Joe Blair, graduate of the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, will read from By the Iowa Sea: A Memoir of Disaster and Love at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 6, in a free reading at Prairie Lights Books in downtown Iowa City. The reading also will be streamed live on the University of Iowa Writing University website.

After his first cross-country motorcycle trip, Blair believed he had discovered his true calling. He would travel. He would never cave in to convention. He would never settle down. Fifteen years later, Blair finds himself living in Iowa, working as an air-conditioning repairman and spending his free time cleaning gutters, taxiing his children, and contemplating marital infidelity. “Our history,” he writes, “gains more weight day by day. And the future seems more and more unlikely to be anything cool at all.” He believes it would take an act of great faith or courage to revive in him the passion and promise that once seemed so easy to come by.

What it takes, he discovers, is a disaster. When the Iowa River floods, transforming the familiar streets and manicured lawns of his neighborhood into a terrible and beautiful sea, he begins to question the path that led him to this place.

Blair is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell and the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program. He has had essays published in the New York Times, Salon.com, the Iowa Review, and the Christian Science Monitor.

The Nonfiction Writing Program, part of the Department of English, is part of the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

For more information or special accommodations to attend this reading, call Jan Weissmiller at Prairie Lights, 319-337-2681. For a UI arts calendar and details about upcoming events visit the new Arts Iowa website.