Short bio
Matt Mauch is the author of five books of lyrical prose and poetry, including A Northern Spring, We’re the Flownover. We Come From Flyoverland., Bird~Brain, If You’re Lucky Is a Theory of Mine, as well as the chapbook The Brilliance of the Sparrow. He founded the Great Twin Cities Poetry Read and the journal Poetry City, and has organized and hosted many other poetry readings and events. Mauch’s work has been recognized by the Minnesota State Arts Board and as a finalist for National Poetry Series and other national and international contests. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Conduit, The Journal, DIAGRAM, Willow Springs, The Los Angeles Review, Forklift, Ohio, Sonora Review, Water~Stone Review, and on the Poetry Daily and Verse Daily websites. Mauch lives in Minneapolis and teaches in the AFA in Creative Writing program at Normandale Community College.
LONG BIO W/COLOR COMMENTARY
THE OELWEIN YEAR
Matt Mauch was born in Oelwein, Iowa—a town the name of which he has written on many an application form, but holds not in his memory banks, for his parents moved to another town shortly before his first birthday. If e’er he returns to the town where his father sold transistor radios to Amish kids on the sly when their families came to town for supplies on Saturdays, he will think of Odysseus and will say, “Nine years ain’t that long.”
THE WORTHINGTON YEARS
The town his three-member family moved to, Worthington, Minnesota, is where he can place his first memories, starting with the big flood that brought all the neighborhood kids out to swim in the new pool created at the intersection of Thirteenth and Clary Streets. A photo in the Worthington Daily Globe shows his father riding a refrigerator floating like an iceberg in the basement of the duplex his family rented. Worthington appeared prominently in Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone and was fictionalized in The Things They Carried. It was the era of Vietnam, Nixon, streakers, the Bicentennial, and disco. You could buy a raffle ticket each winter, guessing to the minute when the old car named Lena would fall through ice on Lake Okabena. Every September, Worthingtonians gathered on Turkey Day to watch a race called the Great Gobbler Gallop, rooting for Paycheck, Worthington’s bird, in its biannual race with the turkey from Cuero, Texas, Ruby Begonia. In that Worthington of yesteryear, stray chickens that escaped the Campbell’s Soup plant were great finds. Once caught, though, you never knew what to do with them.
THE SIBLEY YEARS
Grown to five members, the Mauch family moved across the border, 18 miles to the south, to a place called Sibley, Iowa, which had neither a mall nor a McDonald’s, nor a drive-in movie theater where you watch the latest in the Planet of the Apes series. Sibley is the sort of place where the juvenile delinquent grows up to be deputy sheriff, where the big summer street dance (read: public party) used to be called Dandelion Days, where you can still cruise main street and go to pep rallies and school dances. In Sibley, Mauch was a town kid in a farm town. He learned to hunt, fish, trap, and fix his own car if the fix didn’t involve such complexities as the innards of a carburetor. Mauch got thrown in jail once, from where he intended to write the soon-to-be-famous “Letter from a Sibley Jail,” but only ended up determined to never land there again, if he could help it. For all the years of mandatory “attempts” in gym class, Mauch ended the Sibley chapter of his life having never won a presidential physical fitness patch. What he brought along as luggage of the sort you never let out of your sight is the gift that arrived via cassette tape one summer in 1978. One side had The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks on it, and the other side had The Clash’s The Clash on it. Mauch played it through the stereo he was piecemealing together in his bedroom, which at the time powered a pair of Koss headphones that, turned out and up, served as speakers. Craig car speakers eventually replaced the headphones, and the way Mauch viewed music and the world would never be the same. Sibley was a microcosm of all that there was to rebel against in the world, and it was the world, with its ideas, its art, its armpit and underbelly and lint-filled bellybutton, that Mauch was about to roll around in.
THE SIOUX CITY YEARS
Some of the world’s entryways—like Sioux City, Iowa, as Mauch was about to find out—aren’t as grand as those that the Kennedys, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers passed through. It was during his time as a student at a Catholic college in Sioux City that Mauch lost his religion, when bacon and eggs turned out to be a bigger lure than was the miracle of bread and wine being turned into the body and blood of one Jesus H. Christ. Mauch’s was a gradual conversion, fueled largely by heavy doses of a liberal education and dorm-room debate. Were that the sole hallmark of his time in the land of Sue Bee Honey, Old Home Bread, and the Twin Bing, Sioux City would be but a footnote in the Mauch saga. More significant that losing religion, though, was what Mauch found to take it’s place. A fantastic English faculty at Briar Cliff College (now University), ushered Mauch from his first major (engineering), to his second (pre-law), to his third and final: English literature, with minors in philosophy and writing and linguistics. Gone, too, was the notion that college is the place you go for primarily practical considerations, i.e., getting a job. College can be, Mauch learned, the place where ideas and perspectives and histories can transform you, such that whomever you were before is somebody you can no longer be, and whomever you will become is as yet undiscovered. Whenever he hears Sioux City mentioned in Johnny Cash’s rendition of “I’ve Been Everywhere,” Mauch sheds a metaphorical tear for all those who went to college and never learned what he did about college being, if you get the most out of it, about everything but getting a job. He feels especially sad for business majors, although not for the business men and women, who were really just music fans, who ran Sioux City’s famous head shop and record store, Uncle John. Mauch worked summers at the Goodyear store in Sibley so he could afford records during the school year at Uncle John. He still has these records, and the vintage Sex Pistols poster Mike, Uncle John’s late proprietor, gave him, and he still plays those records, even though his business major friends told him long ago that vinyl is dead.
THE SIOUX FALLS YEARS
Just up I-29 from Sioux City is Sioux Falls, South Dakota. These two cities and the small towns within their gravitational pull are known on the local news, and on the shingles hung at many an establishment within their spheres of influence, as Siouxland. While Mauch’s extended stay in Siouxland was a direct result, some would say, of his realization that college was about anything but getting a job when you were done, he had friends in Sioux Falls who had beers to drink, potatoes to fry, rent and utilities to share. After brief stints taking instant credit card applications though a headset, for one major multinational company subcontracting a second major multinational (a harbinger in about 42 ways of economic downturns to come), and selling women’s shoes on commission for a department store in a mall who’s claim to fame is that it attracts more annual visitors than South Dakota’s more traditional top tourist destination, Mount Rushmore, Mauch stumbled onto a DIY venture that ended up influencing his future endeavors greatly. The first phase of these DIY years began when Mauch and his roommate were hired by an local entrepreneur to be the editor and sales manager, respectively, for a brand new arts and entertainment weekly—a local paper in the mold of the Village Voice, etcetera. What the first phase ended up being, unbeknownst to Mauch and his roommate, was some pretty valuable on-the-job-training. In the eight or so months of its existence—a tenure which ended with the publication of the first and last ever issue of Mainstream—Mauch and his roommate learned everything they needed to know to start their own magazine, which was a good thing, too, as their boss turned out to be not only a liar, but a broke liar. Fueled by a host of sales and writer contacts, by an expertise with the then-new Macintosh and desktop publishing, and by a desire to prove that the former boss who still owed them money had been the problem all along, Mauch and his now business partner secured funding and started their own arts and entertainment paper, Tempest, and entered into the mix of what was an artistic renaissance of sorts in Sioux Falls. It was the dawn of the age of grunge when Mauch and the staff first spent all-nighters laying out their magazine, and Sioux Falls, like many places in the U.S., had DIY fever. Band and clubs were sprouting up everywhere, and everywhere they were given a sense of legitimacy. Tempest chronicled that failed revolution for 10 years. For Mauch, though, wanderlust set in long before then. With just a year’s worth of issues under its belt, Mauch told the gang he was moving to Florida. While the daily newspaper in Sioux Falls, The Argus-Leader, would have the world believe Mauch’s moving-on was in no small part a result of a well publicized (by The Argus Leader) rafting incident on a sunny summer afternoon on the Dell Rapids River in a raft made by strapping two tractor-tire tubes to the bottom of a four-by-eight-foot piece of plywood made to hold plastic lawn chairs with the legs cut off and a cooler, a second source has never corroborated this.
THE FLORIDA YEAR PLUS
Aside from the Oelwein year—a year, remember, that he has no memory of—Mauch had spent his entire life in Siouxland. He was writing a lot—working twelve and fourteen hours days—but writing for work wasn’t, isn’t, and never shall be the same as writing poems. What CDs, clothes, bedroom stuffs, and kitchen gear could fit into a gold 1970 Chrysler Newport, Aztec Edition, Mauch packed in, and he lit out for the territories, as many a Midwesterner who's read Huck Finn eventually does. The Winter Park, Florida, year began with the touching of Spanish moss and discovering it was soft, rubbery, and not like hair at all. Mauch did what so many others who wanted to be writers had done: he mimicked masters, writing every day, copying their plots in his short stories, capturing their moods and techniques in his poems. It was an apprenticeship, is how he came see it, and while you may never see the poems and stories he wrote, they were the first stepping stone in his path to becoming whatever he is as a writer today. Mauch landed a job at the coolest movie theater in the world, working for the coolest boss in the world, after he walked up to her one day, resume in hand, and told her he was applying for jobs only at places he thought were cool. He didn’t care what he did, but he wanted to go to work at a place he liked. They say a person and his or her personality is, in the end, a transcript of the patterns of his actions. Mauch, you may have guessed, was destined to leave his amazing job, a month or so shy of being able to serve as escort to Fairuza Balk first, and then Drew Barrymore, when they visited the theater where he worked for film fest events. It was grad school that beckoned, and while Mauch had been able to serve as host to Richard Linklater, who was at the theater for a Slacker event, and who drank some Michelob in Mauch’s apartment, the Balk and Barrymore opportunities will always been ones that got away.
The Newport, with its Aztec patterned landau top, vinyl seats, and exterior rubber molding, didn’t make the trip from Winter Park to Mankato, Minnesota, although a nice, three-foot concrete garden statue of Minerva did. The Newport had shorted out after a botched attempt at jump starting it in the dark reversed its polarity, frying its electrical system. Mauch removed the license plates, tried to scratch out the VIN, and headed north in a Mercury Marquis, the contraband goddess promising extra traction on any ice and snow the December roads might offer.
THE MANKATO DECADE
Mankato. Where does one begin? With the Joe’s Country Breakfast—two plates full of meat and potatoes and eggs for the kind of money you can find in your couch cushions? With Carol Bly deeming Mauch's flash fiction morally irretrievable? With trips to the Most Beautiful Place in the World, which to get to is illegal in three or four different ways? With the cross-dressing parties? With the midway at North Mankato Fun Days? With the Circle Inn (stagger out)? With Pagliai's "B Special" pizza (sausage, salami, Canadian bacon, onions—no association aside from unfortunate naming with Northern Ireland's notorious/loyalist/thug Ulster Special Constabulary) accompanied by a 25-cent pitcher of beer if you ordered it on Thursday or Sunday? With the Rancid, Jawbreaker, and All shows at Marti’s? With Billie Joe Armstrong strumming on some kid’s acoustic at the corner of Warner and South Front? With The Good Thunder Reading Series and its after and then after-after parties? With the pizza-sized Duke Burger at the nearby Eagle’s Nest? With Lowell and Ron holding down the southeast corner of the bar at Maggie’s? With standing room only at Writers’ Bloc readings? With the New York strip from Hy-Vee? With the muskrat that attacked Mauch late one night on the way to Hy-Vee? With Mauch’s gratitude for the boots that allowed him a viable self-defense? With the death threats garnered by a nonfiction piece Mauch wrote about killing the muskrat in self defense before he had the chance to find out if it was rabid? With the monument in Reconciliation Park to commemorate the 38 Dakota Indians hanged there in the largest officially sanctioned mass execution in U.S. history, compliments of Abraham Lincoln? With the blizzards that the valley attracted like a magnet? With river fishing for mercury-infused, prehistoric fish folks should’ve worn gloves to take the hook out of before throwing them back? With the Wagon Wheel breakfasts you could get for the kind of money you sluff from “take a penny, give a penny” trays? With the free taco bar at The Still? With the band Violet and hangover-inducing, dirty-line tap beer at the What’s Up? With the ice slide that Warren Street becomes after an ice storm? With the Olympia? With the Lucky Lager? With the Material Issue show, less than a month before Jim Ellison killed himself? With Laura Ingalls’ Pa comin’ to town for supplies on the buckboard? Mankato gets in the blood, and—just like that, with Mauch as witness—a decade goes by.
THE PERU YEAR
Despite all of the above, Mauch received the offer of a real job—tenure track, even—that brought him to southeastern Nebraska hamlet of Peru. If you take a tally of paved roads, Peru boasts one in, one out, and neither is a one-way. The only pizza is made at the local convenience story, Casey’s, where the top selection was the cheeseburger pie. You have to buy water by the jug, because what comes out of the taps isn’t potable. One of Mauch’s students was the babysitter of the real-life killer of Teena Brandon, as portrayed in the movie Boys Don’t Cry. If you’re a history student, Peru is a worth a visit; you can study what the world was like before the civil right movements and acts of the late 1960s. If you’re an ornithologist, Peru is worth a visit, too; you can witness a bottleneck in the great migration of birds, where the Mississippi and Central flyways overlap. What Mauch learned in Peru about the First Amendment and union contracts, about despotic administrators (ding, dong, the witch is dead), about ballsy students and colleagues, is documented on the Internet, where you can read it for yourself.
MPLS
After what amounted to the equivalent of a rest stop in Omaha, Mauch finally landed in Minneapolis. For real and for good, he’ll tell you. Until it's not.
Cue the short bio.
Matt Mauch was born in Oelwein, Iowa—a town the name of which he has written on many an application form, but holds not in his memory banks, for his parents moved to another town shortly before his first birthday. If e’er he returns to the town where his father sold transistor radios to Amish kids on the sly when their families came to town for supplies on Saturdays, he will think of Odysseus and will say, “Nine years ain’t that long.”
THE WORTHINGTON YEARS
The town his three-member family moved to, Worthington, Minnesota, is where he can place his first memories, starting with the big flood that brought all the neighborhood kids out to swim in the new pool created at the intersection of Thirteenth and Clary Streets. A photo in the Worthington Daily Globe shows his father riding a refrigerator floating like an iceberg in the basement of the duplex his family rented. Worthington appeared prominently in Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone and was fictionalized in The Things They Carried. It was the era of Vietnam, Nixon, streakers, the Bicentennial, and disco. You could buy a raffle ticket each winter, guessing to the minute when the old car named Lena would fall through ice on Lake Okabena. Every September, Worthingtonians gathered on Turkey Day to watch a race called the Great Gobbler Gallop, rooting for Paycheck, Worthington’s bird, in its biannual race with the turkey from Cuero, Texas, Ruby Begonia. In that Worthington of yesteryear, stray chickens that escaped the Campbell’s Soup plant were great finds. Once caught, though, you never knew what to do with them.
THE SIBLEY YEARS
Grown to five members, the Mauch family moved across the border, 18 miles to the south, to a place called Sibley, Iowa, which had neither a mall nor a McDonald’s, nor a drive-in movie theater where you watch the latest in the Planet of the Apes series. Sibley is the sort of place where the juvenile delinquent grows up to be deputy sheriff, where the big summer street dance (read: public party) used to be called Dandelion Days, where you can still cruise main street and go to pep rallies and school dances. In Sibley, Mauch was a town kid in a farm town. He learned to hunt, fish, trap, and fix his own car if the fix didn’t involve such complexities as the innards of a carburetor. Mauch got thrown in jail once, from where he intended to write the soon-to-be-famous “Letter from a Sibley Jail,” but only ended up determined to never land there again, if he could help it. For all the years of mandatory “attempts” in gym class, Mauch ended the Sibley chapter of his life having never won a presidential physical fitness patch. What he brought along as luggage of the sort you never let out of your sight is the gift that arrived via cassette tape one summer in 1978. One side had The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks on it, and the other side had The Clash’s The Clash on it. Mauch played it through the stereo he was piecemealing together in his bedroom, which at the time powered a pair of Koss headphones that, turned out and up, served as speakers. Craig car speakers eventually replaced the headphones, and the way Mauch viewed music and the world would never be the same. Sibley was a microcosm of all that there was to rebel against in the world, and it was the world, with its ideas, its art, its armpit and underbelly and lint-filled bellybutton, that Mauch was about to roll around in.
THE SIOUX CITY YEARS
Some of the world’s entryways—like Sioux City, Iowa, as Mauch was about to find out—aren’t as grand as those that the Kennedys, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers passed through. It was during his time as a student at a Catholic college in Sioux City that Mauch lost his religion, when bacon and eggs turned out to be a bigger lure than was the miracle of bread and wine being turned into the body and blood of one Jesus H. Christ. Mauch’s was a gradual conversion, fueled largely by heavy doses of a liberal education and dorm-room debate. Were that the sole hallmark of his time in the land of Sue Bee Honey, Old Home Bread, and the Twin Bing, Sioux City would be but a footnote in the Mauch saga. More significant that losing religion, though, was what Mauch found to take it’s place. A fantastic English faculty at Briar Cliff College (now University), ushered Mauch from his first major (engineering), to his second (pre-law), to his third and final: English literature, with minors in philosophy and writing and linguistics. Gone, too, was the notion that college is the place you go for primarily practical considerations, i.e., getting a job. College can be, Mauch learned, the place where ideas and perspectives and histories can transform you, such that whomever you were before is somebody you can no longer be, and whomever you will become is as yet undiscovered. Whenever he hears Sioux City mentioned in Johnny Cash’s rendition of “I’ve Been Everywhere,” Mauch sheds a metaphorical tear for all those who went to college and never learned what he did about college being, if you get the most out of it, about everything but getting a job. He feels especially sad for business majors, although not for the business men and women, who were really just music fans, who ran Sioux City’s famous head shop and record store, Uncle John. Mauch worked summers at the Goodyear store in Sibley so he could afford records during the school year at Uncle John. He still has these records, and the vintage Sex Pistols poster Mike, Uncle John’s late proprietor, gave him, and he still plays those records, even though his business major friends told him long ago that vinyl is dead.
THE SIOUX FALLS YEARS
Just up I-29 from Sioux City is Sioux Falls, South Dakota. These two cities and the small towns within their gravitational pull are known on the local news, and on the shingles hung at many an establishment within their spheres of influence, as Siouxland. While Mauch’s extended stay in Siouxland was a direct result, some would say, of his realization that college was about anything but getting a job when you were done, he had friends in Sioux Falls who had beers to drink, potatoes to fry, rent and utilities to share. After brief stints taking instant credit card applications though a headset, for one major multinational company subcontracting a second major multinational (a harbinger in about 42 ways of economic downturns to come), and selling women’s shoes on commission for a department store in a mall who’s claim to fame is that it attracts more annual visitors than South Dakota’s more traditional top tourist destination, Mount Rushmore, Mauch stumbled onto a DIY venture that ended up influencing his future endeavors greatly. The first phase of these DIY years began when Mauch and his roommate were hired by an local entrepreneur to be the editor and sales manager, respectively, for a brand new arts and entertainment weekly—a local paper in the mold of the Village Voice, etcetera. What the first phase ended up being, unbeknownst to Mauch and his roommate, was some pretty valuable on-the-job-training. In the eight or so months of its existence—a tenure which ended with the publication of the first and last ever issue of Mainstream—Mauch and his roommate learned everything they needed to know to start their own magazine, which was a good thing, too, as their boss turned out to be not only a liar, but a broke liar. Fueled by a host of sales and writer contacts, by an expertise with the then-new Macintosh and desktop publishing, and by a desire to prove that the former boss who still owed them money had been the problem all along, Mauch and his now business partner secured funding and started their own arts and entertainment paper, Tempest, and entered into the mix of what was an artistic renaissance of sorts in Sioux Falls. It was the dawn of the age of grunge when Mauch and the staff first spent all-nighters laying out their magazine, and Sioux Falls, like many places in the U.S., had DIY fever. Band and clubs were sprouting up everywhere, and everywhere they were given a sense of legitimacy. Tempest chronicled that failed revolution for 10 years. For Mauch, though, wanderlust set in long before then. With just a year’s worth of issues under its belt, Mauch told the gang he was moving to Florida. While the daily newspaper in Sioux Falls, The Argus-Leader, would have the world believe Mauch’s moving-on was in no small part a result of a well publicized (by The Argus Leader) rafting incident on a sunny summer afternoon on the Dell Rapids River in a raft made by strapping two tractor-tire tubes to the bottom of a four-by-eight-foot piece of plywood made to hold plastic lawn chairs with the legs cut off and a cooler, a second source has never corroborated this.
THE FLORIDA YEAR PLUS
Aside from the Oelwein year—a year, remember, that he has no memory of—Mauch had spent his entire life in Siouxland. He was writing a lot—working twelve and fourteen hours days—but writing for work wasn’t, isn’t, and never shall be the same as writing poems. What CDs, clothes, bedroom stuffs, and kitchen gear could fit into a gold 1970 Chrysler Newport, Aztec Edition, Mauch packed in, and he lit out for the territories, as many a Midwesterner who's read Huck Finn eventually does. The Winter Park, Florida, year began with the touching of Spanish moss and discovering it was soft, rubbery, and not like hair at all. Mauch did what so many others who wanted to be writers had done: he mimicked masters, writing every day, copying their plots in his short stories, capturing their moods and techniques in his poems. It was an apprenticeship, is how he came see it, and while you may never see the poems and stories he wrote, they were the first stepping stone in his path to becoming whatever he is as a writer today. Mauch landed a job at the coolest movie theater in the world, working for the coolest boss in the world, after he walked up to her one day, resume in hand, and told her he was applying for jobs only at places he thought were cool. He didn’t care what he did, but he wanted to go to work at a place he liked. They say a person and his or her personality is, in the end, a transcript of the patterns of his actions. Mauch, you may have guessed, was destined to leave his amazing job, a month or so shy of being able to serve as escort to Fairuza Balk first, and then Drew Barrymore, when they visited the theater where he worked for film fest events. It was grad school that beckoned, and while Mauch had been able to serve as host to Richard Linklater, who was at the theater for a Slacker event, and who drank some Michelob in Mauch’s apartment, the Balk and Barrymore opportunities will always been ones that got away.
The Newport, with its Aztec patterned landau top, vinyl seats, and exterior rubber molding, didn’t make the trip from Winter Park to Mankato, Minnesota, although a nice, three-foot concrete garden statue of Minerva did. The Newport had shorted out after a botched attempt at jump starting it in the dark reversed its polarity, frying its electrical system. Mauch removed the license plates, tried to scratch out the VIN, and headed north in a Mercury Marquis, the contraband goddess promising extra traction on any ice and snow the December roads might offer.
THE MANKATO DECADE
Mankato. Where does one begin? With the Joe’s Country Breakfast—two plates full of meat and potatoes and eggs for the kind of money you can find in your couch cushions? With Carol Bly deeming Mauch's flash fiction morally irretrievable? With trips to the Most Beautiful Place in the World, which to get to is illegal in three or four different ways? With the cross-dressing parties? With the midway at North Mankato Fun Days? With the Circle Inn (stagger out)? With Pagliai's "B Special" pizza (sausage, salami, Canadian bacon, onions—no association aside from unfortunate naming with Northern Ireland's notorious/loyalist/thug Ulster Special Constabulary) accompanied by a 25-cent pitcher of beer if you ordered it on Thursday or Sunday? With the Rancid, Jawbreaker, and All shows at Marti’s? With Billie Joe Armstrong strumming on some kid’s acoustic at the corner of Warner and South Front? With The Good Thunder Reading Series and its after and then after-after parties? With the pizza-sized Duke Burger at the nearby Eagle’s Nest? With Lowell and Ron holding down the southeast corner of the bar at Maggie’s? With standing room only at Writers’ Bloc readings? With the New York strip from Hy-Vee? With the muskrat that attacked Mauch late one night on the way to Hy-Vee? With Mauch’s gratitude for the boots that allowed him a viable self-defense? With the death threats garnered by a nonfiction piece Mauch wrote about killing the muskrat in self defense before he had the chance to find out if it was rabid? With the monument in Reconciliation Park to commemorate the 38 Dakota Indians hanged there in the largest officially sanctioned mass execution in U.S. history, compliments of Abraham Lincoln? With the blizzards that the valley attracted like a magnet? With river fishing for mercury-infused, prehistoric fish folks should’ve worn gloves to take the hook out of before throwing them back? With the Wagon Wheel breakfasts you could get for the kind of money you sluff from “take a penny, give a penny” trays? With the free taco bar at The Still? With the band Violet and hangover-inducing, dirty-line tap beer at the What’s Up? With the ice slide that Warren Street becomes after an ice storm? With the Olympia? With the Lucky Lager? With the Material Issue show, less than a month before Jim Ellison killed himself? With Laura Ingalls’ Pa comin’ to town for supplies on the buckboard? Mankato gets in the blood, and—just like that, with Mauch as witness—a decade goes by.
THE PERU YEAR
Despite all of the above, Mauch received the offer of a real job—tenure track, even—that brought him to southeastern Nebraska hamlet of Peru. If you take a tally of paved roads, Peru boasts one in, one out, and neither is a one-way. The only pizza is made at the local convenience story, Casey’s, where the top selection was the cheeseburger pie. You have to buy water by the jug, because what comes out of the taps isn’t potable. One of Mauch’s students was the babysitter of the real-life killer of Teena Brandon, as portrayed in the movie Boys Don’t Cry. If you’re a history student, Peru is a worth a visit; you can study what the world was like before the civil right movements and acts of the late 1960s. If you’re an ornithologist, Peru is worth a visit, too; you can witness a bottleneck in the great migration of birds, where the Mississippi and Central flyways overlap. What Mauch learned in Peru about the First Amendment and union contracts, about despotic administrators (ding, dong, the witch is dead), about ballsy students and colleagues, is documented on the Internet, where you can read it for yourself.
MPLS
After what amounted to the equivalent of a rest stop in Omaha, Mauch finally landed in Minneapolis. For real and for good, he’ll tell you. Until it's not.
Cue the short bio.