Kyle Munson

kmunson@dmreg.com

At first glance Iowa and Westeros don't have much in common.

The latter, bloodier realm springs from the imagination of fantasy writer George R.R. Martin. It's his fictional continent with Seven Kingdoms that teems with medieval-style battles, beheadings and castle intrigue among its vicious rulers as the main setting for HBO's blockbuster "Game of Thrones" series.

Iowa's political invasions by contrast are fought with speeches, not swords.

Westeros emerged in the late 1990s with the launch of Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" epic series of novels (five and counting, about 1,000 pages apiece). But of course the wider world wakes up only after the stories hit the screen.

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Even as Martin, 65, has become the Tolkien of the 21st century, few realize that he spent three formative years in Iowa in the late-'70s as a journalism and English professor at Clarke College (now Clarke University) in Dubuque.

The private Catholic school for women was founded by the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and didn't go coed until 1979.

The first home Martin ever owned — his own humble castle on the shores of the Mississippi River with then-wife Gale Burnick — was a two-story brick built in 1880 at 2266 Jackson St.

"My house was down under the bluffs in the not-so-great section called 'the flats,' " Martin reminisces on his own website. "It was pretty run-down too, which was why I was able to buy it for $18,500. Even by 1976 prices, that was cheap. A little paint and a new roof fixed the major problems, though, and I ended up being very happy with the house."

Savannah Gerlach, 26, grew up at 2266 Jackson but didn't realize that Martin once owned it — even though her boyfriend has been begging her to watch his collection of "Game of Thrones" DVDs.

Martin, who has described himself as a lapsed Catholic, has filled Westeros with a smorgasbord of fictional religions, plus enough sex and gore to appease even Quentin Tarantino. But nearly 40 years ago he worked with and for a school full of nuns in Dubuque.

"He didn't even own a car at that point," said Sister Sheila O'Brien, who likely was the academic vice president who hired Martin. She taught Spanish at Clarke for 44 years and now, at age 74, dedicates her time to Hispanic neighborhoods in Chicago.

"I think he was beginning to come into his own at that point," she added. "He loved to be provocative."

Martin, a New Jersey native with a journalism degree from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., taught journalism and English and moderated the student newspaper. (The newspaper "was great fun and got me in trouble constantly," according to Martin.)

"He had the long hair, but he was very professorial," said Charlie Ellis of Dubuque, who taught alongside Martin in their two-man journalism department.

"I was the electronic guy, and George was the print," said Ellis, 69, who spent four years at Clarke and later retired from the Dubuque school district as its director of technology.

"I didn't see him as a lifelong journalism instructor," Ellis said. "You could tell he was destined for greatness even at that time."

Martin might not have ended up in Iowa if not for George Guthridge, who then taught English at Loras (which had been the Catholic male counterpart to Clarke) and met him at a science-fiction convention in Milwaukee.

Guthridge attended that convention only because a colleague couldn't make the trip, and grant money was just sitting there for a jaunt to Beer City. Initially he hated science fiction and fantasy, but Martin inspired him to write in the genre.

Martin "wasn't making enough money to stay alive," said Guthridge, who now lives in Dillingham, Alaska.

Martin ran weekend chess tournaments to subsidize his writing career, but that work had dried up. So Guthridge put in a word for him at Clarke.

"George changed my life, he really did," Guthridge said. "Not just because he opened doors for me, but he opened this whole vista of sci-fi and fantasy and horror that I never would've gotten into."

"I have a million ideas and I'll never use them all," Martin said in a 1978 story published in the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald. He was interviewed by an intern as a local angle on the science-fiction boom in a post-"Star Wars" world. Martin had won the 1977 Hugo Award for his novella "A Song for Lya" in an era when not every aspiring hack could self-publish online.

At faculty gatherings, "George was often the central person and very sociable, very interesting, challenging, creative," remembered Sister Sara McAlpin.

Ellis sketched the scene of a hangout at Martin's house with, say, a Pink Floyd LP spinning on the turntable in the corner. "We had some parties there," Ellis said. "I'm sure he has some good memories."

Iowa did leave its mark on Martin before he moved to Sante Fe, N.M.: "I think a lot of the stuff in 'A Game of Thrones,' " the author told Vanity Fair, "the snow and ice and freezing, comes from my memories of Dubuque." (The northern edge of the Seven Kingdoms is a 300-mile-long, 700-foot-tall wall of solid ice; Iowa hasn't yet provided such fortification at the Minnesota border to protect us from polkas, hot dishes and rabid walleyes.)

Martin also acknowledged in a webchat for Empire magazine that his 1982 vampire novel "Fevre Dream" was inspired by steamboats on the Mississippi: "Suddenly it seemed to gel for me. Vampires and steamboats: There was a certain dark romanticism to both, and as far as I knew, no one else had ever done vampires on steamboats, and 'Fevre Dream' was the result."

Sister Mary Lou Caffery later spotted Martin's name in the credits as a writer for the 1980s TV series "Beauty and the Beast."

Others noticed his books in stores. Some former colleagues caught up with his career thanks only to HBO.

Most of the people I interviewed for this column haven't waded through Martin's novels. (I'm currently on page 521 of the fourth book, "A Feast for Crows.") Not that I ever imagined nuns as Martin's core audience.

Martin, now recognizable in his signature black sailor cap and wispy white beard, did return to Dubuque several years ago for a signing. He phoned his former colleague, but Ellis wasn't able to attend.

"The story seems endless," Ellis said of "Game of Thrones."

"Endless" is a good word for this pop culture juggernaut since fans continue to harangue Martin to finish the sixth and seventh books in his saga.

Maybe the former journalism professor just needs a long, bitterly cold winter of isolation in Dubuque to get the job done.

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns, blog posts and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/munson. Connect with him on Facebook (Kyle Munson's Iowa) and Twitter (@KyleMunson).