I didn't set out to write a memoir. It was a day-by-day endeavor. Daily writing was a thing I had decided to do six years before I started editing the book. It was something I willed myself to do and, after a time, it was a thing I had to do. I had grown dependent upon it. My writing partner and I would write about an hour a day. We'd sit across from one another, open our computers, and we wouldn't stop writing for an hour. And then we'd read aloud whatever it was we'd written.
After I got an essay placed in the "Modern Love" column in the New York Times, I received calls from a few literary agents. I flew to New York and flew back home with a verbal contract. My new agent, Janis Donnaud, said she needed a book to sell. This, somehow, surprised me. All I had, after six years of daily essay-writing, were thousands of these little one-hour essays--overall, a bramble of words. No arc. No theme. One essay might be about a dog. One about the history of Dubuque. One about marital infidelity. It seemed to be an impossible task.
Editing By the Iowa Sea was sort of like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with pieces I made myself. I wasn't certain they'd fit together, and there was no box with a picture on the lid so I could be sure I had it right. I knew that the Iowa flood of 2008 had changed me in a profound way. And because it changed me, it changed my marriage. Actually, the flood saved my marriage. But until I began work on the book, I didn't know why. It's strange how stories happen in our lives and it takes the act of writing them down and then editing them to force us to realize the existence of them and the power of them to transform us at the very core. --Joe Blair, author of By the Iowa Sea (see review below)