Wisconsin People & Ideas – Fall 2014

wisc

people & ideas

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

Berndt & Glowacki Celebrating Ten Years of James Watrous Gallery Magic

Citizen Science in Wisconsin On the trail with a growing volunteer movement in our state—and beyond

A Bridge in Progress $5.00 Vol. 60, No. 4

Fall 2014

Remembering “The Conscience of the Door,” author Norb Blei

Celebrate Wisconsin character with Wisconsin Life, now on Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television wisconsinlife.org

Contents

fall 2014 FEATURES 4 FROM THE DIRECTOR Cultivating Community through the Arts

6 EDITOR’s NOTES Customer First and Citizen Last 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 The quarterly magazine of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

Jason A. Smith, editor Jean Lang, copy editor Jody Clowes, arts editor Mariah Young-Jones, editorial assistant Designed by Huston Design, Madison Cover photo: Randall Berndt and Martha Glowacki in the James Watrous Gallery, 2014.

Photograph by Zane Williams

7 Upfront 7 Innovation and collaboration yield new tool for rotational grazing 8 Reedsburg installs a glowing agricultural cathedral in Harvest Park 9 Baraboo band PHOX set to take global stage 12 FEllow’s Forum Folklorist James P. Leary takes us along on his personal journey to uncover the cultural and historical treasury of Midwestern folk music.

16 Photo Essay Jon Horvath shares images from Wide Eyed, a series of photographs grounded in a sense of wonder and awe.

24 Report Lisa Gaumnitz introduces us to Wisconsin citizen scientists and researchers who are working together to preserve our environment and unlock the mysteries of nature.

30 ESSAY Myles Dannhausen Jr. examines the life and works of Door County writer, publisher, and provocateur Norb Blei.

36 Galleria Artists Randall Berndt and Martha Glowacki, the creative team behind the James Watrous Gallery, look back on ten years of Wisconsin art.

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

Photo credit: John Nelson

Wisconsin Academy Staff Jane Elder, executive director Randall Berndt, assistant curator, James Watrous Gallery Jeffrey Breisach, project assistant, UW Bolz Center Jody Clowes, exhibitions manager, James Watrous Gallery Aaron Fai, project coordinator Martha Glowacki, director, James Watrous Gallery Meredith Keller, Initiatives director Elysse Lindell, outreach & data coordinator Don Meyer, business operations manager Amanda E. Shilling, development director Jason A. Smith,communications director and editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas

ABOVE: Author and gadfly Norb Blei was a tireless chronicler of—and fierce advocate for— the place where he found his Muse: Door County. Learn more about Blei on page 30.

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Contents

fall 2014 READ WISCONSIN 45 READ WISCONSIN

Looking back on four years of successes and failures for Read Wisconsin,

our effort to bring more attention to Wisconsin’s rich literary culture.

46 FIctiON

The third place prize-winning story from our 2014 fiction contest,

“Luck,” by Marilyn Shapiro-Leys

49 Book Reviews 49 Erika Janik reviews Dispatches from the Drownings: Reporting the

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

Fiction of Nonfiction, by B.J. Hollars

51 Aaron Fai reviews Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America, by Brian Benson

52 Poetry

Poems from Wisconsin poets selected by editor Jason A. Smith 56 LOCAL BOOKSHOP SPOTLIGHT

Nancy Rafal pays a visit to the Reader’s Loft in Bellevue

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Dear Editor: The very best surprises in life are those that awaken us to the life, history, and marvel of one’s immediate surroundings. The Wisconsin Academy’s James Watrous Gallery has just such a surprising, elegant, and enlightening exhibition in The Archive as a River: Paul Vanderbilt and Photography.

I hadn’t known of Vanderbilt, though I have been living in Wisconsin and engrossed in its history for the past forty years. So imagine the shock of recognition as I recently entered the Watrous Gallery. Starting with the first panel, I was visually and literally introduced to a Wisconsin genius: photographer, archivist, and poet all in one—something truly rare.

In the panels Vanderbilt combined historical photographs with his own in a kind of visual dialogue, and in addition as a kind of bridge he added his own poetry. This would be a rare combination on its face, but here it is also an act of deep humanity. For each element of every panel is essential without supplanting or subordinating either of the other elements. This gives us the landscape in dialogue with who and what is behind it. I can only think of a few other instances where this relationship between elements happens. One would be The Home Place, Wright Morris’s 1948 masterful integration of photographs and narrative text, which means that Vanderbilt is in very lofty company, indeed.

As is the Watrous Gallery with this exhibition. The installation is elegant, even masterful, in that the images and their contextual materials are presented plainly and unobtrusively, making the whole experience visually and intellectually engaging. It is a stunning achievement.

Karl Gartung, Milwaukee

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Connecting Wisconsin people and ideas for a better world—since 1870.

Officers of the Board 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 Board Directors Les Alldritt, Washburn John Ashley, Sauk City Mark Bradley, Wausau Patricia Brady, Madison Cathy Cofell-Mutschler, Appleton Roberta Filicky-Peneski, Sheboygan Art Harrington, Milwaukee Joseph Heim, La Crosse Jesse Ishikawa, Madison Tom Luljak, Milwaukee Tim Size, Sauk City Marty Wood, Eau Claire UW Board Leadership Program Robert Brothers, Madison Ryan Dunk, Madison Officers of the Academy Foundation President: Jack Kussmaul Vice President: Andrew Richards Treasurer: Diane Nienow Secretary: David J. Ward Founder: Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) Foundation Directors Marian Bolz Greg Dombrowski Jane Elder Terry Haller Millard Susman

Contents

NEWS for

MEMBERS We’re looking for a few great volunteers of all stripes!

Donate your time and knowledge to the Wisconsin Academy by becoming a volunteer. We’re looking for volunteers to help with the following regular and seasonal needs at our Madison headquarters: • Data entry and filing. We’re looking for a reliable volunteer with great attention to detail to work with staff to update files and records of our meetings and events. Basic computer skills are essential, but we’ll train you on how to use our system.

• Historian. As we approach our 145th anniversary, we’re renewing efforts to capture the thoughts and stories of the people who have made the Academy what it is today.

If you are a history detective with a knack for writing, we’ve got the perfect project for you!

• Garden and grounds. Our office garden and grounds are maintained

by Academy staff. We could sure use help for fall clean-up to spring planting, as well as imaginative ideas for low-maintenance landscaping that is beautiful and good for the environment.

• Office furnishings and décor. Are you a thrift store genius or do you know of lightly used office furnishings we could adopt?

• Minor building renovation. Our 1922 University Avenue office space is over seventy years old and could use a handy-person (or two) to help with painting and basic maintenance.

If you are interested in any of these opportunities to volunteer, please contact Elysse Lindell at elindell@ wisconsinacademy.org or call 608-263-1692 x10.

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Myles Dannhausen Jr. is a native of Door County now living in Chicago, just a couple of miles from the neighborhood where author Norb Blei grew up. Dannhausen is a contributing editor for the Peninsula Pulse newspaper and Door County Living, and has also written for Chicago Athlete, Exclusively Yours, Running Times, UltraRunning, and GapersBlock.com. He returns to Door County frequently to work his parents’ garden and serve as course director of the Door County Half Marathon, Peninsula Century Ride, Spring Classic Ride, and organize the Door County Beer Festival.

Aaron Fai is the project coordinator of the Wisconsin Academy, supporting event planning and office administration. He previously taught creative writing at the University of Oregon and UC Davis and served in Peace Corps Kyrgyzstan. Fai’s interests include literature, translation, hiking, and, most recently, dog training.

Lisa Gaumnitz has been writing about Wisconsin’s natural resources for nearly twenty years, mostly as a public information officer for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. She recently returned to freelance writing and editing after her DNR career and stint as a daily newspaper reporter. Gaumnitz lives in Madison with her family and enjoys traveling the state to fish, camp, hike, bike, and ski.

Jon Horvath is an artist and educator residing in Milwaukee. He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 2008, and Bachelor’s degrees in English Literature and the History of Philosophy from Marquette University in 2001. His work has been exhibited nationally in galleries including: The Print Center (Philadelphia), Macy Gallery at Columbia University (New York), Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Newspace Center for Photography (Portland), and the Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography. His work is currently held in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Haggerty Museum of Art (Milwaukee), and is included in the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago). Horvath was a finalist for the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s 2009 and 2010 Mary L. Nohl Emerging Artist Fellowship. In 2011, he was named a US Flash Forward winner by the Magenta Foundation. Horvath currently is a lecturer in photography at UWM. Erika Janik is a freelance writer and the executive producer/editor of Wisconsin Life at Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television. She is the author of many books, including A Short History of Wisconsin (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2010), Apple: A Global History (Reaktion Books, 2011), and 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 elsewhere.

Nancy Rafal is an advocate of poetry living in Baileys Harbor. Rafal served as treasurer of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets for too many years and is a board member of Friends of Lorine Niedecker.

The Muse takes Rafal to poetry readings throughout the state and her work appears in many editions of the Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar.

Her latest “if you build it, they will come” project is a 96-foot-long mural celebrating Baileys Harbor and Lorine Niedecker.

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Cultivating Community through the Arts Jane Elder wisconsin academy executive director Last year I had the pleasure of interviewing one of my favorite authors, Terry Tempest Williams. In preparation for our conversation, I read her compassionate meditation on how nature and humans both collide and connect, Finding Beauty in a Broken World (2008). The book uses mosaic as an integral theme.

“Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together,” wrote Williams, as she describes how a village project to create a memorial for the Rwandan genocide served to rebuild relationships, trust, and hope, and to make something beautiful and transformative out of the fragments of destruction.

Williams’ story was essentially about how the arts can heal and help to build community. As therapists and trauma specialists know, the arts can help to heal wounded minds and bodies alike. But it doesn’t take a medical degree to know that the arts are essential to human growth. The arts feed the imagination, broaden our perspectives, deepen our understanding of the human condition, and help us express what words can fail to articulate.

So why has Wisconsin, which is ranked 48th in the U.S. for public arts funding, retreated from public investment in the arts?

Some say it’s an artifact of an immigrant culture of hard work and perseverance, a state of mind in which the arts are considered entertainment, and, as such, inessential to survival and productivity. Yet the arts make us more creative, and, I would argue, more productive, creatures. The arts foster entrepreneurial habits of mind, the kind that help us to create something from raw ideas. Innovation, which is such a buzzword these days, springs directly from imagination and creativity—it doesn’t just happen. And, then of course there is the obvious fact that arts jobs are real jobs, annually generating over a $130 billion of economic activity and supporting more than four million full-time employees across the U.S. But in Wisconsin we can’t seem to let go of the stern notion that somehow there’s something frivolous or indulgent about feeding our creative spark.

So, when school budgets get cut, art and music classes are often first in line. Even in higher education, with major initiatives for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education underway, arts advocates have to vigorously wave the banner for arts and fight to expand these initiatives to STEAM. Arts help attract and retain young creative workers, and, in a state that is rapidly aging, that’s something to consider.

Throughout Wisconsin, thriving communities embrace the arts— and the arts are one of the reasons they are thriving. But this positive synergy only happens when we invest in the arts. Like a well-tended garden, the arts need good soil as well as care and cultivation in order to grow. In turn, they nurture us and bring beauty into our lives.

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When the National Endowment for the Arts established its creative place-making grant program in 2011, they sought to foster projects that created a fertile space for the arts to grow, projects that would work to “animate public and private spaces, rejuvenate structures and streetscapes, improve local business viability and public safety, and bring diverse people together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired.”

It turns out that countless communities—of all sizes— throughout Wisconsin were already moving forward on these types of projects. For instance, the City of Eau Claire, UW–Eau Claire, and the Eau Claire Regional Arts Council are working together on the Confluence Project, a major regional arts center at the confluence of the Chippewa and Eau Claire Rivers. Fond du Lac, La Crosse, Sheboygan, Stevens Point, Stoughton, Superior, West Bend, and Wausau all have established or are considering arts and cultural districts in the effort to revitalize their downtowns and create a richer community atmosphere.

The jewels in the crown of Milwaukee’s lakefront are the Milwaukee Art Museum, Discovery World, and a growing gallery district in the Third Ward. Over the last decade Madison’s Overture Center and other cultural offerings around the Capitol Square have revivified an area that was once dark and lonely after work.

Rural communities throughout the state are establishing sculpture parks, art studio tours, and cultural festivals to attract residents and visitors from near and far (see page 8 for a good example of this). Urban and rural, the arts are bringing people together. This isn’t about frivolity or entertainment; it’s about building stronger communities in our state.

But some of the efforts to cultivate creativity and creative places in Wisconsin have been downright heroic. And, frankly, it shouldn’t have to be this hard.

Which brings us back to investment. Minnesota, which holds the number-one slot among the states for public arts spending, allocated $6.36 per capita for the arts in 2013. Wisconsin, on the other hand, was ranked last in the Midwest at 13 cents per capita. Surely, Wisconsin has as great a capacity as Minnesota to embrace the arts as an investment in our communities, our quality of life, and the imaginative potential of our children. In a world that needs creative problem-identifiers just as much as it needs creative problem-solvers, we’d be foolish not to do so.

Don’t be shy in building—or demanding—a conversation about the value of the arts. A vibrant, resilient Wisconsin needs the arts—and it needs advocates for them, too.

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

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EDItor’s Notes

Customer First and Citizen Last Jason A. Smith Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas Fifteen years ago, University of Oregon president Dave Frohnmayer delivered a prescient commencement address on a political and cultural phenomenon called “the New Tribalism.”

“I hear an ancient noise rising in Oregon. … It sounds like the cacophony of a hundred tribes, each speaking their own tongue.

It sounds like a hundred calls to battle,” he said to the brighteyed graduates and their families on that spring day in 1999. “It is the emergence of what I call the New Tribalism, … the growth of a politics based upon narrow concerns, rooted in the exploitation of divisions of class, cash, gender, region, religion, ethnicity, morality and ideology, a give-no-quarter and take-no-prisoners activism that demands satisfaction and accepts no compromise.”

Perhaps to the surprise of the assembled, Frohnmayer went on catalogue the pernicious elements driving this new tribalism and “eroding the civility of public discourse” in America. He started with some themes—economic insecurity, religious fundamentalism, the end of the Cold War—and then moved on to the enablers, namely a media focused on sensationalism and profit and a burgeoning online realm where vitriol and deception are the two faces of the coin.

A former Oregon attorney general, two-term representative, and one-time candidate for governor, Frohnmayer is a savvy politician and keen observer of contemporary culture. He made no bones that day about whom he believes is to blame for this new tribalism: small groups of like-minded people who zealously support narrowly focused political issues in the pursuit of expanding their own wealth and interests.

The new tribalism is a cancer that must he stopped, he said, noting that “once it becomes impossible to talk to the other side, to find points of agreement and compromise, the stage is set for social disintegration.”

While Frohnmayer did offer some possibilities for redemption that day, his speech to a group of grads about to make their way in the world was foreboding to say the least. Yet it’s clear that Frohnmayer—like many of us—has had enough of the status quo.

And while I’m not a huge fan of the term new tribalism, mainly because it too casually bears the colonial standard, I think the concept is good starting point for considering the root causes of political gridlock and partisan divisiveness in America today.

But I would go even further than Frohnmayer and say that after years of exploitation and division of “class, cash, gender, region, religion, ethnicity, morality, and ideology” many Americans are retreating into increasingly smaller tribes. In some ways, we’ve so refined the new tribalism as to enter an era where confirmation bias has supplanted reason and thoughtful opinion—at least in the digital realm.

Imagine this: You turn on the news or go online to try to make sense of the latest instance of war, hunger, poverty, racial injus6

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tice, income inequality, and environmental degradation and find yourself surrounded by images and stories (and, increasingly, products!) all designed to confirm what you already know to be true: I was right all along.

Digital media like satellite radio, RSS feeds, blogs, social media, discussion threads, and so forth provide consumers the calibration tools to connect only with those who look and think exactly as we do—and block from our view those who do not. In addition, every online search we do and page we click add to a composite profile marketers use to pitch the products and headlines designed to grab your attention. In the quest for offering limitless choice, digital marketers and programmers have enabled our retreat into a tribe of one, a singular profile to which all messages can be specifically tailored. I cheekily call this phenomenon mybalism.

The mybalist is customer first and citizen last, free to place their own needs, desires, values, and beliefs above all others, even those considered to be part of their own tribe, by framing their selfish pursuit as an exercise of individual rights.

Sometimes, mybalists arrive at this place by accident, finding themselves prisoners of the barriers around beliefs, values, and activities they have erected in the attempt to create a sense of security in an uncertain world. Other times, the mybalist’s behavior is calculated, and executed with the knowledge that individual rights are sacrosanct in America.

The effects of mybalism are deleterious to civilization, because civilization requires some level of sublimation of your own needs and desires to work. Civilization asks us to show up—in person, not under a pseudonym—and actively participate in discussing, thinking, and finding ways to connect with others who are very different than we are.

Civic participation can be awkward and uncomfortable, but it is a core value of our work at the Academy, and we strive to feature a wide variety of ideas and viewpoints in the pages of this magazine. In work of this kind there are lots of opportunities for embarrassment and criticism. But when is the last time you did something—bowl, sing karaoke, write a poem, get a new job, make a birdhouse, talk to a stranger—perfectly the first time around?

Never. And you won’t do it perfectly the second time, either.

Democracy is an ongoing experiment, the result of which is always in the making. Stand up, raise your hand, and then say something. As long as we are reasonably informed and compassionate, our thoughts and comments should receive at least as much bandwidth as someone who has nothing to lose but their own self-interest.

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

A Good Idea : Shade Haven

In the quest for a more sustainable—and profitable—glass of milk, many dairy farms in Wisconsin are switching from feedlotbased operations to rotational grazing on prairie grasses and legumes like clover. According to the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection, as of 2011 around 3,000 farms had adopted rotational grazing, which involves dividing up large pasture areas into small paddocks of a few acres and rotating herds of cows from one paddock to the next as they forage for food.

Rotational grazing takes advantage of the natural relationship with the land ruminants have developed over hundreds of thousands of years: cattle receive a steady, easy-to-digest source of food while occasionally “trimming” grassland vegetation. Grazing renews plant energy reserves by stimulating new growth, which in turn rebuilds and deepens root systems.

Animal waste is effectively spread throughout grazing areas, supporting plant growth and lessening the possibility of nutrient runoff.

In this way, farmers can realize a savings in feed costs during grazing season, and cows are less likely to become sick or infected with parasites due to their varied diet and frequent movement from paddock to paddock. Sustained rotational grazing can even contribute to the re-establishment of groundnesting birds like upland sandpipers and meadowlarks.

It’s a balancing act to be sure, but one that is paying off in better product and healthier animals for dairy and beef farms across Wisconsin and the United States. However, one perennial problem farmers encounter is the lack of a tree canopy in the forage areas, which are oftentimes reclaimed croplands. Shade is important for cows, providing physical relief from heat and reducing the risk of heat stress, which can lead to diminished milk output. But when animals congregate in a few shady areas, overgrazing, soil erosion, and the buildup of animal waste can quickly become a problem.

One hot summer afternoon in 2011, Vince Hundt was looking out at a sweltering herd of beef cattle on his Coon Valley farm.

In his thirty plus years of farming, he was used to seeing cows crowded underneath trees in search of relief from the heat.

Hundt had been using rotational grazing for years, and he always hated to see his herd suffer in the summer sun. He began to wonder, What if there were an artificial tree that could move from paddock to paddock?

The idea for Shade Haven was born.

Hundt went in search of business partners and didn’t have to look far. He found neighbors and recent college grads Guthrie Knapp (UW–Milwaukee) and Peter Bergquist (UW–Madison), with backgrounds in engineering and architecture respectively, who were willing to apply their talents to create a design that is, in Hundt’s words, “both elegant and functional.”

Photo credit: Vince Hundt

UPFRONT

ABOVE: In addition to blocking the sun, Shade Haven can generate a light breeze below its canopy by harnessing a technology used by ancient Persians and Romans to improve the natural ventilation of tents and buildings. Heated by passive solar energy, the black canvas creates a thermal chimney that causes the upward convection of air, thereby creating a light breeze even on calm days.

Working together over the next year, they developed a prototype for a “mobile shade machine” that can be easily moved with the help of a tractor, truck, or ATV, and would provide about 1,200 square feet of relief from the sun (enough for about sixty cows).

The design they settled on had an easy-to-retract, fortyfoot-diameter canopy made of 80% polyethylene knitted shade cloth that lays perfectly flat at a height of about ten feet. They constructed the body using galvanized steel tubes and laser-cut steel plates mounted to a three-wheeled frame, and crowned it with a trailer hitch.

Hundt volunteered his herd for the testing phase. “The cattle spent time under it whenever the sun was shining from May through September,” he says. The three innovators found that the black color worked best to absorb sunlight and radiate it upward, thereby creating thermally driven breeze under the canopy where “temperatures [are] at least twenty degrees cooler than in the direct sunlight,” according to Hundt.

They knew they were on to something and continued to refine the design during 2012. In 2013, they sold the first production units. Today, there are 21 Shade Haven units in the field. “It works like a giant oak tree that moves wherever you need it,” says Hundt.

Hundt hopes others will find applications beyond rotational grazing, including providing shade for restaurants, outdoor festivals, parks and other places where temporary shade is needed.

For more information, visit shadehaven.net.

—Jason A. Smith

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UPFRONT

Art You Can Sink Your Teeth Into Harvest Park of downtown Reedsburg is the new home of Ruminant (The Grand Masticator), a John Deere 6600 harvesting combine clad in 34 agriculturally themed backlit stained glass panels. An endearingly outsized mash-up of stained glass, agricultural symbolism, and popular culture—all bolted to the chassis of an iconic piece of farm equipment—artist Karl Unnasch’s oneof-a-kind sculpture made a big impression on area artists and farmers alike when it first appeared in a cornfield along Fermentation Fest’s Farm/Art DTour route in 2013.

Hosted by the Wormfarm Institute and featuring artists, farmers, and food experts from across the U.S., Fermentation Fest is an annual, multifaceted celebration of food and farming spread across the fifty miles surrounding rural Reedsburg. Part of the annual celebration, the Farm/Art DTour is a fifty-mile, self-guided back roads tour through the unglaciated hills and valleys of Sauk County punctuated by farm-fresh produce stands and temporary art installations.

An artist with “one foot in Wisconsin and another in Minnesota,” Karl Unnasch says he composed Ruminant (The Grand Masticator) as a playful tribute to agriculture, farming, and food.

“Just as food goes through several chewings and other processes as it is picked and broken down by cattle, so does the harvest as it is gathered and processed by a combine, or art as it is pondered and enjoyed by its viewer,” he says.

“During Fermentation Fest, Ruminant drew a lot of attention and many locals identified with it as a monument to Reedsburg’s agricultural heritage,” says Joann Mundth Douglas, chair of the Ruminant/Harvest Park Project Committee. But finding a permanent home for Ruminant wasn’t easy. According to Douglas, the

effort “took thousands of volunteer hours to plan, to coordinate with the artist and the City of Reedsburg and, of course, to fundraise.”

Thanks to a strong public/private partnership that garnered funds from a Sauk County/UW Extension Arts and Humanities Grant, a Herbert Webb Endowment grant administered by the City of Reedsburg, and City of Reedsburg Room Tax dollars, the Ruminant/Harvest Park Project Committee had a base of resources they could leverage through local private funding and a national Kickstarter campaign. After some initial resistance by the City Council, in April 2014 the Committee received approval to convert a vacant lot next to the downtown Chamber of Commerce building into the small park in which this glowing “agricultural cathedral” would become the centerpiece. On October 3, 2014, Ruminant was formally donated and dedicated to the City of Reedsburg.

Unnasch, who creates stained glass and architectural art in his Chatfield, Minnesota, studio, is more than pleased to see his work in a public space. He notes that the joys and curiosities generated by art should be accessible to everyone, not just to a select few. “It is my aim to create non-discriminatory aesthetic niches of discovery which viewers of all ages—and from all walks of life—can access, ponder and enjoy.”

In this small Wisconsin town of just under 10,000 people, Ruminant has indeed become a niche of discovery for all to enjoy.

This public sculpture, in conjunction with the annual Fermentation Fest Farm/Art DTour from which it sprang, will continue to inspire and delight Reedsburg residents and visitors for decades to come.

—Jason A. Smith

Photo credit (clockwise from left): Ruminant (The Grand Masticator)/Aaron Dysart, Mustachioed Corn-chomper/Karl Unnasch, Robin/Jim Dunn, Termite/Jim Dunn

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UPFRONT

Photo credit: Partisan Records

Baraboo Band Phox Set to Take Global Stage PHOX might not be a household name just yet. But, with a critically acclaimed album and high-profile shows across the globe, this six-piece band from Baraboo, Wisconsin, is garnering attention for its dreamy folk instrumentation and stunning vocals.

Although they knew each other in high school, PHOX members Monica Martin (vocals), Matt Holmen (guitar and arrangements), Zach Johnston (banjo/guitar) Jason Krunnfusz (bass), and brothers Dave (drums) and Matteo (keyboards) Roberts were brought together years after graduation by a series of coincidences and failures. Monica Martin worked at a beauty salon in Madison when she was lured back to her hometown by a group of young men playing music and making videos. Their improvisational sessions were epic, and a few songs began to form even as singer Martin, who is self-taught, struggled to find her voice amidst colliding ideas and musical genres.

Slowly, organically, the band’s sound came together. After rejecting a slew of other names the group settled on PHOX and released its debut EP Friendship on video in 2011. On the strength of Friendship and few other video singles, as well as some wellreceived shows around the Midwest, PHOX secured a coveted showcase slot at Austin’s South By Southwest Music Festival in 2013. At the showcase the band caught the ears of an agent from Onto Entertainment (managers of the popular folk band The Lumineers), who helped them sign a deal with Partisan Records.

Released in June of 2014, PHOX’s self-titled first album for Partisan Records was recorded at the Eau Claire, Wisconsin, studio of Grammy Award-winner Justin Vernon (the creative genius behind band Bon Iver). Pioneers of a new-ish form called “chamber pop,” PHOX used this major label opportunity to emphasize Martin’s emerging vocal style—breezy, almost jazz-

like at one moment, and then dropping to a country drawl the next—which provides the perfect foil for Holmen’s quietly dense instrumental arrangements.

Though it’s a part of PHOX’s signature sound, the multilayering of instruments—folk standards like guitar, banjo, and drum, but also fluegelhorn, triangle, and the occasional whistle— occasionally threatens to overwhelm on songs like their first single “Slow Motion.” But Holmen knows just how carve a path through the hectic arrangements so Martin’s voice finds its way to the listener’s ears—and hearts, which might account for the praise showered upon the band by National Public Radio and music magazines like Paste and CMJ. After a few listens to “Slow Motion” and “Kingfisher,” the second single from their debut album (both easily found online), it’s easy to see why PHOX was hailed as a “Band to Watch” by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2013 and was named 2014 Artist of the Year by the Wisconsin Area Music Industry Awards.

PHOX capped a brief UK tour in spring of 2014, then toured the Midwest and East Coast over the summer and fall this same year. From the looks of things, 2015 seems to have plenty more in store, with a few Wisconsin appearances in January and a national tour kicking off in St. Paul in February.

Although they are officially bona fide globe-trotters, according to bassist Krunnfusz, the members of PHOX have good reasons for holding on to their small-town Wisconsin roots. “We like … being disconnected, “ he says. “We’re happy to be part of the conversation of pop music, without being too worried about the flavor of the day.”

For more information or to listen to new songs by PHOX, visit phoxband.com.

—Jason A. Smith With contributions by Mariah Young-Jones

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My Journey to Folksongs of Another America

By James P. Leary Wisconsin Academy Fellow – Elected in 2014 J a m e s P. L e a r y w a s e l e c t e d a Wisconsin Academy Fellow in 2014.

A

He is the Birgit Baldwin Professor of

merica’s Upper Midwest is a distinctive region where for

Scandinavian Studies, a professor in the Department of Comparative

centuries many indigenous and immigrant peoples have

Literature and Folklore Studies, and

maintained, merged, and modified their folk traditions.

a co-founder of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures

As the prominent American folklorist Richard M. Dorson observed in 1947: “Particularly in the Lake Superior area of northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota … traditions are so mixed that no narrow specialist approach can hope to reveal their breadth.”

Trained at Harvard University in the History of American Civilization and conversant with folk traditions in the East, the South, and the West, Dorson found himself ill-prepared for what he discovered during his time in the Upper Midwest. This was not the America he knew: The New England villages, New York tenements, Pennsylvania Dutch farms, Appalachian hollows, Southern cotton plantations, or Western plains celebrated by folklorists and familiar to the nation. Here was a territory of deep woods, inland seas, mines, mills, and hardscrabble farms; a place wherein Native peoples, native-born, and newcomers jostled, jangled, and intermingled to forge Another America.

Fluent only in English and lacking any type of recording device, Dorson relied on interpreters, his own good ear, and a nimble pencil to set down stories.

During extended fieldwork in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 1946, Dorson documented the oral traditions of “Ojibwa, Potawatomi, and Sioux Indians;” of “Finns,

at UW–Madison. Recipient of the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Public Humanities Scholarship, Leary is a fellow of the American Folklore Society and co-editor of Journal of American Folklore. Born in Rice Lake, Leary has done research since the 1970s on the cultural traditions of workers, Native peoples, European Americans, and new immigrants in the Upper Midwest, contributing to numerous folk life festivals, museum exhibits, films, public radio programs, documentary sound recordings, and accessible archival collections. His UW Press books include Yodeling in Dairyland: A History of Swiss Music in Wisconsin (1991), Wisconsin Folklore (1999), and So Ole Says to Lena: Folk Humor of the Upper Midwest (2001).

He is completing work on a five CD/ DVD/book production, Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946, forthcoming from UW Press in the winter of 2015.

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Swedes, Poles, Germans, Italians;” of Irish, French, and English; and of “Luxemburgers, Slovenians, and Lithuanians;” all toiling variously as “farmers, lumberjacks, copper and iron miners, fishermen, sailors, railroaders, bartenders,” maids, cooks, and more.

In the aftermath, he jubilantly proclaimed, “the abundance and diversity of the oral traditions I found still stagger me.” Having thoroughly traversed Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Dorson ranged briefly into Wisconsin and learned enough about northern Minnesota to recognize their kindred polyglot, egalitarian, working-class frontier ferment.

Yet, important as Dorson’s research was to the understanding of the folk traditions of the Upper Midwest, he completely neglected central elements of this unique culture: the songs they sang and the music they made.

Fortuitously, and unbeknownst to Dorson, a trio of like-minded folklorists had been roaming the Upper Midwest for a decade during roughly the same period—each equipped with a bulky microphone and disc-cutting machine, spare needles, and scores of blank acetate-coated aluminum records—to capture the region’s full span

Photo credit: Wisconsin Historical Society Wisconsin Historical Society, Image ID #25413

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ABOVE: Helene Stratman-Thomas took this photo of Otto Rindlisbacher, folk singer and maker of stringed instruments, holding a Hardanger fiddle at the Buckhorn Tavern. Similar to the violin, the Hardanger fiddle (in Norwegian, hardingfele) is often called the national instrument of Norway. Each one a handmade work of art, hardingfele are decorated with mother-of-pearl inlay and black pen-and-ink drawings called rosing.

of folksongs in English and otherwise.

From 1937 to 1946, Sidney Robertson Cowell, Alan Lomax, and the University of Wisconsin’s Helene Stratman-Thomas, with federal support from the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, recorded nearly 2,000 traditional performances in more than twenty-five languages from musicians and singers in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

Captured in kitchens and parlors, churches and dance halls, the recordings made by Cowell, Lomax, and StratmanThomas spanned dance tunes, ballads, lyric songs, hymns, laments, political anthems, street cries, recitations, and more.

Many recordings held sonic fragments of lost worlds: a Missouri-born ex-slave’s comic commemoration of Noah’s Ark; an Icelandic mother-daughter duet concerning a Christian knight enticed by cliff-dwelling elves; an exuberant calling of the clans by a Scots-Gaelic émigré.

Other recordings featured dramatic adaptations of esoteric indigenous and Old World repertoires for then contemporary public events: a Ho-Chunk warrior song repurposed for summer tourists; a Finnish lullaby arranged for the stage of a workers cooperative hall; a Norwegian one-stringed solo church instrument used by a quartet to play secular tunes for multi-ethnic culture shows.

Some were well-known 19th century patriotic songs reinvigorated from afar with 20th century despair and rage as

invading Fascists occupied Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Norway. Still others addressed new circumstances through witty or poignant makeovers of familiar genres: an Italian sojourner’s paean to America’s grandeur; an impoverished Polish immigrant’s lament for a family whose passage to America he can never pay; a former Czech soldier’s song transposed to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.

A handful of recordings included scurrilous or bawdy ditties previously ignored or censored by genteel folklorists: a Finn’s versified lashing of cheating merchants; a lumberjack’s rasty condemnation of biscuits that “would make an ox fart”; an alphabet song commencing with “Oh A is for asshole.”

And there were startling mash-ups of languages, genres, and cultures: Ojibwe hand-drum songs rendered on fiddle; a Finnish sailor’s homesick lyric sharing its tune with the cowboy song “When the Work’s All Done This Fall”; “The Irish Washerwoman” played on accordion by Germans chanting square-dance calls in English; a Quebecois mixed-language ditty about a bumpkin’s misadventures in Michigan.

Songbooks, radio, and 78 rpm recordings in many languages likewise circulated throughout the region at the time, with lyrics and melodies added to those learned from oral tradition alone: a ballad sung verbatim from a Danish folk-school songbook; a version of “Gambler’s Blues” acquired from a Paramount 78 rpm cut in Grafton, Wisconsin; Gene Autry’s “Three’s

a Gold Mine in the Sky” harmonized by Polish sisters who had heard his broadcasts over WLS-AM Chicago’s National Barn Dance.

It’s important to note that these performances were captured in all their variety and complexity at a significant historical moment: America was in the throes of the Great Depression and World War II was erupting in Europe. Market-driven mass culture was developing as a national force, and concerns with who and what was “American” dominated the media of the day. Up until the past couple of decades, the pursuit of cultural plurality held little or no value for the American government, academic institutions, or popular culture as a whole.

As such, the books and record albums of Sidney Robertson Cowell, Alan Lomax, and Helene Stratman-Thomas exclusively emphasized English-language performances; it was as if the majority of the songs they recorded simply did not exist.

Despite the efforts of these three incredible folklorists—none of whom were the “narrow specialists” of Dorson’s admonition—the folksong traditions of the Upper Midwest have for years remained largely elusive and almost forgotten.

My own discovery of our region’s folk music ferment began in the early 1950s in Rice Lake, Wisconsin. It was summer, and Art McGrath—Warren Leary’s college pal, fellow combat veteran, and best man

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at his wedding—had come north from Indiana to see my dad in his hometown.

The two set out for a drive, a hike in the woods, and a beer. Rather than leave my mom at home with four mischievous kids under age six, Dad took my older brother and me along. Our final destination was the Buckhorn, a bar and café on Rice Lake’s Main Street famed for its Display of Curios. While Art and Dad secured barstools, sipped Breunig’s Lager, and swapped stories, Mike and I, clutching bottles of pop, roamed the checkered floor and gaped.

Mounted heads of moose, bear, and deer, whole wild cats, weasels, birds of prey, and fish festooned the walls. They mingled with fantastic mutant creatures: the owl-eyed ripple skipper, the fur fish, the dingbat, the shovel-tailed snow snake.

There was a slot machine, a thick pockmarked, bulletproof windshield from Al Capone’s car, and best of all, occupying an entire wall, “the world’s largest assortment of odd lumberjack musical instruments”: guitars, mandolins, and fiddles fashioned from cheese and cigar boxes, an elongated tin trumpet, a steel triangle, a bowed saw, a single-string bass fiddle cobbled from a shovel handle and a flour bin, a pitchfork fitted-out similarly, and more.

“Otto Rindlisbacher and some of those old lumberjacks made ’em,” Dad explained, sweeping his hand toward the bald proprietor and a handful of wool-clad old timers along the bar.

My visits thereafter to the Display of Curios were few and fleeting until the mid1960s, when, employed by the weekly Rice Lake Chronotype, I delivered bundled newspapers to a throng of Buckhorn patrons. The instruments were still there, and I learned from my dad’s sister—Katherine Leary Antenne, “Aunt Kay”—that Otto played them all and had even made records for the Library of Congress in Washington DC. What’s more, while attending that city’s Trinity College, she had seen him perform with the Wisconsin Lumberjacks at the National Folk Festival of 1938.

Too young and shy to approach Otto and ask him to play, I finally heard his music around 1968 when, prowling Rice Lake’s Carnegie Library in search of folk-

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song records, I came across a plainly packaged LP produced by the Recording Laboratory of the Library of Congress, Music Division: Folk Music from Wisconsin.

Inside were four tunes from Otto, a fifth from his wife, Iva, and rich notes cheaply offered in a stapled typescript.

From these notes I learned that someone named Helene Stratman-Thomas had traveled Wisconsin in the 1940s recording performers for the Library of Congress.

Gradually, foolishly, I began to imagine a project in which I would pull together the recordings of these three pioneering folklorists, still only dimly aware of the challenges By the mid-1970s I was a young folklorist myself, and lucky enough to work in Washington DC for the Smithsonian Institution’s summer-long bicentennial Festival of American Folklife. The Library of Congress beckoned. On a day off, I visited its Archive of Folk Song for the first of many times. Aided by archivist Joe Hickerson, I discovered the broad scope of Stratman-Thomas’s Wisconsin recordings, that Rindlisbacher had not only recorded for her but also for Sidney Robertson and Alan Lomax, and that the Upper Midwestern work of all three—from 1937 to 1946—was interconnected.

From the 1980s through the mid1990s, as a folklorist working in my home region, I happened onto the fieldwork trails of Robertson, Lomax, and StratmanThomas with increasing regularity. In 1981, for example, an octogenarian retired streetcar conductor and piano accor-

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dionist in Ironwood, Michigan, John Shawbitz, remembered “some guy from Washington” recording his Slovenian tunes in the 1930s. Elsewhere in Michigan, the daughters of Exilia and Mose Bellaire recalled their teenage excitement when good-looking Alan Lomax recorded mother, dad, and assorted French neighbors in their Baraga home.

In 1989 Ed Kania and the brothers Jake and Joe Strzelecki had similar recollections of their fathers recording for Lomax in Posen, where Sylvester Romel, the lone survivor of a singing family, wept as he listened to and sang along with a duet performed fifty-one years earlier with his late brother.

In Wisconsin, Lois Rindlisbacher Albrecht told me about her parents’ preparation for the 1937 National Folk Festival, where Sidney Robertson recorded them.

She and Al Mueller described how, three years later, Stratman-Thomas captured Swiss tunes from them, while Ken Funmaker Sr. and Olwen Morgan Welk offered childhood recollections of their respective Ho-Chunk and Welsh elders being recorded by Stratman-Thomas in the 1940s. And Al Vandertie was still singing Walloon songs when I met him at a Belgian Days parade in 1990.

Bit by bit, I began to wonder about the lives, experiences, songs, and tunes of other Upper Midwesterners documented on discs in the 1930s and 1940s.

It turned out that my curiosity concerning bygone regional field recordings was shared.

In the 1970s, seeking source materials, playwright Dave Peterson, director of the Wisconsin Idea Theatre at the UW– Madison, worked with the UW’s Mills Music Library to secure reel-to-reel copies of Upper Midwestern field recordings of Cowell, Lomax, and Stratman-Thomas from the Library of Congress.

In the early 1980s, Judy Woodward (now Judy Rose) of Wisconsin Public Radio’s Simply Folk set to work on a thirteen-part series, The Wisconsin Patchwork, highlighting selections from the StratmanThomas recordings. Having consulted on that project, I was hired by Peterson to

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write commentaries on each installment, resulting in a booklet published in combination with cassette reissues of the WPR series.

Gradually, foolishly, I began to imagine a project in which I would pull together the recordings of these three pioneering folklorists, still only dimly aware of the challenges of restoring sound on deteriorating discs, deciphering songs in more than two dozen languages, tracking down biographies of hundreds of scarcely documented performers, and determining the often murky provenance of as many songs and tunes.

The result of this foolish notion is Folksongs of Another America, a redemptive countercultural project recalling and honoring the efforts of Cowell, Lomax, and Stratman-Thomas while illuminating the nearly but not quite lost singers and dancers, songs and tunes, individuals and communities characterizing America’s Upper Midwest in the mid-20th century.

Soon to be published by the University of Wisconsin Press and Dust-to-Digital as a multi-format package, Folksongs of Another America presents 187 representative and digitally restored performances by more than 200 singers and musicians, offered on five compact discs and a film/ DVD. The accompanying book provides an introduction, full texts of all lyrics in the original languages and in English translation, extensive notes about each song and tune, biographical sketches and photographs of many of the performers, and details about Cowell, Lomax, and Stratman-Thomas and their fieldwork efforts as song collectors.

Looking at and listening to the full extent of this region’s vibrant songs and tunes effectively challenges and considerably broadens our understanding of folk music in American culture historically.

Just as importantly, historical evidence of the Upper Midwest’s multilingual singing citizens reminds us that the voices and songs of present-day Bosnian, Hmong, Mexican, Somali, Tibetan, and other immigrants and refugees are an enduring and valuable element of our regional and national experience. Z

One of Jim’s Favorite Songs: “How They Sang the ‘Marseillaise’ in Chippytown Falls” Spoken and sung by Charles Cardinal, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, August 13, 1946. Recorded by Helene Stratman-Thomas and Aubrey Snyder.

Charles Cardinal: Now folks, I would like to tell you something about in the early 1900s, oh I should judge about nineteen hundred and six or seven, I run across French Canadian old lumberjack. And he met me one day, in the old saloon days, and he says: “Howdy do, your name is Cardinal, hain’t it?”

I says, “Yes sir, it is.”

“Well,” he says, “you know, Mr. Cardinal, I hused to know your fader pretty well. And I know your honcle too, used to keep the hotel. And say, you know Mr. Cardinal, I’m like to tol’ you somet’ing. You know how dey used to sing da ‘Marseillaise’ in Chippytown Falls?”

I say, “No, I do not.”

“Well,” he says, “dis is da way dey used to sing da ‘Marseillaise’ in Chippytown Falls”: Ol’ Mose Sarazan And Felix Cardinal Johnnie Theriault And Johnny Martineau, Likewise h’ol Pete Lego Charles Cardinal (1889–1983) was born in “Frenchtown” on the south side of Chippewa Falls to French-Canadian immigrant parents. A house painter by trade, who in his sixties was president of Local 259 of the Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators, and Paperhangers of America, Cardinal fathered seven children with his wife, Frances Bergeron. A sociable fellow, Cardinal spent three months in jail for serving “intoxicating liquors” during Prohibition, a “light sentence” that took into account his otherwise upright nature and many dependents, according to a Manitowoc Herald News report from Thursday, August 8, 1929.

Cardinal’s performances for the Library of Congress, all of them in a theatrical French-English dialect, included comic stories, recitations like “Little Bateese” by the Canadian dialect poet William Henry Drummond (1854–1907), and songs, including his localized version of the “Marseillaise.” The original song, which became the French national anthem in 1795, was composed in 1792 by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle (1760–1836). The Chippewa Falls rendition omitted the call to arms for valiant French soldiers and instead intoned the names of local French Canadians: Mose Sarazan owned the Ottawa House, a prominent hotel; Felix Cardinal was Charles’ uncle and owned a saloon; Johnny Theriault owned a brickyard.

Run by Eli Hodge from the 1880s through the early 1900s, the saloon where Cardinal heard the “Chippytown Marseillaise” was, according to him, a favorite gathering place for old lumberjacks, including noted French-Ojibwe logger Pete Legault. Legault, spelled Lego in the song, was a Chippewa Falls native who figured in a cycle of comic anecdotes. Like Sevier Forcier, one of the original settlers of Chippewa Falls, Legault could neither read nor write. But, starting in as a common woodsman, by sheer ability Legault became a successful logger and in later years was invested in one of the large companies of Chippewa Falls. He was an interesting character, but unfortunately it is somewhat difficult to separate fact from fiction in the numerous stories that are told about him. Another old Frenchman, an intimate acquaintance of Legault, expressed the situation to me thus: Said he, “Pete’s back was broad and when anyone heard a good story they would lay it on him.”

Though, I am inclined to accept as true one story attributed to Legault by a William M. Bartlett that I heard many years ago. It was told that once when in charge of a log-driving crew up river, and the water went so low that they had to quit work, Legault’s message to his superiors down river was a sketch of a peavey hook sticking upright in a log.

—James P. Leary

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rounded in a sense of wonder and awe, Wide Eyed departs from a reactionary response to my surroundings. I approach this series of photographs with the spirit of the wanderer and emphasize egalitarianism with the images I select. Wide Eyed persists as the undercurrent of my entire

photographic process, bridging the gaps between more pointed investigations. As a result, this project avoids specificity in content and conceptual motivations. Rather, it functions more analogously to an archive, a database, a repository for meditations, glimpses and passing thoughts about my relationship to anything I may encounter. Wide Eyed is intended to be a breathing body of images, a space to bounce and veer and double back while maintaining the sensation of being in a place of familiarity without specificity.

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Citizen Science in Wisconsin B y L isa G aumnit z

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athy Mehls is a retired high school guidance counselor from Chippewa Falls with an abiding love of birds and the outdoors. Most days,

Mehls experiences the sciences vicariously through her daughter Casey, a biologist working to protect endangered species in South Dakota.

But not today.

On this October evening, Mehls is doing her part for the scientific enterprise as she walks down a wooded trail in search of northern saw-whet owls. Along the trail ahead, illuminated by car lights, small badminton-like nets are strung between the trees. Pre-recorded mating calls—hoot, hoot, hoot—meant to lure the tiny raptors into the nets boom from loudspeakers.

Mehls and Judy Schwarzmeier, her partner on this night, are part of a nationwide research effort to track the fall migration of this elusive creature. Schwarzmeier checks another net and confides, “This moment is a big part of it—the anticipation.”

As if on cue, Mehl hoots in triumph, “We got an owl!”

In Milwaukee, fifteen-year-old Donald Harris begins his weekly Saturday morning survey of the Canada geese at Washington Park. Armed with binoculars and an iPad, Harris identifies and counts each individual goose he can find. To test his hypothesis that the number of geese will vary based on warmer or cooler weather, Harris also records the air temperature.

“If you’re not asking questions, you’re not going to get answers,” says the high school sophomore. “You are always going to be in the dark.”

Ted Ludwig collects weekly water samples from Lake Tainter and Lake Menomin and monthly samples from the streams flowing into the two Dunn County lakes.

During the summer months, Ludwig also pilots his small boat along the shorelines of the lakes in search of curly-leaf pondweed and other invasive water plants. Sometimes he rides his bike and uses a handheld GPS to mark where he finds invasive plants along township roads. At night, Ludwig listens for bats with an acoustic bat detector while driving or boating along specific routes to understand where bats live in Wisconsin and how many there are.

“It can become an obsession and leaves little time for other things,” he says. “But you get the satisfaction [that] you are doing something to help our home.”

The “it” Ludwig refers to is citizen science, a collaborative endeavor in which everyday people volunteer to help with scientific research. While citizen science programs vary in type and scope, people like Ludwig, Harris, Schwarzmeier, and Mehls are part of a growing volunteer corps in Wisconsin and across the globe that works with scientists to monitor the health of our environment and unlock the mysteries of nature.

Photo credits: (top left) Cornell Lab of Ornithology; (top right) Lisa Gaumnitz; (bottom row) Kris Stepenuck

ABOVE: (clockwise from upper left) Bird monitoring is a great way to get the whole family involved in citizen science; Beaver Creek Reserve volunteers band a saw-whet owl to learn more about the bird’s future fall migrations; volunteers of all stripes use dip nets to collect insects, snails, and other aquatic life to help gauge stream health. The presence, absence or dominance of sensitive or tolerant species can be compared to standards for healthy streams.

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Photo credit: Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

Whether they are monitoring streams for pollution, counting bats, or banding saw-whet owls, Wisconsin citizen scientists are fueling insights into the natural resource issues of today.

An old tradition energized by new tools and new demands According to Jennifer Shirk, a project leader at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, citizen science efforts are flowering in Wisconsin, the United States, and across much of the world.

Regarded as a major hub of citizen science today, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology hosts CitizenScience.org, a new website designed to support volunteer monitoring and other forms of organized research in which members of the public engage in scientific investigations: asking questions, collecting data, and/ or interpreting results.

“Nationally there’s been a long history and tradition of citizen science by amateur experts involved in discrete sectors like astronomy, birds, and water quality—and a real explosive and innovative growth in recent years in new arenas,” says Shirk.

She credits the boom to a convergence of factors: most importantly, improved technologies for collecting, transferring, and analyzing information and a growing demand from government agencies and academic researchers for data.

Today, climate change impacts, invasive species, and disease outbreaks are just a few examples of the big-ticket issues being addressed through the digital application of citizen science.

Digital technologies like smart phones and handheld GPS units enable citizen scientists to collect information in the field and directly enter it into web-based databases that cover everything from birds to bees, to bats and bud bursts. Launched by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society, eBird.org, for example, enables people to instantly report sightings of birds year-round, while Zooniverse.org offers citizen scientists their choice of projects on space, climate, humanities, nature, biology, and many other topics. Online gamers can even help advance biomedicine by competing on Fold.it to create the best possible protein structures, while armchair astronomers can collaborate with professionals through PlanetHunters.org to report planetary finds.

Ironically, it is the increasing digitization of modern life that drives many people to environmental organizations and agencies that promote citizen science as a way to reconnect with nature.

“You are getting citizens involved and getting them to care,” says Jeanette Kelly, who directs citizen science programs at the Beaver Creek Reserve where Mehls and Schwarzmeier volunteer. Kelly points out that if people don’t realize that Wisconsin

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has owls—let alone nine species of them—they won’t understand how human activities, including their own, may affect owls or other wildlife.

Too, Kelly notes that as a result of state and federal budget cuts there simply aren’t enough wildlife professionals to go around. Eau Claire and the surrounding four-county area were without a state wildlife biologist for five years. But even with that wildlife biologist position now ably filled by Bill Hogseth, there is more than enough work to go around for volunteers who can help with monitoring bird and animal populations or water level and quality.

For instance, volunteer monitors have been crucial in counting and locating bats in Wisconsin. Bats play an important role in nature by eating mosquitos and insects that can damage forests and crops. Monitoring their number became especially important after white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that has killed more than 5.7 million bats the U.S. since 2006, was documented last spring in a southwestern Wisconsin mine.

Bird populations are constantly challenged by human activity. Starting in winter of 2015, thousands of citizen scientists will be the eyes and ears behind an ambitious effort to update and digitize the Breeding Bird Atlas, a collection of data about all of the birds that breed in a particular state or region.

They’ll be asked to visit pre-selected sites to observe and record on a specially customized eBird site evidence of nesting by more than 200 bird species. The information will yield a digitized Breeding Bird Atlas that will help guide bird conservation efforts for the next generation by showing where species exist today compared to twenty years ago. The Wisconsin Society of Ornithology, the Western Great Lakes Bird and Bat Observatory, and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) hope to recruit at least 4,000 volunteers (and possibly as many as 10,000) to participate.

Volunteers also play an important role in monitoring Wisconsin’s more than 15,000 lakes, 44,000 miles of streams, 5.3 million acres of wetlands, 1,000 miles of Great Lakes shoreline and 1.2 quadrillion gallons of groundwater. Add in a growing desire by citizens and DNR managers to monitor even more contaminants and collect more basic information on stream and lake water levels, and it’s easy to see why professional water managers are counting on volunteers to help get the job done.

“When I started in 2001 as coordinator of volunteer stream monitoring, we were told this was educational only,” says Kris

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With two hundred nature centers, Photo credit: Erick Anderson/Urban Ecology Center

conservation organizations, and other groups now offering citizen science projects, Wisconsin is a pioneer on the new frontier of citizen science.

Stepenuck, whose job as Water Action Volunteers coordinator is shared by DNR and University of Wisconsin–Extension. But when state budget cuts dug into DNR staffing and funding, Stepenuck says volunteer monitoring became much more than just educational.

In fact, the DNR has developed training programs and manuals to help ensure standardized methods are used to collect high-quality data by volunteers and professionals alike.

Data collected by both groups are integrated into DNR databases and used for managing lakes and determining every two years which lakes or rivers do not meet water quality standards. This data in turn triggers federal requirements for cleanup plans and potentially improves the likelihood of federal funding for remediation.

“We’ve seen that citizens have a proven track record of collecting credible, sound data for lakes and streams,” says Tim Asplund, who leads DNR’s overall water quality monitoring program. “We’re now at the point of asking ourselves, what are the opportunities to build on that? Is this a project or a data need citizen monitors can do?”

For example, volunteer monitors have enabled more streams to be tested for nutrient pollution and road-salt runoff in recent years, Stepenuck notes. In excess, both phosphorus and chloride can harm water quality and aquatic life. In 2013, 55% of the 146 stream sites volunteers monitored for phosphorus were found to have high levels. Volunteers also identified 28 sites on 17 different streams with chloride levels that exceed federal standards.

Partnerships with citizen science volunteers free up DNR staff to focus on assessing and interpreting the data and working with citizen groups and local governments to protect highquality waters or improve impaired lakes or rivers. “Citizens can continue to monitor the water to assess progress and we can move on to the next water in need of protection or restoration,” says Asplund.

Local data helps solve regional puzzles Wisconsin citizen scientists are also contributing to a better understanding of the world beyond our state borders. University of Wisconsin–Madison wildlife biologists Benjamin Zuckerberg and Karine Princé analyzed more than twenty years of data on 38 bird species reported by thousands of

citizen scientists through Cornell’s Project FeederWatch, which collects reports of birds showing up over winter at birdfeeders.

Appearing in the journal Global Change Biology, their study found that, as the global climate warms, cardinals and other birds typically found in the southern United States in the winter are pushing north and changing the composition of bird populations here in Wisconsin.

Likewise, assistant scientist Noah Lottig and his colleagues at the UW Center for Limnology’s Trout Lake Station analyzed citizen data from 1938 to 2012 from eight Upper Midwestern states. They found that lake water clarity bounced around a lot between years, but showed an overall improvement of 1% during this time period. “We can pretty confidently say that on average, things are not getting worse, and there is some evidence they might be getting better,” Lottig says.

As growing numbers of professional scientists are trained in using new analytical tools that allow them to more easily study large-scale questions, opportunities for collaboration with citizen scientists will only increase, Lottig says. Citizen collection of information helps scientists get the data they need, and, in turn, will spur more citizen interest when they see their data being used. Lottig also foresees citizen scientists getting more involved in helping to shape research projects. For example, as part of a study, Lottig hopes to recruit local lake association members to help him trap invasive crayfish on Trout Lake.

Citizen science collaborations of this kind are “a new frontier,” Lottig says. “It’s really open, and it’s really exciting.”

With two hundred nature centers, conservation organizations, and other groups now offering citizen science projects, Wisconsin is a pioneer on this new frontier. Not only do robust citizen science programs operate out of the Beaver Creek Reserve (Fall Creek), Mosquito Hill Nature Center (New London), Lakeland Discovery Center (Manitowish Waters), and Urban Ecology Center (Milwaukee), to name a few, but the DNR has also committed staff and funding to advance the citizen science cause.

“Wisconsin absolutely is a leading state in no small part due to the DNR networking efforts,” Shirk says.

Since 2004, the DNR has funded a full-time coordinator to launch and help nurture the Wisconsin Citizen-based Monitoring Network, a loose association of the two hundred organizations engaged in citizen science projects and programs across the state. The DNR sponsors network conferW isc o nsin

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Citizen Science Needs You There are many citizen science programs and volunteer opportunities in Wisconsin that bring community members, teachers, and students together with environmental professionals and university researchers: Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources The DNR offers myriad volunteer project opportunities for an hour, a day, or a weekend, or for longer, seasonal positions across the state.

For more information, visit dnr.wi.gov/volunteer.

Wisconsin Citizen-based Monitoring Network WCBM Network works to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of monitoring efforts by providing coordination, communications, technical and financial resources, and recognition to members of the Wisconsin citizen-based monitoring community. Get involved!

Phone: 608-261-6449 E-mail: owen.boyle@wisconsin.gov Beaver Creek Reserve Citizen Science • Bird Banding & Box Monitoring • Stream and Wildlife Monitoring • Watercraft Inspection & Monitoring Phone: 715-877-2212 E-mail: bcr@beavercreekreserve.org Mosquito Hill Nature Center Citizen Monitoring • Monarch Butterfly Tagging & Monitoring • Wood Duck, Bluebird, & Warbler Box Monitoring • Wisconsin Salamander, Frog & Toad Survey Phone: 920-779-6433 E-mail: jessica.miller@outagaimie.org North Lakeland Discovery Center Citizen Science • Wildlife Monitoring • Bird Call Surveys & Crane Count Coordination • Aquatic Invasive Species Monitoring & Treatment Phone: 715-543-2085 E-mail: contact@discoverycenter.net Urban Ecology Center Citizen Science • Urban Wildlife Monitoring • Monarch Larvae Monitoring, Monarch Watch & Banding • Wisconsin’s Frog and Toad Survey Phone: 414-964-8505 E-mail: tvargo@urbanecologycenter.org

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ences, a listserv and social media forums, and provides up to $100,000 in small annual grants to organizations for citizen science projects. This past summer the DNR, with a grant from the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin, ran a week-long workshop for teachers and other youth educators to show them the kinds of citizen science programs they can easily incorporate into their school or nature center curriculum. The idea, says Carrie Morgan, a veteran DNR natural resources educator and workshop leader, is to get kids engaged in hands-on scientific inquiry while getting them outside and connected to nature.

Creating empowered and educated advocates Kris Stepenuck, who surveyed 345 volunteer water-monitoring programs across the United States, found that data provided by volunteers is indeed critical to sound policy and responsible management. Too, Stepenuck notes that volunteer participation can lead to broader activity around an issue. “The biggest thing is [that] volunteers get civically engaged,” she says, noting that volunteers are the ones who attend public meetings, serve on natural resource-related boards, and write letters to support or refute natural resource policies.

Ted Ludwig has done all of this—and much more. “I felt that it was—and still is—important to monitor the waters that form our lakes,” says Ludwig, who retired in 1981 from the U.S. Marines and in 2004 from the U.S. Post Office. “The only lasting way to clean them up is to reduce the nutrient input to them.”

Ludwig and other local citizens worked with the DNR to create a plan to reduce the nutrients entering the lakes that cause toxic blue-green algae blooms in summer. He started a group called the Red Cedar Basin Monitoring Group to help identify which stream reaches the phosphorus was coming from and to assess the clean up progress.

“Even if these goals [outlined in the plan] don’t occur, I will still continue as I feel it is important to do whatever we can to keep our planet healthy,” he says.

Ludwig encourages others to consider getting involved.

“You don’t have to be a college-trained scientist—I have one semester each of high school and college biology, and manage to do the job,” he says, ticking off the benefits of his citizen science work: “you get to see the local stream up close, see what lives in them, and get some quality time outside.”

Judy Schwarzmeier started volunteering at the Beaver Creek Reserve after her job as an environmental science writer was outsourced to India and she was coping with the death of her father. “I was not in a state of mind where I wanted to reinvent myself,” she says.

Instead, she decided to return to an earlier love: wildlife fieldwork. It was work she had done while getting her Master’s Degree in zoology at UW–Madison in the 1970s, and she realized that she still had a knack for it. “It was a very good fit. I started volunteering at Beaver Creek Reserve and [from there] it kind of exploded.”

Schwarzmeier now works on four different bird-banding projects, monitors mussels and a host of other wildlife species, and

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helps look for invasive species on land and in the water. This year, she’s also pursuing her own research project into solitary bee species that don’t live in big family groups like honeybees or yellow jackets.

“I feel like I’m able to make a contribution,” she says.

Kathy Mehls got involved in the owl-banding project last fall after reading about it in the paper. “I’ve always had a passion for birds and now I have time to learn about them instead of just feeding them and watching them,” she says.

It’s also something that she can share with her biologist daughter, Casey Heimerl, who works for the South Dakota Game, Fish, and Parks Department. In fact, when Casey signed up recently for extensive training in banding raptors and the instructor encouraged participants to bring someone else along to fill the class, she invited her mother.

“We really are very close,” Mehls says. “I like to think Casey’s passion was something I helped spark. She’s doing what I wish I had another life to do.”

Donald Harris is just starting his life’s journey. He got connected to the Urban Ecology Center when he was eight and his brother and their friend recruited him to do a bird count.

The youngsters had a lot of fun trying to identify birds and ended up taking home a third-place prize. Harris was hooked.

“It opened up something to me. It lets me know there’s something here I could do.”

Since then, Harris has participated in citizen science projects to help track monarch butterflies and to keep tabs on a variety of birds.

“Some people can’t understand why I do this. They call me Bird Man,” he says. “I hope [someday] they can experience something outside the box like I’ve been doing.”

Three years ago, Harris joined the Urban Ecology Center’s Driven to Discover program in which students immerse themselves in the scientific process by conducting research and presenting it at a student conference in the Twin Cities. Harris says the program, developed by the University of Minnesota, feeds his love of travel and introduces him to new—and new kinds—of people. Harris says that because of Driven to Discover he would like to study environmental science or agriculture when he goes to college.

“Citizen science is a good thing,” he says. “It gives you a sense of pride. It gives you a good feeling to know you’re doing something to benefit society.”

Tim Vargo, the Urban Ecology Center’s manager of research and citizen science, says that getting citizen scientists to move beyond data collection to actual engagement in the scientific process, as Harris has done, is one of the challenges the movement faces. Other challenges are diversifying participation in and leadership of the research.

“The ultimate goal is [to] create a collaborative space where it’s not always the professional scientists calling the shots,” Vargo says. “You’re trying to democratize the process.”

Doing so increases scientific literacy and deepens the research. “The benefits and power of involving the community bring so much richness and applicability to your research,” he says. “It’s messy, but very rewarding.”

Expanding knowledge by cultivating a sense of wonder Whether they are monitoring streams for pollution, counting bats, or banding saw-whet owls, citizen scientists are fueling insights into the natural resource issues of today on a regional, national, and even global scale. Perhaps just as importantly, citizen science projects offer people an important avenue of education and empowerment, a chance to influence their corner of the world for the better.

The information Mehls, Schwarzmeier, and other Beaver Creek Reserve volunteers collect this fall will add to the growing body of scientific knowledge about saw-whet owls in North America. Like most citizen scientists in the field, Mehls and Schwarzmeier follow precise procedures and protocols for their work—in this case, instructions laid out by the U.S. Geological Survey Bird Banding Laboratory, which maintains the owl database and regulates bird banding.

Responding to her call, Schwarzmeier joins Mehls at the shorter bird net and trains a flashlight on the owl’s claws, which have become tangled in the net.

“Hi, Buddy,” Mehls whispers to the owl, which has a white v-shape above its beak and wide-open yellow eyes. She cradles the saw-whet in one hand while quickly freeing its claw with the other. “That’s called an easy one,” she says.

The two women walk to their car and tuck the owl inside a small tube for the short ride back to the Beaver Creek Reserve Citizen Science Center. Inside the center, Schwarzmeier gently retrieves the owl from the tube and the women measure its tail feathers and wing, weigh it (“Only 80 grams.”), and check under an ultraviolet light for the tell-tale feather pattern that marks it as a young owl born earlier in the year. (“Yes, it is!”)

They attach to the owl’s leg a lightweight metal band stamped with a unique number that will identify the bird if it’s recaptured. Owls caught and banded at Beaver Creek by volunteers have been recaptured as far away as Saskatchewan and Virginia, showing that migration isn’t always north-south, but also east-west.

“Before owl banding got going, people rarely saw northern saw-whet owls in Wisconsin and they were perceived to be pretty uncommon,” Schwarzmeier says. “When somebody figured out you could use an audio lure to attract them and the banding program started, we realized the population was bigger than anyone thought.”

Schwarzmeier carries the owl outside and places it beak first in the top cubby of a shoulder-high box sitting on a pole. She pulls a canvas cover over the cubby; the owl will spend the next ten minutes inside, letting its eyes adjust to the dark after its time in the brightly lit processing room.

Before they check their other set of nets, Schwarzmeier lifts the canvas covering the cubby. In a flash and a flutter of wings, the saw-whet is gone.

The two women shuttle between the two net sites, checking each for owls once an hour. They handle two more saw-whets that night, and, after folding the nets at 12:30 am, they each return home exhilarated but exhausted. Z

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A Bridge in Progress N o r b

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orbert Blei began his career as a writer in the same way as did many young writers of the 1950s: at the bottom of the journalistic totem pole. Blei’s first professional job was reading and running teletype messages at Chicago’s City News Bureau. He later moved

on to drafting obituaries and even became the gofer for the night shift. It was a textbook start to an urban reporter’s career.

At the time, there was no way Blei could know that this was the beginning of a writer’s career that would connect the stories of two communities—one urban, one rural—and change his writerly perspective from that of the cynical insider to an empathetic outsider.

Born and raised on Chicago’s west side, in the Czech neighborhood of Cicero, Blei joined the City News Bureau in 1957. He never did become a full-time beat reporter, leaving after only six months. “I pulled back for fear I’d never be able to write what I truly wanted to write,” he would later explain in Chi Town (Ellis Press, 1990), a collection of essays about the people of the city he called home for many years.

Writing what he truly wanted to write was the theme of Blei’s life. And in his pursuit of writing—and of becoming what he believed a writer should be, from his mind to his habits to his clothes—he would (often stubbornly) sacrifice income, bylines, 30

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even relationships to pursue his vision of the writer in its truest form.

After leaving the Chicago City News Bureau, Blei traveled and taught in area high schools to pay the bills, while working intermittently on a novel and freelance features. By the mid-1960s his byline consistently appeared in Chicago newspapers and magazines, mostly under profiles of the Czechs of Cicero. Even in the 1980s, long after he left the city for the rural wilds of Wisconsin, Blei was still an expert at telling stories about the working men and women of his old neighborhood, stories like the one about Doc Cermak that found its way into his nonfiction collection Neighborhood (Ellis Press, 1987): It was my mother who first found Doc Cermak. She opened the door for my grandparents, her sisters and brothers, the children, the whole family called Papp. To this day, Doc Cermak

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Norb Blei’s career as a writer and journalist spanned over fifty years and yielded countless articles and essays as well as 17 books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. His writing often explored the quiet lives of his Chicago and, later, Door County neighbors. Blei’s titles include (from left to right) his first book, The Hour of the Sunshine Now: Short Stories (1978); the Door County Trilogy, Door Way: The People in the Landscape (1981), Door Steps (1983), and Door to Door (1985); and his “love letter to a city that has meant so much,” Chi Town (1990).

must be visited by some member of the Papp family at least once a week. … He got me through adolescence, over the hump of young manhood, signed papers for physicals, gave me shots for trips to Mexico and Europe, handled my blood tests for marriage (took on a new patient), and initiated me into the first pangs of fatherhood—an agonizing 11 hours in the father’s waiting room. I recall sitting there numb when he finally sauntered in with a nurse behind him who carried a small bundle.

‘It’s a boy,’ he happily announced and shook my hand. Three years later he would greet me under the same circumstances and say, “I got you a little girl this time. Now grandma will be happy. Tell her she owes me a bottle.”

Over the years, Blei had developed relationships with a few Chicago editors “who would take anything [he] had.” He was lucky, he said. “I had such a good deal with the newspaper,” Blei

recalled in September of 2012. “I started at $200 to $400 a story, and toward the end I was getting $2,000 a story!”

Blei had dreams of ascending to the pantheon of Chicago writers: Algren, Royko, Sandburg, Terkel. But he was also raising a family, and, even with what Blei considered “a good deal” for a freelancer, it was tough to pay the bills in the city. To pay the bills he had to sell his work. But to sell his work, Blei had to do something that he felt was an unacceptable compromise of his vision: he had to write to please others.

So, in 1969, Blei packed up his wife and two kids and fled Chicago, his teaching jobs, and perhaps the most vibrant literary scene in America. He drove them nearly six hours north along the Lake Michigan shore past Milwaukee, around Green Bay, across the Michigan Street Bridge in Sturgeon Bay, and through the picturesque little villages of Door County. Blei took them to Ellison Bay, almost as far north as they could go before hitting W isc o nsin

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ABOVE: Blei (left) on his own turf in Ellison Bay, Door County, standing in front of a sign welcoming—or, considering the coyote, possibly warning away—visitors to his converted chicken coop writer’s studio (right).

the cold waters of Death’s Door, to a home in the woods he bought for $8,000.

“I had kids, the city was on fire with all the riots, then when they had sniper fire on the Eisenhower [Expressway] it was time to get the hell out of there,” he said. “I wanted peace and quiet, and moved up here.”

They could live simply in Door County, he thought. This was a place where the cost of raising a family was minimal, a place where a man could write.

With the help of his neighbor, Blei converted an old chicken coop into his writing den. He adorned the walls with pictures of nude women and crosses, set up a typewriter and, much later, a computer. And there, surrounded by stacks of books, newspapers, and notebooks, at a writing perch that could only be reached by a direct door-to-desk path through the literary debris, Blei wrote.

Blei expected his retreat to the isolated beauty of the peninsula would provide time to craft novels and write about Chicago (which he still did, traveling to the city regularly to interview subjects), but he was stunned to find a wealth of material right outside of his door. (“Nobody had ever written about Gust Klenke before!” he said, reminiscing in excitement about an octogenarian beekeeper he profiled in the 1970s.)

Over the next decade, this man of the Windy City would become the chronicler of the Door, of the people who would never be featured in a visitor’s guide, honored with a school gymnasium, or presented with a plaque at a village hall.

But this journey was not an easy one.

In Chicago, Blei wrote tough-edged prose about people with whom he had or felt very personal, generational connections. It was an insider’s perspective: He told their stories, but, in many ways, the stories were his own. In this new place, the one he called simply “Door,” he was an outsider trying to understand a reticent and skeptical people.

“I came here with a cynical urban writer’s attitude … [yet] I felt continually frustrated,” he said, looking back at those early days in the Door. “They seemed to give only so much before a Do Not Enter sign of sorts was pushed in your face. I have never 32

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met a more difficult people to know. … Unless you were born and raised here, subjected to the intricacies of family relations, religion, education, and common relations, you will never know what it is to be a native.”

In Chicago, Blei chronicled the bakers, the barkeeps, the man on a bench, the people who scarcely left their neighborhoods, swallowed by the enormity and electricity of a city on the make.

In Door County, there was no getting lost among the crowd.

Isolated by geography and, when the winds began to blow across the bay, brutal weather, the people of the Door were lost in the nothingness of long, lonely, penniless winters. In the 1970s and 1980s, America wasn’t looking for heroes amongst those struggling just to get by, amongst people who rarely crossed the Michigan Street Bridge. But that’s where Blei found them.

Blei’s style was not to interpret or to judge his subjects, but to let them go, to let their own words tell it, as he did in profiling his 88-year-old neighbor, Charley Root. In Door Way: The People in the Landscape (Ellis Press, 1981), a collection of profiles of these strange new rural friends, Blei shows how a simple snippet of conversation with a neighbor can provide a vivid glimpse into his mind: “How many pups you think my Happy had last night?”

“SIX,” my wife guesses.

“TEN?” I ask.

“Thirteen!” laughs Charley. “Kept me up half the night the way they kept comin’. Drowned ’em all this morning in a bucket. There weren’t no pretty black and white ones like my Spots, else I might a kept one. Goshsakes, all the work.”

“HOW COULD YOU DO SUCH A MEAN THING, CHARLEY?” says my wife.

And once again, with a brightness in his eyes, a suddenness of laughter around his mouth, Charley explains, “Ah, you’d be surprised how much I’ve killed with these hands.”

Blei often lamented his status as an outsider in the Door, but this perspective enabled him to put his subjects in the context of the larger story of a community’s evolution, such as when he

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ABOVE: The interior to Blei’s writer’s studio (left) reflects a man with many ideas and avenues for exploration. The Clearing (right) was a home away from home for Blei, offering him a respite from writing and an opportunity to grow as a teacher and mentor.

wrote about Freddie Kodanko, a man known to the locals as The Polka King. An alcoholic who sold hand-made potato crates and drove a tractor where he needed to go because the sheriff had taken away his license for drunk driving eighteen years earlier, Freddie was a relic in a changing town: Maybe the last of the native folk heroes, people like Freddie fast disappearing form the local history of this land, never to be replaced—certainly not by city folk. All the old Freddies of Door, people with little or nothing, nickel and diming their lives away. Scratching. … Fisherman selling chubs door to door.

Small orchardmen being beat continually by the market or the weather. Scratching. All of it going now with the price of land at a premium. The final disappearance of the native—bought out—if he has any land left to sell.

In profiling average Door residents like Charley and Freddie, Blei was composing a sort of people’s history of the Door, ensuring not only that there would be a record of what happened and when, but also illustrating how people weathered dramatic changes in a rural American community.

A close friend of Blei’s, poet and longtime Wisconsin Public Radio journalist Jean Feraca, says that Blei never saw his subjects as average.

“That’s what made Norb special,” she says. “He wanted to bring attention to and praise the rural life.”

At a time when the peninsula was struggling in the transition from rural farming and fishing community to one that would become almost exclusively reliant on the tourism economy, Blei also gave voice to the potters, painters, sculptors, and dancers.

He profiled scores of individuals. And, although he never thought of himself as a historian, Blei’s books became the most comprehensive documentation of life on the peninsula since Hjalmar Holand’s Old Peninsula Days: Tales and Sketches of the Door County was written fifty years earlier.

For this, Blei was loved by the people of the Door. Door Way became a bestseller in the world of small press books, moving more than 10,000 copies and earning praise from publications

like the Chicago Tribune, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and other writers, including Studs Terkel.

Chicago poet and publisher Al DeGenova, a long-time student and fan of Blei’s, admires the manner in which Blei treated his subjects.

“The ones who said, Damn it, we’re doing it our way! … always appealed to Norb,” DeGenova says. “The quirky ones, the artistic ones, the ones so different that they don’t fit into the norm, he always found something engaging about what they were doing.”

In the introduction to Door Way, Blei writes that “A simple man’s life is not to be overlooked.” In elevating the unsung inhabitants of a tiny sliver of land jutting out into the vastness of Lake Michigan, Blei celebrates the lives they live, however simple, meager, or hard. For this he earned the mantle, “the Conscience of the Door.” But for much of the thirty years that followed the publication of Door Way, Blei was a writer without a platform, maintaining a regular place in print for only a total of a couple years.

At about the time that Door Way came out, the Door County Advocate let him go, determining that they didn’t have the space in the paper for his lengthy columns. Nor did Advocate editors have the patience for his occasional diatribes and forays into subjects that had little to do with the peninsula (“Does an article on [William] Saroyan belong in the Door County Advocate?” Chan Harris asked in his editorial announcing the decision to end Blei’s column). Blei would not alter his subject matter to keep his byline.

Seven years later, Blei negotiated a column in the weekly shopper, the Door Reminder. Tourism was growing on the peninsula, and with it came development. Blei didn’t like what he saw. Often writing under the pseudonym “Coyote,” Blei fired broadsides at business leaders, developers, religious institutions, gallery owners, and his old employer, which he mockingly called “the Door County Aggravate.” His columns were so incendiary that just four months later, Door Reminder publisher Lon Kopitzke held a reader “vote”—“I counted the ballots,” Kopitzke said years later—which Blei lost, ending his three-month run in the paper.

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Drawing by Charles “Chick” Peterson / www.clpetersonstudio.com

Blei’s exile from newspapers, while a loss to readers, was a boon to dozens of writers he would mentor. For forty years Blei taught a writing class at the Clearing Folk School in Ellison Bay, leading a week-long retreat in which Coyote rarely if ever made an appearance.

Blei popped up again in 2002 in the pages of the independent arts and culture weekly, Peninsula Pulse. Again, Blei’s stint was short as he refused to soften his tone or heed an editor’s request for re-writes.

When he looked back at this era in 2012, Blei revealed a trace of regret that he didn’t acquiesce for the sake of having a place to publish, and more importantly, a place to publicly question decisions and ideas that were affecting his beloved Door.

However, this glimmer of regret was quickly eclipsed by the angry, bitter voice of Coyote. “But you make too many compromises. I could have contributed so much good writing through the Advocate and the Pulse, but I cannot do it with people who don’t trust me!”

Blei’s frequent references to “people who don’t trust me” can only be interpreted to mean, “editors.” His agreement with the Reminder was that Kopitzke printed whatever he submitted, and, at the Pulse, Blei turned in lengthy, sometimes rambling prose, which he refused to trim or re-work in any way. In his autobiographical book, The Second Novel: Becoming a Writer (December Press, 1978), Blei sarcastically reprinted several rejection letters, many suggesting re-writes, and even one offering to publish his novel with alterations. True to his vision, he refused to alter his work.

Blei was as well-read a man as you could find, and was known to quote stanzas of cherished authors as though his mind were a literary search engine. He had little respect for editors who couldn’t match this ability. “I never had a literary discussion [with him] that went anywhere,” he said of one former editor.

“I bet he’s never read Orwell, or Hemingway. He’s an illiterate editor.”

David Pichaske, founder of Ellis Press, which published Door Way and many other of Blei’s books, said he didn’t dare edit Blei—at least not with the writer’s knowledge. “I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if I tried,” notes Pichaske.

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“He never did do well with authority voice telling him what to do, or what he couldn’t do,” admits Blei’s longtime partner, Jude Genereaux. “As much as he did that to others, he couldn’t take it himself, and he lost ground because of that.”

Blei’s exile from newspapers, while a loss to readers, the history books, and his own productivity, was a boon to dozens of writers he would mentor. For forty years Blei taught a writing class at the Clearing Folk School in Ellison Bay, leading a weeklong retreat in which Coyote rarely if ever made an appearance.

“He could be so belligerent in print, and some people never got past that,” says DeGenova, who spent many seasons at The Clearing under Blei’s tutelage. “But very few people saw what a masterful teacher he was, the generous spirit he had.”

The man who had such punishing standards for his editors was quite gentle with his writing students. He prodded, guided, and pulled words out of them with care and grace.

“He made people who had never written before feel welcome in his classes,” recalls Paula Kosin. Kosin first encountered Blei as a high school student, reading his profiles in Chicago’s Sunday magazines. For years she wondered why he disappeared from those pages, only to finally find him while planning a trip to Door County decades later.

“His [teaching] preparation was incredible, and his style was collaborative, not competitive,” says Kosin. “He would challenge you, but not tell you how to do it or make you write like him.”

According to Genereaux, as a teacher Blei wasn’t critical. And, she notes, he didn’t try to mold clones of himself. “He encouraged you to find your own voice and path,” she says. “His passion was writing, but his genius was teaching.”

Inspired by his students, Blei started Cross+Roads Press in 1994, which he dedicated to the works of first-time, unpublished writers of record (those who had previous publication in print periodicals, but who had not published their first book). Most of his writers were poets and he published some sketchbooks

of artists as well. At Cross+Roads Press Blei would publish one book of the writer’s work, and, once it sold enough to cover his costs, he would split each additional dollar made with the author.

One of these was Dick Purinton, the owner of the Washington Island Ferry, the lifeline between the peninsula and Washington Island, a community of about 800 residents separated from the mainland by a sliver of water known as Death’s Door. Blei was a passenger on the ferry one early winter day and Purinton invited him up to the Captain’s House for the ride.

“Oh God, you gotta write about this!” Norb exclaimed as he admired the stunning and perilous view. “Start January 31st, keep a journal, and in a couple months I’ll check in with you and see what we have.”

Purinton didn’t think much of it.

“Then a couple months later he sent me a packet with a notebook and a pen,” Purinton recalls. “He told me if I wrote it and it was any good, he’d publish it. He was really encouraging and supportive and that gave me a boost of confidence to express myself in a small community—and that’s hard to do.”

Purinton began writing, and his words proved good.

Cross+Roads published Words on Water: A Ferryman’s Journal in 2009. It sold more copies than any other Cross+Roads book.

All told, Blei’s press would give 35 authors their first published work. Yet Cross+Roads never turned a profit. When a book made a little money, Blei simply invested it the next one.

Blei’s press and gentle nurturing helped many struggling writers, but those close to him, who yearned for more of Blei’s own words, lamented the cost.

“He wanted to be a corrective to the publishing industry’s failings,” Feraca says. “He loved writing so much that he was given over to encouraging new writers more than he was dedicated to his own [writing].”

“It scared me because I knew it would pull him away from other stuff, from his own writing,” says Genereaux.

Blei knew this to be true, but he couldn’t help it. Though there was no repairing the writerly bridges he’d burned over the previous years, perhaps he knew he could help build bridges for other writers. Or teach them to build their own.

Norb Blei died in April of 2013. He was 77. Z Post-Script In July of 2014, The University of Wisconsin Press accepted a donation of Blei’s unpublished papers and writings and is presently at work cataloguing them to be made publicly available in archives and online.

In August of 2014, the chicken coop office where Norb Blei wrote for forty years was moved from his old property in Ellison Bay to the grounds of Write On! Door County, a retreat for writers located between Fish Creek and Egg Harbor on forty acres of woods, meadows and orchards. Blei’s coop will be used as a working space for writers in residence.

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Berndt & Glowacki Photo credit: Jamie Young

T

here was no way of knowing what a great success the James Watrous Gallery in Overture Center for the Arts would be when its doors opened on Sunday, September 19, in 2004.

Located in downtown Madison, just steps from the Capitol Square, the high-profile gallery

was originally proposed in 1997 as new home for the Wisconsin Academy Gallery, which had for years lived in the cozy confines of the Academy’s Steenbock Building offices. After years of consideration and negotiation, then-Wisconsin Academy director Robert Lange, working with philanthropists Jerome Frautschi and Pleasant Rowland, secured a coveted third-floor gallery space in the nascent art center.

The new gallery was named for renowned artist and teacher James S. Watrous. Watrous,

who became a Wisconsin Academy Fellow in 1982, was an advocate for culture and civil discussion in all its forms, and a fine namesake for a gallery whose mission is to support and showcase Wisconsin art and artists. The move to the new Overture Center was a risky one. The proposed space, 1,500 square feet with 130 feet of brightly lit linear wall space along the upper level of 36

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Ten Years of James Watrous Gallery Magic

architect Ceasar Pelli’s soaring glass dome, was a far cry from the living room-sized gallery space at 1922 University Avenue. If the Wisconsin Academy Gallery—now the James Watrous Gallery— was going to succeed at Overture, they were going to need some help.

Lynne Watrous Eich, the daughter of James S. Watrous, had asked curator Randall Berndt

to look into a promising curator named Martha Glowacki who was doing excellent work at the UW–Madison School of Human Ecology’s Gallery of Design. Berndt, who recognized Glowacki's name from mural restoration work both had done for the university, agreed with Eich that Glowacki would be a perfect fit for the new gallery. And the rest is Academy history.

On this ten year anniversary of the opening of the James Watrous Gallery, Wisconsin

People & Ideas asked curators Martha Glowacki and Randall Berndt—each a visual artists in their own right—to share with readers some memories of their time at the gallery and how it has influenced their lives and careers.

ABOVE: A panorama view of A Decade of Art (2004), the very first exhibition at the James Watrous Gallery in Overture Center for the Arts.

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Photo credit: Zane Williams

Photo credit: The University of Wisconsin Collection

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LEFT: Gallery namesake James S. Watrous relaxes upon completion of a 12-by-20-foot mosaic at the UW–Madison Memorial Library in 1977.

RIGHT: Curators Glowacki and Berndt bring years of experience as well as their own artistic sensibilities to the James Watrous Gallery.

Martha Glowacki I was working part-time as the director of the Gallery of Design in UW–Madison’s School of Human Ecology when Randall called me on the QT to see if I might be interested in coming to the Academy to help plan the gallery’s move to the Overture Center.

My artistic life was going well in 2002. I had been part of a four-person show at the Elvehjem Museum (now known as the Chazen Museum of Art) in Madison called Cabinets of Curiosities: Four Artists, Four Visions (2000). That show followed a decade that saw arts residencies in the Kohler Arts Center’s Arts/Industry program and a solo show at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. My sculpture was becoming more complex in terms of materials, scale, and sources. I was drawing ideas from the history of science, poetry, and 19th century material culture. I felt that working for the Academy, with its emphasis on transdisciplinary programs, would be a perfect fit for me.

I was greatly tempted by the job because I knew how important the Academy’s exhibition program was to Wisconsin’s visual arts community, and I thought that I would really like working with Randall. At that time in fall of 2002, the Overture Center was the buzz in Madison; we couldn’t believe that the Frautschis had given that much money to build a first-class arts center in our town. The thought of helping to develop an arts program in the new Overture Center was too much for me to resist.

Randall Berndt Before I even really knew who or what the Wisconsin Academy was, I was invited in 1994 to exhibit my artwork in the Wisconsin Academy Gallery (now the Steenbock Gallery). Given my interest in all things remote and past, the following year I was invited to curate Maps of Encounter: The French in Seventeenth Century Wisconsin (1995) an Academy Gallery exhibition of historic maps from the collection of Parker Pen magnate George S. Parker.

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I must have done something right, because I was asked to co-direct the Academy’s gallery program, along with Sally Hutchison, for several years until I became gallery director in 1998. Prior to this I had various jobs, in addition to pursuing my personal art life, including coloring comics for Kitchen Sink Press of Princeton and working on an art conservation crew during the State Capitol’s renovation in the early 1990s, where, coincidentally, I first met Martha.

But none of this really prepared me for moving the Academy’s gallery program to Overture in 2004, which involved a huge growth spurt! The prospect of being in a well-lit, spanking new, much bigger space was daunting and exciting. It was a tremendous opportunity to build on the well-respected exhibition history we had accrued since the 1980s when the gallery was called into being as a much-needed showcase for Wisconsin art.

Here was the opportunity to put our program in front of a much bigger audience along with much more attention—bright lights on our triumphs and possible missteps.

Martha Glowacki Yes, I remember there being great anticipation for the Academy’s move into the Overture Center. The new gallery space, with professional-quality lighting, more exhibition space, and much better accessibility for people with disabilities, promised to be a quantum leap from the gallery in the Academy office building. Our open hours could be longer and there was parking. Plus we would be in the midst of a group of Overture resident companies that were keen to partner on programs. It was all very exciting.

As the main point person for planning the new gallery space, I got to work with Mike Huffman, the person on the construction team responsible for fitting out the interior spaces in the building. I remember going several times to look at the gallery space during construction, always with a hard hat and climbing up changing sets of temporary stairs to the third floor. Together, we chose office furniture and electronic

Photo credit: JamieYoung

Photo credit: Jason A. Smith

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LEFT: Like many exhibitions, In Good Company (2004) took advantage of the Watrous Gallery's ample natural light and gracefully arcing walls.

RIGHT: Wisconsin notables browse works from High Honors, which featured the 2008 Wisconsin Arts Board Visual Arts Fellowship winners.

equipment as part of our portion of the build-out; no way were they going to let us bring our second-hand furniture and old computers down to this pristine new space!

We decided on gallery display “furniture” too, including a set of simple white tables with Plexiglas vitrines, pedestals, and two movable walls to divide the space. We were able to select our own contractor for the gallery furniture and chose Jim Dietz, a local furniture designer and woodworker, to design and construct the pieces. We are still using all of Jim’s furniture today.

Randall Berndt Our first exhibition in the new James Watrous Gallery, A Decade of Art (2004), featured over ninety small works hung salon style from artists who had shown in our Wisconsin Academy Gallery space during the previous ten years. It was a baptism by fire to put up such a complicated show right at the beginning. But it was visited by thousands of eager, elbowing onlookers during that first week of Overture’s opening celebration.

Martha Glowacki For that first show, Randall had planned to ask all of the artists who had one-person shows at the Academy Gallery to submit a small piece. He wanted to call the show A Decade of Art. What a great idea, I thought: it would be a grand celebration, and at the same time honor the Academy’s commitment to continuing a gallery program for Wisconsin artists.

But I don’t think either of us thought through how much work this would be. There were over a hundred artists on the invitation list. I thought we might get fifty or sixty artists who would be interested in participating in such a large group show. Instead, almost everyone we asked wanted to be part of the celebration. We ended up wrangling almost ninety artists from all over Wisconsin, each of whom wanted to deliver their work to a very busy new loading dock two weeks before Overture opened— and they all wanted tours of the amazing new building. Randall,

Jennifer Stofflet (who had joined the gallery team in the summer of 2003), and I somehow managed to assemble all of the work, shoehorn it into the gallery space, and remain standing for the opening week festivities.

During that first week, with Overture’s extended hours and lots of free programming, we had something like 15,000 people troop through our crowded opening show. It was madness, and we were running on adrenaline and exhausted by the end of the week. For the first year that Overture was open, our attendance was amazingly high as people from the area came in to see what this new arts complex was all about.

Things soon settled down. Jennifer, Randall, and I developed a rhythm as a working team and found that we loved working together. I have very fond memories of our early years at Overture.

Randall Berndt Working in the Watrous Gallery these last ten years has been a terrific “post graduate” course of study—I got my MFA in 1969—in wildly varying artist’s personalities, art styles, and curatorial challenges. Presentation, context, and lighting as well as how far off the floor the art should go were dealt with and mostly went unnoticed by casual gallerygoers. Writing text for exhibitions is a mind-expanding exercise in putting into words the ineffable qualities of visual art—which is supposed to be visual rather than wordy.

In the end, dealing with all this art over the years has helped me think critically if not systematically about quality in art. I have often exercised some curator’s compassion in coming in contact with art wildly different from my own, and, at the same time, becoming more firm in pursuing my personal quest, more definite in developing the identity of my own art, my own visual narrative.

Martha Glowacki My position at the Watrous Gallery has given me lots of freedom to pursue curatorial ideas. Because we are a small W i s c o n s i n

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part-time staff, we have to do the wide variety of tasks that are more specialized in a larger arts organization. I’ve had to learn how to write complex grants and do fund-raising, how to be a registrar and publicist, and how to design and hang all sorts of art work. I’ve loved learning all of those things. This job has never seemed remotely boring to me: sometimes frustrating, sometimes overwhelming, but never boring.

Over the course of my time at the Watrous Gallery I’ve also found that I have a real talent for exhibition design and for large multi-disciplinary projects with a visual arts component. I’ve learned this through my own work as an artist: I’ve done four large installation projects during the last ten years, including my Washburn Observatory show, Starry Transit (2005) and Loca Miraculi/Rooms of Wonder (2008) at the Milwaukee Art Museum with the Chipstone Foundation. But the wide range of projects that we’ve done at the Watrous Gallery has really gone beyond anything I would be able to do on my own as an artist. At this point, I feel really confident about tackling complex projects, and have a reputation as an artist who can pull them off.

Randall Berndt I have especially enjoyed working with the Academy’s Visual Arts Fellows. These have included John Wilde, Warrington Colescott, Lee Weiss, Ray Gloeckler, David Lenz, and Tom Uttech.

They have all been tremendous exemplars for me of what it means to take yourself seriously as a practicing, professional artist. John Wilde, who had a strong national reputation as well as much success with museum exhibitions and commercial galleries too, once confided in me that he was surprised that people would actually want to buy his paintings and drawings.

His work was so utterly devoted to his inward psychic process, containing grotesqueries galore, that he maybe thought it was a lucky coincidence that others could see the art in it. Both Wilde’s magical “inscapes” and Tom Uttech’s powerfully transcendent landscapes set in mysterious northern places have been inspirational for me. Tom is refreshingly unpretentious

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and candid about his struggles to attain what he wants to in his work and, despite his doubts, his paintings are always an intriguing, wild world to enter. Both artists represent for me the importance of personal expression, dedication to craft, and avoidance of the fashionable in art trends.

I have also enjoyed the friendship and support of many other Wisconsin artists met through Watrous Gallery doings, visiting their studios, borrowing ideas and techniques, and complaining about the ups and downs both material and emotional of the artist life.

Martha Glowacki As I hoped, working at the Academy on programs that bridge the sciences, visual arts, and creative writing in innovative ways has fueled my own interests in creating artwork that combines ideas from science and history. It’s been a real pleasure to work with people who are concerned with Wisconsin’s environment and culture, who are energized by talking about ideas, and who go beyond talk to create programs that share Wisconsin’s creative people and ideas with others.

I’m often called upon to talk about the synergy between my life as an artist and my life as a curator. There seems to be great interest in artists working as curators right now. Randall and I both believe that we have brought special insight into our curatorial work at the Academy because we are practicing visual artists. Many of the artists that we have worked with comment on this, appreciating that we understand working on an exhibition from the perspective of an artist as well as a curator.

My position with the Watrous Gallery and Academy has opened doors for me as an artist. I’ve had the chance to work with people from all sorts of other cultural organizations because of my position at the Academy. This has led to valuable connections for me as an artist as well as lasting friendships. I’m grateful for that and know that I’ll have to find new ways to maintain those connections when I retire from the gallery at the end of this year.

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OPPOSITE PAGE: (left) Randall Berndt, The Little Dancer: E. Degas Rebuked by the Modern Woman, 2014. Acrylic on panel, 16 x 16 inches. (right) Randall Berndt, The Taming of Nature, 2014. Acrylic on panel, 18 x 19 inches.

ABOVE: Randall Berndt, My Great, Great-grandparents Visit the Temple of Flight, 2014. Acrylic on panel, 18 x 22 inches.

Artwork photos by Eric Ferguson

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OPPOSITE PAGE: Deconstructing Flight (Homage to Étienne Jules Marey), 2011. Steel, cast iron, bronze, slate, taxidermied cockatoo, wild goose and turkey bones, inkjet prints, 66 x 54 x 26 inches.

ABOVE: Summa (For My Mother), 2007. Diptych of wood, glass, bronze, linen, paper, bones, graphite, and pigments, 21.5 x 19.5 x 6 inches.

Artwork photos by Eric Ferguson

Randall Berndt Representing “The Arts”—we at the gallery usually thought of these as visual art alone—in a multidisciplinary organization has a distinct advantage: the freedom to conceptualize and present art in different ways. As a curator I had the opportunity to organize exhibitions with “value added” to the purely visual component of the subject matter.

Two historic maps exhibitions were mounted where their geography, history and visual beauty all talked about how odd these 17th, 18th, and even 19th century maps look to our modern eyes. Rebirth of the Prairie: Aldo Leopold and Ecological Restoration (1999) focused on the beginnings of prairie restoration at the UW Arboretum through photography and text. I also curated The Fine Art of Children’s Book Illustration (2009), an exhibition featuring well-known Wisconsin authors/ illustrators of children’s books, where the synergy between text and image came alive on the gallery walls. The recent Inhabited Landscapes (2013) exhibition featured art from seven prominent Wisconsin landscape artists and emphasized through artists’ statements the importance of their sense of place as well as environmental issues implicit in the art itself.

Martha Glowacki One of the greatest curatorial gifts I received was an invitation to the Curators’ Conversations that David Wells organized through Edenfred, an arts residency facility in Madison that is, alas, now closed. Soon after I came to work at the Academy, David came up with the idea of asking arts curators from large and small museums and university art galleries across Wisconsin to gather twice a year for a day-long meeting.

I’ve felt embraced by this group of people: we eat together,

kvetch, share successes and failures alike. I feel like we are part of a family, my fellow-travelers in the arts.

I have also developed friendships and great working relationships through some of the projects that I’ve worked on for the Watrous Gallery. These projects tend to be an inordinate amount of work, but for me the results are worth it.

I loved working with Ruth Olson, a folklorist with the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at UW–Madison.

Ruth and I spent a lot of time together during two exhibition projects: Miss Annie Mae’s Hats (2006) and Wisconsin’s People on the Land (2007). I especially remember a road trip to Milwaukee with Ruth and photographer Bob Rashid. We were going to a hat shop that specialized in wonderfully flamboyant “church hats” to meet Annie Mae’s niece, who would model hats while Bob photographed her. Egged on by Annie Mae’s niece and the shop owner, Bob, Ruth, and I ended up throwing our inhibitions out the hat shop door, trying on hats (!), and buying one to take home to wear for the exhibition opening.

Another group of people that I greatly enjoyed working with were people from the McPherson Eye Research Institute at UW–Madison for an exhibition titled About Seeing (2012), which looked at the physiology of human sight as well as the work of three visual artists who had experienced significant eye problems. I was both excited and a bit intimidated by this project. Would I understand their research well enough to work with them to develop content for the show? At our first meeting I realized that the scientists were just as excited about partnering as I was. Matt Rarey, Shiela Reaves, Bas Rokers, Rodney Schreiner, and Gail Stirr worked with me for over a year to develop About Seeing. I think that we created W i s c o n s i n

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Help from other curators, like our neighbors at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, and designers, like John Huston from Huston Design, has been invaluable to both my personal success and the success of the gallery. MMoCA has been generous with us in many ways, letting us borrow frames and exhibition cases, partnering on educational programs, and loaning artwork from their permanent collection. MMoCA preparators Mark Verstegen and Doug Fath even showed Randall and me the nuances of installing vinyl lettering on the walls, along with other tricks of the trade. And I would like to thank Steve Fleischman, Sheri Castelnuovo, Marilyn Sohi, Katie Kazan, Rick Axsom, and Leah Kolb for their help and friendship.

John Huston, the Academy’s (and sometimes my own, personal) graphic designer, has been wonderful to work with.

I like his clean, classical design aesthetic; it dovetails with my own. When I was working on Starry Transit, my installation at the Washburn Observatory at UW–Madison, I asked John if he would consider working with me to do the graphic design on one of the mixed media pieces for the show. The resulting piece, titled Natural Philosophies (2006), was purchased through the UW–Madison Friends of the Library and hung in Memorial Library for several years. Tandem Press went on to publish an edition of prints based on Natural Philosophies.

Randall Berndt If I have any advice to aspiring artists, it is this: Show your work wherever you can to get it out of your studio. See how it looks in the company of other art. Too, keep trying if you are rejected from competitive shows, find a place to be accepted—there are layers and layers to the art world. Okay, this, too: study art history and the old masters, find out how to make the craft of your art better, put yourself in your art, keep it personal but somehow try to drag in as little as possible from the dispos-

able, fad-ridden pop culture we all swim around in. Spend little time in shopping malls. Study trees and clouds.

Remember we are all emerging each and every day.

Find inspirational artists’ aphorisms to live by and note them down in your sketchbook. Here is one taken from the short story “The Middle Years” by author Henry James that I have on my studio wall: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art”

Martha Glowacki While there are many parts of my work for the Academy that have been meaningful, the thing that has meant the most to me personally is our work with fellow artists. Randall and I often talk about how much we have learned from the many artists we have worked with: how they balance the demands of work, family, and studio; how they weather lean times; how they come up with new ideas to energize their work.

We also believe that a big part of our jobs as artist/curators is to support the artists who are doing solo exhibitions so that together we can produce the best possible result. This means being sensitive to the needs of the artist. Some are ready to install a well-designed exhibition with little help from us; some need lots of advice about selecting work to show and don’t know where to start with installing. Regardless of individual levels of experience and confidence, all of the artists are putting their most personal selves, their work as artists, out on public view. We share the resulting exhibition with the artists, celebrating if the show is fine and suggesting ways to make the next one better.

While we work intensely with artists for a short time during their shows at the gallery, the relationships that build from these experiences are almost always satisfying and sometimes long-lasting. These relationships have reinforced my own deep belief in the importance of creating and sharing art. Z

CONNECT: At the James Watrous Gallery Randall Berndt: The Taming of Nature Christine Style: Visual Stories & Genetic Explosions On view November 11—December 23 Join us for side-by-side solo exhibitions from Randall Berndt and Green Bay artist Christine Style. Berndt’s drawings and paintings are inspired by the lives of famous artists, the mysteries of our place in nature, and historical events filtered through literature and mythology. Style's current works in woodcut, monotype, and digital print with encaustic reflect on the roles our hearts play: physically, symbolically, spiritually, metaphorically, personally, and inventively. This exhibition and all related events are free and open to the public. Visit wisconsinacademy.org/gallery for more details.

Left: Randall Berndt, from the Homage to Famous Artists Series: Magritte’s Garden, 2014. Acrylic on panel, 24 x 18 in.

Right: Christine Style, Benevolent Heart I, 2010–13. Woodcut with hand painting, 22 x 16 in.

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read WI

Photo credit: Jason A. Smith

READ WISCONSIN We began the Read Wisconsin section of Wisconsin People & Ideas back in the summer of 2010. Then-literary editor John Lehman and I came up with the idea for a new section of the magazine that would bring more attention to Wisconsin's rich literary culture by showcasing fiction and poetry beyond the stellar works appearing in our annual contests and featuring regular interviews with Wisconsin writers and poets. We thought that providing reviews of new and important titles and profiling independent bookstores might also encourage people to "buy local" works by Wisconsin authors at locally owned bookstores.

It was an ambitious idea for sure, and over the course of four years the Read Wisconsin project yielded some hits and some near misses. Our interviews with Wisconsin authors and poets, for instance, almost always uncover some fascinating insight into the creative process; and our annual contests—as they have for over twelve years—provide readers with a continual stream of excellent, award-winning prose and poetry.

But our Local Bookshop Spotlight and High Five sections haven't fared so well. While I can chalk up the former to the

fact that independent bookstores in Wisconsin (and, I would say, across the world) are a dying breed, the latter was a failure simply because, oddly enough, I couldn't find that many people outside of the literary circle who wanted to share their top five books with us.

While I'm not entirely certain how many people read our book reviews, I believe thoughtful cultural criticism is an essential component of an informed democracy—a component you likely won't find in the Comments section of Amazon.com. As such, we will assign and publish book reviews until we run out of books.

Looking back, perhaps the biggest failure of the Read Wisconsin section of the magazine is this: By removing our literary content from the heady mix of arts, culture, science, environmental, and other kinds of articles in the magazine, we may have inadvertently marginalized it. As such, we will move toward re-incorporating across the pages of the magazine content found for the last four years in Read Wisconsin and thereby renew our emphasis on the "happy collisions" one finds at the intersection of the sciences, arts, and letters.

—Jason A. Smith

TURN THE PAGE TO READ THE THIRD PLACE PRIZE-WINNING SHORT STORY FROM OUR 2014 FICTION CONTEST!

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Wisconsin People & Ideas 2014 Short Story Contest

Photo credit: Lewis Hine/Newberry Library

RD

LUCK

By Marilyn Shapiro Leys

F

irst the eyes, he thought. Watch the eyes—where are the eyes watching? Forward, searching over heads, sorting out the familiar ones ahead on the rickety gangplank? Or backward, back to the steamship, the eyes glancing over the shoulder—the right shoulder, usually, which some-

times even turns to accommodate the search?

Or, luck willing, do the eyes look only down?

The train from Philadelphia took a long time to get to New York City, and the horse-drawn trolley took a long time to get to the docks for this unplanned return to Castle Garden. That was a long time to think, so Aaron had it all decided. First, the eyes, where they were watching. That was the most crucial thing, more important than any pretty face the eyes might sit in,

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or an attractive body that, as it was December, would be swaddled and hard to judge in any case. Second, the question. He had rejected many questions.

He knew—recalled—he would have time for only one question before the vendors closed in to sell a million cheap wonders of their New World, before the makeshift porters pressed in to snatch the bags.

There was a woman coming down the gangplank now, a small stranger, very

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young—a girl, maybe. And the eyes were in the right direction. Although downward eyes might have been merely caution, for the flimsy gangplank swayed ominously underneath the back-to-belly packing of the greenhorns. But the question would sort things out, would ratify what the eyes suggested.

Aaron approached the gangplank on the dock as the woman approached the dock on the gangplank. “I can help you

read WI find your family?” he inquired. In Yiddish, this having the benefit of establishing her fitness in an additional regard.

The eyes dropped farther, if this were possible. “It’s only me,” she answered, a little sadly.

“An orphan?” he asked, struggling to hide his delight that maybe he was not going to have to ask a second griner kuziner to find somebody without a family temporarily invisible somewhere on the ramp behind her, or on the dock ahead.

He did not need one more family.

Also, he noticed, the face was not unattractive, an additional plus. Pale, but that was understandable—he remembered there was often not much sun on the ocean in December, or in steerage.

Heart-shaped, he guessed such a face was called, the result of a little brown widow’s peak showing under her babushka, and at the bottom a sharp chin. A smallish nose, dark brown eyes. He guessed they were dark brown, for the eyes were still so downcast that he was catching only the shortest glimpses. She was half a head shorter than himself, and he was no Goliath; however, she was carrying two bulging satchels, one in each hand, and she was not even puffing.

Maybe, he thought, maybe that should come after the eyes. If—luck forbid— I have to try again. Maybe whatever burdens and how they’re managed should come before the question.

Now she was explaining at him, shyly, hesitantly. She is one of three daughters, the oldest and also—she blushes—maybe the smartest. At least her father thinks so. Her mother being dead. She will work—they say there is work here in New York—and bring her family here, home.

This was what anybody thought, what anybody planned. It didn’t have to happen; often these particular plans fell through. So Aaron was maybe not hoping a false hope.

“A shame your plans are made,” he told her, walking her away from the gangplank, through the vendors, past the porters, though both bags were still in her own hands. It was all going so smoothly, he could not quite believe his luck.

She looked back to where they had come from. The gangplank was gone, all

folded up and gone, and even now a sailor on the dock was throwing up the last rope and the steamship was huffing away. Her eyes were down again. “No plans,” she murmured, “Not exactly.”

Then, looking up to smile at him, or at a memory, “Addresses. A couple addresses.”

“Your father gave you these before you left?”

She nodded a tiny nod.

“But by now those addresses will be pretty old.” He made his tongue go, “Tsk.” He elaborated, “Here in New York now, things are bad.”

“Bad?” He shook his head to indicate that she could not imagine how bad things had gotten in New York.

Suddenly, as if hired for the purpose, a beggar slipped through Aaron’s invisible cordon that had until now miraculously held off the world. The beggar had an intelligent face and, worse—or better, from Aaron’s perspective—he was dressed in a tweed coat that appeared to have once belonged to a gentleman. Except now lining showed through a large rip in the left side seam and strips of lining hung down below the woolen hem. And the hand that was extended toward them, palm cupped to hold the coins he hoped for, was covered with a formerly-fine leather glove, two of whose fingers had come unsewed.

She shivered; Aaron took one menacing step at the beggar, who disappeared in nothing flat without a word.

Aaron greeted the departure with an open, up-turned palm pointed in the man’s direction plus a shrug, and these were words enough. He had proven his point: things were awful in this New York. She drew a little closer to him.

They walked; he gave it a minute or two then he went on, “What I meant to say was, since things are bad here, maybe the people at those addresses are gone by now—left a little early in the month—you catch what I’m saying here?”

Quickly, she thought this one through, then edged away from him a step or two.

W i s c o n s i n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marilyn Shapiro Leys was born and raised in Philadelphia and migrated to Madison to attend the University of Wisconsin.

Like her husband and younger son, she majored in journalism; like her older son, she was a teacher. After twenty years teaching journalism and creative writing in Milwaukee Public Schools, she and her husband retired to a beef cattle farm in southwest Wisconsin. Twenty years later, they moved to Prairie du Chien, the location of her soon-to-be-published historical novel.

JUDGE’S NOTES

By Susanna Daniel The thing that stands out from the start of "Luck" is the author's ability to pull tension —and menace—from the first paragraph through to the last sentence. The sentences match the character: quick-witted, determined, nearly desperate in pace and detail. It's because of these snappy sentences that the reader wants to keep going despite the feeling that one is going into the mouth of a lion—and then there's a turn, where the sentences slow down and the action, in flashback, changes the meaning of the entire situation in a surprising and welcome way.

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read WI “But these are good people, my father said!” she disagreed, a tiny bit less than mildly. “Not somebody who tries to cheat a landlord.”

Now both of Aaron’s hands were up in protest, palms facing her. Simultaneously, both shoulders were hunching toward his ears.

“You think some landlords don’t deserve the worst?” He drew a sharp breath; this familiar street was not the one to be on. He swerved, “Who said cheat? Did I say cheat? No, no, things are so bad in New York, what I meant to say was, maybe the people your father knew were put out on the street.

Or knew they would be on the street tomorrow, and so they already left today. Maybe it was all they could do.”

This caused, to his intense gratification, a gasp of horror. And then, “You think?” The eyes were worried now, the hands clenched around the handles of the heavy satchels.

“Here, let me help you with those,” Aaron offered.

Slowly, her eyes running over him, evaluating him, she offered him the smaller of the bags.

He said nothing. Experience told him he’d better let her think she had the choice of whatever should come next.

They walked; she asked into his silence, “So, what else could I do?”

He pretended to weigh her options.

Slowly, as if he had not thought all this through a hundred times, he answered, “Philadelphia.”

“Filadelfer?” It was a long word. She had trouble saying it, and it was no surprise to Aaron when she added, “But I don’t know from this Filadelfer.”

“This is my home, Philadelphia.”

He puffed his chest out with pride of ownership, though in truth it had not been his home for long, comparatively, and he knew the lack of a New World accent must betray him to her if she, despite her alarm, was still capable of thinking. Which, luck willing, she was not. Then he took the great leap: “I am a doctor there.”

It was while studying himself in the tiny mirror in the tiny bathroom on the train that he became a doctor. He

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looked the part: the expensive-seeming borrowed suit, the carefully trimmed triangular little beard and the moustache that flowed into it. The watchful, deliberately kindly eyes. The neatly cut hair, receding a little, graying a little more than that, but all of it adding to the impression of a man who is carrying the cares of too many other people on his shoulders, though a man who is more than adequately reimbursed.

And this was true—the first part. The

“Here, let me help you with those,” Aaron offered.

Slowly, her eyes running over him, evaluating him, she offered him the smaller of the bags.

Experience told him he’d better let her think she had the choice of whatever should come next. number of people he hoped to carry once more on his shoulders was eight.

Plus a memory, one year old.

Of snow. Of so much white snow, so much already fallen, so much falling as he tramped from place to place, peddling his shoes. The year’s luck had been good to him, and he had managed to build the capital he earned from selling just a few shoes into a little more and a little more, until, when he started out that day, he had as many shoes to sell as he could carry. But this meant he must walk farther from his home and

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stretch the truth more often. Because he hadn’t enough capital or strength to carry every single size in every single style.

So sometimes the genuine shoe did not fit the real-life foot, and therefore something had to be manufactured out of words. This was not so much a sin as a necessity; the fault was with the buyer, after all, if she believed him instead of her own cramped feet. And there were nine lives depending on his shrewdness, nine beloved lives. Nine lives plus one, his own. And each of these was familiar to him, was not some credulous stranger. What else could a husband and a father do?

So it was still snowing this other December morning, snow that to him was seeming a wet curse. But as it would turn out, the snow would be a white blessing, because it was mounded up three feet thick near the old brick wall of the row house where they were living on the third floor. Lived.

The wholesaler he bought the shoes from once called them Trinity houses.

Three floors, he’d amplified: the Father; the Son; the Holy Ghost. And laughed.

Aaron did not get it, but he laughed too, because it was not his habit to be caught out by anything and because the wholesaler seemed to expect it. And afterward he asked around discreetly, but no one knew. No one among the immigrants like himself in the tenements on his block could understand the joke.

Later, when he had worked around a while, gone a little farther away to sell in some of the less Jewish neighborhoods, he unraveled it. The meaning, but more than that, the poverty inherent in these Trinity houses, and the shame. Once the buildings had housed one family only, when they were new—or newer.

But now so many people were coming in and needing housing that the smart men with some money were buying up these buildings and breaking them into thirds—one family to a floor. At least in theory.

Where he was living—lived—there were streets full of Trinity houses, one beside the next, rows of them with

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{ Book Reviews } no space between, sharing their side walls, making, as you looked at them from the street, solid walls of red brick pockmarked with door and windows, door and windows, door and windows, twenty five or thirty on each side of the street all down the block. Block after block. Filled with hard-working, honest people like himself. Plus the occasional gonif. Which it had been, unfortunately, his luck to encounter for a landlord.

How was he to know his landlord was in trouble? Aaron always paid the rent on time. The families who lived in this house of their landlord’s had all paid the rent. So how was it that their landlord went and chose their house to try to ease his tsorres?

Aaron had been a mile or more away that snowy morning when the landlord’s fire started. It was daytime luckily, school time for the two who were in school, work time for the oldest two who had already completed the third grade. But that left four at home with Hannah—and the little one was only three months old, the next, two years, the next one three, then, finally, the four year old. All on the top floor of the building. With its ancient stairwell, open top-to-bottom, clogged with the debris of years.

What happened next Aaron kept constructing over and over again from what he had been told. Waking, sleeping, now leaving Castle Garden in New York, where what he was doing was no more nor less than fighting a war to win his family back. The fire blazed. Hannah and the children were caught upstairs. She tried to send the older ones down the steps, but the fire was already climbing up that way.

There were spectators now, standing on the sidewalk. There were children at the window, his children. And also Hannah. She opened the window.

“Jump!” screamed the people on the sidewalk.

She whispered to the oldest little one. He was one of their brave ones. He edged out the window, sat on the ledge for just a moment, took the gamble, jumped. And someone caught him.

Dispatches from the Drownings: Reporting the Fiction of Nonfiction

by B.J. Hollars University of New Mexico Press, 216 pages with b/w photographs, $29.95

Reviewed by Erika Janik In late August of 1906, Mrs. Anna Carlton announced her intention to drown herself in the Chippewa River. Her disappearance soon after led many to believe she had followed through on her promise.

Dispatches from the Drownings: Reporting the Fiction of Nonfiction by B.J. Hollars contains one hundred such reports of drowning, mainly in the Chippewa Valley region, that occurred between 1875 and 1922. Seventy-five of these reports are true while twentyfive are completely fictitious. Good luck telling them apart.

An assistant professor of English at UW–Eau Claire and author/editor of five other books, Hollars first encountered his subject when several people drowned within weeks of his arrival in Eau Claire in 2011. He soon learned that drownings are common in river towns, which led him deep into local archives in search of historical drowning reports.

What struck Hollars more than the deaths, however, were the vast discrepancies in the details reported. Some journalists reported little more than a name and the body of water that claimed a life, while others drew from quotes by friends, neighbors, and family members to speculate on the psychological rationale behind the tragedy. For instance, how could a reporter have known that in 1885 sixty-year-old laborer Patrick Riley entered the river in a state of delirium, “hardly creating an additional ripple upon entering the frigid water”? Or that lumber baron Charles Bateman may have taken his own life due to declining health and business disputes in 1909? When does speculation become a substitute for truth? These are the questions that animate Hollars’ work.

Hollars aims to make readers reevaluate facts. He wants us to understand the choices that journalists and other writers make, even when telling the truth. Some facts are left in while others are left out for reasons of space, accuracy, instinct, interpretation, and even misreading of the event, particularly when those incidents happened in the past.

Truth has its limits, even among those with the best of intentions.

The reports in the book are not taken verbatim from the source. Rather, Hollars rewrites them in a similar style and tone. Many of the stories are paired with photographs from photographer Charles Van Schaick, who photographed Wisconsinites in his Black River Falls studio from 1890 to 1910. Hollars make very clear that no person captured in the photo is the person in the adjacent news story, but its hard not to associate the two once you’ve seen them. Proximity creates a new fiction in the readers’ mind.

The reports are haunting. A young boy disappears on one page only to turn up a few pages later, a body discovered in the river. Most of the reports are less than a page long, yet are as engrossing as a short story. Paradoxically, not knowing what’s true made me care more for the people’s stories. The desensitization that can come from continual exposure to something seems counterbalanced by uncertainty. The photos—many quite strange in their own way—likely only enhanced this feeling.

Dispatches from the Drownings was partly inspired by Michael Lesy’s 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip, which also pairs news reports with photographs from Van Schaick. The reports in Lesy’s book, however, are true and taken straight from the source. Selections from Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 collection Spoon River Anthology, a compilation of poems written as epitaphs for the residents of the fictional town of Spoon River, serve as epigraphs for Hollars’ chronological chapters. Hollars’ homage to both Wisconsin Death Trip and Spoon River Anthology further illustrate the mutability of truth in telling the story of a place.

A strength of the book is that at no point do the stories feel like a quiz, a game designed to make the reader feel tricked—or worse, stupid. While some may see the book as a puzzle to solve, this approach seems to miss the point of Hollars’ exercise: critical

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read WI Their second now, this one more timid than poor Hannah herself. He did ease himself out the window, he got that far, the neighbors would tell Aaron, but then he sat and measured off the distance between himself and the snow, and sat still, paralyzed.

Inside their room, the smoke was seeping beneath the door, was growing thick enough for the people on the street to see. Hannah whispered to the second one. He would not go. She whispered again. She saw he would not go. She gathered all her courage, the tiny store she’d borrowed from her husband’s excess. She pushed, though gently. He fell and he was caught.

The little ones were easiest—they did not know from fear. Hannah seized the blanket from the bed and then a pillowslip. She wrapped Miriam in the blanket and kissed the two-year-old on her yellow curls and dropped her from the window. And she was caught.

Bluma, the baby, went into the pillowslip and over to the window and was dropped. Into the deep snow, which cushioned her fall. The four-year-old ran to her, expecting a corpse, but came up with his baby sister, squalling and alive.

Hannah had stayed too long. By the time she jumped, coughing, her lungs were wrecked. She died three days later, and so the children were dispersed, no longer at home to be with Aaron, to serve him cool water in the summer, his glass of tea in winter, to amuse him, love him.

This stranger on the dock, this little woman, was tugging at his sleeve, a fish waiting to be reeled in, a customer begging to buy shoes that might not fit.

He knew every one of his customers by name; he realized now that he did not know this stranger’s. No matter.

“A doctor?” she was asking. “What kind of doctor?”

He weighed her words: curiosity or suspicion? Curiosity, he decided. Luck willing. “How many kinds of doctor are there?” he asked her in return.

He watched until she smiled.

“Married?” she inquired.

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He shrugged. “Widower,” he corrected.

“There are children?”

“A couple,” he told her without a second’s hesitation, though fear coursed through him at the thought of how much she might force him to

This stranger on the dock, this little woman, was tugging at his sleeve, a fish waiting to be reeled in, a customer begging to buy shoes that might not fit.

He knew every one of his customers by name; he realized now that he did not know this stranger’s.

No matter. explain. Whether he would have to tell her about his oldest two, left in Europe to fend for themselves because they could; about the two who had been working when the fire started, and worked today, and the two erstwhile schoolchildren, the boy now already working, all four of them now bedding down at night on that staple of immigrant life, the foldout lunchka. And the two who jumped, also farmed out to relatives who had some use for them.

And the two who were tossed? Too small to do anybody any good. But somebody in Hannah’s family had heard about some nuns. Who knows how a

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Jew finds out about nuns; luck excavates the strangest knowledge from the mines. So the two youngest were living with some nuns. Which made Aaron unhappiest of all.

It had been a year. He was here in New York City on borrowed money and borrowed clothing and a profession borrowed until he could achieve the right result. “Well,” he said, as if the idea had just struck him, “you could come with me to Philadelphia.”

The idea, he saw, had not occurred to her until he said it. But she was smiling; she was buying the idea. This is even easier than shoes, he thought.

A shame I’ll only get to do it once. Luck willing.

“But I don’t know anybody there,” she said.

“You know me.” He seasoned his voice with hurt. With the hand that did not have possession of her satchel he fingered the watchless chain that Hannah’s cousin’s husband had lent him. He waited. He recognized this as the crucial moment, that he must hurry nothing or the sale would disappear.

She was looking at her satchels, first the one in her own hand, then the one in his. She was looking at his face, examining his clothes. “I know,” she said, then, “I have heard that in your America they do things different. But still—to go with you to this Filadelfer, and I am not, that is, we are not …”

“Married?” He hoped the smile he felt on his lips appeared a kindly one, not the gloating one he’d share only with himself after a pair of shoes was taken.

A person should be smart, but the smartest person was the one who knew when to keep from revealing truth.

The little nameless stranger nodded once, sharply.

“But getting married is easy,” he explained. He corrected himself, “Or so they say.”

“You can find somebody right here in New York?”

“So they say,” he answered.

He knew there was, and where—the exact address. Z

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{ Book Reviews } New & RECENT Releases

thinking about an idea rather than the specific instances. Hollars even admits in the end that he can no longer remember which drownings are true and which are fabricated.

Dispatches from the Drownings is a book that demands more from a reader than acceptance at face value. By continually erasing and redrawing the line between fiction and nonfiction, Hollars forces readers to consider what truth means, whether truth is even possible, and, perhaps more importantly, why truth matters.

OCTOBER 2014 Perimeter: A Contemporary Portrait of Lake Michigan

by Kevin Miyazaki Wisconsin Historical Society Press

Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America

The Slow Regard of Silent Things

by Patrick Rothfuss DAW Publishing

Plume, 288 pages, $16.00

Local Ground(s)—Midwest Poetics: Selected Prose Verse Wisconsin 2009–2014 Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman, eds.

Cowfeather Press

Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Boy and girl ride shiny new Fuji bicycles on a 2,000-mile trip from boy’s Wisconsin hometown out west in search of adventure and spiritual fulfillment. Brian Benson’s memoir, Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America, embarks on a journey to the great, white Somewhere, that kept me wondering throughout: Will this end as a romance or a tragedy?

Benson, who grew up in Land O’Lakes in northern Wisconsin, has written his first book about his favorite subject—himself—during the few months he and girlfriend Rachel planned and undertook a cross-country journey by bike. A confused but proud twentysomething, the Benson we meet in this memoir is ready to take on the world, but clueless as to how to do so. While Benson’s world-weary narrative occasionally tests the reader’s patience, as with any lost boy we are curious to know if the journey will end with discovery.

At the center of the memoir is Benson’s road diary, and certain passages in the book seem to be taken from it whole cloth. “There was something comforting about this quantitative account of daily life … every entry packed with headwinds and tornado threats and sex and blown spokes and selfless strangers and stunning scenery and sex.

I’d done a good job recording these moments—and, inevitably, burying them in masturbatory adjectives and shitty landscape metaphors—but the play-by-play had left me too spent to write about much else. About, for example, my anxiety over the horizon. Or my frustrations with Rachel.”

Frustration is at the core of Benson’s experience. And, even though he claims to be self-aware—characterizing himself as a brash, privileged, inexperienced, white male making an expensive bicycle trip into the unknown with a beautiful, smart woman he can’t begin to appreciate—he can’t stop feeling dissatisfaction. For instance, he resents Rachel’s inability to match his pace, yet he struggles with the selfishness of his resentment, thereby entangling himself in a Möbius strip of unhappiness.

Benson writes best when his and Rachel’s relationship is at odds with the vague, selfish quest for “something” that hangs over their trip. The couple’s initial enthusiasm and moxie darken as the elements and their bodies turn against them. Too many hours in the saddle battling headwinds, troublesome tires, and numb limbs creates a friction that any person who has ever taken a long trip with a loved one can understand. At the end of bad days, they take time for themselves at opposite ends of city parks, eating candy bars in silence.

The sour moods break during brief moments of glee when they find their way (in the spirit of adventure, they purposefully haven’t bought bicycling maps) and when friends and strangers offer them a hot meal and the opportunity to reflect and reconnect.

Like all good first-person accounts, Going Somewhere is a conversation between two people: the insecure Brian who takes this journey, and the slightly-wiser older Brian who lives to tell the tale. There are awkward moments when this conversation is not conducted elegantly, but even this feels like a natural part of Brian’s frustrated song of himself.

By its rushed epilogue, Benson’s book arrives at a hopeful place, a place further from tragedy than I had anticipated. If nothing else, Benson’s minor adventure proves that the spirit of young America may still lie in the unexpected cracks of the frontier, even if that frontier no longer exists and perhaps never did.

Editor's Pick: Madison Poets Laureate and Verse Wisconsin editors Busse and Vardaman have assembled a collection of selected work from their over six years at the hybrid poetry magazine that includes observations by the editors and other commentary that seeks to "redefine what a poetics of the Midwest might be, and to point the way towards what such a Midwest poetics might become."

Little Hawk and the Lone Wolf: A Memoir

by Raymond C. Kaquatosh Wisconsin Historical Society Press

NOVEMBER 2014 The Lives of Chang and Eng: Siam's Twins in Nineteenth-Century America

by Joseph Andrew Orser The University of North Carolina Press

FEBRUARY 2015 Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946

by James P. Leary University of Wisconsin Press Milwaukee Mafia: Mobsters in the Heartland

By Gavin Schmitt Barracuda Books Did we miss something?

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

by Brian Benson Reviewed by Aaron Fai

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Wisconsin poetry

December Poem, 2013

Drop my children off at another parent’s house To free up time to drive aimlessly, listening to FM radio, waiting for a song that I feel deeply Connected to, stopping in small towns to pump Gasoline, eager to make acquaintances with the Cashier, a woman who tells me my credit card Has been declined; always so embarrassing. In Fall Creek I present a notice of delivery to the Postmaster, who has me sign my name on a Computer screen; turns out to just be a bill. Who Does that? Sends a bill, certified? Snowing Outside so I drive some more: a country church Where the cemetery looks like a postcard from Somewhere very beautiful. Two days ago, Auburn Beat Alabama in something called The Iron Bowl Which sounds more like an Age, or an Epoch of Time, and I listen to a recording of the Auburn announcers Scream about Jesus and the Lord Above and Grown men shrieking like little girls and then I Drive past my favorite supper club, where two Men are installing a big picture window Despite the heavy snow, and I think, Sweet Jesus Don’t drop that window, don’t drop that window.

And they don’t, which leaves only a trip to Wal-Mart for bird-seed, colored Christmas lights, And a gift for a kid named Jesus, who I don’t even Know, but who is apparently very poor, or rather, Whose parents are very poor. And my church Has volunteered to supply him with Christmas gifts.

And of all the names that I could have chosen last Sunday at church, I choose Jesus’, because I was at Church, and already thinking of Jesus, though, we Pronounce his name differently, a totally different man, Et cetera, and because I like Mexican people, and Because Jesus only wanted Legos, and my son, Henry, also loves Legos, so I went hog-wild on Little Jesus’ behalf, and spent fifty bucks on a Star Wars themed Legos set, an X-wing fighter.

And when I arrive home, I eat Thanksgiving leftovers, Again, and think about gravy and cranberries, and How I’ve eaten gravy for five days straight.

Gravy on potatoes, gravy on stuffing, gravy on turkey, Gravy on my toast, gravy on my cranberries, on my Cheese, on my Miracle-Whip, on my green-bean casserole.

Gravy on everything. Gravy. Gravy. Gravy.

—Nickolas Butler, Fall Creek

3.14

For a Love

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I drove midnights of wildly slick and snowy highways.

Wisconsin winters amplified for me the distance love drives us beyond. Time, for the solitary, lit by falling snowflake, seems relentless in duration. Einstein knew a heartsick journey, a lonely interlude was immensely magnified—but joyous hours—

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o hopelessly swift embraces of enraptured romantics, quicken then disappear. Love lies nearly vanishing in the flickering instant. Memories,

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a heart’s pure allegiance abides in whispers shared by dashboards, highways, hometowns, midnights; longings shared by truckers, insomniacs, the road warriors of earth.

For such as I, o faintly flickering memory, whisper Wisconsin.

—Max Garland, Eau Claire

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ABOUT THE POETS

Strip Scrabble To make it fair, we’ll need to wear the same number or articles of clothing and decide whether socks count as one or two and if rings and watches count at all.

Then we’ll need to agree on time, say, to stop every five or ten minutes, to see who’s ahead or behind in running out of clothes.

But here’s the big rule: we can use only words that together we agree are sensual or seductive to us both.

So words like lips and tongue might always work, while words like zest and zygote, though arguably on topic, might never, and terms like fabric and tactile wouldn’t cut it, while a word like, say, lingerie, though French, would be fine, as I figure would silk and touch and wine.

So let’s say I get to go first: if I drew an S and and E and an X, sex is the word I’d lay down or up or across that center star. Then you might draw some seven-letter wonder like hugging or kissing or (oh, come on) undress to make an even more erotic linguistic interlocking.

But before we begin, before I’m trapped in a corner where even little words can score big, before I’m driven scantily clad out of my mind, before we come to our final turns, promise me, before I lose my pants, that you, I mean plain old y-o-u, in a pinch will count double for me as a sexy word for you.

—Dion Kempthorne, Richland Center

Nickolas Butler is an author, poet, and lead judge for the 2015 Wisconsin People & Ideas Fiction Contest. His writing has appeared in Christian Science Monitor, Kenyon Review Online, Narrative Magazine, Ploughshares, and The Progressive. Butler is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Called “impressively original” by New York Times book critic Janet Maslin, his debut novel Shotgun Lovesongs was published in 2014. Bulter lives near Eau Claire.

Max Garland is the Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2013-2014 and author of two poetry collections: The Postal Confessions (1995) and Hunger Wide as Heaven (2006).

A first generation college student, Garland left a ten-year career as a mail carrier to pursue his love of poetry. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa in 1989 and has been teaching since 1990; currently he is Professor of English at the UW–Eau Claire.

Dion Kempthorne is the first-place winner of the 2014 Wisconsin People & Ideas Poetry Contest. His poems have appeared in Mature Years, Verbatim, Verse Wisconsin, Wisconsin People & Ideas, and the Wisconsin Poets' Calendar. Badger born and bred, Kempthorne earned a PhD in English from UW– Madison, and then taught English in the UW Colleges and served as CEO/Dean at UW-Richland.

Kara Candito is a poet and lead judge for the 2015 Wisconsin People & Ideas Poetry Contest the author of Spectator (2014), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, and Taste of Cherry (2009), winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Candito, whose poetry has been published widely, is a co-curator of the Monsters of Poetry reading series, a creative writing professor at UW–Platteville, and the co-director of Membership for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

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read WI A Genealogy of the Father I. Everything I know about silence I learned the morning of September 11th trying to reach my father on his cell in lower Manhattan.

No one got through.

When he finally called

there was nothing to say except You’re still there. And all in all, I think of there as a treeless island where a secret is buried in wet sand.

If the ferry is full, I’ll swim.

If I drown, I drown.

II. “If you are Calabrian, the ocean is in your blood,” says my father, poetic for once. Then, he yanks the lawnmower cord, and everywhere headless dandelions; the wrong, sweet smell of cut grass

blowing across the yard before I exist.

III. I mean before he is my father and therefore indentured; before the 70s when the Atlantic is toxic and humpback whales wash up on Nantasket Beach

dead, fat and full of algae; before he builds Boston Whalers and returns to my mother each night with fiberglass under his fingernails; before he buys a sailboat he can’t afford, stencils “Cara Mia” across the hull and runs private cruises from Miami to Martinique, Saint Lucia, Curaçao— islands we’d visit on a cruise ship in ten years

and ask land or water excursion?— before the 80s and the drug pirates; before my father auctions the boat, sells insurance policies and drinks his vermouth neat each night watching the news cycle unfurl like a mooring line, IV. it is Boston, 1966—

is there ever an innocent year?

My parents meet at a Catholic high school named after the saint of lost objects.

Latin class, genitive case: my father is the Calabrian milkman’s son.

He scrubs toilets to pay tuition.

His collars are furiously starched.

His voice is parched, savage, smiling.

“Like the mezzogiorno,” says my mother, who had never been to Italy.

Amor fati.

Like Nietzsche, I do not want to accuse.

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V. “A section of your book will be the Father’s,” the poet augurs. Biblical, Jungian, Lacanian— the Father. Can I call him that and me you?

VI. These things are dear to the Father in 1991: a mason jar of rare sea glass on his dresser; a miniature replica of a Sicilian fishing boat on the mantle; a set of Callaway golf clubs.

When the Father returns from work in a skyscraper twenty miles away, you’re folding laundry, rolling his sweat-socks into fist-sized balls. It’s funny really, a pure joy, a joke when you aim and hurl a pair at him, (he never taught you to play catch), then miss, strike the tiny bow. The sail snaps, the ship goes down. Splendid, ridiculous, the Father forging the room like a channel.

When he was four his uncle threw him off the end of the pier at high tide and called it learning to swim.

The Father slaps your stunned cheek, not hard, but the amplified crack, like a wave striking the side of a ship; not hard, but you’re triumphant now, contract-drunk, both of you awash in the tidal-pull of performance.

So you say it, the worst insult in his language, words reserved for men and their enemies:

I hope you outlive your children.

Neither of you ever mention this.

Not the next day when a nor’easter shreds the coast with twenty-five foot waves, sucks whole houses and hotels into the sea from Marshfield, to North Beach, to Brant Point.

Because it is October and no longer hurricane season,

the storm is never named.

VII. When I am eight and want more than anything in the world an absurd green raft in the shape of a crocodile, my father looks me in the eye right in the aisle of Caldor

and asks, “How does it feel to want?”

read WI VIII. How does it feel? Here, the male poet finds a sheltered inlet, drops anchor and muses—for years, he drifted, distant, drunk, dear/detested dad; hardy, leaky, forever bobbing out past channel, while I, on shore with brother and fishing rod; my not yet beard and public library card, waited. For years he drifted,

until one day dad ran aground— sober, dead, in diapers.

Now, I’m older. We’ve become one falling body, dad and I, by which I mean we love and hate our wives. In dreams, we go off

to sea (as metaphor) together,

and rest on our weary oars.

IX. “His uncle helped him build it, then he died,” says my nonna the fatalist when I find my father’s pine box derby car in the basement.

Is this sequence causal? Arbitrary? Predetermined?

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things. Resolution

of shadow and noon.

X. The same dream—I’m reading or watching TV in a hotel bed when a man I’ve slept with, am sleeping with, crawls in beside me, lowers himself delicately, as if the bed were perched on a cliff and beneath it open water. We don’t speak. The weight settles, the parts settle—his bare skin against my stomach.

We don’t speak when he peels back the blankets, shows me the cuts covering his arms, his shoulders, his neck. They make him look like a crownless Spanish Inquisition Christ, and looking is like swimming out so far that the shore could be anywhere— backward, forward, another horizon.

The cuts are symmetrical, intentional.

This is a clean operation. He turns to me and says very quietly:

“Look how I’ve suffered for you.”

ABOUT THEse POEmS

"December Poem, 2013" was penned in the spirit of the holiday season by Wisconsin poet and writer Nickolas Butler, who also happens to be the lead judge for the 2015 Wisconsin People & Ideas Fiction Contest. Composed for the Wisconsin Academy's annual "Poetry and Pi" celebration held on March 14th, Max Garland's "For a Love" draws inspiration from both the theme and numerals of pi, the latter of which he incorporates to 100 decimal places (go ahead, count them!), beginning with a title that uses 3.14. Dion Kempthorne's poem, "Strip Scrabble" was omitted by mistake from last issue and run in this one with the poet's suggestion that it might provide readers with an idea as to what to do on a cold, winter night. Kara Candito, our lead judge for the 2015 Wisconsin People & Ideas Poetry Contest, graciously allowed us to reprint her poem "A Genealogy of the Father," which first appeared in Spectator (University of Utah Press, 2014), a recent collection and winner of the 2013 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize.

I'm pleased to feature works by these four incredible Wisconsin poets in this issue. Enjoy!

—Jason A. Smith

—Kara Candito, Madison

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When you step into the Reader’s Loft, if you’re lucky, the first things that catch your eye are the cats. Located in Bellevue, Wisconsin, just a few minutes south of downtown Green Bay, this cozy bookstore has two cats, Sophie and Greta.

Sophie can often be found atop the checkout counter, her blond coat blending in with the soft light of a glass shaded lamp. Greta likes to walk the aisles, seeking head-pats from browsers.

“Cats have been associated with bookstores … ever since books were bound using wheat paste, which attracts mice,” says Reader’s Loft out-of-print specialist Craig Jones. “That’s over 500 years,” he notes.

Virginia Kress, owner of the Reader’s Loft, founded her shop 21 years ago in a 1,200 square foot space in DePere (the first cats were Stan and Ollie). In 2005, Kress decided to relocate and expand the Reader’s Loft to its current home in London Alley, a quaint retail community in nearby Bellevue. Today the store boasts 3,300 square feet of space, high ceilings, and new and used books as well as a refined selection of greeting cards and other gift items.

Although she doesn’t have a literary background (she was trained in corporate bookkeeping), Kress has a love of books and surrounds herself with an educated and eclectic staff.

“No one can know everything about books, but together this staff can help customers with most anything book related,” she says.

Jones began his association with the Reader’s Loft about twenty years ago as a customer. Hunting down hard-to-find orders is a specialty of the store, which engenders repeat business, and Jones excels in ferreting out titles for patrons through oodles of Internet research. Other staff members include Amy Mazzariello, Kathy Carley, and Matthew Bauman.

The store incorporates shelving from the old DePere Public Library and antiques from around Green Bay. Two salmon-colored leather armchairs and a variety of couches and carved chairs make a cozy in-store reading area that also serves as a meeting place for book clubs, readings, and author programs. Among the various Wisconsin writers the

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Photo credit: Nancy Rafal

Local Bookshop Spotlight { The Reader's Loft – Bellevue }

The Reader's Loft occupies the largest of four retail spaces in London Alley, which is owned by the bookshop's owner/operator Virginia Kress. Owning her own space—as well as the adjacent retail spaces— allowed Kress to weather the recent economic downturn.

Reader’s Loft have hosted are poet and Wisconsin Public Radio journalist Jean Feraca and Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs.

Kress says the welcome mat is always out for community groups who would like to use the space to host events. A monthly poetry reading organized by Tori Grant Wellhouse, regional vice-president of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, typically features two or three poets and an open mic immediately afterward. Kress sends out a newsletter “irregularly but definitely before holidays” to keep loyal fans of the Reader’s Loft up to date with events and with staff picks for new and upcoming books.

Being a locally owned, independent bookstore, the Reader’s Loft has faced a lot of competition from online retailers and big box stores. But the level of service found there has set them apart. “We all know and love books. And we work together in assisting customers,” Kress says of her coworkers. The store and its surroundings are inviting, an oasis from everyday hustle and bustle. And of course Sophie and Greta greet visitors and keep watchful eyes out for hungry mice.

For more information, visit readersloft.com.

—Nancy Rafal

Be informed.

Be inspired. wpr.org Wisconsin and the World.

Nonprofit Org. U.S. Postage Paid Madison, WI Permit No. 1564

1922 university avenue | madison WI 53726 Price

$5

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WISCONSIN ACADEMY TALKS wisconsin academy of sciences, arts & letters

Envisioning Responses to Climate Change Tuesday, February 3, 7–8:30 pm Madison Museum of Contemporary Art Lecture Hall, 227 State Street, Madison

This free Academy Talk will explore how tools like scenario-building, storytelling, and the arts can help us better envision our role in prospective responses to climate change. Panelists include author and artist Mrill Ingram, a Visiting Scholar in the UW–Madison Geography Department, and UW–Madison agronomist Chris Kucharik and limnologist Steven Carpenter, both of whom currently lead an NSF-funded investigation that uses scenario-building to illustrate how life in Wisconsin will be different in the future depending on how we respond to climate change. Ingram will discuss how the arts and storytelling can simplify complex concepts like climate change and help us see responses in a new light. Kucharik and Carpenter will discuss how scenario-building combines science with graphic arts and storytelling to craft potential futures for life in Wisconsin.

JAMES WATROUS GALLERY wisconsin academy of sciences, arts & letters

Brandon Gaudynski: Object Syntax Brandon Norsted: The Purchase of Deep Water Side-by-side solo exhibitions On view January 13–March 1 Opening reception Friday, January 16, 5:30– 7:30 pm, with artists’ talks at 6:30 pm

Join us for side-by-side solo exhibitions from Thomas Gaudynski and Brandon Norsted. Gaudynski’s drawings riff off the still-life tradition, combining studies of furniture and knick-knacks from his home into “object salads” that offer hints of autobiography and tantalizing references to literature and the artist’s process. Norsted takes architectural woodwork and domestic objects as the raw material for his sculpture and installations, shifting them from their mundane status as homeowner’s projects and problems into strange new realms of beauty and meaning.

Left: Thomas Gaudynski, Untitled, March 10, 2014 (detail). Ink and gouache on paper, 22 x 30 in.

Right: Brandon Norsted, T.I.N. Project, 2014 (detail). Coal, tobacco, Mercedes parts, ultramarine pigment, This exhibition and all related events are free and open to the public. furniture blanket. Dimensions variable.

Visit www.wisconsinacademy.org for more details