither of my parents had gone to college. What follows then are longer excerpts from our seven-hour conversation, during which we discussed a wide range of topics, including first impressions, fate, philosophy, religion, hunting, and, of course, writing and literature.ĭid you read a lot while you were a kid? Were there a lot of books in the house? While I tried to give a sense of this in the profile “After the Flood,” which appears in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, I was unable to quote Rhodes at length. But no amount of research or quotes from secondary sources could have prepared me for the honesty, generosity, and intellectual curiosity of the man with whom I shared an afternoon and evening. Having heard some of the details of Rhodes’s story from his editor at Milkweed, Ben Barnhart, and his publicist, Emily Cook, I knew that the novelist was exceedingly kind, not at all bitter about what had happened to him more than thirty years ago. Through it all he continued to write, and Milkweed Editions, an independent publisher in Minneapolis, is releasing a new edition of his third novel, Rock Island Line, along with his new novel, Driftless, in September. Although I grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and was familiar with this kind of spiritual advertising, the signs I found outside Wonewoc in early June did little to bolster my confidence as I headed to interview an author who, having published three successful novels in the early 1970s, was paralyzed in a motorcycle accident and slipped into a three-decade silence during which he publishing nothing.

Deep water based on a book