Writing from the heart

DES MOINES, Iowa — Growing up on her family’s eastern Iowa dairy farm, Carol Bodensteiner never considered that she could be a writer.

“I didn’t know I could write,” Bodensteiner said. “Like every girl my age, I grew up reading Nancy Drew. I read a lot, so somebody had to be writing those books, but it was never in my head that I could be a writer.”

Bodensteiner’s parents milked a herd of 50 cows on their 180-acre farm near Maquoketa.

“It was a typical 1950s family farm,” Bodensteiner said. “My parents took over the farm after my dad got out of the service in 1945. The farm had no electricity and there was no indoor plumbing.”

She said her dad focused on the dairy. He was a member of the Dairy Herd Improvement Association and had the first milking parlor in the area.

Bodensteiner recalls the country school where she was the only person in her class for eight years, until she rode the bus and attended the town school.

Her first brush with creative writing came at the country schoolhouse.

“I wrote an essay I thought was pretty good,” Bodensteiner said. “It was called ‘From My Barn Door.’ I got a C on it, I think because my handwriting was atrocious. When I got to college, I wrote essays for classes and got feedback that I was good at that; still it wasn’t something that I considered I could do for a living.”

Bodensteiner pursued a degree in education, with plans of teaching high school, but instead found a job with a public relations agency.

“There I was writing all the time,” Bodensteiner said. “I’d set up interviews, then go out in the field and do the interviews and take the pictures, come back to the office and write the articles and place them, then move on to the next set.”

Bodensteiner worked in public relations for 23 years, never considering she could make a living writing her own stories.

“My mom always said, ‘Carol, you’re a writer, you can write our stories,’” Bodensteiner said. “I told her I was a business writer, that I didn’t know creative writing. She kept insisting and planted that seed for me.”

Eventually Bodensteiner considered her mother’s appeals.

“I wanted to write about my parents on the farm,” Bodensteiner said. “I attended writing workshops; one workshop leader told me that what I was writing about myself was more interesting than what I was writing about my parents.”

Uncertain what that constructive criticism meant, the clarification Bodensteiner received became the validation she needed.

“If I did a good job writing about my own experiences growing up on the farm, people would know my parents and the farm,” Bodensteiner said. “I took that advice to heart and began writing what became ‘Growing Up Country.’”

That memoir chronicled Bodensteiner’s youth.

 “My mom was so persistent about it, so I wrote the stories,” Bodensteiner said. “I had no idea how they would resonate with other people who had grown up on farms.”

Publishing the book proved more difficult than writing it.

“I kept getting the same feedback: that it was well written and full of interesting stories, but there were just too many memoirs out there,” Bodensteiner said. “I decided it needed to be published, so I self-published it.”

Relying on her background in public relations, Bodensteiner handled the marketing.

“I was everywhere, contacting media, doing interviews,” Bodensteiner said. “I got some good editorial placements that brought the book to the attention of librarians, then was invited to speak in their programs. The success was a total surprise to me.”

Bodensteiner hopes the book catalyzes others.

“I’m a storyteller; I encourage others to tell their stories,” Bodensteiner said. “If these stories start you thinking about your own life and talking to your family, I’m happy.”

With the first book a success, Bodensteiner felt emboldened to write a second, “Go Away Home.” The piece is historical fiction loosely based on her grandmother’s story. She self-published this book too until it was picked up by Lake Union Publishing, an Amazon imprint.

In her third book, “Simple Truth,” about a young woman working in public relations, Bodensteiner was able to glean background from her own career of two decades.

The fourth book Bodensteiner set out to create, “Stitched Through Time: The Story of Libbie Haylock’s Quilts,” was different than the first three.

“My grandma had a huge trunk; my sisters and I always said it looked like a casket or coffin, it was so big,” Bodensteiner said. “But in there were a whole lot of quilt blocks and pieces of quilt blocks, 100 years or more old. My mother got them out — she is so persistent — and told me I needed to finish these quilts. I told her I am not a quilter, but she just said she knew I could do it.”

With the help of her sister-in-law who assembled the blocks into quilt tios with batting and backing, was left to finish the quilts.

“I hand-quilted or tied all of them, and got them finished,” Bodensteiner said. “Every time I finished one, I would take it to my mother’s house, and she put it on display, just loving all of this. By the time I finished them all, my mother had passed away. I didn’t want them to sit in the trunk for another hundred years, so I gifted them.”

As she began distributing the quilts among family members, Bodensteiner felt a twinge of anguish.

“These quilts had been together for more than 100 years, and now they were going all over the country,” Bodensteiner said. “I couldn’t let that happen without giving everybody the story of the quilts.”

Bodensteiner researched the quilt patterns her grandmother had established, and she added in the stories of putting each one together and completed the collection with photos of each person with the quilt they had selected.

For a second career that she had never envisioned for herself, Bodensteiner said writing has given her more than she could have imagined.

“It’s been interesting, and I just love writing,” she said. “I didn’t set out in my life to be a writer, so I give my mother all the credit for the encouragement she gave me, that I went on to do something I never considered I could. Life is short and there are so many things you can spend your life doing, that to do one thing your whole life doesn’t make any sense to me.