Life on the road is a restless journey for rock musicians. They have a hunger in their bones for a life that frequently offers little reward.

As soon as they play a show in one town, it’s time to move on with a few dollars in their pocket, a wicked hangover and, if they’re lucky, a good story to tell in the next town.

Most musicians never achieve the limelight. They while away their days exorcising their demons in roadhouses, clubs and bars in the backwaters of the United States.

For Deb Marquart, ISU professor of English, the rewards of the road have become more tangible.

Marquart has combined her experiences on the road with bands in the ’70s and ’80s with her unique literary vision to produce her latest collection of short stories entitled “The Hunger Bone: Rock ‘n’ Roll Stories.”

“The Hunger Bone” was the 1998 recipient of the Capricorn Fiction Award, a prize that is intended to draw attention to an unpublished fiction manuscript of merit. The award is sponsored by The Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA in New York.

In 1999, the collection won the Headwaters Award and is slated for publication in the fall of 2000 by New Rivers Press. The book won out of 130 submissions from North and South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan. The other winner is Patricia Zontelli for “Red Cross Dog.”

Many of the single chapters in “The Hunger Bone” have been published in literary journals such as North American Review, River City, New Letters and Witness and have won literary prizes such as the Dorothy Churchill Cappon Award and the River City Short Fiction Award.

Marquart received her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Liberal Arts from Morehead State before coming to Iowa State for her Master of Arts degree in English. She graduated in 1993 and became a visiting writer at Drake until 1995 when she returned to Iowa State as assistant professor in creative writing. At that time, her first book, “Everything’s a Verb” was published.

The book explores the hunger, both figurative and literal, which musicians feel. The hunger for fame is deeply imbedded; they feel it in their bones. That combines with the very real hunger that stems from the poverty of life on the road.

“I fought with the publisher a lot about that title,” she said. “I think that in the title ‘The Hunger Bone’ there’s a sense of restlessness that musicians feel being hungry for fame and literally hungry, too, because the life of a musician is a life of poverty so the title exemplifies all of that. The word ‘bone’ is in the title because the hunger is really deep and it seems impossible to satisfy that. There is also that restlessness and there is sexual connotation to it as well.”

“The Hunger Bone” is a collection of short stories and flash fiction about traveling rock musicians that focus on the unseen, less-than-glamorous side of touring as a struggling rock band. It is a close look at the personal tolls, the grueling poverty, the gnawing hunger for fame and the small and unlikely moments of redemption.

The book is laid out like Ernest Hemingway’s “In Our Times.” Short stories tell the tales of band members while the pieces of flash fiction (short pieces of 250 words) fill us in on the roadies, bartenders, and other people encountered on the road. Marquart says the form suits the lifestyle of rock musicians and their lives.

“One of the things I figured out while I was writing the book is that you have a cast of thousands,” Marquart said. “There is the audience, the groupies, the girlfriends and the musicians themselves, but a short story is inherently about two people.”

Marquart said the short pieces of flash fiction act like the grout between bricks. They tie the over-arching theme together and fill in what would otherwise be blanks left in the whole story.

“What I tried to do with the flash fictions is to create that cast of thousands,” she said. “Otherwise it would be like watching ‘Ben Hur’ without the throngs in the background, it just wouldn’t be the same.”

Marquart drew heavily upon personal experience as a singer and playing in various bands for the book. There she took on many roles, one of which — chronicler — would not become obvious for many years.

“I toured with club bands that would play regions, one of them had albums,” she said. “Mostly I played in the western part of the United States and I toured a lot in Iowa. In every band my role was a little different. I was always the singer but sometimes I would play keyboards or guitar, whatever they needed me to do.”

Like any collection of stories, what is real and what is fiction become inextricably entangled.

“What I did for the book was I started within some things that actually happened,” Marquart said. “For example, I played with this band that burned down a prom in South Dakota. I played at this county fair where the bass player forgot his bass at home — it was a nightmare. I started with that premise and went from there.”

Marquart said the truth in real events can often be brought out better when it is fictionalized. Many stories with disparate parts can be missing something until tied together with fictional elements that show us a deeper meaning underlying them. Imagination is the key.

“They were basically stories I lived through and then fictionalized,” she said. “Sometimes when you write about things that really happened they are missing an element, so you have to fictionalize in order to explore elements of imagination in the reality of what happened.”

Marquart’s first love is poetry. The satisfaction of writing poetry is more immediate while the rewards of fiction are more delayed.

“Poetry is kind of like instant gratification,” she said. “You can work on a poem in an afternoon and shape it into something that feels finished. Writing prose requires stamina, especially fiction.

“You have to create this world that the characters have to move around in. It takes a lot longer. Writing fiction is work and writing poetry is joy,” she continues. “I have high regard for fiction writers after writing this book. At a conference recently, someone said that fiction writers are like the marines and poets are like the air force.”

Richard Peabody, author of “Buoyancy and Other Myths,” was the final judge of the Capricorn Fiction Award Competition. He found “The Hunger Bone” to be a unique and humorous look at the real lives of rock ‘n’ rollers.

“I like my realism with a twist,” Peabody said. “She has written a sort of Spinal Tap for everyman. Marquart writes consistently zippy sentences that make me laugh, because even the most pitiful characters remain human in embarrassingly real ways.”

Peabody said Marquart is able to write about a difficult subject in a new way.

“It’s really hard to write convincingly about rock ‘n’ roll without being cliched, sentimental or boring,” Peabody said. “Debra knows what goes on in the heart of every musician, she captures all of it in these pages — funny, sad and a little bit twisted.”