"Writes dirty books"

A gang of guys are playing Rook in the dorm. I'm among 'em. The jabbering makes the game secondary. Mostly, we're just talking.

It's fall, 1966, sixty years ago, and I'm a freshman at Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa, far, far from home. But friends aren't hard to come by when they all have similarly unreadable last names like "Schaap" and could sing more than one verse of "The Ninety-and-Nine." Like I said, we're playing Rook when some local guy mentions a name I'd never heard, "Feikema," even though it sounds pretty much like everyone else's.

"He's a writer," some other local kid says, "big guy--huge--writes dirty books." There's nothing accusatory about the way he says it. To me, he was marketing. "Changed his name. It's Manfred now."

"Naah," I say or something similar. "Gi'mee a break. This guy writes books, and he's from here?"

"Not Sioux Center--Doon," somebody says. 

I had no idea what a Doon was.

Some weeks later, in a bookstore in Wisconsin, I spot a paperback with the name "Frederick Manfred." If I hadn't had 75 cents along, I would have walked out of the store with the skinny thing stuck in my pants. Manfred was the Iowa guy, the one who writes dirty books.

I read The Secret Place cover to cover (175 pp), a rarity. I wasn't a reader, never was and, sure, the story had more than its share of sexual hijinks. The kid at the heart of the novel gets two girls pregnant, both out of wedlock, and this Manfred/Feikema guy brings us out into the country to watch.

But something happens. I get lost in the story, especially when the kid gets brought before the consistory--something in that scene especially smells familiar. He's writing on my ground somehow. I know this kind of story--about transgressions and consistories. Something I'd never, ever imagined happened before--I recognized the characters, recognized the world of The Secret Place (1965).

In point of fact, I was so moved by what I only vaguely understood--finding myself in what some call the "felt life" of the novel--that I went to my English prof to ask her if I could write my freshman English paper on a novel by this guy, this Frederick Manfred. I had to tread lightly, I knew, because those guys playing cards had said that somehow our feisty little college president, B J Haan, had seen to it that no one could check out Feike Feikema's books from the college library unless they had special dispensation. Dirty books after all--no pictures, but full-frontal nudity.

I told the teacher I owned my own copy of The Secret Place and she gave me the green light, so I wrote my term paper on Frederick Manfred's The Secret Place. That little novel made me think I maybe I could write too, tell stories. That Iowa novel, sixty years ago, set me off on a lifelong commitment to sit here and watch newly formed letters march over an empty page or screen. I've been at it pretty much ever since, devotionals for kids, novels, short stories, denominational history, family albums for the Back to God Hour, the CRC, and Rehoboth Christian Schools, innumerable personal essays, and today, somewhere close to a hundred podcasts.

In truth, it wasn't just The Secret Place that set me off on a writing journey, but when I look back at all those years of sitting here at the desk like I am right now--early, first light just now opening the sky--and this morning, like always, trying to get the words right, to create something somehow worth my time and yours, the first book I remember as central to that long story is a skinny novel by a local novelist, a dirty book, I guess, banned back then in the college library. 

With all the fuss here in Sioux Center about dirty books, I thought maybe my experience with dirty books might just have some relevance.

Just about then, there stood a sign on 75 that said something like "Doon, Iowa--home of Frederick Manfred. Just about then, after The Secret Place anyway, that sign mysteriously came down. 

But that's a story for another time.