The stories I can't tell yet
The Wayne County Mural Festival created amazing art - and prodded at unhealed wounds
Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and tech worker who recently moved back to my 430-person town in rural Iowa. I write about the wild and weird magic of my rural life, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join me!
Hi friend,
The Wayne County Mural Festival is officially over and I’m slowly returning to the real world. My body is crashing into a familiar post-adrenaline hangover — the kind I get after finishing a manuscript or leaving a job. It was ninety degrees yesterday, but today feels like fall. I’m sitting on my balcony for the first time in weeks, watching buzzards circling over my neighbor’s house. They’ll head south soon enough. For now they’re drifting, homing in on scents carried up to them by the ever-present prairie wind.
My body is tired, but my heart is glowing. The mural festival1 was a smashing success. It exceeded my wildest expectations. The artists brought an incredible level of talent. And the community spirit was remarkable — both among the artists and within the local community. It gave flashbacks of the community I remember from childhood, before poverty and politics changed everything.
My heart knows what it felt this weekend — a bone-deep sense that this work is meaningful. An intuition that some of this art might change the world. A profound awe that this tiny community of 5000 people pulled off something so huge — a festival that hosted 200+ artists from 29 states and 6 countries, and created 16 new murals.2
But I’m not a journalist or memoirist. I never write about current events or emotions on a deadline. I distill my feelings over months or years, add some plot, and call it fiction. I paper over my own experience with humor and glamor and a bit of trickery.
I’m frankly uncomfortable embracing a moment that feels like a miracle and trying to explain it in somewhat-real time. I’m even more uncomfortable letting that miracle stay magical, without poking at it with sarcasm and subterfuge.
The mural festival was magical, though. It was a miracle. There are no better words for it.
It mostly took place at the Wayne County Fairgrounds, which I’ve described to you before (“Ribbons and Rodeos”). We took over the mucked-out cattle barn, sprayed it to kill the flies, and turned it into an art studio for fourteen large murals ranging in size from 5x18 feet to 10x30 feet. Two others — a complicated mosaic and a restoration of an old brick-wall mural — were painted offsite, but most of the artists spent the weekend working at the Fairgrounds.
These murals were painted on panels that can be moved later. This helped our logistics, since we didn’t have to find volunteers for multiple sites. It also means that we can move murals if a building or town disappears. These panels hold paint longer than brick does, so I hope to see these murals for a long time.
I also hope to carry some moments for a long time:
- The generosity of the Allerton Garden Club women, who baked four dozen cinnamon rolls and eight dozen cookies to feed “their” four painters. A handful of artists repainted the old Coca-Cola mural on the side of the soda fountain in Allerton, and the Garden Club didn’t want the offsite painters to feel left out of the fun at the Fairgrounds. The Garden Club sat in the park next to the Coca-Cola mural for three days to help with anything the artists needed. There were often more volunteers than painters, and the quiet moments in that park with ladies I’ve known my whole life were some of my favorites.
- The auctioneer who ran our benefit auction, in his starched blue jeans, choking up over the art. He usually sells livestock and farm equipment. But his ability to read the crowd and the way he went from “confused late addition” to “staunch advocate” of the mural festival resulted in the auction raising an incredible amount of money for future upkeep of the murals.
- All the artists who volunteered their time and money to come here…and were so grateful for the opportunity to get together with their artistic community that they gave me t-shirts, wine, and Canadian maple syrup as thank-you gifts.
- The way painters are so relaxed about their travel plans, which does not at all mesh with my “anticipate all the ways the plot can go wrong” writer brain. In other words, you will never catch me blindly hoping to catch a ride to Chicago with a stranger (but I wish that guy luck).
- The volunteers who just…showed up and did things, even if they hadn’t been asked. Whenever something needed to get done, someone jumped in and did it. People called me to offer airport rides, unsolicited. Some people volunteered every single day — anyone who was part of the Methodists, PEO, Garden Club, and some other local groups might have been on tap to serve four or five different meals. But they all did it anyway; and everyone who did said the festival was one of the best things to happen here in years.
The shorter version of this is: it’s amazing what you can accomplish with a handful of septuagenarians who are hell-bent on getting things done.
- The grumpiest old farmer I know, who gave me an earful about how one of the mural themes should have been axed (summary: the main character on the mural died a hundred years ago, but some of his descendants are disreputable and, per the complaint, “what good did they ever do for the town?”). But the farmer showed up every day, was visibly moved by the art, and has reshared all of our Facebook posts (except, of course, for that one mural, which is still anathema to him).
But for all the joy this festival created, and all the warmth I’m feeling in my post-event hangover, there are some stories I can’t write yet:
- I can’t write about the new Round Barn mural. It’s a recreation of the old Round Barn mural that was painted in 1993, which featured the Round Barn (a historical site that my parents were instrumental in preserving, and still run the nonprofit for) and a local house, train, and garden. Everyone here loves the new mural. I say I love it too. But while the Round Barn and the train are still part of it, the house in the mural is different — it’s no longer the house my grandparents were married in, which was torn down years ago. The mural will no longer hang on the store that my grandparents owned; they haven’t owned it for decades, and the wall is too fragile anyway. There’s a new woman standing in the garden, which is a memorial to a local woman who passed away last December. I truly loved her, and she deserves to be immortalized…but my heart is a little raw as the mural becomes more important to a different family’s lore instead of my own.
- I can’t write about how many times I heard, or overheard, that I’m my grandma all over again (but with more spreadsheets).
- I can’t write about tattoos. The mural for Lyle Tuttle is a gorgeous piece, now installed in Millerton (population: 36). Lyle was the “granddaddy of tattoos” who tattooed Cher, Janis Joplin, and the Allman Brothers. He was born in Millerton, but spent most of his life in San Francisco. He made different choices than I did — creating art with bodies instead of books, staying in San Francisco, embracing a wilder life.
His mural reminds me that I don’t have tattoos because my mother hates them. His mural reminds me that a day is coming when she will no longer be able to voice that opinion in this world. His mural makes me ask: are my choices made out of respect, or because I crave approval? Am I going with the flow, or avoiding heartache? What’s the difference between rebellion and pursuing one’s own truth? What limits am I placing on my writing because of the ghosts (living and dead) who whisper their judgments in my ear?
- I really can’t write about the Farm Aid mural. From a distance, it’s Willie Nelson singing at Farm Aid in 1985. Zoom in, and it’s dozens of scenes from Wayne County in the 1980s. His ear is pigs; his hair is corn; the background includes the crosses that were planted in the Wayne County courthouse lawn as an act of protest for every farm that was lost.
There is so much local trauma about the 1980s Farm Crisis. So much shame and grief that is never discussed. So much personal blame and guilt carried, for decades, over losses that were mostly caused by macroeconomics and policy failures. I don’t want to overstate it, but my intuition says that this mural, if it gets some exposure, could be something like the Vietnam Wall for the Farm Crisis — a powerful, silent memorial to a complicated legacy of national shame.
I am deeply, profoundly proud that this mural exists in Wayne County. But the emotions that come with it are difficult.
I cried when I met the artists who were painting it, and I cried again in my car after I was safely away from them. I know dozens of people who cried when they first saw it. I’ve passed old men, unknown to me, who wipe away tears as they look at it.
The enormity of what was lost in the 1980s has been forgotten outside these rural communities; I suspect most people in my generation don’t know anything about it at all. But the emotions here are still as raw as they were when farms were auctioned off and farmers committed suicide forty years ago.
There must be something buried inside me that remembers my dad losing everything, even though I was too young for that memory to hold on, because the images from the farm auctions break me every time. This will be another post someday….but it’s a story I can’t write yet.
Art is one of the most profound ways that we can make sense of the world. My creative side is ablaze with all the art I witnessed this weekend, and I’m eager to get back into my book.
Today, though, I’m choosing to set aside the stories I can’t tell. They’ll percolate, buzz, evolve, and eventually turn into something I can make sense of. I don’t know yet what will come from everything I felt this weekend — whether it will be fiction, memoir, or something else.
I do know that, for me, writing often generates heat when it’s going well. It sounds woo-woo, but I know an idea will work when I feel a certain warmth that tells me to look closer, dig deeper, and write about what I find in the embers.
But right now, the heat of the stories I can’t tell is a wildfire.
It’s pain, not illumination.
I need it to calm down and become a torch — still hot, still a bit too bright, but controlled enough to shine a path in the dark.
So I’m going to pause for a minute and enjoy the fresh September day. I’m going to leave the house and take pictures of more murals as they’re installed — the pretty ones, the ones that don’t prod at my unhealed memories. I’ll let myself be proud of what we accomplished as a community and how my work with the festival made a real impact. I’ll celebrate what’s still here and what we can still do together.
The wildfire, the buzzards, the not-dead-yet towns with new murals adorning the last buildings standing, the defiant statement that art makes in the face of all we’ve lost… it will all simmer in my heart until I’ve had a chance to catch my breath.
Cheers,
Sara
You can find out more about the festival on our Facebook page (all the posts are mine, which is why I’m using some of the same photos here).
Another time, I’ll tell you more about how this mural festival came to be and why we hosted it here. Or I’ll direct you to the website I’m building, which will tell everything about each mural’s theme and location so that tourists can find them…once I get over the initial event hangover and can focus on a website for more than ten minutes.
This takes my breath away. Gorgeous and gutsy piece, Sara, and such a gift to read. Thank you!
Beautiful. I always think of the Round Barn stories when I think of you.