Wisconsin People & Ideas – Spring 2014

wisc

people & ideas

nsin the magazine of the wisconsin academy of sciences, arts and letters

The Nickolas Butler Interview

Meet the author of the next great Midwestern novel: Shotgun Lovesongs

Climate & Energy Initiative Update How can we reboot Wisconsin’s energy strategy to address climate change?

Fiction and Poetry Contest Winners $5.00 Vol. 60, No. 2

Spring 2014

Prize-winning works from our 2014 fiction and poetry contests

Be informed.

Be inspired. wpr.org Wisconsin and the World.

Contents

spring 2014 FEATURES 4 FROM THE DIRECTOR Moving Climate Solutions Forward

The Steenbock Center, offices of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

Wisconsin People & Ideas (ISSN 1558-9633) is published quarterly by the nonprofit Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters and is distributed free of charge to Wisconsin Academy members. For information about joining the Wisconsin Academy to receive this magazine, visit wisconsinacademy.org/join.

Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Copyright © 2014 by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. All rights reserved. Postage is paid at Madison. Postmaster: Send address changes to mailing address below.

Wisconsin People & Ideas Jason A. Smith, editor Jean Lang, copy editor Jody Clowes, arts editor Meg Domroese, science editor Augusta Scescke, editorial assistant Designed by Huston Design, Madison Cover photo: Nickolas Butler, 2014.

Photograph by Andrea Paulseth/VolumeOne

7 Upfront 7 Wisconsin Arts Board fans the flames of creativity 9 Wisconsin Civility Project promotes democracy through conversation 10 White-nose syndrome found in Wisconsin’s threatened cave bats 11 The Hal Prize brings national writers and photographers to Door County 12 FEllow’s Forum Meet the new Wisconsin Academy Fellows, seven brilliant Wisconsinites with lifelong commitments to intellectual discourse and public service.

16 PHOTO ESSAY Lois Bielefeld’s Weeknight Dinners series provides a glimpse of people’s habits and personal spaces—and what they reveal.

24 INTERVIEW Catching up with Nickolas Butler, author of the critically acclaimed new novel Shotgun Lovesongs.

30 Initiatives Update Erik Ness shares some inspiring examples of climate change leadership in the run up to the publication of the Wisconsin Academy report, Climate Forward: A New Road Map for Wisconsin’s Climate and Energy Future

36 Galleria Jody Clowes chronicles the life and career of Donald Friedlich, one of America’s premier metalsmiths and jewelers.

administrative offices/steenbock gallery 1922 university ave. | madison, WI 53726 tel. 608-263-1692 www.wisconsinacademy.org

Photo credit: Amanda E. Shilling

Jane Elder, executive director Randall Berndt, assistant curator, James Watrous Gallery Jody Clowes, exhibitions manager, James Watrous Gallery Meg Domroese, Initiatives program director Aaron Fai, project coordinator Martha Glowacki, director, James Watrous Gallery Elysse Lindell, outreach and data coordinator Don Meyer, business operations manager Amanda E. Shilling, director of development Jason A. Smith, director of communications and editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas Panelists Emily Jones (Clean Wisconsin), Ron Seely (Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism) and Todd Ambs (Healing Our Waters - Great Lakes Coalition) discuss threats to our freshwater resources at the Wisconsin Academy’s recent Resilient Wisconsin Day forum. See page 30 for an update from other Academy environmental initiatives.

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Contents

spring 2014 READ WISCONSIN 43 READ WISCONSIN

Announcing the winners of our 2014 poetry and fiction contests 44 Poetry

Poems from our 2014 poetry contest winners:

Dion Kempthorne, Jeanie Tomasko, and Judith Harway

50 FIctiON

The first-place prize story from our 2014 fiction contest,

“The Walk to Makino,� by Karen Loeb

51 Book Reviews 51 Erika Janik reviews The Good Luck Girls of Shipwreck Lane,

by Kelly Harms

53 Brendon A. Smith reviews Marketplace of the Marvelous:

The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine, by Erika Janik

55 NEW & REcent Releases Selected titles by Wisconsin authors

56 LOCAL BOOKSHOP SPOTLIGHT

Our Wausau correspondent Dino Corvino pays a visit to the

oldest bookshop in Wisconsin: Janke Book Store

Our gallery, the James Watrous Gallery in Overture Center for the Arts, Madison

The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters Officers of the Council President: Millard Susman President-elect: Linda Ware Immediate-past President: James W. Perry Treasurer: Diane Nienow Secretary: James W. Perry Vice President of Sciences: Richard Burgess Vice President of Arts: Marianne Lubar Vice President of Letters: Linda Ware Statewide Councilors-at-Large Les Alldritt, Washburn John Ashley, Sauk City Mark Bradley, Wausau Patricia Brady, Madison Roberta Filicky-Penesky, Sheboygan Art Harrington, Milwaukee Joseph Heim, La Crosse Jesse Ishikawa, Madison Tom Luljak, Milwaukee Tim Riley, La Crosse Tim Size, Sauk City Marty Wood, Eau Claire Officers of the Academy Foundation President: Jack Kussmaul Vice President: Andrew Richards Treasurer: Diane Nienow Secretary: David J. Ward Founder: Ira Baldwin Foundation Directors Marian Bolz Greg Dombrowski Jane Elder Terry Haller Douglas J. Hoerr Millard Susman

Chrissy Mount from Luck, Wisconsin, captures the history of Janke Book Store in an oil painting featuring founder Carl Janke (rear right), Jane Janke Johnson (with longtime store denizen Marvin the Cat), Sarah Johnson, and John Janke. Mount's award-winning oil paintings focus on vintage and Americana themes inspired by her rich Wisconsin heritage. Her website is vintagepainter.com.

Learn more about Janke Book Store on pate 56.

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NEWS for MEMBERS Do you love Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine? Are you amazed at the depth and breadth of Wisconsin Academy programming?

Then why not share Academy life with friends and family? Give a membership to the Wisconsin Academy for only $30. E-mail members@wisconsinacademy.org or call Elysse Lindell at 608-263-1692 ext. 14 to arrange for a gift membership today.

There are so many ways to stay connected to the Academy in between issues: sign up for our e-mail updates at wisconsinacademy. org/signup, join our Facebook page at facebook.com/wisconsinacademy, or follow our Twitter feed at twitter.com/ WASAL. Members in Central and Western Wisconsin are encouraged to attend our Academy Evening talk in La Crosse with Wisconsin Academy Fellow and neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson at 7:00 pm on Monday, June 2, at the Viterbo Fine Arts Center. See the back cover of this issue for more details. Bring a friend—it’s free!

The Wisconsin Academy thanks the following institutional members for their continued support: Carroll University Marshfield Clinic UW Colleges UW–Baraboo/Sauk County UW–Barron County UW–Eau Claire UW–Fond du Lac UW–Fox Valley UW–Madison UW–Manitowoc UW–Marathon County UW–Marinette UW–Marshfield/Wood County UW–Milwaukee UW–Richland UW–Rock County UW–Sheboygan UW–Washington County UW–Waukesha

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Lois Bielefeld is a conceptual photographer who splits her time between fine art and commercial/fashion photography. She was born and currently resides in Milwaukee with her teenage daughter. Bielefeld has her BFA in photography from Rochester Institute of Technology and from 2003–2010 she lived in New York City. Besides photography, she feels passionate about Scrabble, urban gardening, and bicycling adventures.

Jody Clowes is exhibitions manager for the Wisconsin Academy’s James Watrous Gallery in Overture Center for the Arts, Madison. Prior to joining the Academy staff, Jody served as director of UW–Madison’s Design Gallery, associate curator of decorative arts at Milwaukee Art Museum, and director of exhibitions at Detroit’s Pewabic Pottery. A curator and writer, Jody is interested in the complex relationship between design intention, technique, and cultural meaning. She received her MA from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware and a BA in studio art and art history from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Dino Corvino has spent a lifetime working for the development of his community, as well as finding ways to give voice to the community at large. He founded the low-power, FM radio station WNRB, and he is one of the co-founders of a leading hyperlocal, citizen-journalism website, citizenwausau.com.

Erika Janik is a freelance writer and the executive producer/ editor of Wisconsin Life at Wisconsin Public Radio. She is the author many books, including A Short History of Wisconsin (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2010), Apple: A Global History (Reaktion Books, 2011), and the newly published Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine (Beacon Press, 2014). Janik’s work has appeared in Isthmus, The Onion, Midwest Living, the Wisconsin Magazine of History, Wisconsin Natural Resources magazine, the Wisconsin State Journal, and in the book Renewing the Countryside: Wisconsin (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007).

Erik Ness has been writing about science, health, and the environment for more than two decades for publications as diverse as Discover, OnEarth, Prevention, and The Progressive. He lives in Madison.

Andrea Paulseth grew up in Eau Claire and is still proud to call it her home. She graduated from UWEC in 2007 with a BFA in photography. For the past six years she’s had the privilege of being the staff photographer for the fast-growing culture and entertainment publication of the Chippewa Valley, Volume One Magazine. When she’s not taking photos, Paulseth enjoys spending time with her family and stays very active in her local church and community.

Brendon A. Smith lives in Madison with his lovely wife, his talented son, and the world’s most annoying dog. By day he is the director of communications at Willy Street Co-op; by night he writes plays, and has recently had a few one-acts produced.

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F R O M T H E D I R E C TO R

Moving Climate Solutions Forward JANE ELDER WISCONSIN ACADEMY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Global climate change is a serious issue that becomes more serious with each passing day. This spring heralded the release of three new reports from respected scientific organizations that amplify concerns about the impact of human-driven change in our atmosphere, affirming for us that the Wisconsin Academy’s work in this arena is needed, timely, and significant.

On March 18, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) launched a new initiative to expand the dialogue on the risks of climate change. At the heart of the initiative is What We Know: The Reality, Risks, and Response to Climate Change, an assessment of current climate science and impacts.

According to project co-chair James J. McCarthy, a Harvard biological oceanographer and former AAAS president, What We Know is “intended to state very clearly the exceptionally strong evidence that Earth’s climate is changing, and that future climate change can seriously impact natural and societal systems.”

McCarthy notes that many of those who already know about the evidence for climate change and what is causing it “do not know the degree to which many climate scientists are concerned about the risks of possibly rapid and abrupt climate change.” McCarthy says that this is why AAAS is redoubling efforts to discuss climate change with multiple audiences, “from business leaders and financial experts to decision makers in all walks of life.”

On March 31 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is comprised of thousands of volunteer scientists from around the globe (including a few high-level researchers from Wisconsin) issued the findings of its working group on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability.

The report details the projected impacts on human health from heat waves and flooding, losses in crop yields, increased risks for species extinction, shrinking downstream water supplies as glaciers also shrink, and much more. IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri delivered a blunt and sobering distillation of the impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability report: “No one on this planet will be untouched by climate change.”

The IPCC report also provided guidance to decision makers, including two key points that bring even more immediacy to the AAAS What We Know initiative. The first was a reminder that even though we know with a high degree of certainty what kinds of climate change impacts we’ll experience, we have no way of predicting the timing or severity of impacts. Climate change is a moving target. As such, the only way to hit it is to anticipate a range of impacts—even if our efforts to adapt to these impacts may or may not be fully effective.

The second point was that near-term adaptation and mitigation choices will affect climate change impacts throughout the 21st century and beyond. If we don’t make these efforts now, the scale of impact will be more severe and widespread.

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In early April the IPPCC issued the third report of this current series with a focus on the reduction of emissions. The report affirms that emissions are still high and rising, and points out that many current strategies for reducing emissions are insufficient. Our window of opportunity for making meaningful reductions to stave off severe climate disruption is getting smaller and smaller, said the report.

So where does the Wisconsin Academy fit in this spectrum of activity to address climate change?

In a small but significant way, we apply insight from science and guidance from Wisconsin leadership to help our state respond to this global—but also quite local—challenge.

Wisconsin has a wealth of research and technical capacity in the areas of climate science and clean energy, and we have a rich conservation heritage. The Wisconsin Academy is the place where these things come together, where people who contribute to thoughtful and civil dialogue on climate change can help identify potential strategies and solutions for Wisconsin.

To this end, we’re releasing on July 1 of this year a new Wisconsin Academy report called Climate Forward: A New Road Map for Wisconsin’s Climate and Energy Future. This report is the product of a two-year collaboration and dialogue with climate and energy leaders in Wisconsin. Our intent is that Climate Forward will serve as an essential tool for addressing our climate and energy challenges in Wisconsin. It is designed to provide an assessment of current energy resources and needs, and a practical vision for how we can harness innovation, imagination, and our Wisconsin values to shape a future that is good for our environment, our economy, and life in our state.

In Climate Forward we examine many facets of solutions to reducing emissions and reliance on fossil fuel, and we hope that it thoughtfully lays out the challenge for Wisconsin to be a leader in energy conservation and efficiency, renewable energy, transportation, natural carbon storage and various process and system changes. We also profile more than a dozen businesses, communities, farms, and individuals that are in the vanguard of positive change and 21st-century thinking about climate and energy.

We hope Climate Forward will spark a wider, deeper, and more vigorous conversation about Wisconsin’s role in making informed and thoughtful choices that affect our lives today and for generations to come. We’ve included a preview of the report on page 30 of this issue. The full version will be available on July 1, 2014.

Questions or comments? E-mail jelder@wisconsinacademy.org

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Wisconsin Arts Board Fans the Flames of Creativity Art that interacts with and improves local communities is essential for maintaining—and improving—our quality of life in Wisconsin. Thankfully, we have a state agency dedicated to cultivating and promoting arts that make our communities great: the Wisconsin Arts Board.

Even though the Arts Board is celebrating in 2014 their forty year anniversary of supporting community arts programs, people are sometimes surprised to discover just how much influence they have. “Technical assistance on the front end of things tends to get lost over the years,” says Wisconsin Arts Board director George Tzougros. “Without the Arts Board fanning the early flame of a project, you don’t get the successful piece at the other end. But it’s rare that people know about this early history,” he adds with a chuckle.

One type of behind-the-scenes work the Arts Board does is to advise individual artists and arts organizations and help them overcome challenges. For instance, Tzougros and assistant director Karen Goeschko travel to coffee shops and community centers across the state to hold Office Hours on the Road where they answer questions like, How can I start an art studio? or How can we plan a public mural project?

“It’s important to connect with people where they are, not just by phone and e-mail,” Tzougros says, referencing Office Hours held in Washburn, Superior, Milwaukee, La Crosse, Eau Claire, Rhinelander, Madison, Wausau, Fish Creek, and Appleton. He adds that the coffee shop environment “gives people a chance to know that we are human beings coming to listen to what you’ve got to say—and hopefully help you through what you’re dealing with.”

One of the perennial questions Tzougros encounters during Office Hours has to do with artists seeking connections to other artists or organizations. If it is promotional or networking help they want, Tzougros usually directs artists to Portal Wisconsin, the online arts and culture community created by the Arts Board and other members of the Wisconsin Cultural Coalition. (Editor’s

Note: The Wisconsin Academy is part of this coalition.) Portal is a great resource for people working in the fields of arts, humanities, and history, with up-to-date postings on auditions, calls for artwork and conference paper submissions, jobs, residencies, and other opportunities for artists across the disciplines.

But many artists seek collaborative opportunities, too, and Tzougros emphasizes that “the Arts Board is good at working to find people who have like interests, pulling them together, and saying, How can we all work together to the betterment of our part of this industry and therefore to the betterment of the citizens of Wisconsin?”

In addition to creating connections between individual artists and organizations, the Arts Board also encourages collaboration on a larger, institutional scale. As an example, Tzougros relays the history of Film Wisconsin, a nonprofit organization that reaches out to people who are interested in making films, television programs, even video games in Wisconsin.

When the state film office was eliminated from the Department of Tourism in 2005, the Arts Board created and facilitated a task force with film industry leaders in Green Bay, Madison, and Milwaukee. “Somebody’s got to send the e-mails, create the distribution list, make sure that lunch is ordered—all of that kind of stuff,” Tzougros says with a smile. From these Arts Board task force meetings emerged Film Wisconsin, which incentivizes the local production of multimedia entertainment ventures.

Film Wisconsin was responsible for bringing film crews for Public Enemies, the 2009 Universal Studios movie starring Johnny Depp, to several locations across Wisconsin. While projects like this provide national (even global) visibility for our state, they also support Wisconsin’s economy. Production teams patronize local hotels, restaurants, car and prop rental shops, and other businesses during shooting. Public Enemies alone spent $7.4 million on Wisconsin workers and vendors, and the movie and television industry as a whole is responsible for almost 8,000 jobs and $206.3 million in annual Wisconsin wages.

ABOVE: The Wisconsin Arts Board’s Karen Goeschko and George Tzougros hold a meeting with local residents at Volume One in Eau Claire to discuss regional arts and cultural activities, explore opportunities, and address challenges in their work.

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TOP: “Brick” streets of downtown Oshkosh on U.S. Highway 45 get a 1920s makeover on the set of the Johnny Depp movie Public Enemies.

MIDDLE: Wayne Valliere stands in front of an Ojibwe-style birch bark hunter’s canoe that he made through Wiigwaasi-Jiimaan: These Canoes Carry Culture, a program designed to teach Ojibwe youth the traditional art of canoe building.

BOTTOM: Kelsy Vestin (left) and Katie Masson (right), members of Shakespeare on the Edge’s travelling youth core company the Eclectic Rogues, perform in a 2009 production of The Tempest at the Piazza, the stone foundation of the oldest barn in Green County.

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Image credit: B. Marcus Cederström Image credit: Jennifer Bethel

These types of mentoring and networking efforts are, as Tzougros characterizes them, “the invisible hand” of the Arts Board, elevating both the quality and quantity of arts in the state.

Perhaps more visible expressions of Arts Board support are grants that fund specific projects as well as the seasonal work of arts organizations. The popular Creative Communities grants support projects in the areas of arts education, folk and traditional arts, and local arts. Eligible arts education projects bring arts programs to K–12 grade students, whether it’s within schools or in the community at large. Folk and traditional arts funds go to projects that document, display, or otherwise honor the work of traditional and folk artists. Local arts grants support projects that include public participation and planning, with an emphasis on projects embracing cultural diversity.

Shakespeare on the Edge, a recent recipient of a Creative Communities grant in the area of arts education, used Arts Board funds to develop Shakespeare! By Kids, for Kids! Participation in theater helps youth to “develop character, self-esteem, confidence, peer-bonds, and combat bullying,” Shakespeare on the Edge reports in its mission statement. Their major project was a February 2014 community youth production of Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing at the Monroe Arts Center.

The Chippewa Valley Museum in Eau Claire was awarded funds under a Creative Communities grant in the area of folk and traditional arts for Intersections, an exhibition showcasing the work of regional artists. Opening in July 2014, Intersections features the needlework of Hmong artist Mai Xee Xiong, canoes built

by Ojibwe artist Wayne “Mino-Giizhig” Valliere, and the ornate turkey calls of Scott Wilhelm. These artists are stewards of the diverse cultural traditions of Wisconsin. By sharing their work in a long-term exhibition, the Chippewa Valley Museum helps preserve and celebrate the cultural fabric of our state.

Tzougros, who has been director since 1996, and his Arts Board colleagues have been fanning the flames of many a creative fire throughout the state for over forty years. The Arts Board’s fortieth anniversary celebration, happening this year, should be observed by all those who have directly and indirectly benefited from their excellent work. Hopefully they will continue to mentor arts programs, foster collaboration, and provide funding to sustain the arts—and support the arts economy—long into the future.

While the Arts Board’s work has widespread influence, the agency’s many ongoing efforts are not always recognized as interconnected. So the next time you attend a film festival, enjoy a youth theater production, or experience a new form of folk art and feel inspired, keep in mind the role the Arts Board has in fanning the flames of inspiration and creativity in your community.

—Augusta Scescke

Image credit: Royal Broil/Flickr.com

UPFRONT

UPFRONT

Cultivating Conversation Wisconsin Civility Project Promotes Democracy through Civil Discussion Pay attention. Listen. Be inclusive. Don’t gossip. Show respect.

Be agreeable. Apologize. Give constructive criticism. Take responsibility. Most of us learned these basic rules of discussion back in grade school. Yet, how often does anyone really abide by them anymore?

While civil discussion is an age-old concept and a core principle of democratic societies, one needs only to turn on a TV or listen to, gulp, talk radio to see that reasoned and respectful conversation is on the decline.

Tom Grogan, leader of the Oshkosh Civility Project, believes society can reclaim some intellectual and cultural territory lost to polemicists and pundits alike by incorporating these nine basic rules of civil communication into everyday life. Grogan emphasizes that practicing civility is necessary for us to foster healthy debate, empathize with each other, and work through cultural issues.

“We make stronger communities by having a shared understanding of the principles of interpersonal communication,” he says.

Along with Oshkosh Civility Project co-founders Walter Scott and Karlene Grabner, Grogan facilitates civility discussions at area public schools, businesses, faith communities, and on campus at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh, where he is Special Assistant to the Chancellor. Since the Oshkosh Civility Project began in 2011, over nine hundred community members have signed a pledge to adopt the rules of civil discussion and work to enhance their communication and compassion skills.

Grogan says the Oshkosh Civility Project’s model is derived from a public service campaign by the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation called “Speak Your Peace.” Drawing on the 2002 book Choosing Civility: The Twenty-five Rules of Considerate Conduct by Dr. P.M. Forni of the Johns Hopkins University, the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation launched “Speak Your Peace” in 2003 as an attempt to address the hurtful effects of divisive, uncivil communication in its own community as well as the country at large.

Today the “Speak Your Peace” model is being used in Oshkosh, Door County, and Appleton as well as more distant places—Truckee, California; Montgomery County, New York; and Bowling Green Township, Ohio—to address bullying, hate speech, and other modes of communication that erode democracy.

Grogan’s Oshkosh Civility Project has used a version of the “Speak Your Peace” model for well-received presentations in Waukesha, Fond du Lac, Green Bay, and Madison, and he and his colleagues have provided direct guidance to Door County and Bowling Green Township in promoting their own civility pledges.

Grogan points out that this civility model resonates with so many people in part because citizens are tired of the decidedly abrasive nature of much of today’s public dialogue, especially in the arena of politics.

“There really is a huge piece of unfinished work that relates to the political divide in the state,” he says. But Grogan is optimistic about the power of civil speech to help “heal the fracture,” adding that finding a “level of mature, reflective, introspective discussion—where we’re actually learning and growing through disagreement—is what the practice of civility is trying to advance.”

Grogan recently launched a networking site called The Wisconsin Civility Project to connect the different civility efforts around the state and country. If you are interested in starting a civility pledge or advocating the nine rules of civil communication in your neighborhood, organization, school, or business, visit wisconsincivilityproject.org for more information.

—Augusta Scescke

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White-nose syndrome found in Wisconsin Bats “The discovery is not a surprise, but it’s a sad day for Wisconsin. We face the loss of multiple bat species and the benefits they provide to our ecosystems and our people,” Crain says. “[But] we knew this day would come because white-nose syndrome spreads rapidly, bat to bat and bat to cave.”

Bats play an important role in nature by eating many species of insects, including those that can damage forests or transfer diseases like West Nile Virus. Wisconsin is home to several of the upper Midwest’s largest bat hibernation sites and historical estimates have put the population at between 350,000 and 500,000 bats.

At this time, the discovery in the Grant County mine appears to be an isolated occurrence, and cave and mine owners across the state have been notified of the disease-positive site. The Wisconsin DNR’s visual surveys of 85 other mine and cave sites this winter did not find any other signs of white-nose syndrome. However, the DNR is awaiting results from routine genetic tests underway on samples collected at nineteen of those other sites.

DNR officials will be meeting with external white-nose syndrome science and stakeholder teams to discuss the findings and how best to proceed based on data collected this

Photo credits: (left) Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources/ (right) Jeff Durbin

White-nose syndrome, a bat disease that has spread to 23 states and killed up to five million bats since 2006, has been confirmed in Wisconsin, according to officials from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Results from visual inspection and genetic and tissue tests completed in early April showed that 2% of bats in a Grant County mine have the disease, named for the characteristic white fuzz on their nose, wings, and tails, according to Erin Crain, who leads the Department of Natural Resources’ Natural Heritage Conservation Program.

Caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans, whitenose syndrome is an infection of the skin of hibernating bats.

The fungus affects the respiratory system, causing bats to frequently awaken, thereby depleting their energy stores and increasing the chances that starvation or dehydration will kill them before spring arrives. Up to 95% of bats in infected caves and mines in other states have died from the disease. It does not affect people or other animal species.

DNR bat crews had been wrapping up winter surveillance efforts for 2014 when they discovered eleven individual bats with the classic signs of white-nose syndrome in the Grant County mine. The mine is within flying distance for bats from a site in Illinois where white-nose syndrome had been confirmed in 2012.

LEFT: A bat with white-nose syndrome, a disease that has spread to 23 states and killed up to 5 million bats in America since 2006.

RIGHT: Wisconsin DNR conservation biologist Paul White examines a bat for the disease during winter surveillance efforts in Grant County

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winter. The teams are advisory and will forward management recommendations to the DNR for consideration, according to Crain.

Most Wisconsin caves that serve as bat hibernacula have been seasonally closed to the public for several years as part of measures the DNR has taken to give hibernating bats the best possible chance of avoiding the disease. Voluntary prevention agreements are in place with owners of private and commercial caves and mines open to human access, and recreational cavers are required to follow decontamination procedures to prevent transmission of disease between sites.

But more must be done to stop the spread of white-nose syndrome to Wisconsin’s cave-dwelling bat species, which are

already listed as threatened (a status that makes it illegal to kill them or take action that would result in their death).

Wisconsin citizens can help bats by not disturbing them, especially during hibernation season, by following all decontamination requirements when entering caves or mines, and by volunteering to monitor bat populations.

“Now more than ever we need Wisconsinites’ help to keep our bats healthy as they [head] into next year’s hibernation period and the challenges they will face,” Crain says.

Learn more about bats and volunteering opportunities on DNR’s Bat Program website, found at wiatri.net/inventory/bats.

—Jason A. Smith With contributions from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

INTRODUCING THE HAL PRIZE

Peninsula Pulse, Door County’s popular arts and news weekly, recently announced a new literary and photography contest to be held in conjunction with Write On, Door County, a nonprofit literary retreat located just south of Fish Creek.

Named after the late Harold “Hal” Grutzmacher (pictured right), the writer and professor who founded Passtimes Books in Sister Bay, the Hal Prize is available to anyone in the United States for works submitted in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and photography.

Selected by contest judges with relevant experience in each field, works of Hal Prize winners in each category will receive publication in Peninsula Pulse’s annual Literary Issue, which reaches a readership of 17,000. In addition, the author or photographer will receive a cash award of up to $150, a one-week stay at Write On, Door County, a class at Peninsula School of Art (a nationally recognized year-round destination for artists and art appreciators), and other prizes.

Grutzmacher is remembered as an avid reader, writer, poet, columnist, critic, and editor, who influenced a number of writers from Wisconsin and beyond. The Hal Prize memorializes the life and career of this influential member of the Door County community.

According to son Steve, who now runs Passtimes Books, Grutzmacher had a passion for writing about the Cubs and prominent Chicagoans, as well as an abiding interest in the Romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth. Grutzmacher became acquainted with many writers and poets during his life in academe, often acting as Beloit College faculty liaison to visiting writers and sharing meals with authors like Philip Roth and Wallace Stegner.

Aside from literary pursuits, Grutzmacher was a champion of arts and culture in Door Country.

“He had the community at heart,” says John Lowry, a friend who served with Grutzmacher on the Ephraim Village Board.

Grutzmacher’s passion for the written word, as well as his desire to create an

Photo credit: Family of Harold Grutzmacher

Peninsula Pulse Unveils New, Improved Contest for Writers and Photographers

accessible, inviting environment for creativity in Door County, are the twin banners under which the annual Hal Prize contest flies today.

Judges for 2014 include poet Heid Erdrich, Wisconsin authors Michael Perry and Lesley Kagen, and Door County photographers Len Villano and Kelly Avenson.

All submissions for the Hal Prize should be sent digitally. The deadline for submission is Friday, June 27, 2014; the deadline for next year’s contest will be Friday, April 25, 2015.

Visit TheHalPrize.Submittable.com for complete contest guidelines and to submit creative work.

—Jason A. Smith

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With contributions from Sally Slattery

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MEET THE 2014 WISCONSIN ACADEMY FELLOWS

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ost people in Wisconsin know at least one or two innovative people whose work has transformed our state and the world in some meaningful way. These people—doctor, painter, or poet—are our friends, colleagues, and neighbors. They are part of the fabric of our state, and as such their work helps define who we are as a people.

Through Fellowship, the Wisconsin Academy seeks to recognize and acknowledge the best and brightest our state has to offer. To reach this pinnacle of Academy recognition, Fellows will have demonstrated high levels of achievement in—or at the intersections of—the sciences, arts, or letters, and will have shown a lifelong commitment to civil discourse and public service.

It is important that we recognize and celebrate the Fellows, of which the Wisconsin Academy currently has eighty-four. But often in recognizing these Wisconsin treasures, we get caught up in lists of accomplishments, publications, and projects only to forget that, at heart, these are people who love their work and their state.

Before we inducted seven new Fellows this April, we asked each one a few questions about their work and lives in order to better get to know them. Here’s what the class of 2014 had to say:

What was your first reaction to being named a Wisconsin Academy Fellow?

Chapman: I was amazed, and terrifically thrilled, to receive [Fellows Selection Committee Chair] Linda Ware’s call during my January writing retreat at the Banff Centre’s Leighton Studios. (I might have thought it was an ordinary call if she hadn’t titled her earlier email “Nota Bene.”) The red squirrel outside my window was the first to be told, and the mule deer, and then I called up Will, my spouse. I love the work that the Academy does in its lecture series on issues affecting Wisconsin and the world, and

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I love its emphasis on integrating the sciences, arts, and letters, and so I felt a great honor to be included among the distinguished Fellows chosen.

Kelsey Foley: My reaction was incredulousness because I didn’t know I had been nominated. Of course, that initial disbelief quickly turned to delight as I absorbed the many wonderful implications of the Academy’s Fellow honor. Linda Ware was the bearer of this exciting news. Because Linda also lives in Wausau and we occasionally speak by phone, it didn’t seem unusual that she would be calling me. Linda did ask me to keep the news

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Robin Chapman Poet

James P. Leary Folklorist

Kathy Kelsey Foley Museum Director

John J. Magnuson Limnologist

“under wraps” and I asked, likely in a slightly flustered state, if it would be okay to share the news with my husband. I think she laughed and said “certainly.”

Frank: Somewhat akin, I imagine, to learning that I had been drafted by the Packers as their new starting quarterback. (But now, who knows, maybe next year?)

Magnuson: My first thought when receiving the call about being nominated as a Wisconsin Academy Fellow was that of appreciation to my colleagues for initiating and preparing my nomination and, to the Academy, for choosing to recognize me.

Leary: I was surprised and honored. Although the American Folklore Society was formed in 1888, making it one of the nation’s oldest “learned societies,” folklorists have not fared well in the academy. This may be because we are few in number, work across and between established disciplines, and have always focused on the “low culture” of indigenous peoples, immigrants, regional communities, and workers. Since I’m a folklorist and a Wisconsin native, it’s very special to be a Wisconsin Academy Fellow.

Rohatgi: I was very humbled and felt very honored when I heard about being named as Wisconsin Academy Fellow. I was happy that my contributions were recognized by people of the state of Wisconsin where I live and work.

Temple: I was delightfully surprised when I was notified because I was unaware that colleagues at the Aldo Leopold Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, and UW’s Nelson Institute had nominated me. That the nomination came from three groups with which I have worked for many years was especially gratifying.

And it was an honor knowing that I was joining other Fellows whose work I have long admired.

David Frank Producer & Director

Pradeep Rohatgi Materials Engineer

Stanley Temple Conservation Biologist

How have you used creativity in your field? Does your work intersect the sciences, arts, or letters?

Chapman: Poetry requires being open to silence and the unexpected as you write, being inventive about form, music, and language. I’ve been particularly interested in collaborating with scientists and artists in my work, integrating the three domains (or collaborating with my own cognitive scientist and beginning artist sides). Examples include Images of a Complex World: the Art and Poetry of Chaos, pairing my poems with physicist J.C. Sprott’s explanations and fractals; my just-out poems about climate change, One Hundred White Pelicans, and my recent chapbook Dappled Things with poems paired with photogravure artist Peter Miller’s etchings of Asian landscapes.

Kelsey Foley: Creativity, by necessity, touches just about every aspect of my work, more so now than ever. From stretching limited resources to program planning, creativity has become not only a way of life, but also a touchstone. As the director of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, the “art part” is always front and center when considering exhibitions as well as additions to the collection. Because the collection focuses on art in nature—and the Museum’s flagship exhibition, Birds in Art, is an annual undertaking—the science of ornithology is integral to our thinking and decision making. Also, writing and editing are daily endeavors, whether for a funding proposal, gallery text panel, or the Museum’s weekly blog, Woodson Wanderings. I’m often amazed by how much writing is part of day-to-day art museum life.

Frank: The organizational goal of American Players Theatre is to foster an environment in which creativity can be recognized and flourish. Creativity is, it might be said, the goal itself. The W isconsin

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tools to achieving this include method and logic, the work of scholars over the ages.

Magnuson: I enjoy science and numbers and ideas. The College of Letters and Science and Center for Limnology at UW– Madison have been a great academic home with the breadth of the sciences they represent. Being interdisciplinary in approach is important to me. I appreciate art, music, and literature. Occasionally I have been able to help link the natural sciences with the humanities and social sciences. I did some of this work on the Wisconsin Academy’s Waters of Wisconsin project and the Center for Limnology’s Long-Term Ecological Research Program, as well as for a project of the Center for Biology Education called Paradise Lost: Art and Climate in the Northwoods.

Leary: I do empirical ethnographic research using field recordings and photography to document the folk cultural traditions of community-based artists; then I transform that documentation, often collaboratively, into festivals and such publicly-accessible productions as compact discs with accompanying notes, radio programs, films, and exhibits. In essence, I’m a humanist who combines scientific methods with aesthetic sensibilities to present and ponder the vibrant, varied, complex folklore of the Upper Midwest’s diverse peoples, whether it be Ole and Lena jokes or polka music, homemade decoys, or workplace customs.

Rohatgi: Creativity has been an essential component in addition to hard work, and perseverance in doing whatever little I have been able to do. My main work has been on scientific research, but I have also spent considerable time examining and writing about the impact of science on society.

Temple: As a pioneer in the emerging field of conservation biology I realized that preserving the world’s biodiversity was an enormous challenge that required guiding principles and enabling methodologies from a wide range of disciplines. Although I am an ecologist, I sought working partnerships with individuals and organizations that sincerely embrace this approach, among them the three organizations that nominated me.

How does your work influence the community? The world?

Chapman: Some say that poetry makes nothing happen, but I believe that poems go out into the world and lead their own lives in other people’s lives. Occasionally reports come back: a poem will appear in a book or anthology, will receive a state or national award. Some lines of mine can be found by the giraffes and the African cichlids at the Milwaukee Public Zoo, in a sixtyfoot mural at Everglades High School in Florida, and on the back of an Australian singer’s jazz CD. Poems have been set to music and sung both here and in Canada; included in the nationally distributed meditation program, Quest; and toured the city and state in the Epidemic Peace Imagery exhibit that I helped organize with Russell Gardner. Some will appear soon in Madison’s Green Cars, in a project of HYBRID poetry and photographs organized

by Thomas Ferrella and Sara Parrell. More certain influence, perhaps, has come from my thirty years of research and teaching in children’s language development and disorders at UW’s Department of Communicative Disorders; in teaching some one thousand outstanding clinicians and a number of now-eminent doctoral students; and in carrying out longitudinal research 14

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on the language skills of children and adolescents with Down Syndrome at the Waisman Center.

Kelsey Foley: My Woodson Art Museum work is largely audience—i.e., visitor—focused, and our audiences comprise the immediate and surrounding communities of north central Wisconsin as well as the entire state and the Upper Midwest.

In terms of Birds in Art, the reach is international because this juried exhibition is open to artists from around the world. In addition, after the exhibition’s fall debut at the Woodson, sixty artworks travel to multiple venues across the country, thereby extending the reach of the Museum as well as serving as a Wisconsin cultural ambassador.

Frank: The magic of the performing arts is that they take place within a community of participants: the audience. It is the collective sharing of the experience that makes them so potent.

Speaking of community in a broader sense, it might be said that APT’s history has been one long dialogue between this theater and a community that was midwife at its birth and which sustains it still today. The theater’s influence has continued to spread; some fifteen thousand people from out of state are attracted to APT every year.

Magnuson: When I became an emeritus professor in 2000, I felt it was time for pay back to the community where my wife and I had lived since 1967, where our children grew up. I began to apply myself more selectively to the local community, doing more for groups like the Dane County Lakes and Watershed Commission and the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts. Correspondingly, my national and international contributions declined somewhat.

Leary: In 2000 I helped found the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures (CSUMC), dedicated to research, archival collections, and public programs focused on the languages and folklore of our region. We’ve worked with state agencies, local museums, ethnic/immigrant groups like the Sons of Norway and the Hmong Mutual Assistance Association, American Indian tribes, farmers, loggers, labor unions, hunters, and more in Wisconsin and the surrounding region. Scholars and citizens from Europe especially have been attracted to our projects featuring the talk and traditions of Wisconsin’s Baltic, British, French, Germanic, Irish, Mediterranean, Scandinavian, and Slavic peoples. Meanwhile films like The Art of Ironworking, produced with students from our fieldwork with Local 383, has attracted more than 55,000 viewers on YouTube, including ironworkers from locals throughout North America.

Rohatgi: My research has been directed at revitalizing the materials manufacturing industry in Wisconsin and training our workforce for the future because I firmly believe that manufacturing is very essential to the economy of Wisconsin. Wisconsin has already become a leading producer of cast metal matrix composites, an area of my research. My work on lightweight castings of advanced composites has had an impact on the entire U.S. and the rest of the world in reducing energy consumption and pollution.

Temple: My students, colleagues, and I have worked to save dozens of endangered species and the habitats on which they depend, in Wisconsin and around the world. It is enormously satisfying to know that none of the endangered species I worked

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with has gone extinct, and most are either recovering steadily or have come off the endangered species list. There are important natural areas in Wisconsin and elsewhere that have been protected as a result of efforts to which I contributed. These are among my most tangible and, I hope, enduring impacts.

What is your favorite Wisconsin tradition/pastime?

Chapman: I love hiking the prairies and Wisconsin River uplands, canoeing the rivers, snowshoeing in winter, contra dancing year round, singing folksongs, sitting on the Union Terrace watching the lake, gardening a plot in the Eagle Heights Community Gardens.

Kelsey Foley: Badger athletics! Although I’m not a UW– Madison alumna, our older daughter is. So, by association, I feel a kinship with the Badgers. It’s been fun to cheer on the football team in the fall, and this winter’s March Madness run was terrific until the heartbreaking Final Four defeat in the last seconds of an exciting and valiantly played game.

Frank: Tradition: Good beer. Pastime: The same—in good company. Also, the City of Madison and all it has to offer; music, theater, museums and a vibrant, thoughtful, liberal and cosmopolitan community that is a profound pleasure to be a part of.

Magnuson: I enjoy being out in the diversity of nature, gardening and watching my garden grow and bloom; I enjoy capturing through photography my glimpses of nature, family, and people.

Leary: I grew up a “jackpine savage” in northern Wisconsin, literally between two lakes, a woods, and a swamp. I love working and playing outdoors in all seasons, maybe with a Brewer or Packer or Badger game on my headphones, and some good local food and a microbrew or two at day’s end.

Rohatgi: I love to attend a lot of cultural activities in Wisconsin including parades, ethnic festivals, state fairs, theater and music, watching sports and rooting for Wisconsin teams.

Temple: Wisconsin has a long, proud tradition of leadership in the field of conservation, with an impressive legacy left by Wisconsin greats like Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Gaylord Nelson, and others. Because of their efforts, I have been able to enjoy exploring the wonderful diversity of species and habitats Wisconsin supports. I hope that Wisconsin’s tradition of stewardship of its rich natural heritage continues so future generations can enjoy the same opportunities to discover and enjoy nature.

Any additional thoughts or reflections on what living and working in Wisconsin has meant to you, personally?

Chapman: My whole life since graduate school at Berkeley has been spent in Madison: it has meant living in a wonderful set of intersecting communities of poets, artists, scientists, teachers, nature-lovers, singers, dancers, gardeners, arts-lovers of a broad range of ages and interests. I feel extraordinarily fortunate in my writing colleagues, my professional colleagues, and my friends.

Kelsey Foley: I grew up on the East Coast and I have lived on the West Coast. My determination is that the Midwest—and specifically Wisconsin—is the best. The reason is the people.

Wisconsinites—our friends, my coworkers, and statewide

colleagues—have an exceptional work ethic in addition to being genuinely thoughtful and caring.

Frank: Wisconsin has become home to us. We wouldn’t consider settling anywhere else. Who minds a little snow?

Magnuson: I like it here! One of my beliefs is that science has an important role in the formulation of public policy. Simply put, policy development advised by science is likely to be relevant longer and less hindered by undesirable surprises. Such policy should contribute more to a sustainable future than policy without, or excluding, the benefits of science advice.

Leary: My parents were small town journalists who valued travel, learning, creative expression, egalitarianism, and civic responsibility. Curious about and committed to Wisconsin, and to its place in the nation and the world, my dad championed liberal populism through newspaper editorials, while my mother was a lifelong civil rights supporter. Following them, my commitment has been to cultural democracy, to making the rich lives and eloquent expressions of ordinary people better known, to Wisconsin’s intricate connections with the wider world, and to the intrinsic worth of its people’s varied and common cultures.

Rohatgi: Living and working in Wisconsin has allowed me to devote my research to manufacture of advanced metals since Wisconsin is a leader in this field. On a personal front, it has allowed me to have a wonderful family life since Wisconsin is a great place to raise children. I had moved a lot before coming to Wisconsin, but have stayed put in Wisconsin for the last thirty years.

Temple: I was very fortunate to spend my career at the University of Wisconsin in the academic chair previously occupied by two of my personal and professional role models: Aldo Leopold and Joe Hickey. Knowing that history motivated me to live up to the high standards they had set while occupying the chair. I don’t think there is another university position in my field that carries such a weighty legacy or any other state in which that legacy is so widely respected.

The Wisconsin Academy would like to extend a special thank you to our Fellows for generously sharing their personal reflections on Fellowship. We hope our members and readers of this magazine gain a greater appreciation for them beyond their curriculum vitae and, in doing so, perhaps better understand what makes them Wisconsin Academy Fellows. Z

Connect We rely on friends and members of the Wisconsin Academy to recommend potential Fellows. If you know someone who should be honored as a Wisconsin Academy Fellow, please consider submitting a nomination on their behalf. Visit our website for up-to-date nomination information or to learn more about existing fellows at wisconsinacademy.org/fellows.

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photographs b y lois bielefeld

I admit it—I’m nosy. I’ve always been fascinated by people’s habits and personal spaces, and what they reveal. There are things we all do: eat and sleep, for example. But the various rituals surrounding these activities and how we define the spaces for partaking in them can be telling.

I use conceptual portraits to capture the moments and qualities that bind us together as humans and, at the same time, display our uniqueness. Weeknight Dinners is a series of photographs focusing on typical weeknight meals at home, when concerns about where and what we eat are sometimes swept away by the demands of a busy workday.

While photographing new subjects for Weeknight Dinners over the past year, I revisited some of the same subjects from an earlier project, The Bedroom (2008–2012), to examine how habits and environments can change over time.

The Weeknight Dinners series currently has 47 images and is on view at The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago as a part of The Midwest Photographers Project. I first showed the work fairly early into the composition of the series at INOVA in Milwaukee as part of the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship Exhibition. This September many of the overlapping images from both series’ will be displayed for the first time in Room&Board: Weeknight Dinners and The Bedroom at ArtStart in Rhinelander. I’m also composing a body of work that will include video, audio, installation, and photography called Androgyny, which will open at UW–Parkside in November 2014.

I can be reached through The Portrait Society Gallery or my website, loisbielefeld.com, which includes information about other projects as well as the trailer to my recently released documentary film, Ladies Out. —Lois Bielefeld

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TOP: Thursday: David and Cathy. 2013 BOTTOM: Wednesday: Leo and Michael. 2014

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TOP: Wednesday: Bruce, Heather and Wyatt. 2013 BOTTOM: Tuesday: Seynabou, Rui James and Marie. 2014

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TOP: Wednesday: Hiawa, Delilah and Abraham. 2014 BOTTOM: Wednesday: Glynis, Liam, Jorin, and Mona. 2013

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TOP: Tuesday: Lydia and Lois. 2013 BOTTOM: Wednesday: Willie Mae. 2013

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TOP: Monday: Eric and Sally. 2013 BOTTOM: Monday: Nuco. 2014

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TOP: Tuesday: Alden and Alan. 2014 BOTTOM: Monday: Sรกlongo and Daphne. 2014

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TOP: Wednesday: Natalia and Maryanne. 2014 BOTTOM: Tuesday: Juanita and John. 2014

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ickolas Butler was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. His writings have appeared in Christian Science Monitor, Kenyon Review Online, Narrative Magazine, Ploughshares, The Progressive, and elsewhere. Butler is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Released in March of 2014, Butler’s debut novel Shotgun Lovesongs is causing quite a stir in the literary world. Called “impressively original”

by New York Times book critic Janet Maslin, this story of five childhood friends living in—and out of—rural Little Wing, Wisconsin, was hailed by critic Jonathan Evison as “a sure-footed and unabashedly sentimental first effort that deserves to be among the standouts in this year’s field of fiction debuts.”

Independent and online reviewers are echoing these sentiments, with an appearance on the Amazon.com Top Ten list for March and at the top of IndieBound.com’s Indie Next List bringing even more attention to Butler’s “unmistakenly American” novel.

I recently traveled to Butler’s home near Eau Claire, where he lives with his wife and their two children, to discuss his new novel, his Wisconsin roots, and his plans for the future.

All photos by Andrea Paulseth/Volume One W isconsin

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I think Shotgun Lovesongs is sentimental at times, but I don’t think that it is sentimental in the pejorative sense. I’d like to think it is more of a clear-eyed interpretation of contemporary life in rural Wisconsin.

eyed interpretation of contemporary life in rural Wisconsin, reflecting real choices and sacrifices that people make, than a sad-sweet tale about how friendships change.

Two of the main characters leave Little Wing, for example, and I think that’s a positive thing for them, and probably a reflection of the fact that they no longer “fit” into small-town America.

I also wanted to show readers that the face of small town Wisconsin is definitely changing. The work done on bigger farms today isn’t necessarily being performed by old, noble Norwegian farmers. More and more, farms are operated by hard-working immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

It’s interesting to me to see how people across the U.S. receive the book. I guess I’d like to think that the book resonates with people in Wisconsin and beyond. Though, it means a lot to me that the book is received well here in Wisconsin, in particular.

JS: First off, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell our readers that you used to work for the Wisconsin Academy. So, your success as an author can be traced back to us, right?

NB: [Laughter] I had and still have a great affinity for the organization and in particular this magazine. I actually used to read it, either at my school library or the public library when I was a teenager, and I think I entered the fiction contests when I was in my early twenties.

JS: Readers in America—and other countries, too—are gobbling up your new “big-hearted” novel, Shotgun Lovesongs. What is it about rural Midwestern life as portrayed in your book that so many people find compelling?

NB: If you are a writer from the Midwest it seems like your work is always— almost automatically—characterized as sentimental. Which is unfair.

I think Shotgun Lovesongs is sentimental at times, but I don’t think that it is sentimental in the pejorative sense.

I’d like to think it is more of a clear-

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NB: Not at all. No, plenty of great writers—David Rhodes and Michael Perry come to mind—have been voicing the culture and concerns of Wisconsin and the rural Midwest long before I stumbled onto the scene. Also: Jane Smiley, Garrison Keillor, William Maxwell, Jane Hamilton.

JS: Those are great writers. As a firsttime writer, how did you navigate that vast unknown into which your book was being released?

NB: Well, during the prepublication phase of Shotgun Lovesongs, the plan was that I would travel a loop around Wisconsin and the upper Midwest and down to the Ohio River Valley on something called the Nickolas Butler Heartland Walking Tour to promote the book.

I actually did do a lot of driving, but I also flew here and there and then drove out to small, independent bookstores with a stack of four or five books in my hands. I would often arrive to a greeting of, Now, who are you? People were gracious, but, because this is my first book, no one knew who I was.

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Then a lot of Midwest independent booksellers got behind the book because they took the time to read the copies I gave them. I really owe them a lot of gratitude for getting out the word—I can only assume they talked about the book because they liked it.

JS: Well, there is so much of Little Wing that I—born and raised in rural Wisconsin—find familiar: the abandoned mill, drinking at the VFW hall, long nights by the bonfire. Is this book in some ways a love song to Wisconsin?

An excerpt from

SHOTGUN LOVESONGS

By Nickolas Butler Published March 2014 by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, New York.

Reprinted with permission of the author.

NB: Yes, I suppose it is. I wanted to write about Wisconsin—I wanted to show people why I’m so proud to be a part of this state. So, yeah, it’s a love song.

A lot of people ask me at readings, Hey, is the mill in your book the mill from Fall Creek? and other questions about the novel’s setting because it is so recognizable to someone who grew up in Wisconsin.

For instance, my best friend Josh Swan for a number of years had a boat shop in an old mill in Mount Horeb that was eventually taken down to make room for office space. I would go to visit Josh to watch him work, we’d hang out, talk, then go to the Grumpy Troll for a drink afterward.

And I guess I never realized how much of that space I remembered. As I was thinking about this story, I already knew what the mill smelled like, how the light came in only through certain windows at certain times of the day.

Years later, driving all the time to Iowa for my writing workshop, I realized how many towns have these old mills. So, I wrote a mill into the first chapter, but I wasn’t thinking about a larger book beyond that chapter.

I wrote the end of the book later on, but I didn’t have anything to bridge the beginning and the end. It was my agent who suggested the mill should be a character in the book, a way to bridge that gap. “Why do they keep going to the top of the mill?” he kept asking, almost pushing that point. So I made it a central part of the book.

We invited him to all of our weddings; he was famous. We addressed the invitations to his record company’s skyscraper in New York City so that the gaudy, gilded envelopes could be forwarded to him on tour—in Beirut, Helsinki, Tokyo. Places beyond our ken or our limited means. He sent back presents in battered cardboard boxes festooned with foreign stamps—birthday gifts of fine scarves or perfume for our wives, small delicate toys or trinkets upon the births of our children: rattles from Johannesburg, wooden nesting dolls from Moscow, little silk booties from Taipei. He would call us sometimes, the connection scratchy and echoing, a chorus of young women giggling in the background, his voice never sounding as happy as we expected it to.

Months would pass before we saw his face again, and then, he would arrive home, bearded and haggard, his eyes tired but happily relieved. We could tell that Lee was glad to see us, to be back in our company. We always gave him time to recover before our lives resumed together, we knew he needed time to dry out and regain his balance. We let him sleep and sleep. Our wives brought him casseroles and lasagnas, bowls of salad and freshly baked pies. He liked to ride a tractor around his sprawling property. We assumed he liked feeling the hot daylight, the sun and fresh air on his pale face. The slow speed of that old John Deere, so reliable and patient.

The earth rolling backward beneath him. There were no crops on his land of course, but he rode the tractor through the fallow fields of prairie grasses and wildflowers, a cigarette between his lips, or a joint. He was always smiling on that tractor, his hair all flyaway and light blond and in the sunlight it was like the fluff of a seeding dandelion.

He had taken another name for the stage but we never called him by that name. We called him Leland, or just plain Lee, because that continue

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A lot of coming back to the Eau Claire area is about family. We have four grandparents living within fifteen miles of our house. I have humble desires for the way I want to live my life. accepted into law school when I was working the counter at Star Liquor on Willy Street [in Madison] making eight bucks an hour, and we were on state assistance. I had applied to grad school once and got rejected.

So Lee’s whole experience is in some ways my experience of writing this book. I wanted to provide for my family, and I wanted my child to be proud of me. I don’t have a lot of skills, and I thought, Hell, I’m just an English major. I love books and I can’t do much beyond reading and roasting coffee and recommending a good beer.

So, my life became about becoming a better writer. I took a workshop with Dean Bakopoulos, and kept working on my short fiction, which in turn got me into the Writing Program at Iowa. More short stories led to publication in some big journals. I started building momentum, building my own momentum. And, that’s what Lee’s story is about. I think that if you are just dogged about it, like Lee, you can—well, you need to improve yourself, too. That hard work, the learning and refining, is the unsexy part of it all. I think that’s what it takes to be an exceptional writer, or, in Lee’s case, an exceptional musician.

JS: The parallels between Leland (Lee) Sutton and Justin Vernon, Bon Iver frontman and Grammy Award winner, are clear, but Shotgun Lovesongs isn’t really a book based on his life, right?

NB: You have to understand that in this community there wasn’t really a template for artistic success and fame on the scale of Bon Iver. Justin gave a lot of us this sense of confidence that we could go out and do something different.

So the character Leland is inspired by him, but he’s obviously not based on him. Justin has never been shot in the leg, and I don’t think he’s even ever been married. One thing that sets Justin apart from so many other people is that he went away, gained success, and then came home. He’s really involved in the Eau Claire community.

JS: So, you drew inspiration from Justin, with whom you went to high school, but this book is based more on your life and experiences.

NB: Yes, I mean, Lee’s journey came from the fact that I really never had a good job. My wife and I got pregnant with our first son, and she was

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Except that musicians are sexier than writers.

JS: Beyond Bon Iver, there is a lot of great art and culture coming out of the Eau Claire region right now. Do you feel like you are a part of the Eau Claire zeitgeist?

NB: Well, I live in the unincorporated township of Cleghorn, which is about ten miles south of Eau Claire. So, I don’t know if I am part of the zeitgeist.

I don’t know. Maybe someday I’ll be part of that zeitgeist. Right now I sort of feel like a carpetbagger.

For me, a lot of coming back to the Eau Claire area is about family. We have four grandparents living within fifteen miles of our house. I have humble desires for the way I want to live my life. Living in St. Paul, simple things like feeding birds, watching the stars, just weren’t possible.

I hope for the sake of Eau Claire and smaller communities around the Midwest that people are “coming back.”

Eau Claire is definitely investing heavily in its downtown and much of the grassroots excitement is coming from younger entrepreneurs who seem

i n t e rvi e w

determined to succeed, which is great.

One attractive thing about places like Eau Claire is that you can try—and perhaps fail and try again—at a fairly cheap cost. There’s so much opportunity here.

JS: I’ve heard you mention that you greatly admire place-based novels like Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion.

What role does home—the physical place as well as the feelings associated with the concept—play in your book?

NB: When I was an undergraduate at UW–Madison, I took a course with Bill Cronon, the revered environmental history professor. He urged us to write about place, and that was something that has always stuck with me. So, yes, Sometimes a Great Notion is probably my favorite novel, partly because the setting of the book is so well written, and partly because the setting shapes the characters, challenges them, even defies them. I feel likewise about Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, Poachers

by Tom Franklin, and really anything

by Rick Bass—just to name a few.

In terms of home … I suppose I was interested in coming home. I was interested in trying to create my own place, a place to grow my family, a place with connections to family and a community that I knew. Of course, home is a fertile ground for writers: family dramas, memories, rivalries, money, love—every emotion in the human spectrum is easily accessed when you return home, and the perspectives on home are so deep, so knowing.

JS: Where did you come up with the name Little Wing, by the way?

NB: I really struggled to come up with a name for the fictitious town in the book, but I was definitely looking at maps of Wisconsin, in particular at little towns close to the Mississippi.

Then I remembered that Stevie Ray Vaughan cover of the Jimi Hendrix song “Little Wing,” which seemed perfect because the town was small.

was his name. He lived in an old school house away from things, away from our town, Little Wing, and maybe five miles out into the countryside. The name on his mailbox read: L SUTTON. He had built a recording studio in the small, ancient gymnasium, padding the walls with foam and thick carpeting. There were platinum records up on the walls. Photographs of him with famous actresses and actors, politicians, chefs, writers. His gravel driveway was long and potted with holes, but even this was not enough to deter some of the young women who sought him out. They came from around the world. They were always beautiful.

Lee’s success had not surprised us. He had simply never given up on his music. While the rest of us were in college or the army or stuck on our family farms, he had holed up in a derelict chicken coop and played his battered guitar in the all-around silence of deepest winter. He sang in an eerie falsetto, and sometimes around the campfire it would make you weep in the unreliable shadows thrown by those orange-yellow flames and white-black smoke. He was the best among us.

He wrote songs about our place on earth: the everywhere fields of corn, the third-growth forests, the humpbacked hills and grooved-out draws. The knife-sharp cold, the too-short days, the snow, the snow, the snow. His songs were our anthems—they were our bullhorns and microphones and jukebox poems. We adored him; our wives adored him. We knew all the words to the songs and sometimes we were in the songs.

—NB From Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler. Copyright © 2014 by the author and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

But it also worked as an homage to Vaughan, who died in a helicopter crash in Wisconsin.

JS: I read online that Fox Searchlight bought the film rights to Shotgun Lovesongs. Any trepidation in seeing your characters appear on the big screen?

NB: In my mind, the film and book are two totally different pieces of art. And because I have so little control over what happens in the film, I’ve also released myself from any kind of trepidation. Contractually, there’s just not that much that I can do, so it’s not worth worrying about. That being said, I’d love to see Dean Bakopoulos’ novel Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon

on the silver screen. Or maybe Michael Perry’s Population: 485.

JS: Other than resuming your Heartland Walking Tour, what’s next for Nickolas Butler?

NB: I have a collection of short stories, The Chainsaw Soirée, that will be published in the summer of 2015 by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press, and a collection of poetry, Light Travels Faster Downhill, that will be published

by Typecast Publishing in late 2014 or early 2015. After that … I don’t know. I’m working on a new novel, a new collection of short stories, and a collection of plays— all of which are presently totally embryonic. We’ll see.

I’m dabbling. Z

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AN Overview of the Forthcoming Wisconsin Academy REport:

Climate Forward: A New Road Map for Wisconsin’s Climate and Energy Future

T

he year 1999 was a good one for advocates of clean energy in America. When the year began, only three states required their utilities to generate any electricity from renewable sources instead of fossil fuels.

By the end of 1999, four more states had enacted renewable portfolio standards, which are policies designed to increase electricity generation from renewable resources like wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass. Wisconsin capped this pivotal year by setting a modest standard of 2.2% of electricity to come from renewable sources by 2012. In 2006, the state legislature moved the bar up to 10% for renewables by 2015 and set new goals for efficiency.

Unfortunately, that year was to be the near end of Wisconsin’s state-level leadership in matters of energy and climate change. Today, eight years later, we’re flat at about 7% of our energy coming from renewables, and many of the 2006 energy efficiency initiatives have been scaled back.

We continue to rely on fossil fuel-burning technologies that grow rather than shrink our carbon footprint, exacerbating climate change at home and around the globe. All across America—38 states and the District of Columbia, to be exact— attention and resources are being directed toward renewable portfolio standards, leaving Wisconsin in the dust when it comes to increasing energy efficiency and courting the green economy.

However, a number of Wisconsin farms, municipalities, and businesses both large and small are no longer waiting for legislative action. Instead, they are moving forward, fighting to uphold our conservation legacy and do their part to address climate change. Drawing from a deep and diverse pool of scientific, technical, and professional talent, many citizens of our state are working to apply the can-do spirit of the Wisconsin Idea to the critical problem of climate change.

A steward for the Wisconsin Idea for over 142 years, the Wisconsin Academy recently focused attention and resources on exploring of the connections between our state’s energy use and global climate change. For the past eighteen months the Wisconsin Academy has encouraged and amplified productive conversations about innovative climate and energy solutions for Wisconsin.

The product of these conversations is Climate Forward: A New Road Map for Wisconsin’s Climate and Energy Future, a document that assesses where we are today and outlines a practical vision for an energy future that is good for our environment, economy, and life in Wisconsin.

Climate Forward is for those who understand that global climate change is one of the most serious social, economic, and environmental challenges of our time. Climate Forward does not offer a comprehensive solution to climate change, nor does it address every single energy need now or in the future. The document is called a “road map” because it will help us navigate the myriad choices as we begin to address climate change in ways that protect our natural and human resources.

The details of the science behind measuring climate change and the ways in which we observe its growing catalog of evidence and threats, both local and global, will not be recapitulated in this article. If you’re in doubt, the educational resources available are comprehensive and, at times, ominous.

Here, we will focus on the constellation of options and opportunities featured in Climate Forward and share a brief overview

This update was prepared with contributions from Erik Ness, Wisconsin Academy staff, and members of our Wisconsin Academy Climate & Energy Initiative working groups. Look for the full Climate Forward: A New Road Map for Wisconsin’s Climate and Energy Future report in July 2014.

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Photo credit: Transcend/Flickr.com

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of what the Wisconsin Academy hopes to achieve with this document.

The biggest part of the climate change challenge is to establish and accelerate a clean and sustainable energy economy. Practically every human activity—from taking a phone call to taking a shower—uses energy. The triumph of our modern economy is the constant and easy availability of energy to do whatever we please. But if this energy comes from burning a fossil fuel, the carbon dioxide released contributes—infinitesimally, incrementally, but inevitably—to climate change. Today more than 80% of Wisconsin’s energy comes from coal, oil, or natural gas. Reimagining the way we generate, move, and use energy is a challenge that reverberates from Wisconsin around the globe.

Massive as the task may seem, it’s offset by the fact that we already have all of the tools we need to create a more efficient, resilient energy system overall. Further technological advances will lighten our load, but the real challenge is one of personal, cultural, and political will.

This job won’t be easy. But continuing on our present course is not sustainable.

We can and should have a wider and deeper conversation about this topic in Wisconsin. All of our citizens—especially those who will come after us—have a stake in the choices that we make now and in the coming years.

“Turn off the light when you leave.”

It’s a phrase each of us has heard hundreds of times. And if the light bulb is a low-energy LED, the phrase nicely encapsulates one of the easiest ways to reduce Wisconsin’s carbon footprint: by improving energy conservation and efficiency.

Wisconsin ranked 23rd out of all U.S. states in the 2013 State Energy Efficiency Scorecard, published by American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE), a national energy efficiency information and advocacy organization. At the same time that other states were making rapid efficiency gains, Wisconsin dropped six positions compared to 2012, continuing a five-year slide. ACEEE contends that one reason Wisconsin has been losing ground is the changes the legislature made to Focus on Energy, the state utilities’ program that works with eligible Wisconsin residents and businesses to install costeffective energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.

These projects are essential because, well, winters are cold here, and we use a lot of energy to heat buildings. Insulation and other efficiency enhancements added to existing buildings have great potential to save energy and money. Thinking smart about new construction, like taking advantage of passive solar design and using technology such as solar panels and geothermal heat exchangers, can push a building towards a carbon footprint approaching zero.

Inside the home are myriad efficiency opportunities, from using Energy Star appliances to incorporating new lighting technology. Innovations in manufacturing, including the recycling and reuse of materials, are changing every industry. By using cradle-to-cradle analyses, manufacturers can intelligently evaluate the life cycle of a product or technology and better understand the hidden ecological impact and carbon footprint of goods and services. Using local materials can further lower carbon emissions associated with transportation of goods.

One of Wisconsin’s efficiency leaders is the West Central Wisconsin Community Action Agency Inc. (West CAP). Among the state’s first community action agencies, West CAP was founded in 1965 to help rural families overcome poverty and W is c o nsin

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Photo credit: West CAP/Peter Kilde

Photo credit: Gundersen Health System

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Newly renovated by West CAP, this historic building on Main Street in Boyceville serves as the nonprofit’s regional food pantry and has four energy efficient apartments in the second level.

In the top 1% of energy efficient hospitals in the Upper Midwest, Gundersen’s new eco-friendly Legacy facility in La Crosse is heated and cooled by a geothermal heat pump system.

cultivate a more just and sustainable society. Based in Glenwood City, near the St. Croix River Valley, the organization assists low-income families by enhancing both their self-sufficiency and their contribution to the sustainability of their communities within the areas of housing, transportation, food security, job skills, and basic literacy.

The rising cost of electricity is a significant challenge for all Wisconsin residents, but it can be crippling for low-income households in rural areas. According to West CAP executive director Peter Kilde, the more we can free ourselves from dependence on expensive and inefficient fossil fuels, the more resilient Wisconsin citizens can become. For example, West CAP developed the Residential Alternative Energy and Conservation Program to rehabilitate existing low-income housing to improve energy efficiency while using locally harvested, renewable, carbon-neutral sources like wood pellets to meet the remaining energy needs.

With the ambitious goal of reducing energy use in old homes by 80%, West CAP begins with an extensive home energy audit.

Applying technology gleaned from the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Alaska (Kilde jokes that West CAP turns old homes into “giant beer coolers”), the West CAP team first places four-inches of insulation on the foundation, walls, and ceilings as well as on the six-inch stud walls. Windows are sealed with energy-efficient glazing, and attic insulation is bumped up to R60. The team installs 95%-efficient Energy Recovery Ventilation or Heat Recovery Ventilation systems to exchange fresh air from outside with exhaust air from the home to ensure interior air quality.

Once West CAP has lowered energy use, it turns to on-site renewable energy sources instead of fossil fuels to provide the daily energy it takes to run a household. Solmetric Suneye technology helps the team make use of the solar potential for each site. Where possible, solar hot water systems provide up to 71% of the energy needed for heating household water. Photovoltaic panels provide electrical generation while solar hot air panels supplement home heating. When photovoltaics aren’t an option, West CAP uses other renewable technologies like passive design, geothermal and air-source heat pumps, and

off-peak thermal storage that aid in the efficient heating and cooling of homes.

Finding the right combination of renewable technologies and efficiency efforts requires an investment of time and money.

It can be a complicated process, but the payoff is real. The first electrical bill for one of West CAP’s recently retrofitted duplexes in Menomonie was a $354 credit.

In Kilde’s opinion, the shift from conventional energy use to renewables is a fundamental but essential change: “The systems for harvesting clean, free energy on-site are qualitatively different from the systems fro burning fossil fuels. This is a paradigm shift, not just a matter of cost-and-benefit analysis or pay-back analysis.”

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Conservation and efficiency practices are making their way into the corporate world as well, and small and large business owners alike are realizing that these practices are good for the Earth and the bottom line.

Just down the Mississippi River Valley, a physician-led health care company in La Crosse has set a goal of becoming completely energy independent in 2014. This is not a typo.

Through an ambitious sustainability plan called Envision, Gundersen Health System will achieve energy independence across all of its facilities this year.

“As a healthcare organization, it is our responsibility to not only take care of our patients in a hospital or clinic, but to help our patients and communities stay well,” says CEO Dr. Jeff Thompson. Under Thompson’s leadership, Gundersen’s Envision program has utilized a strategy it calls “Two-Sided Green” to both reduce costs and reduce harmful emissions.

The plan began with the bottom line. In 2008, Gundersen’s leadership realized that their utility bills were increasing by $350,000 each year. They conducted energy audits at their largest facilities to identify where they could improve efficiency. These audits revealed that Gundersen could reduce energy use by 25% and save more than $1 million each year by upgrading heating, cooling, and lighting systems and

Photo credit: WI State Energy Office

Photo credit: Heidi Clausen/Eau Claire Leader Telegram

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Owned and installed by Wisconsin biogas firm Clear Horizons, Crave Dairy's anaerobic digestion system generates enough electricity to power the farm, cheese factory, and 300 area homes.

A tour group in the Future Farm Food and Fuel greenhouse during a beginning aquaculture workshop. The 27,000-square-foot complex produces lettuce and other leafy, green vegetables as well as fish.

by training employees in basic sustainability practices like recycling.

Partnering with the state’s Focus on Energy program to implement these low-cost and no-cost measures, the Envision initiative was born. Improving energy efficiency required relatively little financial investment from Gundersen and quickly resulted in lower utility bills. This success demonstrated to Thompson and Gundersen leaders that environmental thinking makes good financial sense.

Soon, Gundersen Health System began to look for other projects. They collaborated with Organic Valley to build a wind farm near Cashton and built their own in Lewiston, Minnesota. They installed solar heating systems and solar panels in campus buildings and parking structures. They built a biomass boiler using locally produced wood chips to heat their La Crosse campus. They even partnered with La Crosse County to build a generator that uses landfill biogas to power their Onalaska campus. The landfill gas, which is piped 1.5 miles from the La Crosse County landfill, is used to fuel a 1,137 kilowatt reciprocating engine generator set with heat recovery.

While the system is sized to completely offset campus electrical energy usage, the heat recovery is enough to provide heat and hot water to campus buildings. So, the generated electricity it is sold to Xcel Energy (the local utility) for an annual profit of $300,000 after paying about $200,000 per year for the landfill biogas.

While they were enhancing their facility infrastructure, Gundersen also began purchasing locally grown and produced food for patient and employee meals as well as underwriting initiatives to make healthy food available to local communities. A staple of almost every hospital, Styrofoam trays and containers were eliminated from Gundersen’s food service as a part of a comprehensive waste management system that also keeps seventeen tons of food out of landfills each year. More than 30 recycling initiatives cover everything from the usual glass-paper-plastic suspects to surgical wrap.

Certainly Gundersen has benefitted from Envision, but patients and the community have as well through lower health care costs and a cleaner environment. Money saved on energy bills has helped keep costs to patients below the inflation rate.

Harder to measure individually, but still very real, Gundersen’s clean energy projects have kept pollutants out of the environment—and out of patients’ bodies.

In January of this year Gundersen began accepting patients at a new hospital in La Crosse, which is in the top 1% of energyefficient hospitals in the Upper Midwest. Envision leader Jeff Rich attributes Gundersen’s success to executive leadership and committed employees. There isn’t just one single department working on sustainability. “Everyone’s on the green team,” he says. “It’s everyone’s job.”

As the nation’s Dairyland, cows are big business here in Wisconsin. And while our 5.6 million citizens easily outnumber our 1.3 million milking cows, cows produce much more solid waste than humans do. In fact, Wisconsin’s dairy cows produce as much wastewater as 35 million people.

That’s a lot of waste to deal with, not to mention that manure also produces methane and nitrous oxide. While less common than carbon dioxide, both gases are critical to climate change equations. While methane has twenty times the warming power of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide is even more harmful, doing 317 times the damage.

Fortunately, dairy is one of the most forward-thinking industries in the country. In 2008, a coalition of U.S. dairy producers pledged to slash greenhouse gas emissions 25% by 2020. A fiveyear, $10 million federal research grant was recently awarded to a UW–Madison-led project to examine the entire dairy production system to improve efficiency while decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.

And while there are many pieces to the emissions puzzle, advanced technology like biodigesters will be a big part of the solution. Biodigesters are essentially huge, closed tanks where manure and other organic wastes are broken down by bacteria.

The process yields useful products like methane gas, nutrientrich wastewater, and sterile solids. Captured gas can be used to generate electricity or heat, wastewater can be used to fertilize crops, and sterile solids can be used as animal bedding. More importantly, capturing and using methane reduces climate W is c o nsin

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change twice: once by capturing damaging methane, and again by using it to replace fossil fuels.

Wisconsin leads the nation in the number of commercial farm-based biodigesters, and new technology is being developed to facilitate biodigester operation at small- and medium-sized farms as well. An active supply chain infrastructure currently supports more than 130 systems at farms, food processing plants, landfills, and municipal wastewater treatment facilities. But we could harness four or five times more methane gas energy if we strive to match Germany, the world’s leader in biodigester integration. (This level of digester use would be equivalent to removing the greenhouse gas emissions from 6 billion miles of car travel.)

While University of Wisconsin researchers are investigating further changes in manure handling that might minimize nitrous oxide production—indeed, they are examining every step in the dairy production chain for greenhouse gas efficiencies— ultimately it’s the farmers assembling these solutions in the real world. Wholly dependent on the condition of the land and the weather that affects it, farmers can’t help but notice the changing climate.

Long before many of his colleagues, John Vrieze saw the need for a carbon neutral dairy operation. The founder and owner of Emerald Dairy in St. Croix County, Vrieze owns 2,600 cows across three dairies: Baldwin, Emerald, and Emerald II. In 2004, Vrieze began planning for a digester to spur the greening of his farms. Digesters often require sticker-shocking capital investment. The price tag for Emerald was no exception: $3 million for the digester and its supporting technology. Vrieze patched together funding from the Wisconsin Department of Commerce, the University of Minnesota, investors, bank loans, and his own pocketbook.

Today Vrieze’s digester provides gas for his farms and for 875 homes in the nearby village of Baldwin. Excess gas is piped into the Northern Pipeline System and purchased by the manufacturing company 3M to supplement its green energy portfolio.

But biogas is not the only by product of digestion. Vrieze quickly realized the many potential uses for the digester wastewater. Used as fertilizer for the farm, he reduced his fertilizer purchase by 95%. He added phosphorus-capture technology, which limited the potential for harmful runoff into nearby streams and also produced fertilizer pellets that he could sell.

With every improvement the water became a little cleaner, and eventually Vrieze was able to eliminate his now obsolete manure lagoons. His treated wastewater was clean enough to discharge directly into nearby Dry Run Creek.

But Vrieze wasn’t done; he installed another digester at his 1,050-cow Baldwin Dairy. Here the wastewater was used to feed Future Farm, a high tech greenhouse and fish farm cofounded

by Vrieze and Steve Meyer. Gas and heat from the digester provide the energy. The wastewater flows first to the fish farm, nurturing thousands of tilapia. Then the aquaponics greenhouse uses the tilapia water to grow herbs, cleaning the water at the same time.

It’s a lot of moving parts and economic returns are not yet complete, but, after some down and neutral years, profit is on

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the rise. Vrieze, Meyer, Emerald Dairy, and Future Farm are breaking trail towards sustainable, closed-loop food systems that will help green Wisconsin’s dairy industry.

While Climate Forward: A New Road Map for Wisconsin’s Climate and Energy Future details many more inspiring examples of climate change leadership by communities and businesses in Wisconsin, the question remains: What is keeping the rest of Wisconsin from moving forward with plans to address climate change?

To begin with, because Wisconsin doesn’t have an integrated, long-term energy plan, it is difficult to articulate to the public the needs, risks, and trade-offs involved in our energy options.

In some ways, we’ve grown complacent, comfortable with the status quo. For years Wisconsin was a leader in energy efficiency, but now we’ve fallen to the middle of the pack. Today we are investing less and less in efficiency, despite the potential for long-term gains. Integrating new technologies into our aging electrical grid will require extremely complicated changes to its physical structure as well as to utility business models. Because we know how to run a fossil fuel-dependent energy system, the familiar is an easy default—especially in the absence of a comprehensive state climate and energy plan.

A divisive political environment means missed opportunities for civil dialogue in the policy arena. Lately, Wisconsin has developed a reputation for its hostile and confusing climate for green businesses like wind energy, which sends entrepreneurs and developers to other states.

Facing similar hurdles and a lean economy, neighboring states are still attracting clean energy jobs and investment.

In 2012 alone, Michigan increased its wind energy capacity to more than Wisconsin will have in total by the end of 2015.

Minnesota expects to generate 25% of total electricity from renewable resources by 2025. Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota all have aggressive energy efficiency goals, while Illinois, Iowa and Michigan have adopted stronger building energy codes than Wisconsin. Neighboring states that have increased their reliance on locally produced renewable energy, such as Iowa and Minnesota, also have more stable electric rates.

Short-term thinking in both business development and realtime energy expenditures is costing us big. In 2011, we remitted $15.9 billion out of state to import our fossil fuel-based energy.

This dependence makes us vulnerable to interruptions in the supply chain, unexpected price shifts, even minor spills and accidents. Wisconsin’s electric rates may become some of the highest in the region as a result of this near-sightedness.

Rapidly rising propane costs and shortages during winter 2014 illustrate just how vulnerable Wisconsin businesses and families alike (especially in rural areas) are to market fluctuations.

Do we cling to the status quo and hope it gets better? The status quo is comfortable for some, but as time goes on it brings increasingly limited options—and less and less opportunity. Change is coming. Making a plan and moving forward now will keep Wisconsin vibrant and competitive in the future.

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Despite our stumbling start, Wisconsin is still poised to be a global leader in the emerging clean energy economy.

Certainly we can find ways to reduce our own state’s carbon footprint. But we can also go further, pushing for breakthroughs in conservation, efficiency, and renewable energy.

The benefits of the second path include a better standard of living here in our state and the chance to export our clean energy resources and models across the world.

The road forward will require hundreds, even thousands of smart choices made by individuals and households, by communities and businesses. But there are many ways to get to our destination. A few suggestions taken from Climate Forward will help us arrive there sooner rather than later.

Be ambitious.

To have a meaningful impact on greenhouse gas emissions, cut Wisconsin’s carbon emissions 80% by 2050—a target that would align us with recommendations from the international scientific community. Most experts agree that serious reduction efforts won’t happen without settling on a price per ton for carbon emissions. While national and international efforts to price carbon are necessary, pressure from below may also be required. Wisconsin can and should be a leader here.

Increase overall efficiency in Wisconsin by 2% each year.

By matching goals already in place in Illinois, Wisconsin could realize significant energy savings and reduce emissions. Drawing on figures from a 2009 study by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, the Wisconsin Environmental Initiative projects that an annual 2% improvement in energy efficiency over ten years would save $3.4 billion and create more than 4,000-energy related jobs.

Commit to a minimum 1% average annual increase in renewable energy generation in Wisconsin in 2015.

Wisconsin can realize a much larger role for solar energy, smart use of biomass, and expanded wind generation.

Immature clean energy markets combined with shifting policy priorities can jeopardize market development; for example, inconsistent federal incentives hurt wind development, while Wisconsin’s changing priorities have hurt the solar industry in the state. Supporting a variety of alternatives in a measured but constant way spreads risk across multiple technologies and pathways forward.

Foster stewardship.

We are the home of conservation pioneers Aldo Leopold and Gaylord Nelson. Caring for our lands is in our blood, and we can and should explore new ways to maximize nature’s own capacities to store carbon in soil and plant tissues that support beneficial ecological processes for people and nature. And the healthier our land and waters, the more resilient they will be in the face of climate change.

Make mobility sustainable.

Our transportation system is in need of a smart upgrade.

By simply managing travel demand, encouraging off-hours freight, and setting some basic efficiency and pollution standards for cars and trucks, we can get more—a lot more—out of what we have. Future transportation investments should be guided by principles that facilitate pedestrian, bicycle, bus, and train travel, as well as automobile.

Communicate.

We need to help the public better understand the challenges, options, and choices we face. Free and open public conversations about climate and energy topics are essential. More minds, more voices, and more votes are needed to ethically respond to the burden that climate change places on vulnerable people here and abroad, on future generations, and on other species.

Our world faces climatic changes that threaten our health, safety, and the stability of the natural systems that sustain us.

Change creates opportunity, but that opportunity comes with the responsibility to pursue options that support our people, our environment, and our economy in a global context.

We have the research capacity, the manufacturing knowhow, and innovators leading the way. We have a system of world-class higher education. We have citizens, researchers, farmers, and many, many people who know how to roll up their sleeves and tackle hard challenges.

If leaders from all walks of life in Wisconsin can more fully imagine what it will take to embrace this challenge, there’s no reason not to begin working to find ways to address climate change. We are confident that Wisconsin can chart a new climate and energy future that will truly carry us: Forward. Z

CONNECT: Climate Forward: A New Road Map for Wisconsin's Climate and Energy Future The product of a two-year collaboration and dialogue with climate and energy leaders in Wisconsin, Climate Forward: A New Road Map for Wisconsin's Climate and Energy Future provides an assessment of current energy resources and needs and a practical vision for how we can harness innovation, imagination, and Wisconsin values to shape a future that is good for our environment, our economy, and life in our state. In Climate Forward the Wisconsin Academy examines many facets of solutions to reducing emissions and reliance on fossil fuel and profiles more than a dozen businesses, communities, farms, and individuals that are in the vanguard of 21st-century thinking about climate and energy. Visit wisconsinacademy.org/climateforward for more information or to download a PDF of the full report after July 1, 2014.

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GALLERIA

Donald Friedlich: A Life of Stone, Gold & Glass B y J od y C lowes

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t was a chance meeting on a ski run that first piqued Donald Friedlich’s interest in making jewelry.

At the age of twenty, unsure of his direction, Friedlich spent a winter in Stowe, Vermont, skiing and contemplating his future.

One day on the slopes, as he recalls, “This little girl—I thought—passed me like a bat out of hell. We ended up going up the gondola together. Turns out she wasn’t a girl, but a small woman. June Mendell and I skied together and got to be friends.

She was sort of a hippie jeweler.”

During a walk on a Martha’s Vineyard beach the following summer, Friedlich pocketed an oval beach stone, wondering if Mendell might make him a piece of jewelry from it. When he brought it back to Mendell’s studio in Vermont, she refused, offering him a greater gift instead: the challenge of trying his own hand at the jeweler's bench.

“I took to it rather quickly,” Friedlich says modestly. “I made the stone into a silver pendant and wore it for many years. Over the next year from time to time I would go to her studio and make jewelry. It was a very casual arrangement.”

Still, it took a few years before Friedlich considered pursuing jewelry seriously. “I had never thought of myself as an artist or creative in any way. I did like working with my hands and taking things apart and fixing them.” Although he’d done well in math and science in school and fantasized about becoming an inventor, college hadn’t held much appeal.

Eventually he enrolled at the University of Vermont. While working in Mendell’s studio had certainly sparked his interest, a few semesters passed before he found his way to the university’s art department and a jewelry class taught by Laurie Peters.

“That class changed my life. I ended up practically living in the jewelry studio, took a bunch of other art classes, and discovered a creative side that was completely dormant. It was very exciting.”

From that point on, Friedlich’s course was laid. He spent about a year working for the jeweler Timothy Grannis in nearby Burlington, and ventured to Haystack Mountain School of Crafts

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in Maine for a metalsmithing workshop with the artist Arline Fisch. Friedlich transferred to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he received his BFA in jewelry and metalsmithing in 1982. “I had a nine-year undergraduate career,” he notes wryly.

Then as now, RISD was known for its extraordinary faculty in craft media. Friedlich studied intensively with metalsmithing master John Prip, jeweler and sculptor Claus Bury, and even took a professional practices class with glassblower Dale Chihuly, all three heavyweights in their respective fields. His focus and dedication in the classroom paid off. Within a year of leaving RISD, Friedlich was showing his work in several prominent craft galleries, and his limited-production jewelry was getting notice from a national audience at craft shows directed at wholesale buyers and serious collectors.

After many years in Rhode Island, Friedlich and his wife Judith Mitchell moved on, first to Iowa City, and then to Madison in 1998, where Mitchell eventually settled into a position teaching creative writing in UW–Madison’s English Department. By this time Friedlich was already well established as an artist. He was showing internationally, serious collectors were seeking his oneof-a-kind pieces, and his limited production jewelry was selling consistently.

Not bad for a self-professed ski bum.

So what is it about Friedlich’s work that is so captivating to jewelry and art collectors alike?

In many ways, his work defies easy categorization. For one, he’s a jeweler whose primary material is glass: although a surprising number of jewelry artists have experimented with

Image credit: Larry Sanders

Image credit: Judy Mitchell

GALLERIA

Celery Brooches, 2013. Glass, 14k gold, (top) 6 x 1¼ x 1¾ inches; (bottom) 6 x 1¼ x 1¾ inches

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GALLERIA

Interference Series Brooch, 1994. Slate, 22k gold, sterling, 2¼ x 2¼ x 3⁄ 8 inches

Flower Petal Brooch, 2012. Blown glass, 14k gold, 5 x 17⁄ 8 x 3⁄ 8 inches

Flower Petal Brooch, 2012. Blown glass, 14k gold, 5 x 17⁄ 8 x 3⁄ 8 inches

This page photo credit: Larry Sanders

Interference Series Brooch, 1995. Slate, sterling silver, 2¼ x 2¼ x 3⁄ 8 inches

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the medium, few have explored its potential with such depth and focus. An artist with a finely tuned sense of color and formal composition, he’s equally driven by technical challenges, constantly pushing himself to develop new skills.

It is this fierce independent streak that drives Friedlich to continually explore unusual materials, new methods and tools, and the unique qualities that set jewelry apart from other art forms: its scale, its relationship to clothing and the human form, and the design challenge of attaching it to fabric or suspending it from the body.

Throughout his career Friedlich has been drawn to nontraditional media, from that first beach stone to slate, semi-precious stones, clear optical glass, even ceramic tile. His most recent series are centered on new ways of working with glass, and even his most saleable pieces use precious metals and gems very sparingly.

Within the small, specialized world of studio jewelry, work in nontraditional media isn’t a new phenomenon. Artists have been moving away from precious gems and metals since the 1950s, celebrating and elevating everything from found objects to wood, resins, plastics, and eccentric metals like titanium and aluminum. At mid-century, the use of non-precious materials was often seen as a challenge to the conventional status of jewelry as trophies for the rich.

By the time Friedlich began focusing his attention on slate in the early 1980s, the gesture was innovative but not necessarily radical. Instead, his choice of materials reflected a profound appreciation of the stone’s natural beauty: its soft dark sheen, the way it absorbs light, and the layered, irregular edges revealed when it breaks.

Friedlich treated slate as if it were a gemstone, cutting it with lapidary techniques and pairing it with gold. Since the slate was virtually free—a large stash of fragments from a broken chalkboard was enough to fuel years of work— Friedlich could afford to invert the traditional ratio of stone to precious metal.

Rather than using gold to set, or frame, the slate, Friedlich employed it as a bright, warm accent against expanses of velvety matte black, punctuating the transitions between the stone’s varied shapes and textures. When he added diamonds or other gems, they were small and precisely spaced, like sparks of light peeking out from a darkened sky. These early pieces— typically brooches just two or three inches in diameter—create visual tension through the interplay of dark and light, smooth and abraded surfaces, and sharply cut and roughly broken edges.

In the mid-1980s, inspired by the dramatic canyons and mesas of the American Southwest, Friedlich began a deeper exploration of texture, carving his work with a sandblaster to develop surfaces that echo the effects of wind and water on stone. The gentle, organic nature of these surfaces is held in check by the severe clarity of Friedlich’s favorite geometric shapes: triangles, rectangles, spheres, and off-kilter ovoids. Quiet and restrained, such simple forms create a perfect foil for his increasingly subtle explorations of texture, shadow, and light. His abraded

marks were equally simple, most often X’s or rows of parallel lines.

Friedlich began to work with glass in 1990, carving and sandblasting it much as he did stone. He loved its color and translucence, and often backed his glass brooches with thin sheets of niobium—a metal that takes on brilliant colors through electrochemical oxidation—to generate an optical effect as the wearer shifts and moves.

As he became more familiar with the material, Friedlich was increasingly fascinated by what he calls the “site-adaptive” qualities of jewelry made with translucent glass: its ability to reveal (and sometimes magnify) the color and weave of clothing, and also to reflect or refract light in response to movement. But he felt his glass skills limited him to “cold-working:” carving, grinding, etching, and sandblasting.

In 2001, seeking to expand his technical abilities in glass, he started going to The Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass (CMOG) in upstate New York to take one- or two-week work-

Friedlich’s current work encompasses lyrical, curved, leaf-like shapes, subtle rounds that suggest cells or rippling water, and a delightful series of pieces cast directly from items in the produce department: celery stalks, apple slices, asparagus, and sections of squash. shops. The CMOG is an international leader in the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge about the art, history, science, and technology of glass and glassmaking. The Studio is a wellequipped teaching facility adjacent to the museum.

In 2003 Friedlich was the first jeweler to be accepted into its extremely competitive residency program. Since then, he’s become a regular at The Studio, returning two to three times each year to teach or take classes. The fruit of this relationship has been a radical change in his approach, several new bodies of work, and fresh excitement about stretching his abilities and expanding his toolkit. “One of the best things about being an artist is that if you work it right, you can spend your life learning,” Friedlich asserts.

His current repertoire includes a wide range of techniques: working with glassblowers to create his own “raw materials,” hollow forms designed specifically to be cut and shaped into jewelry; casting chunks of glass into plaster molds in a kiln; press-molding hot, molten glass into carved graphite molds; and more.

The carved graphite molds alone represent a tremendous learning curve. Designed with software and carved with computer-aided machining, the molds are also incredibly beau-

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This row photo credit: James Beards

GALLERIA

Aqua Series Brooch, 2007. Glass, 22k gold, 18k gold, 14k gold, 31⁄ 8 x 25⁄ 8 x 3⁄ 8 inches

Aqua Series Brooch, 2008. Glass, 22k gold, 18k gold,14k gold, 31⁄ 8 x 25⁄ 8 x 3⁄ 8 inches

Magnification Series Brooch, 2008. Glass, 14k gold, 3 x 2¾ x ½ inches

Apple Brooch, 2013. Glass, 2013, sterling, niobium, 22k gold, 18k gold, 14k gold, 25⁄ 8 x 2½ x 5⁄ 8 inches

Aqua Series Brooch, 2013. Glass, 22k gold, 18k gold, 14k gold, 25⁄ 8 x 23⁄ 8 x 3⁄ 8 inches

This row photo credit: Larry Sanders

This row photo credit: James Beards

Translucence Series Brooch, 2009. Blown glass, 22k gold, 18k gold, 14k gold, 2¾ x 2½ x ½ inches

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tiful in themselves. Friedlich began exploring digital fabrication through visiting-artist sessions at Kendall School of Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where his colleague and friend Phil Renato has equipped a state-of-the-art studio.

“I spent half the time with the students doing critiques, demonstrations, and lecturing, and half the time with Phil, playing with their very cool high-tech toys.”

Not having a glass furnace of his own, Friedlich has reached out to local artists and businesses for help, collaborating with Madison glassblower Shayna Leib on the press-molded pieces and renting kiln space from a local stained-glass workshop to cast glass. Each of these techniques has opened up new avenues for his work, which now encompasses lyrical, curved, leaf-like shapes, subtle rounds that suggest cells or rippling water, and a delightful series of pieces cast directly from items in the produce department: celery stalks, apple slices, asparagus, and sections of squash. The tiny glass vegetables and fruits are crystalline in their perfection, so bright and clear they seem like something out of a fairy tale.

These organic forms, Friedlich confesses, are a far cry from the abstract geometric style he’s most comfortable with, but “the idea wouldn’t leave me alone. It would cross my mind, and I would think, ‘this is the silliest idea I’ve ever come up with.’ I kept pushing it aside, but it was so persistent. Finally I decided to try one celery brooch, and I liked the way it came out. The idea of wearing a stalk of celery as a brooch makes me smile.”

Increasingly, collaboration and education (his own and others’) have become essential components of Friedlich’s work schedule. He has continued to cultivate a reputation as a talented and generous teacher, traveling widely to present workshops or share his experience as a visiting artist or lecturer. His informal teaching stints include the Canberra School of Art in Australia (2004), Tainan National University in Taiwan (2007),

and California College of Arts and Crafts (2012), to name just a few.

Today Friedlich has an international reputation, with work in important collections like London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and the Schmuckmuseum in Pforzheim, Germany, not to mention Wisconsin’s own Racine Art Museum.

Although he’s been all over the world, Friedlich has found a comfortable home here in Wisconsin. But comfortable doesn’t mean static, and you can bet Friedlich’s restless imagination will keep his work as an artist on the move. It’s important to note, too, that unlike most of his peers, Friedlich doesn't have the security of an academic post. An independent artist, he supports himself in large part through sales of limited-production jewelry.

Having established his own career during the economic boom of the 1980s, Friedlich was and is today particularly concerned about younger jewelers entering the field, noting how attendance at craft shows and the patronage of both dealers and collectors are declining rapidly.

“I feel the time after school is over is the most fragile time in an artists’ life,” he explains. “That’s when we lose so many talented people. When I started, galleries and stores were actively looking for new talent. The market was growing and robust, and craft shows offered a viable way to make a living.

Now the shows have gone downhill.”

As president of the Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) from 1999–2001, he became known as an outspoken advocate for independent studio artists and production jewelers, who operate without the support of an academic position. Friedlich feels that he and his contemporaries need to do more work to articulate the value of the craft to the public.

“If we can’t find a way to engage a younger audience, we are doomed to go the way of the buggy whip,” he says. “Most people have no idea that the field of contemporary jewelry and metalsmithing even exists. If we were an Olympic sport, it would be curling. We need to find a way to be ice-skating.” Z

Connect

Donald Friedlich: Organic Matter Dianne Soffa: Storm Candy Side-by-side solo exhibitions, on view May 13–June 29 Opening reception on May 16, 5:30–7:30 pm, featuring gallery talks

by Donald Friedlich and Dianne Soffa at 6:30 pm Donald Friedlich is internationally recognized for his elegant and innovative jewelry, which combines cast and cold-worked glass with gold. Inspired by memories of Midwestern childhood summers, Dianne Soffa’s abstract color field paintings have luscious surfaces, luminous color, and a rich emotional core. These exhibitions and all related events are free and open to the public. Visit wisconsinacademy.org/gallery for more information.

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READ WISCONSIN Congratulations to the winners of our 2014 fiction and poetry contests

Karen Loeb - First Place Fiction

Jennifer Sauer - Second Place Fiction

Marilyn Shapiro Leys - Third Place Fiction

Dion Kempthorne - First Place Poetry

Jeanie Tomasko - Second Place Poetry

Judith Harway - Third Place Poetry

Every year our fiction and poetry contests shine a light on some of the best Wisconsin writers. I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you that Wisconsin People & Ideas is the only quarterly magazine that features Wisconsin fiction and poetry along with articles by and about the writers and poets who make our state great.

If are a subscriber, please suggest this magazine to a friend or fellow writer. In addition to sharing four issues of the best magazine of contemporary Wisconsin thought and culture, you’ll be connecting them with an organization dedicated to critical thought and exploration across the sciences, arts, and letters: The Wisconsin Academy.

Participation in our annual contests by a lot of writers means that we can award some nice prizes. Winners of the poetry contest receive awards of $500 (first place), $100 (second place), and $50 (third place). Fiction contest winners receive awards of $500 (first place), $250 (second place), and $100 (third place). The first-place poet and writer both receive a one-week residency at Shake Rag Alley School for Arts and Crafts in Mineral Point, one of two sponsors of our annual contest And, of course, all of our winners are invited to read in Madison for the Wisconsin Book Festival (see page 54 for details), our other contest sponsor.

This year, the poetry contest featured as preliminary judges John Lehman (Cambridge) and Jeremy Behreandt (Madison). Lead poetry contest judge—and current Wisconsin Poet Laureate—Max Garland waded through 585 poems to find our three winners.

This year the fiction contest lead judge was author Susanna Daniel (Madison) and I, along with Wisconsin Academy colleague Aaron Fai, acted as preliminary judges. The fiction contest received 69 submissions.

All judging was done blindly and ranking was done solely on the merit of individual stories in the opinion of our judges.

I'd like to thank our lead and preliminary judges for volunteering their time and efforts to the 2014 contest, and offer a special thanks to 2014 contest sponsors Shake Rag Alley School for Arts and Crafts and the Wisconsin Book Festival.

Most important, thanks to everyone who participated in the 2014 contests. I'm continually amazed by and proud of our state's poets and writers. Keep on writing and Wisconsin People & Ideas will keep on supporting your craft.

More information on the contests, prizes, and sponsors can be found at wisconsinacademy.org/contests.

—Jason A. Smith, editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas

TURN THE PAGE TO READ THE WINNING POEMS AND FIRST-PLACE STORY FROM OUR 2014 CONTESTS!

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ABOUT THE POET

Winner of the 2014 Wisconsin People & Ideas Prize in Poetry:

Badger born and bred, Dion Kempthorne was a linebacker on the 1963 Wisconsin Rose Bowl team.

He earned a PhD in English from UW– Madison, and then taught English in the UW Colleges and served as CEO/ Dean at UW–Richland. Now a professor emeritus, Kempthorne lives in the woods in Richland County and spends his days reading, writing, hiking, and cutting firewood. His poems have appeared in Mature Years, Verbatim, Verse Wisconsin, Wisconsin People & Ideas, and the Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, among other places. In addition to writing poetry, Kempthorne is at work on essays about Emerson and Thoreau and on a memoir that explores the personal benefits of reading and writing poetry.

Liturgy of the Swallow While Cardinal Swanson flares his satin sleeves on high to let fly the word of God, the little bird, swift and sweet as a stolen kiss, having lost its way in, seeking a way out, tries flying some dazzling demonstrations of flight above the heads of a gaping congregation, dives way down to sway a swerving choir, swoops way up to light on the barbed brow of Jesus, pauses there to perch a parable on the virtues of an open window, then sets off on a mission of light and thuds like a bible into a muddled rainbow of leaded glass, drops as dead, but dangles

JUDGE’S NOTES

from the sill, then flutters up to cling to a leaded seam of sky, and hangs there faintly pecking at the pane of Sebastian, its sleek wings drawn in, its forked tail trembling,

By Max Garland: The form and language, sound and sense, in “Liturgy of the Swallow” seemed to me, well, about as seamless as could be imagined. I liked the flow and music and intensely compact images in the poem so much I only realized on the second or third reading that the poem was composed of a single sentence. A very vivid sentence.

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in back a baby crying.

— Dion Kempthorne

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Rural Route Delivery After the brown eggs over easy, the morels simmering down, the luna moth at the window, after watching our wine blaze in the setting sun, then at dusk to hear the unsettling untuning of another year, the milkweed rattling in the wind, the barred owls harping who who who cooks for you while an asylum of crickets cheers our ascent to silence in solstice stars sparking ice in a descending sky, we will after all be content to know, like a soldier’s letter home, what was feared lost forever, will at last, just in time, be delivered.

—Dion Kempthorne

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In a Word When I just was and cared less for reading, my mother in the far corner of our living room in her solitary cone of light, sat alone and read poems aloud to herself.

Poetry, she said somebody said, is a dialogue between the living and the dead.

Sometimes she said one word over and over so often I thought she was calling me, as she calls me still in the sound of a screen door closing on a summer night.

Now as I sit here trying to write, my granddaughter, the daughter of my daughter my mother never lived to see, is busy dressing some babies she’s punched out of a book of babies on the floor beside me.

I can tell you this, she’s laying down some hard rules for them.

Stop crying and go to sleep, she says to the one in pink pajamas, who seems to me not to have made a peep.

So of course I want to lift her up and hold her close and try this poem on her.

I want to say mother over and over and over to her.

—Dion Kempthorne

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ABOUT THE POET

Second-Place Prize in Poetry:

Jeanie Tomasko is the author of Sharp as Want (Little Eagle Press), a poetry/ artworks collaboration with Sharon Auberle, Tricks of Light (Parallel Press) and the e-chapbook, If I Confess Before 5:00 (Right Hand Pointing). Her recent work appears in The Midwest Quarterly, Rattle, and Right Hand Pointing.

Her story/poem Prologue, is the recipient of an Editor’s Choice award from Concrete Wolf Chapbook Series, and will be published in the fall of 2014.

Tomasko works as a home health nurse in the Madison area. She and her husband, Steve, are the editors of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets 2015 Poets’ Calendar.

The We of Two Horses Even one and one’s loneliness, the we of our cats or the we of two horses in the autumn field, side to side, head to rump, their muscular together. It’s better with a we, my mother said to me when I first met you, and I said again to you last Saturday morning as we watched the two geldings eating apples at the farm.

And later, out of all the warblers east of the Mississippi, two had decided to take a bath together under the abandoned fire hydrant.

JUDGE’S NOTES

They couldn’t stop talking, it seemed, they had much to say. Today,

By Max Garland: I appreciated the way “The We of Two Horses” poet took an ordinary and ordinarily overlooked pronoun, we, and turned it over and over until we (the readers) became reacquainted with how large a concept a small word can contain.

I like we in my friend’s poem. We walked the prairie, she and I, we banded butterflies. Sometimes things happen to the we of our us and it’s a good word to say again, a word that wants to hold hands, September, prairie just past yellow, ready to flame into that color for which we have no name.

— Jeanie Tomasko

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2014 Contest Honorable mention POEMS AND STORIES

Another day and we haven’t used Algebra

Congratulations to our ten honorable mention poets for their outstanding works of poetry:

—Sign outside a convenience store in Milwaukee

• “ Wild Women in Old Movies” by Margaret Benbow, Madison • “Crossing Guard” by Bruce Dethlefsen, Westfield • “ Her Things Become Her” by Nancy Jesse, Madison • “Heaven” by Kathryn Gahl, Two Rivers • “ Strip Scrabble” by Dion Kempthorne, Richland Center • “ Dollar Store Moon Poems”

by Louisa Loveridge Gallas, Milwaukee • “ Snow Dance” by Richard Roe, Middleton • “ Katsura” by Jason Splichal, Eau Claire • “ Another day and we haven’t used Algebra” by Jeanie Tomasko, Madison • “Reversal” by Lisa Vihos, Sheboygan

Rain doesn’t mean melancholy or cucumber, it doesn’t mean that I am sad or Methodist, nor that you can assume or predict what a poem about rain is going to say. You don’t know anything about my windows or that I am or might be missing someone or no one who I walked with in the rain once or not.

These are simply drops traveling the pane and rain in this poem means rain. Rain in this poem means I wanted it to rain all night in a hard, perpendicular way but it didn’t.

It is raining now though, and there was a point at which the robins stopped singing.

There was also some logic my cat used

Congratulations to our five honorable mention authors for their outstanding stories:

to decide not to go out, so she and I are watching rain fall from one green leaf of the August

• “Swimming to Saba” by Shaun Melarvie, Sturgeon Bay • “John and Loretta, Circa 1967” by Mary Rodriguez, McFarland • “Night and Day” by Tom Stark, Madison • “Guardians” by Sandy Walejko, Belleville • “Creatures of the Air” by Tim Walsh, Madison

crabapple to another. She is happy (I think) with the way this works, and I am thinking as logically as I can, which I owe the exquisite ability to do so to seventh grade math.

At this point someone might say: but you can have all your algebra back if you whisper me again in my right ear the solution for that damn unknown.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2014 contests. For more contest information and rules, visit wisconsinacademy.org/contests.

— Jeanie Tomasko

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ABOUT THE POET

Third-Place Prize in Poetry:

Judith Harway is the author of the forthcoming memoir Sundown (Branden Books) and three collections of poetry: Swimming in the Sky (Finishing Line Press, 2014), All That is Left (Turning Point Books, 2009) and The Memory Box (Zarigueya Press, 2002). She is Professor of Writing and Humanities at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and two-time recipient of the Wisconsin Arts Board fellowship in literature.

Interior Landscape In the window, hung on fishing line, three prismed crystal globes catch and refract whatever rays dive down between apartment blocks: kaleidoscoping stars of rose, blue, saffron light dance crazily across the walls, the quilts, the shelves of novels bookended by cast-iron cats, the canopy of her window-sill bonsai forest rooted in a glen of celadon pots. Each afternoon, she murmurs home from school four hours before her folks come in, the gold spill of her hair tangling in backpack straps as she throws the deadbolt, slips off flowered sneakers, stretches on the bed among stuffed bears and kittens, humming sotto voce to her room, her world.

How perfectly she tends it! Word by word, she fills the journal tucked beneath her bed with secrets, longings, lies for her eyes only;

JUDGE’S NOTES

drop by drop she measures rainfall, mists each bonsai leaf, completes the composition with an inch-high herd of sika deer, so fine their porcelain hooves almost click among roots, ambling tree to tree, grazing the grass-green moss.

By Max Garland: I liked how full of detail “Interior Landscape” was, and how much setting and characterization were compressed into 24 lines. Also, the poem seemed to actually demonstrate what it described. In other words, a kind of underlying argument for poetry (or art) itself might be discovered lurking there.

The scene’s as beautiful as it was yesterday, as it will be tomorrow, every element a thing she treasures. What would I see outside, eleven stories down? Let’s say it’s autumn. Say the park’s a ruckus of bare limbs and mud. Say kids are calling, shoving at their games and winter’s breathing down the necks of muffled people waiting at the bus stop as day fades into a stormy dusk, wind rising off the Hudson to her windows like a shake of bones. Alone, inside, she flicks on lights, draws blinds, bends low to peek beneath the leaves of tiny white oaks, poplars, sugar maples, green and stunted stars that never bloom and never have to fall.

—Judith Harway

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A Fish Story I met him on my way up from the creek, that old guy, shapeless hat pulled low and big chaw in his cheek. “Catch anythin’?” he called. I shrugged my shoulders, for I had no pole, no net, no wish to catch more than a glimpse of sundappled water rushing on like history to whatever happens next. Anyway, the only lure for me in silver feathered flies, their bogus lives aflutter till a big one strikes, is the fantasmagory of a magic fish I read of once: as my line bends, he’ll leap and dance onto the sand, his mirrored tail ablaze with all the world’s light, with the promise of three wishes, just for me, if I will set him free. I’ll choose my words with care, snagged on the memory of how my father sliced the nightcrawlers we’d dug, then slipped his barbed hook down into the body’s sleeve, the worm’s end hanging off and looping in the air until lakewater closed around it. Waiting, he’d reassure me: Fish are primitive, he said, their blood too cold, their brains too simple to know pain, and even so the hook sticks mostly in the gristle of the lip. Hook, line, and sinker, I believed him, never thinking of the ones who took hooks in their tongues or swallowed them, though some of those we cut the line and threw back anyway. My father’s arms were strong.

When he threw back a fish, he stood and pitched a perfect arc, a rainbow mirroring the sunset for a dozen yards or more before it hit, the splash a parody of a big bass jumping, and he joked of catching it again.

Strung through the gills, the ones we kept dragged out behind the boat like cans behind a car as he rowed in. My father’s hands were quick. When he lay fish out on the dock, their red gills pumping as they drowned in air, their gold eyes staring into dusk, he’d sometimes take his knife and slit a live one, anus up to gills, to show me, in among the tiny pastel organs, the still-beating heart. He meant it, I am sure, as a sort of science—like pithing frogs, perhaps, before dissection—and, since fish are primitive, when the heart’s laid bare and prodded with a knife his daughter felt no pain. But now I feel the weight of what I did not tell that old man by the creek, my first and shining wish: that, big or small, may they always get away.

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Wisconsin People & Ideas 2014 Short Story Contest

The Walk to Makino B y K aren L oeb

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y father is flying, my father is flying,” Rachel chants as they rush around the house in a panic, moving their mattress down to the tatami room and making their bedroom ready for the visit. his daughter. “Don’ thing I’ll come, hate flying what’did ya talk me inta this for must be crazy yer crazy for even going to Japan it’s too far too far too far.” He called her back a few days later, his voice reined in, explaining he had been sick, but now he was better.

She and Sam spread out guidebooks on the coffee table and make lists of places to go. “Can he walk okay?” Sam asks. He has only met this father one time, a year ago, in the twenty years that he has been with Rachel.

“Do you realize he’ll be here twentyone days? That’s one-fifth of our stay in Japan,” Sam says.

“One-fifth doesn’t seem like so much,” Rachel replies.

“It’s twenty percent.”

“Well, now that you put it that way. …”

She’s not actually sure he will be on the plane. When she talked to him last week, he was at home in California, and his voice was so filled with alcohol it was a river spilling over its banks, saturating everything in its path, including

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“Walk? Of course he can walk,” Rachel says. “Well, he always used to be able to walk.”

“I just meant that he’s past eighty.

He’s bound to have some limitations.”

“You’re right. Sorry for snapping. I guess we won’t be able to go to Nara to see the Daibutsu. I thought if he saw a Buddha fifty-three feet tall, there’d be a chance he’d remember it.”

Rachel goes over to the telephone table and takes out a bag from the lower compartment. She extracts a half-liter of

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{ {Book Reviews } Book Reviews } whiskey and holds it up so a sunbeam threads through it, causing the amber liquid to glow.

“What’s that for?” Sam asks. He’s amused as he imagines Rachel negotiating in Japanese for this squat bottle of Suntory liquor.

She shrugs. “I thought it would be something to tide him over in case he wants a drink.”

“It won’t tide him very far” “I know. But I’m not sure if he drinks scotch or whiskey, so I didn’t want to overspend in case I got it wrong.” She places it in the dining area on the bottom shelf of the cart for the rice cooker.

aaa Day two of the visit Rachel knocks on the door of the bedroom where her father is sleeping. “Come in,” he says.

She finds him sitting on the edge of the bed. “I woke up in the middle of the night and I wasn’t sure where I was,” he said. “I had no idea. And then I tried to go to the bathroom, but I nearly killed myself getting down the stairs.”

“Dad,” she says, going over to him.

“There’s a bathroom upstairs, and you have to be careful on the steps.”

“Well, they must be waxed or something.”

She pats his hand, noticing his crisp new pajamas. All the clothes she helped him unpack are new, most still with the price tags attached. His hair is white and combed back behind his ears, longer than he probably wore it when he was a judge, but not too long. His moustache is lean and bristly, yellowed from smoking.

This is the first time since she was nine that she has stayed under the same roof with her father.

Downstairs she gives Sam the bad news. He’s Mr. Moustache too, only his mushrooms out from his face, looking frothy instead of bristly. “Guess what?

We have to move the mattresses.”

“No.” He looks up from his bowl of hot rice and the Sumo magazine.

“He nearly fell going down the steps.”

“He’ll have to sleep with the mattress on the floor down here. There’s no way

The Good Luck Girls of Shipwreck Lane: A Novel

By Kelly Harms Thomas Dunne Books, 304 pages, $24.99

Reviewed by Erika Janik Iowa resident Janine Brown’s life changes in an instant when she wins a dream home on the coast of Maine. The only trouble is that there are two Janine Browns living in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and both believe they’ve won the dream home. The two wildly different Janines come faceto-face in the Maine mansion, where they struggle for control of their future in Kelly Harms’ debut novel, The Good Luck Girls of Shipwreck Lane.

The chapters alternate in perspective between the two Janines—one known as Janey and the other as Nean— who come to the home with different but similarly sad backgrounds.

The loss of a loved one had sent mousy Janey into hiding. She cooks elaborate gourmet meals for herself and her Aunt Midge, and breaks out in hives at the smallest of social interactions. Winning the contest is the last thing Janey thinks she wants (Aunt Midge entered her name behind her back) and she considers giving it up to stay in Iowa and the comfort of her routine. It’s only at the insistence of Midge that Janey agrees to move to Maine.

For Nean, the dream home is her ticket out of a hard luck life of homelessness and abusive relationships. Nean spends all her money on a one-way bus ticket to Maine and what she hopes will be a fresh start. Although she’s in her twenties, younger than Janey, Nean seems much younger still. She’s scrappy and clever, but also prone to impulsive behavior with the vulnerability of a teenager.

Neither woman is delighted with the other at first, as both are convinced that the other is an imposter bent on taking what is rightfully hers. But a series of lies

by Nean and the intervention of Aunt Midge, who sees the two Janines as just what the other needs, leads the three women to take up permanent residence together in the home.

Of the three main characters, octogenarian Midge with her stories of love and adventure is the most colorful. Her embrace of life contrasts most starkly with Janey’s fear and introversion. Midge’s presence and snappy dialogue greatly enlivens those chapters belonging to Janey, which can otherwise bog down in her extreme social phobia. Her anxiety, and how death precipitated what we perceive to be a transformation in her personality, are only lightly explored.

As a result, Janey appears to the reader just as she likely does to those who encounter her in life: flat, uptight, and closed off.

Although fiercely protective of and loyal to Janey, Midge has far more in common with the hardscrabble Nean. Midge sees the vulnerability behind Nean’s wisecracks and opens the house to her over Janey’s objections. The two women form a fast bond as Nean attempts to take responsibility for her choices and life.

Love interests for both Janey and Nean force each woman to confront her past and realize how much they need each other. The man in Janey’s life, Noah, is nearly as opaque as she is and it’s never clear what attracts him to Janey on their first meeting. Nean’s relationship, fitting her immaturity, seems more the stuff of a summer fling than a lasting bond.

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read WI ABOUT THE AUTHOR

to lug the whole bed down, and besides, the straw mats would be destroyed.”

They tell him the plan of switching sleeping places and what it will mean.

“That’s fine,” her father says. “Just fine.”

He noses around in the tatami room, bending to touch the straw, imagining his new digs. When they bring the single mattress down and the double back up, he sits all the way on the floor and pats the mattress. “This is great. I think I’ll move my bed to the floor when I get back to California. This is how everyone should sleep.”

Rachel carries down his clothes and rearranges them in the cupboard in the tatami room. It’s a six-mat room, goodsized, about the dimensions of her and Sam’s dining room back in the U.S. Her father rustles around behind her. She turns, and he’s buttoning his travel vest, which has ten pockets in front and a large, zippered one on the back. “I’m ready to see Japan,” he says. “I’ve been cooped up here too long.”

“We thought you needed at least a day to rest.”

“Well, I’ve had my day.”

“We’re out of whole wheat bread.

Maybe we can go to the store that sells it.”

“Let’s go.”

“It’s far, Dad. Over a mile. And there’s no bus.”

“I can walk. I don’t need a bus.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“I’ll just get my sweater.” Rachel finds Sam trimming his moustache. She comes up behind him and peeks over his shoulder. “Not too much,” she cautions.

“I just have to get this side even,” he says.

She shuffles her fingers through her short hair, then shakes it into place.

“This is the plan. My dad and I will walk to Makino for bread.”

“Good plan,” Sam says. “I can grade a few papers.”

“Not necessarily. What if he can’t make it?”

“You can always catch a taxi by Makino Station. This way we’ll see if he’s able to walk. That will tell us what kind of stamina he has for sightseeing. And

2014 Fiction Contest First-place winner Karen Loeb grew up in Chicago and has called several states home: Ohio, Florida and, since 1988, Wisconsin.

In 1996 and 1999 she had two extended stays in Japan. Loeb’s fiction has appeared widely in magazines: Louisville Review, North American Review, Thema, and elsewhere. She won a Minnesota Voices Project Award for her 1993 collection Jump Rope Queen. She also writes and publishes poetry. Stories of hers have won PEN Syndicated Fiction Prizes, and she is a past recipient of a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship. Living in western Wisconsin with her husband and daughter, she teaches creative writing and literature at UW–Eau Claire where she is a professor emerita.

JUDGE’S NOTES

By Susanna Daniel: The best family stories convey their meaning—and their quiet suffering and misunderstandings and disappointments— inside moments that seem unremarkable without a smart writer’s particular lens. This is true of the central moment of “The Walk to Makino,” wherein a father reveals his limitations to his adult daughter and she (finally) comes to accept them. This author does the work of holding the many pieces of a fictional world on the page at once: the lovely and unfamiliar setting, the conflicted characters and their complicated but disconnected love for each other, the spare dialogue.

Too, the writer keeps the information on the page limited to what the reader needs to know to understand precisely how the events, quiet as they may be, will come to change the narrator’s life.

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remember the bench half way, you can always sit on the bench to rest.”

Their excursion begins. Outside the March day is cool and lovely with the wind rustling through the grove of take.

How lucky to have this tiny bamboo forest across the road from the house.

“When you come outside to smoke,” Rachel says to her father, “you can go out the gate and walk along here by the bamboo.”

“I’m not going anywhere on my own,” he says. “I can’t speak the language. If I take a wrong turn I wouldn’t know how to ask to get back.”

“But there are no turns along here.

You could just walk down a ways and come back.”

“I might not remember the direction.” He fishes in one of his many vest pockets and plucks out a cigarette. “Now if I can just find the damn lighter.” They stop at the end of the grove and he pats the various pockets until he finds the red plastic.

They’ve been walking about three minutes. “How are you doing, Dad?” “I’m doing fine, just fine. How are you doing?” He chuckles at her when she doesn’t answer right away.

“I’m fine, too.” She loops her arm through his and she guides him around a bend and then around another, avoiding the raging shepherd dog contained in a yard with a too-short fence. Every house is fenced and gated with carefully trimmed trees and bushes. Forsythias are just out, a splurge of delicate yellows everywhere.

They come to a little area with dancing bears painted on the cement walk. People bring their dogs here. It’s a respite from walking on the narrow streets where there are no sidewalks.

The bench that Sam mentioned is up ahead. “Dad, let’s rest over here for a minute.”

“Why? Are you tired? Okay, if you’re tired, we can stop.”

“I’m not tired.”

“Well, I don’t need to stop.”

They keep walking, across another street and walk along a ravine where they can look down to the Hotani, whose muddy trickle challenges the

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{ Book Reviews } notion of river. They stay close to the guardrail, walking single file to avoid traffic. As they approach the station area, there’s a row of shops on the right. Bars, tofu shops, bicycle stores.

In one drinking place the bar is very close to the sliding shop doors, which are glass on top and corrugated tin on the bottom. Wooden bar stools, splintered and scuffed are up against the door. The idea is that when the door slides open the patrons will be sitting with their backs to the street.

The glass is filthy, and Rachel peeks in seeing piled up dishes and containers of food left out on the counters. Her father is also pressed up to the glass looking in. Maybe he’s imagining himself inside drinking with the regulars when it opens later. She’s heard some of the students from the university where she and Sam are teaching for a semester mention this place. It’s called Tropic Heaven, even though there isn’t a coconut or pineapple in sight to attempt a tropic motif.

Fifty yen will get you a glass of some kind of soapy looking beer.

“My god,” her father says. “Will you look at that?”

“What?” She moves closer to him, and sees.

“No,” she says. “I don’t believe it.”

Her father laughs, pushing the laughter through his nose so it comes out a snuffle. On one of the stools is a calico cat, one of the wretched, mangy cats that scrounges in the brush above the Hotani River. She’s lying on her side, nursing several kittens. It’s so astounding to see this inside the shop that they stare for a few minutes.

Finally they walk on. “You know,” her father says. “I remember when your mother was nursing you.”

Rachel listens hard. She never remembers her father talking about her childhood.

“She’d always go to a rocking chair.

We had one downstairs and one upstairs. You were so thirsty that we thought she would run out of milk.” He chuckles at the memory.

“I remember the green rocker upstairs. But I don’t remember the one downstairs.”

The Good Luck Girls of Shipwreck Lane follows a predictable path of discovery and redemption through friendship and love, but the charms and quirks of its characters—particularly Midge and Nean—propel the book along. Harms is an engaging and good-humored writer who delivers a light but enjoyably wacky story that will make every reader wish for an Aunt Midge of their own.

Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine

By Erika Janik Beacon Press, 352 pages, $28.95

Reviewed by Brendon A. Smith In Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine, Erika Janik traces the development of alternative (or “irregular,” as it was known then) medicine in nineteenth century America. Chapters chart the rise, decline—and, in some cases, resurgence—of botanic medicine, phrenology, hydropathy, homeopathy, mesmerism, patent medicines, and osteopathy. Throughout the book, Janik draws surprising connections between these varieties of irregular medicine and current scientific thought.

She begins the book with a description of her own sense of wonder at finding her great-grandmother’s 1916 certificate in water therapeutics from The Kellberg Institute for Hygiene, Massage, and Medical Gymnastics. Janik, the driving force behind Wisconsin Public Radio’s Wisconsin Life, did what any author of four award-winning history books would naturally do upon encountering an intriguing question: she researched.

Janik found that doctors at the time had belittled the idea of medical gymnastics, what we would today call exercise. But the gymnastics system to promote health and healing developed by Swedish immigrant Per Henrik Ling became quite popular among independent healers of the day. Janik discovered that Ling, who developed a method of medical calisthenics after noticing how his own daily exercises helped to heal joint injuries, “is the Swede behind Swedish Massage.”

“These weren’t the stories I was used to hearing,” Janik writes after offering other examples of irregular-yet-familiar medical treatments. “Most accounts of early American medicine focus tightly on embattled doctors valiantly protecting the public from harmful—and even deadly—medical charlatans and quacks.

The nineteenth century was not called the ‘golden age of the quack remedy’ for nothing, right?”

During this period, she goes on to tell us, professional doctors treated patients by bleeding them, blistering them, sweating them, and inducing vomiting.

These methods were called “heroic medicine.” Many doctors and their patients believed that a strong visceral reaction was a sign that the administered remedies were working. On top of these painful and largely unsuccessful methods, paying a visit to a doctor was expensive and, in rural areas, could require hours of travel.

The nineteenth century was a tumultuous time in America. The era spawned utopians, abolitionists, prohibitionists, public school supporters, champions for women’s rights, and other advocates for social reform. The Second Great

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read WI “Nothing, Dad. Nothing would have happened. You could have stepped out of line and waited. I was just over there.”

“That one might have been black,” her father says.

“Careful,” she calls out. She nudges him closer to the row of shops, avoiding a car by an inch on the narrow street.

They go into Keihan—The Store! and down the escalator to the supermarket section. Rachel speeds up, her eyes on the bread aisle. She spots the loaves of whole wheat, four of them, on the top shelf. “This is more than they usually have,” she tells her father.

“The slices are too thick.”

“That’s how they are—double sized. I usually slice them in half.” She gives two loaves to her father and she carries two to the checkout.

“There are only five slices in this bag, Rachel.”

“It’s okay, Dad. I’ll make them into ten when we get home.”

“Maybe they have another brand with thinner slices.”

“That’s it. That’s what they have.” She remembers they need milk and orange juice and dashes back to retrieve a liter of each, leaving her father to hold their place in line. When she returns, he’s up to the counter with the loaves already on the conveyer, and he’s looking warily around.

“You almost didn’t get back in time.”

“But I did.”

“What would have happened if you hadn’t?” His voice is strained.

He’s a man who is perpetually thirsty himself, whose kitchen counter holds dozens of glasses with puddles of whiskey in the bottoms waiting to be washed.

They walk back more quickly than they came. Her father insists on carrying the groceries, and they don’t even give a thought to resting on a bench. “Can you remember anything else from around that time?” Rachel asks.

“What time?” Her father stops, putting the bags down on the road to light a cigarette.

“The time when I was very little.

What else can you remember?”

“I can’t remember anything. It was too long ago. I wasn’t surprised though when I heard about your mother getting emphysema. She had problems breathing way before we divorced. She smoked more cigarettes than I do.”

Day twenty-two—they have put her father on the airplane, after the trip to Hiroshima—day ten of the visit—where he started drinking again, after the trips to Kyoto and Osaka, to Iwashimizu Hachiman-gu, the shrine on a mountain you get to by cable car, after walking through o-hanami, the cherry blossom festival, after their visit to the fifty-three foot Buddha, he gets on the airplane, still wearing his travel vest, the pockets clinking with dozens of yen coins he’ll give as souvenirs.

At home, near dark, they remember it’s recycling the next day. Most of their recycling this time is in the form of glass, specifically whiskey bottles of the Suntory persuasion, liter bottles that clash and clatter in the shopping bags as they carry them halfway to Makino through the quiet neighborhood to the drop-off spot. They leave their four bags slumping there in the crates. Who is this father who brought exactly one story with him about how thirsty Rachel was as a baby? If he hadn’t seen the calico cat, he might not have told it. He’s a man who is perpetually thirsty himself, whose kitchen counter holds dozens of glasses with puddles of whiskey in the bottoms waiting to be washed. Some families use photographs as evidence, as celebration of a reunion. For Rachel, it’s the bottles that serve as proof that her father came thousands of miles to visit. Z

CONNECT: Wisconsin People & Ideas 2014 Fiction & Poetry Contest Reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival Venue and Date TBD, October 2014 Join Wisconsin People & Ideas editor Jason A. Smith for an evening of the best poetry and fiction by up-and-coming Wisconsin writers at the Wisconsin People & Ideas 2014 Fiction and Poetry Contest reading event during the 2014 Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison. This showcase reading features the winners of our 2014 fiction and poetry contests. Featured poets for 2014 include Dion Kempthorne (Richland Center), Jeanie Tomasko (Madison), and Judith Harway (Shorewood). Karen Loeb (Eau Claire), Jennifer Sauer (Madison), and Marilyn Shapiro Leys (Prairie du Chien) will read their prize-winning stories from the 2014 contest as well. This event is free and open to the public.

For more information on the Wisconsin Book Festival please visit wisconsinbookfestival.org. Or, to find out more about our annual fiction and poetry contests, please visit wisconsinacademy.org/contests.

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{ Book Reviews } New & RECENT Releases

APRIL 2014 Banning DDT: How Citizen Activists in Wisconsin Led the Way

by Bill Berry Wisconsin Historical Society Press May 2014 The Artist's Library: A Field Guide

by Erinn Batykefer, Laura Damon-Moore Coffee House Press Spectator: Poems

by Kara Candito University of Utah Press A Kind of Dream: Stories

by Kelly Cherry University of Wisconsin Press On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman University of Chicago Press Editor's Pick: With rich ethnographic detail, Alice Goffman reveals the emotional arc of deceptively complex young lives that are criminalized daily in one Black neighborhood in Philadelphia

June 2014 How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

By Jodan Ellenberg Penguin Press Studying Wisconsin: The Life of Increase Lapham

by Martha Bergland and Paul G. Hayes Wisconsin Historical Society Press Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America

by Brian Benson Plume

Did we miss something?

E-mail jsmith@wisconsinacademy.org with other current or forthcoming titles from Wisconsin authors.

Awakening swelled Baptist and Methodist congregations. With an expanding frontier, waves of immigrants, and money to be made, social mobility increased dramatically.

All of this rapid social change created fertile ground for new ideas and an emerging, American do-it-yourself spirit in the realm of cures and pain relief through a proliferation of irregular medicine options. Hydropathy used cold baths, wet bandages, and steam baths to wash away disease. Phrenologists “read” the bumps and depressions on people’s heads to determine character traits and provide guidance on how to improve negative ones. Osteopaths believed that blockages in blood vessels caused disease and deformity.

Humility doesn’t seem to have been a trait of most of these irregular medicine originators. Many of them claimed that their system was the remedy for all diseases and refused to allow their disciples to change any aspect of it, despite a variable record of success. The irregular systems Janik describes grew in popularity, drawing millions of adherents. Many of them started professional associations and schools. By the end of the Civil War, an increasing number of legitimate doctors were changing their methods to regain patients lost to some of these systems.

But it wasn’t all quackery. Again and again throughout the book, Janik shows that despite being belittled by the medical establishment at the time irregular medicine gave us some useful elements that we rely upon today. Some irregular medicine practitioners encouraged new scientific approaches to testing medical treatments and explored the power of suggestion or brought to light new concepts of cognition. Others decried the idea that remedies were meant to be painful, and touted the benefits of good diet, exercise and cleanliness to ward off disease.

Botanic, patent, and homeopathic medicine were ideal systems for in-home use, and women, as the center of home life, were central to the irregular medicine movement. Many women were in fact respected experts in their fields. For instance, Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was an early and best-selling American patent medicine. Founded in 1851, the American Hydropathic Institute began churning out men and women graduates in almost equal proportion.

Where the Massachusetts Homeopathic Medical Society admitted women in 1870, the American Medical Association prohibited admission of women until early in the twentieth century.

Scientific discoveries in the last decades of the 1800s—including germs as causes of infection, the importance of sterile surgery, X-ray imaging, and others—helped to further shift the site of health care out of the home and into the hospital. As such, the irregular medicine system lost much of its momentum and most of its adherents.

Janik closes the book by enumerating the many victories and discoveries of irregular medicine that regular doctors had financial and professional incentive to marginalize. In Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine, she provides a much-needed corrective to our understanding of health care in this period of American history and a lens through which we can and should view emerging medical treatments. Z

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read WI Local Bookshop Spotlight { Janke Book Store – Wausau } Janke Book Store has been a fixture of downtown Wausau for generations. Erected in 1874 by Richard J. Collie and purchased by Carl Janke and Reno Kurth in 1919, the retail space at 508 3rd Street was the first incarnation of this Marathon County treasure. Although, back then it was known as Janke-Kurth.

“Our grandfather Carl came back from the First World War and in 1919 bought the store with his Army pension money alongside his buddy Reno Kurth,” says Jim Janke. In 1948 the Janke family bought out Kurth’s portion of the store, renaming it Janke Book Store. Today the store is in its third generation of Jankes, with Jim and sister Jane Janke Johnson owning and operating the space on 505 3rd Street, right next door to where their grandfather had his shop almost a hundred years ago.

Janke Books has survived a great depression and a few recessions, the death of the streetcar (Wausau’s closed down in 1940), the advent of the Internet, and countless other impediments to thriving retail sales. As a result, owners Jane and Jim have an almost glacial sense of calm when it comes to the future of the family business.

Like the Janke “kids,” I grew up in a family-owned business.

So I understand some of the combined pressures of history and legacy. Where I considered my family’s business a sort of personal playground—that is, until I had to work there—the Jankes feel the pull of obligation to keep the business alive.

“I did work in the store until after college,” says Jane, who returned in 1983 to work at the store full time. Jim, who never left, says that “like most boys, I helped out after school.”

(Although Jane refutes this claim: “No he didn’t, he was scared!”). When their father John passed away in 2006, their mother Delores retired and left the store to the siblings.

Talking to local bookstore owners is a lot like talking to small newspaper publishers: Invariably, the discussion turns to ways of thriving—or just surviving—in a largely digital marketplace.

“There are three things that are troubling,” says Jane, noting how, first, Waldenbooks and the big box stores showed up thirty years ago. Then the rise of digital retailers like Amazon. com, and the ubiquity of tablets and e-readers, put further pressure on the store to court both the walk-in customer as well as book clubs.

Foot traffic is key, and Janke’s downtown location helps to bring in customers. “Getting people in the store means more sales, and more sales means we get to keep the doors open,” says Jim. But he notes the decline in book clubs, even though the store has a dedicated space for them near the front.

“They don’t really meet in the store anymore,” he says. “The AAUW [American Association of University Women] used to meet in the basement, but the stairs got to be too hard for the older women. I guess they sort of aged out of meeting here,” says Jane, noting how the book club demographic is changing.

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Janke Book Store, run by Carl Janke's grandchildren Jim Janke and Jane Janke Johnson is known for its community involvement and knowledgable staff members. Employee Karen Briggs, pictured here, happens to have been Jane's seventh grade math teacher. Photo #3727 by Carl Corey from the Wisconsin Historical Society book, For Love and Money: Portraits of Wisconsin Family Businesses.

“But we are still here,” she adds with a chuckle and nod to their almost hundred-year tenure.

It’s clear the Jankes are proud to be a part of Wausau past and present. Indeed, their pride is reflected in their large collection of books about Wausau and Central Wisconsin.

The store has published a few books of their own, and Jane co-authored two with her father John Janke: Big Bull Falls: Postcard Views of Wausau, Volumes 1 and 2.

“Some of these projects do not make money, or we may even lose a little bit. But we think the history of Wausau is important,” says Jane.

People make history, and the Janke’s commitment to serving the citizens of Marathon County is just as palpable as their family pride. “We have seen people have kids and those kids grow up as customers,” says Jim, unspooling a story of a man who came into the store five days a week after he retired.

“Relationships like these are special,” adds Jane.

Clearly a bookstore that has been around for over a hundred years, through two families and more than three generations, has a handle on the importance of books, community, and the history of a place and its people.

For more information, visit jankebookstore.com.

—Dino Corvino

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La Crosse Compassion Project LIVE! An Evening with Richard J. Davidson Monday, June 2, 7–8:30 pm Viterbo Fine Arts Center, 929 Jackson Street, La Crosse

A renowned neuroscientist and one of the world’s leading experts on the impact of contemplative practices, Richard J. Davidson will discuss his groundbreaking work in studying emotion and the brain. His appearance at the Viterbo Fine Arts Center is sponsored by the D. B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership in partnership with the School District of La Crosse, the La Crosse Public Education Foundation, the Pump House Regional Art Center, and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. Free and open to the public.

Tyler Robbins: Anatomy of a Weekend Graham Yeager: Making Adjustments Side-by-side solo exhibitions On view July 11–August 24, 2014 Opening reception Friday, July 11, 5:30– 7:30 pm, with artists’ talks at 6:30 pm

Tyler Robbins’s Anatomy of a Weekend series is an offshoot of his photographic work about suburban rituals and citizenry. He removes objects used for chores and entertainment from their environments to form playful, decorative arrangements. Graham Yeager’s sculptures in steel, wood, and clay are often finished with strong, playful color, and are suggestive of simple machines, tools, or toys.

Left: Tyler Robbins, Shearly (detail), 2013. Photomontage, 24 x 36 in.. Right: Graham Yeager, Deputy Signal Flags (detail), 2013. Wood, steel, paint, 24 x 24 x 24 in.

Visit www.wisconsinacademy.org for more details