CEDAR FALLS -- Loree Rackstraw was apprehensive about this new teacher, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

A divorced mom with two kids struggling to get her graduate degree and working part-time jobs, Rackstraw was happy being one of the "gang" of novelists-in-training in the warm incubator of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She'd just lost her mentor and teacher, novelist Verlin Cassill, who had abruptly left the workshop. It was 1965. No one had really heard of Vonnegut. His first novel, "Cat's Cradle," had made a ripple, but "Slaughterhouse-Five" was yet to come. So now she sat, expectant and a little angry, watching a rumpled bear of a man duck into the classroom and deliver a few jokes and some straight talk about keeping a reader reading until the end.

He was disarming, and Rackstraw was impressed. As the semester in Iowa City lengthened, a brief love affair began, then ended. Their relationship grew into a friendship that lasted more than 40 years until Vonnegut's death in 2007. He died after a fall in his East Coast home at age 84.

In "Love as always, Kurt -- Vonnegut as I Knew Him," Rackstraw, a professor emeritus at the University of Northern Iowa, writes about Vonnegut with affection. She mined 42 years of private correspondence and conversations with Vonnegut, as well as his essays, speeches, reviews and page proofs, to share an intimate portrait of the man she admired, as well as his triumphs and frustrations as a writer and social activist.

"I was intrigued by his mind. He was compassionate, politically vehement, satirical, humorous and he was very kind to my children. He and I were on the same track and we had a lot of fun. It was an unusual friendship because we didn't see each other all that often over the years, but there were countless letters and phone calls. I realized I had this amazing chronology of his life in these letters. I understood him," Rackstraw said.

Vonnegut himself hinted of their relationship near the end of chapter one in "Slaughterhouse-Five."

"I was a participant in the 'beautiful trouble' he got into and got out of again. That 'trouble' evolved into a bond unique in my life's experience. From the beginning, it defied analysis, so I simply accepted it and came to trust it," Rackstraw writes in "Love as always, Kurt."

The book's official release date is April 11, the second anniversary of Vonnegut's death. Published by De Capo Press, advance copies are expected in bookstores in mid-March. Rackstraw will do several book signings and readings, including an April 23 event at St. Stephen's Catholic Student Center's Social Hall in Cedar Falls, sponsored by University Book & Supply.

Rackstraw was a bit bemused when the London Sunday Times recently published an interview she gave about the memoir, emblazoned with the headline "My Secret Affair With Vonnegut," which, in most aspects, misses the book's point.

Their friendship weathered Vonnegut's divorce and subsequent remarriage, the death of Rackstraw's poet husband, Richard, and the innumerable comings-and-goings of family and friends. She also became friends with Vonnegut's first wife, Jane, and children, particularly Nanny, his youngest daughter.

Her home is filled with Vonnegut's "colorful doodles," self-portraits and graphic art, his gifts to her, often inscribed for "dear Loree." Among Rackstraw's favorites is "Mondrian Socks," geometrically patterned socks drawn with a black felt tip pen with splotches of color; an "Absolut Vodka" advertisement with hands making a cat's cradle, an allusion to "Cat's Cradle"; and a piece he created for her retirement from UNI in 1996. She will donate the letters and artwork to the University of Iowa.

She spent six years working on the book project. "I told Kurt what I was doing, and he was pleased. I told him about two years before he died, and he wanted to know if I was going to include one great weekend in Key West (Florida) when we flipped a sailboat and nearly drowned. I said 'yes,'" Rackstraw recalled, laughing.

The first draft was finished just days before Vonnegut died.

Rackstraw, a former fiction editor of the North American Review, occasionally reviewed Vonnegut's novels. He once surprised her with a telegram, thanking her for one particular review.

"That was Kurt … nobody sent telegrams anymore, but he liked being different. He appreciated what I said about his work because I understood what he was going for, what he was really saying. He liked making people laugh, but sometimes I think that, for readers, the humor obscured some of his deeper insights."

Vonnegut also read Rackstraw's scholarly writings, offering his own criticism and encouragement. He once sent an essay she'd written about misconceptions of female/male equality to Ms. magazine. Editor Gloria Steinem promptly turned it down and Vonnegut called her refusal letter an "obtuse response."

Rackstraw was equally protective of Vonnegut and recognized the melancholy man who lurked beneath the whimsical surface. He attempted suicide in 1984. His books, in one way or another, dealt with the paradox that humans often do harm when they think they are doing good, she said. He was particularly influenced by his experiences as an American soldier imprisoned by the Germans during World War II in Dresden during that city's devastating fire-bombing, on which he based "Slaughterhouse-Five."

She devotes several pages in her book to Vonnegut's two-day 1977 visit to Cedar Falls and speeches and book signings at UNI. He sent her a note after that weekend: "Dearest Loree -- You elate me. What good times we have together -- and how obvious it must be to one and all that we love each other so …"

Rackstraw learned of Vonnegut's fall in a phone call from Nanny Vonnegut. She greeted news of his death with sorrow, but was comforted by one of Vonnegut's scrawled sayings, "No matter how bad things get the music will still be wonderful."

"I miss him a lot," she wrote in her preface. And she does.

Contact Melody Parker at 291-1429 or melody.parker@wcfcourier.com.