Stone City

Stone City is a small community located near Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It was made famous by Grant Wood’s fantastical painting entitled, Stone City, Iowa, 1930. This novel is a work of historical fiction set in and around this charmed community during the summer of 1969. As their society is being torn apart by war, poverty, and racism, these star-crossed lovers will come together for one fateful week that will forever change the trajectory of their lives.

Ashley Morgan, thirty-eight, married and mother of three, is in Cedar Rapids for an educational conference. But a chance encounter with Jaymes Fitzgerald, a free-spirited, twenty-four-year-old graduate student and consummate blues player quickly turns into a dinner invitation and an evening of “dancing on water”. The ease of their togetherness leads to an offer to ditch the conference to enjoy a day of exploration and untethered freedom.

They visit historical Stone City, vestiges of Greene’s two-hundred-acre estate, and Jaymes’s favorite hangout – the town’s General Store Pub. Hearing stories of this folkloric town, Ashley learns about Eastern Iowa’s art community, which in part evolved from Grant Wood’s Art Colony Schools of the early ‘30s where Jaymes’s dad, a renowned regional artist from St. Paul’s warehouse district, had attended as a student.

Hungering for more time together, the couple travel farther north on Jaymes’s fiery red, Indian Chief motorcycle to see many of Iowa’s scenic places and cultural interests. Throughout their odyssey filled with edgy scenes, they share long held secrets before returning for the conference’s concluding rooftop luau. After toasting their week of self-expression, they slip away to a private world of flickering candlelight and strains of Dvorak’s New World Symphony to assert their new-found love. Each was oblivious to their looming destinies in this emotionally charged story of two opposing truths.