As a traveling musician, Debra Marquart never imagined that she would become a teacher later in life.

Marquart, assistant professor of English, started out as a road musician in the ’70s.

“I started out and was in a really bad country and Western band that played Holiday Inns and stuff. Then I went from there to rock, then hard rock, then entered a progressive heavy metal band,” she said.

Marquart said the progressive heavy metal band was her favorite because it closely resembled opera to her.

“It’s like opera in a way. It’s very theatrical, very drama-filled,” she said. “l liked the volume. It was very loud, dramatic music.”

After 20 years of being involved with music, Marquart settled in Ames with her husband, Pete Manesis, a guitar player. Later, they met up with percussionist Anthony Stevens.

The three gelled musically and adopted the name The Bone People in 1992 as their representative title.

Marquart had the opportunity to put her poems to music with the creation of the band.

“I was really a musician before I became a writer. So when I started writing poems, it seemed natural to put them to music,” she said.

“I worked with the band and created a landscape of music to run under the poems and recorded them,” Marquart said.

Marquart uses her performance background to entertain her students in the classroom.

“It’s interesting how the two intersect,” she said of teaching and performing. “When you are performing, you have to look at the audience to see if you are getting through — to see if your message is cutting through to the audience.

“If not, you have to adjust right in the middle of the performance.”

Treating her students as an audience, she molds her teaching method to fit them.

“You go into the classroom with a plan, but in a way, your students determine how that plan is executed,” she said.

Marquart says her job as a teacher is to show students how to bridge the gap between what is in their heads to what they write on paper.

“Teaching writing is rewarding. The students come to class with an idea of something that they want to say,” she said. “Then, when they go to put it down on paper, it rarely comes out the way they had imagined it would come out.”

Marquart cited a friend, who is a poet, who once told her: “The image in your head of what you want to write — it’s big, complete and wonderful. When you begin to write, it’s small, reduced to words and not very good to look at.”

“My friend, the poet, and I decided that as a writer you have to be willing to face the beauty,” she said. “It requires courage to face the beauty of this big thing you imagined. You have to be brave enough to take a pen to it.”

Marquart said she tries instilling this value into her students.

Because of her dramatic blend of teaching and performing, she recently earned a universitywide award for Early Achievement in Teaching.

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Debra Marquart

Degrees:

• Bachelor’s degree from Moorhead State University in 1984.

• Master’s of liberal arts in creative writing from Moorhead State University in 1990.

• Master’s of arts in creative writing from Iowa State in 1993.

Came to ISU: 1995

Courses taught at ISU: Creative writing and freshman composition.

Books: “Everything’s a Verb.”

Recordings with The Bone People: “A Regular Dervish,” a spoken-word jazz poetry CD (1996) and “Orange Parade,” an acoustic rock CD (1996).