Schoolhouse ─ Lessons on Love & Landscapes

SCHOOLHOUSE: Lessons on Love & Landscape concerns the search for where identity, place, and heart intersect. The memoir opens with its Brooklyn-born narrator standing on his head outside an old one-room schoolhouse amid 500 acres of remote woodlands in Iowa, his new home. Why this Walden-like retreat? Is it to attend the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop, or is he actually on the lam from love? Structured like a schoolbook, each chapter is named after a school subject (i.e. Geography, History, Social Studies, What I Did On My Summer Vacation), which collectively forms an overall lesson plan for his coming back out of the woods. For the Heartland, it seems, won’t allow him to hide from his own heart forever. SCHOOLHOUSE is a study of both nature and of human nature.

Marc Nieson is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and NYU Film School. His background includes children’s theater, cattle chores, and a season with a one-ring circus. Excerpts from his memoir SCHOOLHOUSE have received a notable listing in Best American Essays 2012, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and been published in PRAIRIE GOLD: An Anthology of the American Heartland. His recent fiction has appeared in EVERYWHERE STORIES: Short Fiction Literary Review, Iowa Review, Green Mountains Review, Chautauqua from a Small Planet (Press 53), Conjunctions, and Hawk & Handsaw. His prose has earned two Pushcart Prize nominations, the Literal Latte Fiction Award, and Raymond Carver Short Story Award. His award-winning feature-length screenplays include SPEED OF LIFE, THE DREAM CATCHER, and BOTTOMLAND. He serves on the faculty of Chatham University, and is working on a new novel, HOUDINI’S HEIRS.