Sandy Moffett: The Ghost of Craven Snuggs

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Transcript

Marshall Poe:

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I’m the founder and editor of The New Books Network, and you’re listening to an episode of Grinnell College’s Artists and Authors podcast series. Today I’m very pleased to say we have Sandy Moffett on the show. Sandy has been at Grinnell for a very long time, I think since 1971. Isn’t that right, Sandy?

Sandy Moffett:

Very long time.

Marshall Poe:

Very long time. Well, we’ll talk about how he got there, and we’ll talk about his experience teaching at Grinnell, how he got into theater, and his new book, which is called The Ghost of Craven Snuggs. Sandy, welcome to the show.

Sandy Moffett:

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Marshall Poe:

Well, let’s begin at the beginning. This is a Grinnell College podcast. How the heck did you end up at Grinnell College?

Sandy Moffett:

Well, it’s a very simple answer to that. There was a job here. I was teaching at a small college in North Carolina, and things kind of went sour there for me. A friend of mine was teaching here and had taken the job at Michigan. He called me up and said, “There’s a job at this little place in Grinnell College in Iowa.” I had to ask him where Iowa was.

Marshall Poe:

Right.

Sandy Moffett:

Then we came here thinking we’d spend a year and then go back to NC. It’s been a long time.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, it’s been 50 years.

Sandy Moffett:

It’s a long year.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, it’s been a long year is right. That’s good. You’re originally from North Carolina, is that right?

Sandy Moffett:

I am, yeah.

Marshall Poe:

What were your impressions of Grinnell when you first got there? It was 1971. That was quite a year, if I recall correctly.

Sandy Moffett:

Yeah, it was quite a year. It was the kind of coming off of 1970 when they closed the College at the end of the year and didn’t have graduation. That was a big controversy. My impressions were we landed in Cedar Rapids, and this was in April, in early April. We drove through Grinnell through that little back road, which you probably know well.

Marshall Poe:

I do.

Sandy Moffett:

The snow was melting. It was cloudy. Everything was ugly. I thought this was ugly. I couldn’t wait to get away. Then the next day, the sun was shining. I was on the campus. It was a beautiful place. I loved the people that I met, first of all, the other faculty and the staff, and then the students. I just fell in love with the place.

Marshall Poe:

Who was president when you got there? Was it George Drake or who was, I don’t remember.

Sandy Moffett:

Oh, it was Glenn Leggett.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Sandy Moffett:

Glenn Leggett.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. I got to talk to George Drake, which was very nice before he most recently passed. You are a theater … is it correct to say a theater person? Is that disparaging?

Sandy Moffett:

No, it’s okay.

Marshall Poe:

How did you get into theater in North Carolina of all places?

Sandy Moffett:

Well, it’s a kind of a long story that I won’t …

Marshall Poe:

That’s what we like, long stories.

Sandy Moffett:

Anyway, I went to undergraduate school at the University of North Carolina and did not do well. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I took a kind of break of three years in the Army. I came back, and I decided I wanted to teach.

I came back, majored in history, but for various reasons got into some theater, mainly because I wanted to meet some girls. That was a good place. I noticed that theater professors were having a lot more fun than history professors.

Marshall Poe:

I think that’s generally true.

Sandy Moffett:

I decided that I might look into that. Finally, I got a graduate degree and ended up teaching theater.

Marshall Poe:

Did you do a lot of acting yourself and writing and things like this?

Sandy Moffett:

That’s how I got started, going to the Carolina Playmakers and trying out for a play and getting into a play. Then once I started directing, I fell in love with directing, and I haven’t acted much since then.

Marshall Poe:

How does one get into directing? Do you just say, “I’m a director?”

Sandy Moffett:

In a way. Going to school helps. Then I did some stage managing, both at UNC and also as a professional stage manager. That’s a really good job if you want to learn everything about theater. That kind of moved me into directing.

Marshall Poe:

What was it like to direct plays? This is a ridiculously general question, but at Grinnell, were students keen to be in plays and things like this?

Sandy Moffett:

They were, yeah. That’s one of the things that impressed me about Grinnell was the talent that we had here. On the other hand, the kind of attitude that Grinnell students had about theater, they were serious about it. They wanted to do good work. They felt that it was an art, not just something to pass the time. On the other hand, they weren’t desperate like some theater people who go to MFA programs and theater schools. They have a lot of options.

A number of them are — well, a lot of students that have been here since I’ve been here are in theater — are making a living in theater, but mostly in unusual ways. There are not many Grinnell students who want to be movie stars or necessarily on Broadway, but a lot of them want to make something, want to do something. There are little theaters in Milwaukee, in Kansas City, and Minneapolis that Grinnell students have founded and run for … ever since I’ve been at Grinnell. I mean for a long, long time. That’s what Grinnell Theater students tend to do.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, I think this is not widely known that there are these theater companies all over the United States.

Sandy Moffett:

Yeah.

Marshall Poe:

I would say thousands of them. If you want to see, I mentioned earlier that I’d seen a production of Tartuffe you did. If you want to see Tartuffe, you probably can.

Sandy Moffett:

Yeah.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. Just an anecdote, I had a friend at Grinnell, and he said, “I want you to come to my production of Tartuffe.” I said to him, “I didn’t know you acted.” He said, “I do now.”

Sandy Moffett:

Funny. People kind of wander in out of curiosity and read for a part, and end up being the lead in the show. It’s really, that’s the wonderful thing about doing it here at Grinnell.

Marshall Poe:

Do you have any particular highlights from the plays and things that you’ve ... I don’t want you to pick favorites, but things that you remember particularly?

Sandy Moffett:

I really remember them all.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah.

Sandy Moffett:

The Grinnell Magazine, I think it was, asked me for a statement about what was important to me about Grinnell, or what was my favorite something in Grinnell. I said my favorite thing about Grinnell was walking into these theater spaces. Even though I’ve been an emeritus professor for a number of years, walking into these theater spaces and seeing these students from five years ago, 10 years ago, 30 years ago, walking across the stage, and they kind of all run together. It’s hard to pick a favorite.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, no, it must be very gratifying to see that, though. To see them go on to new careers and theaters and things like this.

Sandy Moffett:

Careers somewhere else.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, that’s right. I can tell you, I never acted, and I always kind of wish I did. Not to be the opposite of humble, but I think I’d be good at it, but I never tried it. Maybe I will try it. I’m 61. I can still do it.

Sandy Moffett:

Yeah, you’re performing right now.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, right. I am performing right now. That’s right. I know that you also at Grinnell did a lot of conservation work. This is of interest to me because I told you earlier that I’m from Kansas, and there’s something called the Tallgrass Prairie there, which is the largest tallgrass prairie extant maybe in the world. I spent a lot of time there hunting and fishing when I was growing up. Could you tell us about your conservation work in Iowa?

Sandy Moffett:

Well, one of the things that has kept me here, aside from Grinnell College, was my falling in love with the land. When people talk about Iowa being a drive-through state, and it is, if that’s all you do, drive through it. Little by little, I began to fall in love with this landscape in Iowa. We lived on a little farm when we were in North Carolina. Betty, my wife, and I — who incidentally is also a Grinnell writer — we lived on a farm in North Carolina. When we got here, we immediately started looking for someplace in the country. We found a little four-acre-old house out in the country. Then we moved there a year after we moved to Grinnell.

We lived there for 40-odd years before we moved to where we are now in town. Little by little, I just came to love this land. I came to see, you got to look deep to find out about Iowa land and Kansas too, I think. Once you start looking deep, you find the kind of diversity and wonder that you find that I knew in North Carolina, which incidentally had an ocean and mountains.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah.

Sandy Moffett:

I began to love the land. Then in addition to that, things started deteriorating around me. That was a result of a lot of changes in the way Iowa generally approached the land. I saw what I consider a major and serious deterioration of the landscape as a result of large corporate agriculture. That has kind of been heartbreaking to me. I just early on decided I wanted to do whatever I could to counter that. Now, what I do is nothing compared to a 10,000-acre farm, but what I do is something if you get down and look deeply at it.

Little by little, I started, first of all, doing prairie around in our little four acres. Then I managed to buy some land south of town, and I put it into restoration, into prairie. It had woodland that I was working on to enhance. Then we managed to buy a farm across the road from our house, and this was bigger. I put that in a conservation easement and started using CRP to put in prairie there.

Marshall Poe:

What’s CRP?

Sandy Moffett:

Conservation Reserve Program.

Marshall Poe:

What is that exactly?

Sandy Moffett:

Essentially, rent your land, if you will put it into various conservation practices. I was able to do that to get some income from my land. I was still making payments on it, and also at the same time to begin to restore it in prairie. That’s 125 acres now that essentially is all restoration, all made it.

Marshall Poe:

Is this, again, my only experience is in Kansas on the tall grass prairie, is this tallgrass prairie? What is the ...

Sandy Moffett:

Yeah, it is exactly what you call a tallgrass prairie, which runs down the Midwest from actually southern Minnesota all the way down into [inaudible 00:12:19]. Kansas and Iowa are the kind of main areas of it. And at one time, all of Iowa was tallgrass prairie.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. The only reason I can tell you, this is in what an area called the Flint Hills in Kansas. It’s right in central Kansas. The only reason it wasn’t put under cultivation is that there are huge limestone deposits in it. It can’t be plowed. This was an area where they still put cattle out on it, but they couldn’t do much else with it outside the bottomland.

They could farm the bottomland, but the tallgrass prairie itself was completely preserved and still is to this day. I remember when they created the Tallgrass Prairie in Kansas. It was quite an effort, let’s put it that way, to get the ranchers — they were ranchers and not really farmers — on board with taking what was a huge area up practically the size of, I don’t know, Delaware, essentially out of production.

Sandy Moffett:

Yeah. Well, the curse of Iowa is that it has this wonderful, rich land.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, yeah. This is a problem. I’m doing air quotes here. You can’t see that on the audio. Yeah, anything will grow there.

Sandy Moffett:

Anyway, I write about that quite a lot in the book.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. Oh, great. Well, let’s turn to the book. The book is called The Ghost of Craven Snuggs. Why did you write it?

Sandy Moffett:

To say something about what was happening in the state of Iowa. There’s a writer named Carl Hiaasen. I don’t know whether you ever heard of him.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, I do.

Sandy Moffett:

He’s a native Floridian, and he just absolutely hates what has happened to his state, with the development and the changes and draining swamps and all of this. Years ago, I was with a group of friends and we were talking about Carl Hiaasen, and I said, “Iowa needs a Carl Hiaasen.” Then I forgot about that. When I retired, I wrote some short stories and continued to write short stories.

Then when the pandemic came along, I said, “I’m going to try to write a novel.” I want it to be two things. I wanted it to be readable and funny. I want it to say some stuff that’s serious. That’s why I approached this thing.

Marshall Poe:

What were you hoping people will take away from the novel?

Sandy Moffett:

Well, a lot of people already have talked about saying, this is what somebody should be saying about what’s happening to the Iowa countryside. In some ways, they’re turning Iowa into a kind of triage, saying, we just ruined the environment of Iowa so we can produce all this ethanol, and all these pigs, and all of this stuff. Then let all of the other states have national parks and be pretty, and people from Iowa can go to these other places to see the outdoors.

Marshall Poe:

Well, it’s particularly, for a reason that you mentioned, it’s particularly tough in Iowa because the land is so good.

Sandy Moffett:

Yeah.

Marshall Poe:

My ancestors on my mother’s side were German, and they came in the 1840s to Ohio. I happened to know that they were amazed by Ohio. They liked Ohio a lot.

Sandy Moffett:

Yeah, but the problem is, it’s not people like your grandmother that are doing this anymore. It’s people who don’t even live in Iowa.

Marshall Poe:

Right.

Sandy Moffett:

Thousands and thousands of acres. They’re mining it for every little soybean and every little grain of corn they can get, and just doing incredible damage.

Marshall Poe:

I’ve read a little bit about this, but I’ve been told that multinationals are now buying a lot of farmland. Is that right? In my day back in Kansas, he literally had single-family farms and they owned it. And that was that. My grandfather, he owned this, essentially part of the tallgrass prairie and bottomland. He farmed it. That was that.

Sandy Moffett:

Yeah. There are two kinds of people buying farmland. There are the people who farm, and when land comes for sale adjoining their farms, they will pay them almost anything.

Marshall Poe:

Yep. I remember this well.

Sandy Moffett:

Don’t want anyone else there, which is okay, that’s good. Then they’re also, there’s a huge market for it, an investment market for it. The price of land has gone up incredibly, way beyond what can be earned from it. People are investing in this, not to grow crops, but investing in the idea that next year, it’s going to increase 10% in value.

Marshall Poe:

There’s a lot of speculation in land, then, among these? I’ve been told that Bill Gates owns hundreds of thousands of acres, and …

Sandy Moffett:

Yeah. Yes, there is a lot of speculation.

Marshall Poe:

Are there any efforts among farmers trying to do anything about this? Is there a farmer’s union or anything like this that attempts to ... one of the things I do remember is if the farm next to yours came up for sale, you really wanted to buy that. You really wanted to buy it. You say that the farmers are now being priced out?

Sandy Moffett:

Yeah. A lot of them are. A lot of them are. There’s some farmers that live on the land and they’re big farmers and they’re very successful. The situation is that they’re forced into farming in the way that gets the most profit today and pays little attention to what it’s going to be like tomorrow.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. My grandfather used to say that a farmer was a mechanic who liked to garden, because I remember the machinery.

Sandy Moffett:

Oh, yeah. That makes sense. If you walk by a typical farm today, you see a couple of million dollars worth of machinery.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, no, that’s right. Yeah, that’s right. These machines are truly incredible. I remember. I’ve ridden on some of them myself, and they’re now like GPS guided. They’re astounding things, and they do cost a small fortune to operate. I remember combine crews coming through Kansas. They’d start in Texas and end up in Dakota. People didn’t own their own combines. They were too expensive.

To go back to that question, is there any effort to keep this Iowa farmland in the hands of Iowans? Is there anything that can be done about this?

Sandy Moffett:

There is an effort. There’s a group in Iowa called Iowa Farmer’s Union, which is, it’s the kind of counterpart to the Farm Bureau. The Farm Bureau is a huge national, I don’t know what you call it, organization, I guess, not a corporation, organization of farmers, but it does all sorts of things. Farm Bureau is an insurance company too.

Farm Bureau is designed for farmers who want to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. The Farmers’ Union is made up of smaller farmers, a lot of farm-to-market people who are raised in the community farming tradition. Yes, this is an organization that’s fighting against hugeness, but whether or not it’s making any inroads, I don’t know.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, you don’t know this, but I used to be a professor at the University of Iowa, and every Sunday, I would go to the farmer’s market there. These were people that had truck farms. I don’t know if people know what a truck farm is, and they would bring local produce. Is there that kind of thing going on in Grinnell, though?

Sandy Moffett:

Oh, yeah. There’s one guy who’s a Grinnell grad, graduated from Grinnell, I would say about five or six years ago. He’s got a wonderful little farm, grows all kinds of vegetables. We still get them once a week. He’ll do it as long as he can into the winter. He has a greenhouse.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah.

Sandy Moffett:

Yeah. He has a big market for what he is doing, and I think he’s doing okay.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, that’s good. I know that in Iowa City that the farmer’s market was a big deal, and that’s pretty much where you went to go meet people on Sunday.

Sandy Moffett:

It’s Thursday here, so that’s ...

Marshall Poe:

Is that right? Are you growing anything yourself?

Sandy Moffett:

No. When we first moved out into the country, we had a garden and grew tomatoes and zucchini and everything. Then we kept coming home, and there’d be these little plastic bags hanging on our door full of tomatoes. We kind of said, "Why do we go out there and dig in the garden?" My garden is a prairie.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah.

Sandy Moffett:

I do that.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. Are Grinnell students involved at all in this conservation work?

Sandy Moffett:

They are. There’s a part of Grinnell called the Center for Prairie Studies, and you probably remember Jon Andelson.

Marshall Poe:

I totally remember Jon Andelson, yes.

Sandy Moffett:

He was very big in starting this. It’s a very active student group, student and faculty group, that does all sorts of things about conservation and prairie and so forth. Yeah, there are a lot of students who are very interested in this kind of thing.

Marshall Poe:

Well, it’s funny, because again, kind of anecdote,I do come from kind of a farming background on one side. When I got to Grinnell, I took a class from Andelson, it might’ve been Christiansen, I don’t remember which. They took us out to a preserve, and we counted bugs and we counted different sorts of species and things like this.

I remember thinking, I didn’t know anything about that. What my grandfather did was this essentially industrial ranching and farming. It was a very different thing. It was more like, work on this tractor.

Sandy Moffett:

Once you get the tractor running and get the GPS, you don’t have to do anything.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, that’s right. We were not interested in conservation as such. Well, that’s very good. I want to thank you very much for spending time with us today to talk about this. Let me say again that we’ve been talking to Sandy Moffett. His book is called The Ghost of Craven Snuggs, and it is widely available. You can get it all over the place. Sandy, thanks so much for being with us today.

Sandy Moffett:

Thank you. I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.