On Iowa City’s Market Street stands a low-slung, trailer-like red building. This is Dave’s Fox Head Tavern, one of the sites where the official culture and the counterculture of this most literary town overlap. Often used for student gatherings of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop—and memorialized in season 4 of Girls—the bar boasts such past regulars as poet John Berryman, novelist Denis Johnson, and poet Dean Young. Yet, for all its past sex, drugs, and literary high jinks, today’s Fox Head can’t quite match the volatile seediness of the original Vine, a bar important to Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. “Some of the most terrible things that had happened to me … had happened in [the Vine],” remembers the narrator of Johnson’s short story “Out on Bail”—“But like the others I kept coming back.” Nonetheless, the Fox Head still bridges across time to the vanished counterculture of the long sixties. Hunter Thompson was thrown out of the Fox Head when visiting Iowa City in 1978, and Kurt Vonnegut drank there when he taught at the Writers’ Workshop from 1965 to 1967. Vonnegut’s house, still standing at 800 North Van Buren Street., is only about a half mile from the legendary bar.

Is there a more literary town than Iowa City, Iowa? Iowa City is the place where contemporary English literature matters more than anywhere else on earth. The home of arguably the world’s most famous MFA program, Iowa City has authors’ plaques embedded in the sidewalk (yes, our streets are paved in literary gold), over 100 literary readings per year, and roughly 1,000 writers—young and old, town and gown—in a community of 75,000. No surprise, then, that in 2008 Iowa City was named a UNESCO City of Literature.

Yet as the Fox Head shows, there also exists another Iowa City alongside this broadly accepted and well marketed literary identity. Like a smaller Ann Arbor or Berkeley, Iowa City has long been a countercultural burg, more elusive and more incoherent than the City of Literature brand might suggest. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Iowa City was where antiwar activism coexisted with a fervent dedication to the literary and artistic avant-garde. This era witnessed the innovations of such figures as Denis Johnson, but also artist Vito Acconci (a Workshop poet before he created celebrated art pieces like Seedbed), publisher Alan Kornblum (founder of Coffee House Press), artist Rosemary Mayer (a poet before she revolutionized feminist art), artist Ana Mendieta (celebrated for her earth-body works), writer and Actualist provocateur David Morice (a.k.a. Dr. Alphabet), and poet Alice Notley (a second generation member of the New York School), among others. And this legacy persists, not only in the material traces of that bygone era—the Fox Head, George’s Buffet, and the rock club Gabe’s—but also in the revolutionary 21st-century writing of trans poet and artist Anaïs Duplan and queer novelist Andrea Lawlor. Most importantly, perhaps, the vestiges of an avant-garde survive in the fandom of those students, faculty, and townspeople who seek a countercultural aesthetic that doesn’t always completely jibe with the more mainstream literary identity. The bookstores, headshops, bars, and clubs that Morice described as “Poetry City”—a place of artistic experimentation where a writer could, as Morice once did, wrap an entire city block in a poem—have largely disappeared thanks to urban renewal and real estate development.

Still, some sites remain. And, more excitingly still, new countercultural institutions have emerged.

If we want to keep college town communities dynamic, we should work hard to keep them weird.

If one were to take a tour of an alternative Iowa City, past and present, one could begin at the Black Angel (1913), the eight-and-a-half-foot tall memorial created by Mario Korbel that stands in Oakland Cemetery on the northside of town. This Beaux Art sculpture inspired Mendieta’s 1975 Super 8 film of the same name, in which the Cuban American artist ritualistically creates a silhouette of her body on the tombstone that extends from the base of the statue. In the film, Mendieta first uses dark dirt or paint to outline her body; then she traces it again in red pigment before adding a red “heart.” Mendieta completes the silhouette with a large black X also composed of dirt or paint before standing on the stone and swinging her leg, brushing away the figure with her foot. Short and intense, Black Angel provides a powerful reminder of how a radical artist can make a local landmark troubling and new.

Mendieta’s innovative use of the Black Angel statue looks ahead to Lawlor’s equally bold appropriation of the memorial in the novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (2017). In this celebrated trans text, Paul Polydoris, the protean protagonist, attempts to seduce a visiting writer in the shadow of the vampire-winged statue. Bored by the local lore about the angel—“Supposedly if you touch it you’ll die,” explains Paul—the writer still seems sufficiently moved to engage in oral sex with the protagonist. In Lawlor’s capable hands, visiting a Beaux Art statue becomes an unlikely prelude to a queer tryst and one of the more famous local points of interest commemorates a long-marginalized portion of the community.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a rich novel in many ways, but it has particular value for me as a de facto guidebook to countercultural Iowa City in the early 1990s. Indeed, one can even follow Lawlor’s inadvertent travel tips from the Black Angel to the Fox Head, nearby, for a drink with the memories of Vonnegut, Thompson, and others.

But one doesn’t only have to linger with the ghosts. While Iowa City, like virtually all college towns, has erased much of its avant-garde past, contemporary artists and writers have created their own bohemian enclaves and institutions.

Head south from the Fox Head on Gilbert Street, and you’ll pass downtown, and then the celebrated bookstore Prairie Lights, home of countless literary readings. Soon, one will notice an elegant mansion at the intersection with Bowery Street. This is the home of Public Space One, “an artist-led, community-driven, contemporary art center” founded in 2002. PS1, as it’s known, includes a gallery, a print-making co-op, a media arts co-op, and, perhaps most importantly, the Center for Afrofuturist Studies—an institution whose inspirational vision statement reads, “To live in a world where Black artists thrive.” Iowa City is hardly as white as the rest of the state, but its Black population is, according to the most recent census, still only 8.4 percent of the town’s population. More reason to celebrate Duplan’s 2016 creation of the center, a residency program for artists of color that also displays artwork and hosts readings.

These are hardly the only initiatives that promise to ensure the survival of a countercultural sensibility, broadly defined, in this city of the arts. The 2015 founding of Vetch: A Magazine of Trans Poetry and Poetics by Stephen Ira and Liam O’Brien, poets from the Writers’ Workshop, and the 2017 creation of Feed Me Weird Things, a fiercely eclectic music series by the much-mourned Chris Wiersma, testifies to the irrepressible avant-gardism of this seemingly typical Big Ten town.

And that may be the lesson of all the college towns across the country. If we want to keep these communities dynamic, we should work hard to keep them weird. Places like Iowa City often have scandalous reputations, particularly when embedded in red states. Yet that reputation sometimes stems not from bacchanalian excess, but rather from a refusal to accept the status quo. Ensuring that our college towns remain places of real not rote learning, of innovative education not AI simulation, means encouraging their residents, within and without the university, to forge ahead, push the limit, break through.

These educational communities don’t exist solely to support sports teams and traffic in alumni nostalgia: They also provide, for the young and the bold, opportunities to create books like Jesus’ Son and films like The Black Angel. And, perhaps, to push back against the powers that be, at home and across the nation.