Wisconsin People & Ideas – Fall 2015

wisc

people & ideas

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

Fomenting a Food Revolution Luke Zahm serves up a farm-to-table philosophy at Driftless CafĂŠ

The Historic Apples of Badger Ammo How the Badger Apple Corps is restoring the Sauk Prairie one tree at a time

75 Years of the Arts in Wisconsin $5.00 Vol. 61, No. 4

Fall 2015

The Wisconsin Regional Arts Program looks back—and forward

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

Contents

fall 2015 FEATURES 4 FROM THE Director Gathering the Clans

6 Upfront 6 Olbrich Botanical Gardens GLEAM exhibition fuses light and sculpture 8 Wisconsin expertise key to recent anthropological discovery 9 Three Wisconsin poets win NEA Creative Writing Fellowships 10 FEllows Forum administrative offices/steenbock gallery 1922 university ave. | madison, WI 53726 tel. 608-263-1692 www.wisconsinacademy.org

The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters produces programs and publications that explore, explain, and sustain Wisconsin thought and culture. Our signature publication is Wisconsin People & Ideas, the quarterly magazine of Wisconsin thought and culture; programs include the James Watrous Gallery in Overture Center for the Arts, which showcases contemporary art from Wisconsin; Academy Talks, a series of public lectures and discussion forums; Wisconsin Initiatives, exploring major sustainability issues and solutions; and a Fellows Program, which recognizes accomplished individuals with a lifelong commitment to intellectual discourse and public service. The Wisconsin Academy also supports the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission and many other endeavors that elevate Wisconsin thought and culture.

Zoologist and Academy Fellow Allen M. Young reveals the delicate evolutionary dance between tropical butterflies and plants—and what it means for the future health of both people and planet.

16 Wisconsin Table In our new feature on Wisconsin food culture, Annaleigh Wetzel introduces us to Chef Luke Zahm of the Driftless Café in Viroqua. Photos by Dan Howard.

20 ESSAY Conservation biologist Curt Meine shares the secret lives of the apples of the Badger Army Ammunitions Plant. Photos by Jill Metcoff.

28 initiatives Report Wisconsin Academy Initiatives program director Meredith Keller provides some tips on how to talk to your uncle (or anyone) about climate change.

Wisconsin People & Ideas (ISSN 1558-9633) is the quarterly magazine of the nonprofit Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. Academy members receive this magazine free of charge.

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/join for information on how to become a member of the Wisconsin Academy.

Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Copyright © 2015 by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. All rights reserved. Postage is paid at Madison, Wisconsin. Postmaster: Send address changes to mailing address above.

Cover photo: Luke Zahm of the Drifltess Café, 2015. Photograph by Dan Howard

Photo credit: Curt Meine

Wisconsin People & Ideas Jason A. Smith, editor Jean Lang, copy editor Jody Clowes, arts editor Jacob Turner, editorial assistant CX Dillhunt, cold reader Designed by Huston Design, Madison

A team of apple enthusiasts known as the Badger Apple Corps map and label heirloom apple trees on the former Badger Army Ammunition Plant grounds. Read about their work to revive the precious remnants of the Sauk Prairie and save these apple trees on page 20.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

1

C  ontents

fall 2015 FEATURES 32 PROFILE

Writer Miriam Hall reflects on the teachings of beloved modern dance

instructor Ellen Moore and the community that she helped found.

38 GALLERIA

Rural arts advocate Helen Klebesadel shows the power of the palette

through 75 years of the Wisconsin Regional Art Program.

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

47 Read Wisconsin

Five must-see events at the 2015 Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison

Wisconsin Academy Staff Jane Elder • Executive Director Rachel Bruya • Exhibitions Coordinator, James Watrous Gallery Zachary Carlson • Web Editor Jody Clowes • Director, James Watrous Gallery Aaron Fai • Project Coordinator 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

48 FIctiON

“Duck, Duck, Goose,” by Erica Kanesaka Kalnay, the second-place

prize short story from our 2015 Fiction Contest.

51 Book Reviews 51 Shelby Anderson reviews The Man Who Painted the Universe:

The Story of a Planetarium in the Heart of the North Woods, by Ron Legro and Avi Lank 53 Elizabeth Wyckoff reviews The Jesus Cow: A Novel by Michael Perry

51 New & Recent RELEASES

A list of new and recent books published by Wisconsin authors.

Officers of the Board Linda Ware • President Tim Size • President-elect Millard Susman • Immediate-past President Diane Nienow • Treasurer James W. Perry • Secretary Richard Burgess • Vice President of Sciences Marianne Lubar • Vice President of Arts Cathy Cofell-Mutschler • Vice President of Letters

Image credit: Wisconsin Regional Art Program

52 Poetry

Poems from our 2015 Poetry Contest honorable mention poets.

Two Oaks, a watercolor painting by Richland Center artist Gordon Glass, received the 2015 State Chinese Fine Art Association Award. See more award-winning works by emerging Wisconsin artists in our essay on the 75th Anniversary of the Wisconsin Regional Art Program on page 38.

2

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Statewide Board of Directors Les Alldritt, Washburn John Ashley, Sauk City Mark Bradley, Wausau Patricia Brady, Madison Malcolm Brett, Oregon Jane Elder, Madison Roberta Filicky-Peneski, Sheboygan Joseph Heim, La Crosse Jack Kussmaul, Woodman Tom Luljak, Milwaukee Bernie L. Patterson, Stevens Point Marty Wood, Eau Claire Officers of the Academy Foundation Foundation Founder: Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) Jack Kussmaul • Foundation President Andrew Richards • Foundation Vice President Diane Nienow • Foundation Treasurer David J. Ward • Foundation Secretary Foundation Directors Jane Elder Terry Haller Millard Susman Linda Ware

Contents 

NEWS for

MEMBERS 2015 Member Meeting Register today to join us for The Promise of the Wisconsin Idea (November 6 & 7), a weekend of thoughtful discussion, good company, and fun! Turn to page 5 for more information, or visit wisconsinacademy. org/2015membermeeting.

Academy Connections This September we delivered our first edition of Academy Connections, our quarterly e-update for members that provides a peek inside the workings of your Academy. If you did not receive your issue or would like to receive your copy by mail, please e-mail members@wisconsinacademy.org or call 608-263-1692.

2015 Open House Mark your calendars for the evening of Wednesday, December 9, for our annual open house/holiday party. More information will be available on our website in the coming months.

Fall Fund Drive Each year, between October and December, the Wisconsin Academy raises the majority of the funds needed to provide programming throughout the year. Membership dues only cover 4% of our annual need. Please consider a tax-deductible donation to support the programs and operations of the Wisconsin Academy. Together we can make Wisconsin better by expanding access to knowledge and powerful ideas. Visit wisconsinacademy.org/ donate to make your online gift today.

Stay Connected In between issues of Wisconsin People & Ideas visit wisconsinacademy.org for information about our events, happenings, and latest blog posts. If you have questions about your membership or would like to leave a comment, call 608-263-1692 or e-mail members@ wisconsinacademy.org. We’d love to hear from you.

C

o

n

t

r

i

b

u

t

o

r

s

Miriam Hall is a Madison-based photographer, writer, and teacher of contemplative arts. This year Hall co-authored Looking and Seeing: An Introduction to Contemplative Photography. She will be presenting at the Wisconsin Book Festival in October, as a contributor to the collection of essays called Love, Always: Partners of Trans People on Intimacy, Challenge and Resilience (2014). You can find her online at herspiral.com.

Dan Howard is a photographer and graphic designer from the United Kingdom. He now resides in Viroqua with his wife, Sarah, and their son.

When Howard isn’t out shooting he’s at home renovating one of his many vintage cameras. A selection of Howard’s work can be found at danhowardphotography.com Meredith Keller joined the Wisconsin Academy as Initiatives Program director in fall of 2014 after years of leading the Minnesota Waters Program at Conservation Minnesota and working with citizens’ groups and state agencies to control the spread of aquatic invasive species.

Before attending UW–Madison for Environmental Studies, History, and Political Science, Keller dedicated two years to the Reading Corps Program in Minnesota and worked on a Senatorial race in 2008.

Helen Klebesadel has taught courses and workshops on creativity, studio art, and the contemporary women’s art movement for two decades. She is currently director of the Women’s Studies Consortium in the UW–Madison Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

Since 2013 Klebesadel has also been the director of the Wisconsin Regional Art Program. Her artworks can be seen at klebesadel.com.

Curt Meine is a conservation biologist and writer based in Sauk County.

He serves as Senior Fellow with the Aldo Leopold Foundation and International Crane Foundation, and as Adjunct Associate Professor at UW–Madison. Meine served as on-screen guide in the Emmy Awardwinning documentary film Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time (2011) and edited the Library of America’s definitive collection, Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac and Other Essays on Ecology and Conservation (2013). He is a founder and member of the Sauk Prairie Conservation Alliance in Sauk County.

Jill Metcoff focuses her lens on places where history and natural habitats intersect, including (since 1998) Badger Army Ammunition Plant. Work from the Badger series was featured in a collaborative exhibit titled Inside the Fence. Metcoff is the author of Along the Wisconsin Riverway (1997), a black and white study of five different landscape types, and Firelines, a forthcoming collection of images about fire and prescribed burning.

Annaleigh Wetzel is a student in the J-School at UW–Madison. This fall, she embarks on her final year of school before entering the “real world.” After graduation Wetzel plans to venture outside of Madison to pursue a career in food writing. Until then, she’s spending as much time as possible hanging out at Memorial Union Terrace, walking Willy Street, and lounging on the Capitol lawn.

Allen M. Young is Curator Emeritus of Zoology at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Young is one of the founding board members of the Tirimbina Rainforest Center in northeastern Costa Rica. His research concerns the natural history and ecology of butterflies, cicadas, orchid bees, and the pollination ecology of the cacao tree, the latter resulting in his book, The Chocolate Tree (2007). He is the author of several books, including Small Creatures and Ordinary Places: Essays on Nature (2000), and the author or co-author of more than 300 scientific papers and popular articles.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

3

F R O M T H E D i re c tor

Gathering the Clans Jane Elder wisconsin academy Executive director When the winds of change are in the air, it’s a good idea to gather one’s extended circle—especially the wisdom-keepers and those who understand our history and how it shapes these times and the future. By taking the time to come together, we can figure out what all this change means, how we might want to respond, and how we can foster the resilience and longevity of our extended Wisconsin family.

Change has certainly been in the air in Wisconsin in the context of how our state values higher education, science, environmental stewardship, and creative culture. So, we’re calling the Academy clan together this fall on November 6th and 7th for our first member meeting in more than fifteen years.

Our clan—the thousand-plus group of Academy members— is comprised of truly remarkable people: scholars, scientists, academic leaders, librarians, gardeners, inventors, entrepreneurs, artists of many kinds, farmers, policymakers, volunteers, business and civic leaders, attorneys, health professionals, poets, writers, and passionate readers. Our clan is diverse in vocation yet united by an enthusiasm for ideas and a love of Wisconsin. This is a good combination for creative problem solving, and makes for interesting people to be around.

We hope to renew connections and forge new ones among those who believe that the Academy’s historic pledge to “gather, share, and act upon knowledge in sciences, arts, and letters for the betterment of the people of Wisconsin” is needed today more than ever. We seek your collective wisdom as people who care about Wisconsin and the Academy. We hope to gather it through your reflections on provocative presentations, through questions and discussions, and even through your poetry and art.

Gatherings like our member meeting are also about renewing old friendships and forging new ones, having fun together, and celebrating heritage. Perhaps most importantly, they are also about the promise of the future. So we invite you to join us this November as we explore the topic: The Promise of the Wisconsin Idea. At its essence, the Wisconsin Idea is about the power of knowledge—and access to it—to improve lives, livelihoods and our society. It implies the old notion of a rising tide raising all boats.

While the roots of the Wisconsin Idea were formed in progressive and egalitarian values, education is the essential element that makes it grow. But assumptions about education in Wisconsin are in flux, across the full spectrum from early learning to post-graduate research. Budgets from K–12 to the university system are more constrained than I remember at any other time in my 35 years of living in Wisconsin, while the cost of college education has soared beyond reach for some—and 4

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

beyond imagination for many. The role of scientific knowledge in policy-making has shifted, too, with sound data often ignored by those with singular agendas.

Because of our state’s waning commitment to excellence in education and a diminished incorporation of scientific information in policy decisions, many teachers, academic researchers, and young people are leaving Wisconsin for perceived greener pastures. Does the promise of the Wisconsin Idea still hold today? If it is at risk, what can we do to strengthen and renew its promise? And what can those of us who are concerned about the potential loss of its promise do? These will be among the topics we’ll explore in our time together.

“Base camp” for our member meeting will be the Pyle Center on the UW–Madison campus, where Friday evening will include dinner and a panel discussion about the Wisconsin Idea by three Academy Fellows. Saturday morning local field trips will give you a chance to explore science, arts, and letters close up with special lab tours, gallery talks, and museum tours on the UW campus tailored just for our members. On Saturday afternoon, we’ll host round table discussions about the Wisconsin Idea and your hopes and concerns about Wisconsin, and we’ll also offer three workshops—one on writing poetry, another on creating art, and a third discussing sustainability in Wisconsin through the lens of our Wisconsin Initiatives on Climate & Energy and Waters of Wisconsin. Before we conclude, we’ll share the best ideas emerging from our time together in a wrap-up plenary session. We’ll also host some optional Saturday evening events for those who want to keep the fun going after our formal sessions conclude.

We’re excited about the opportunity to gather our clan. We can’t promise you a colorful mix of tartans or a caber toss, but we expect there will be the opportunity for mental workouts when it comes to elevating the role of arts in Wisconsin, or the role of science in policy making, as well as lots of enjoyable discussion with people who are enthusiastic about learning, ideas, and a better Wisconsin.

So, bundle up and plan to spend part of a brisk November weekend with the warm company of your Academy clan.

We hope it will be the beginning of a new tradition, and look forward to future gatherings in other communities around Wisconsin.

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

Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

2015 Member Meeting

Join us for a gathering of friendship, learning, and exploration of The Promise of the Wisconsin Idea

November 6 & 7 on the University of Wisconsin–Madison Campus

Photos by Megan Monday Photography

BE A PART OF ACADEMY HISTORY The 2015 Member Meeting revivifies a tradition at the Wisconsin Academy in which we meet to share new ideas while offering members a chance to connect, have fun, and learn more about the Academy’s mission and vision. Titled The Promise of the Wisconsin Idea, our meeting will be spread across two days and multiple locations in and around the UW–Madison campus:

Opening Reception & Dinner We come together for a Friday evening opening reception and dinner with cocktails and insightful presentations by Wisconsin Academy Fellows representing the sciences, arts, and letters (see right).

Local Field Trips Participants can choose from a selection of Saturday morning field trips to local areas of interest, hosted by Wisconsin Academy staff and friends of the Academy.

Discussion Groups & Fun Workshops Saturday lunch features a brief overview of the Wisconsin Academy today, a group discussion, and topical workshops with a focus on the Wisconsin Idea.

Art & Theatre Options Join us Saturday early evening for the opening reception for the Rina Yoon/Sandra Byers exhibition at our James Watrous Gallery in Overture Center for the Arts and the Forward Theater production of Silent Sky.

R. Alta Charo

Kathy Kelsey Foley

John Gurda

REGISTER TODAY Registration is now open for current and new Academy members. Weekend registration fees begin at $100 per person.

Register online to secure your space at wisconsinacademy.org/2015membermeeting or call 608-263-1692 x14 for more information.

Photo credits (l to r): Photo by Jeff Miller, UW-Madison, University Communications/Megan Monday Photography/JohnGurda.com

Friday reception features presentations by—and discussion with—three Academy Fellows

Questions about registration or local accommodations?

Contact Aaron Fai at afai@wisconsinacademy.org or call 608-263-1692 x14.

About the Wisconsin Academy The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters is a membership organization dedicated to serving the people of Wisconsin since 1870. Through the generous support of our members and donors, we produce programs and publications that explore, explain, and sustain Wisconsin thought and culture.

For more information or to become a member visit wisconsinacademy.org.

UPFRONT

In a Botanical Light Illuminating Sculpture with GLEAM

This fall, regular visitors to Madison’s Olbrich Botanical Gardens may find themselves in an unfamiliar place. As the sky trades sun for moon, strange shapes glow among the sixteen acres of carefully tended landscapes.

On the path near the entrance, a massive and luminous dragonfly pulses with alternating hues: blue and green, red and gold. A light sculpture made from glass and metal, Alighting was created by Madison artists Laura Richards and Grant Turnbull and lighting designer Patrick Devereux to illustrate the luminous beauty of native dragonflies.

Alighting is part of a collaborative sculpture installation at Olbrich Botanical Gardens called GLEAM, Art in a New Light that explores the intersection of light, sculpture, and nature.

Another of the six “GLEAM teams” of artists and lighting designers populating the gardens is comprised of University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point sculpture professors Kristin M. Thielking and Keven Brunett and Stoughton-based lighting designers Matt Hanna and Kevin Smits. Their Voices installation is a series of amber-colored cast-glass tongues along a semicircular path near Olbrich’s Golden Thai Pavillion. Mounted on long metal rods, the tongues glow from within, bringing attention to sandblasted words—flabbergasted, thing-a-ma-bob, diddly squat—and their definitions from the Dictionary of American Regional English.

According to Thielking and Brunett the Voices installation “celebrates the unifying power of language across diverse cultures and ethnicities.”

Milwaukee artists Dianne Soffa and Tom Kovacich collected almost two hundred rearview mirrors and perched them on stakes along Olbrich’s Prairie Dropseed Meadow for Rearview Stream. Blue Mounds-based lighting designer Craig Kittleson

worked with Soffa and Kovacich to create a ripple effect of light through the mirrors, not unlike moonlight reflecting upon a stream.

GLEAM artistic director David Wells says the installation “provides an opportunity for the public to see exciting art works by local and regional artists, and ... engage[s] the imagination by seeing things through the magic of illumination.” ”The project is all about artists and designers growing together,” says Joel Reinders, GLEAM’s lead lighting designer.

“We wanted to have the lighting designers really collaborate with the sculptors to come up with [interesting] ways to light these things internally.”

Through GLEAM, sculptural artists and lighting designers benefit both from their exchange of expertise as well as the opportunity to work in a unique venue. Olbrich, in turn, finds a creative partner to complement the natural beauty of the space.

“We were really looking for an event that was going to highlight the gardens in the fall,” says Olbrich spokesperson Katy Plantenberg, noting that “this is one of the most beautiful times in the gardens.”

While the illuminated sculptures offer various points of interest throughout the garden, the entire exhibition literally sheds light on a landmark Madison attraction, creating a fresh visual experience for new and returning visitors alike. When pink lights bounce off familiar trees and blue dots stack against visiting bodies as if they intend to stay, the landscape becomes surreal, evoking the feeling of discovering something new and exciting in a once-familiar place.

To learn more about GLEAM artists and installations, visit olbrich.org/GLEAM.cfm.

—Jacob Turner

Opposite Page (clockwise from top): Each of the 100 glowing tongues of Voices carries a unique colloquial term. A collection of bright, wiremounted oranges and reds, Murmuration stands in stark contrast to the dark greens of the gardens, evoking the image of starlings swarming in the wind. Alighting, the first installation to greet visitors, is a scientifically-accurate sculpture that shifts colors to reflect the species and gender of native dragonflies.

6

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

UPFRONT

All photos by Kai Stanecki

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

7

Wisconsin Expertise Key to Recent Anthropological Discovery Humans have descended from an evolutionary branch that includes divergent species such as Australopithecus africanus, which lived around 3 million years ago, and Homo erectus, which lived around 1.5 million years ago. But the discovery of Homo naledi, a new species named by an international team of anthropologists, could lead to a greater understanding of our ancestral family tree.

In October 2013 a group of recreational cavers were exploring a valley near Johannesburg, South Africa, known as the Cradle of Humankind for the many ancient human fossils found there. While traversing the Rising Star cave system, the group of cavers noticed a skull at the bottom of a chamber one hundred feet down, accessible only through a crack about eight inches wide. Maneuvering into the chamber, the cavers realized the chamber floor was littered with bones.

They took video and photos, and brought the evidence to paleoanthro-

8

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

pologist Lee Berger, a professor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Berger was elated by the find, and called his friend and colleague John Hawks to share the good news. An expert on paleoanthropology and the VilasBorghesi Distinguished Achievement Professor of Anthropology at UW— Madison, Hawks joined Berger in quickly assembling a team of experts, including archaeologists that could fit into the narrow cave opening.

UW–Madison anthropology graduate student Alia Gurtov was one of six diminutive paleoanthropologists selected by Berger for the excavation crew. Under the guidance of Berger and Hawks, Gurtov and five colleagues spent a month collecting 1,500 fossils— teeth, bones, and bone fragments—from at least fifteen individuals. “It was like pick-up sticks,” says Gurtov.

As the excavation crew brought up more and more bones, Berger and Hawks knew this was something special. “We

I D E A S

have a new species of Homo, with all of its interesting characteristics,” says Hawks, adding that this is “the biggest discovery in Africa for hominins.”

Berger named this ancient hominin Homo naledi after the word for star in the local Sesotho language. Yet, because discovery site does not contain any animal remains or plant matter, Berger and Hawks do not know when Homo naledi lived. “Knowing where and when [our] ancestors lived informs us about what we share, what makes us human,” says Hawks.

Caroline VanSickle, a UW–Madison postdoctoral fellow in anthropological biology, is one of thirty scientists comparing the fossils to other early human samples under Hawks’ supervision. From the data gathered so far, scientists believe Homo naledi was likely a great long-distance walker, and given its powerful hands and a broad thumb, very good at climbing.

“They walked upright,” says Hawks.

“They [were] very thin, very skinny

Photo credit: Jeff Miller/UW–Madison

UPFRONT

Image credit: John Gurche / Mark Thiessen / National Geographic

UPFRONT

Opposite Page (left to right): doctoral candidate Alia Gurtov, professor John Hawks, and postdoctoral fellow Caroline VanSickle in the Biological Anthropology Lab at UW– Madison with casts of fossil specimens from hominins who lived 1 to 2 million years ago in Africa and West Asia. The three paleoanthropologists are members of the Rising Star Expedition that discovered Homo naledi, a new species of hominid that existed in South Africa hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago.

Above: A reconstruction of Homo naledi’s head by paleoartist John Gurche, who spent some 700 hours recreating the head from bone scans.

looking,”—traits we wouldn’t typically envision when we think of early human ancestors.

As the team continues to study and learn from the discovery, they hope to find out where Homo naledi fits in within the early human family tree, and explore the cultural implications that a burial site may have on our understanding of human evolution.

According to Hawks, “We think it is the first instance of deliberate and ritualized interment. The bodies were not intentionally covered and we’re not talking about a religious ceremony, but something that was repeated and repeated in the same place. They clearly learned to do this and did it as a group over time.”

For up-to-date information and to learn how UW–Madison researchers are contributing to this incredible discovery, visit news.wisc.edu/naledi.

—Elysse Lindell

Three Wisconsin Poets Win Prestigious NEA Fellowships For the first time in the history of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowships program, three Wisconsin poets have received Creative Writing Fellowships in one year: Brittany Cavallaro, Susan Firer, and Melissa Range.

Creative Writing Fellowships represent the National Endowment for the Arts’ most direct investment in American creativity by supporting the production of new work and allowing writers the time and means to write.

The $25,000 fellowship award enables recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.

While Milwaukee poet Brittany Cavallaro writes in other genres, she says none are “as capacious as poetry—a poem can play with history, time, and voice, link together dissimilar subjects, travel the world.” Cavallaro enjoys hunting through archives and reading documents, and her Creative Writing Fellowship helped her build the historical foundation for a forthcoming manuscript set in Victorian Britain called Unhistorical. “I don’t think anything can beat doing on-the-ground research to help make your poems feel alive. ... I’d planned to do most of my work in the library. But this fellowship from the NEA has allowed me to plan trips to go and perform that research in person. It’s a rare gift for a poet, and one for which I’m so incredibly grateful,” says Cavallaro Whitefish Bay poet (and former Milwaukee Poet Laureate) Susan Firer notes how the prize arrived at a dark time in her life. “Two years before being awarded the NEA fellowship, I had lost my best reader, friend, companion, and husband, James Hazard. I was working alone and my time was spread pretty thin in many ways that are not particularly helpful to poetry,” says Firer. “The NEA gave me a great gift of sustained time to focus on my book manuscript The Transit of Venus, from which I included many poems in my application ... and I’ve tried to give back [this gift] by doing readings and workshops in the community.”

Appleton poet Melissa Range was at the start of a historical collection about the Abolitionist Movement in the U.S. when she received the fellowship, which provided her with the needed incentive to expand her area of study. Her research into the Quaker editor of an abolitionist newspaper, a man named Elihu Embree, brought her to the decision to write about the movement as a whole. “Being part of the antislavery cause involved a lot of sacrifice and courage, particularly before the movement gained steam,” she says. “I don’t think the stories of these brave and forward-thinking folks should be forgotten, which is part of why I want to write this book.”

Firer perhaps best sums up the gratitude a writer or poet feels for recognition of this kind. “Lorine Niedecker, the great Wisconsin poet, once wrote, ‘Nobody, nothing / ever gave me / greater thing / than time.’ The NEA gave me a great gift of sustained time to focus on my book. ... I’m thankful to the NEA for their generous support of my work and the work of so many other artists.”

—Jason A. Smith

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

9

f e ll o w s f o r u m

10

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

f e ll o w s f o r u m

Butterflies and Plants Designers of Tropical Rain Forest Pharmacology

By Allen M. Young Wisconsin Academy Fellow since 2002

La Tirimbina, Sarapiqui, Costa Rica—As I walk along a narrow path, slicing through the tangle of vines bordering the stately tropical rainforest here, shafts of sunlight reflect from rain-slick leaves and highlight the aerial dances of butterflies everywhere I turn. At first, I notice the showiest species—medium-sized or large butterflies with wings adorned in vibrant colors, a striking contrast to the backdrop of lush verdancy. But as I stand quietly in the morning sun that streaks down through the forest canopy, I begin to notice the scores of smaller-sized butterflies darting amongst the webwork of vines and about my feet. With my insect net I am able to catch a few of them—some species in subdued earth tones of gray and brown are small, others large and spectacular in color.

What I discover along this short stretch of path is but a preview of the much bigger, more complex story of insect and plant relationships in this biologically rich habitat. The rainforests of Central and South America host the world’s richest faunas of butterflies, moths, and other plant-feeding insects.

These forests teem with thousands of species of butterflies packaged in many different sizes, shapes, and colors—all part of the unique assemblage of interdependent life-forms that have been molded by longstanding evolutionary forces.

Butterflies here include the giant iridescent blue morphoes; the small, brownish wood satyrs and skippers; and the amply represented swallowtails, nymphalids, danaids, and others—all adding splashes of vibrant color to a canvas of green vegetation. This diversity among butterflies is no accident, but rather Left: Among the largest butterflies in the world, the blue morpho is severely threatened by deforestation of tropical forests and habitat fragmentation. Yet these and other tropical butterflies may hold the key to discovering pharmaceuticals that will benefit humankind.

the result of long, uninterrupted periods of evolutionary innovation and adaptation.

The rich cornucopia of wing colors, patterns, and habits of these butterflies is part of the tropical rainforest’s attraction to eco-tourists and natural history buffs. But beneath the beauty is a compelling story about how butterflies, moths, and the plants they eat have coevolved in important ways that not only maintain the balance of this incredible ecosystem but also create unique substances that can benefit humankind.

Before they become butterflies or moths, leaf-munching caterpillars take part in one of nature’s most intensive balancing acts—feeding on food plants with which they have coevolved. Yet these food plants for the caterpillars contain

ABOUT THIS PROGRAM

WIsconsin ACADEMY FELLOWS Allen M. Young is a Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy. Since 1982, the Wisconsin Academy has honored the best and brightest of Wisconsin. The Fellows award acknowledges a high level of accomplishment as well as a lifelong commitment to intellectual discourse and public service. The Fellows Forum section of the magazine provides a forum for our Fellows to share ideas and opinions about their work and lives. You can meet all of the Wisconsin Academy Fellows and learn about the Fellows program by visiting wisconsinacademy.org/fellows.

Photo credit: Tzooka/istockphoto.com W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

11

Photo credit: Far Out Flora/Flickr.com. Licensed by CC 2.0.

Photo credit: John Flannery/Flickr.com. Licensed by CC 2.0.

f e ll o w s f o r u m

Pipevine swallowtail—Battus philenor—larvae (left) feed on the poisonous leaves of Dutchman’s pipe, absorbing and carrying into adult butterfly stage (right) toxic compounds called aristolochic acids. These compounds protect butterfly larvae, adults, and even eggs from predators. Used for centuries as a remedy for various illnesses and diseases, aristolochic acids show promise for pharmacological development.

substances that can poison other insects in search of a meal.

Discoveries of these naturally occurring, biologically active substances have led scientists to re-think their understanding and treatment of various human diseases, and have heightened our awareness of the crucial, unique role of tropical rainforests in our lives.

Nowhere else on Earth is this fine-tuned ecological struggle between plants and their “grazers” more intense, largely because the proliferation of plant and insect life is so great and diversified. Covering less than 2% of the total surface area of our planet, the world’s rainforests are home to 50% of Earth’s plants and animals. A typical four-square-mile patch of rainforest contains as many as 1,500 flowering plants, 750 species of trees, 400 species of birds, and 150 species of butterflies.

Insects comprise 95% of all terrestrial animal life, and tropical rainforests are the perfect habitat for them; dense and diverse plant life captures and mobilizes vast amounts of the sun’s radiant energy, which, through photosynthesis, is transformed into living plant tissues rich in nutrients for hungry insects.

Through their leaves, tropical plants synthesize their primary nutritive substances required for growth and making flowers, fruits and the seeds they contain. Caterpillars exert a tremendous “grazing pressure” on these leaves, a potent force that, without the intervention of specific biological “smokescreens” in plants, would decimate the rainforest. These smokescreens have been developed over a long period of evolutionary time. Each of the many thousands of tropical plant

12

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

species produces its own unique array of physical barriers (such as coarse hairs or thick leaf cuticles) as well as noxious chemical defenses to thwart the onslaught of plant-feeding insects. Called secondary plant substances, these noxious chemicals serve no nutritive role in the plant’s survival. Rather, they are specifically developed to mediate the tug-of-war between plant and animal that would otherwise end with the plant losing most if not all the nutrient-rich tissues required for growth and reproduction.

This stabilization of the rainforest’s complex ecology was shaped over thousands, if not millions, of years of evolutionary experimentation. Thus the vast array of biologically active substances synthesized in rainforest creatures is a product of both this habitat’s past and present. Because of this, when the rainforest goes—and it is being destroyed at a rate of at least 80,000 acres per day—it cannot be readily replaced. The evolutionary slate that produced it in the first place is wiped clean, much to the long-term disadvantage of humankind.

The quest for energy ultimately shapes the elaboration of all species and their adaptations. Without a full complement of leaves, a plant cannot photosynthesize at full capacity and suffers a loss of energy. Thus living plants divert some portion of their energy for the synthesis of defensive substances to deter insect attacks on photosynthesizing leaves and other tissues. These noxious secondary plant substances often vary from one plant species to the next, endowing the tropical rainforest, which supports a prodigious number of plant species, with an immense store of novel pharmacological substances— few of which have been explored by modern science.

Photo credit: Melpchar/Fliclkr.com. Licensed by CC 2.0.

Photo credit: James St. John/Flickr.com. Licensed by CC 2.0.

f e ll o w s f o r u m

The zebra longwing—Heliconius charitonius—butterfly (left) and larvae (right) are highly unpalatable to predators due to enzymes and cyanogenic glycosides that come together to produce toxic hydrogen cyanide. Passion flower shows pharmacological promise in increasing levels of a chemical called gamma aminobutyric acid in the brain, which lowers activity in certain cells and induces a calm state of mind.

Converse to what is typical of life at the higher latitudes where insects are less ecologically specialized, rainforest insect grazers have more refined and limited palates. Thus, each species of rainforest plant is attacked by only a handful of insect species. Some rainforest plants are more “resistant” to insects than others, the strongest species possessing more effective arsenals of chemical weaponry. The plants with the most effective arsenals in particular hold the greatest potential for research, discovery, and human application.

In spite of powerful chemical weaponry to deter caterpillars and other insects, virtually all rainforest plants are fair game for a small slice of the total insect fauna. Each species of butterfly, for example, has evolved its own countermeasures—the capability to penetrate the chemical defense system of one or more plant species, typically members of the same family of plants. Often defensive plant substances, while effective in screening out or slowing down many caterpillars, have evolved into feeding attractants for other insects. Vulnerability to insects is then largely a matter of plant flavors, a balance between repellency and attraction, depending upon the plant species and the butterfly species.

A few examples of the highly specialized interfaces between butterflies and their caterpillar food plants will illustrate the nature of these important relationships and their secondary plant substances.

For instance, some “pharmacological swallowtails” feed as caterpillars on deadly toxic Dutchman’s pipe vines of the Aristolochiaceae family. The defensive substances of these plants are aristolochic acids, which have been used in medical

research to explore the physiology of cardiac arrest and respiratory failure in laboratory animals. The potential of these secondary substances as biological insecticides has also been studied. A consequence of caterpillars feeding on these vines is that as mature butterflies they are distasteful and poisonous to their natural enemies. Lizards and birds learn to avoid these insects by recognizing the vivid “poison warning” color patterns displayed boldly on their wings.

Slender-winged rainforest butterflies adorned with stripes of yellow, orange, and black called Ithomiines feed on the diverse Solanaceae, or nightshade family. These plants contain potent insecticidal alkaloids, some of which have been isolated, chemically-characterized, and used in medical research on depressants. This is the same family of plants from which potatoes, eggplants, tomatoes, and tobacco have been cultivated, the latter containing nicotine, a repellent to many insects. (It is for a very good reason that one does not eat the greens of a potato, eggplant, or tomato.)

Another group of slender-winged rainforest butterflies, the Heliconiines, graze as caterpillars on Passifloraceae or passion flower vines. Sets of defensive alkaloids different from those of the Solanaceae, as well as cyanogenic glycosides, make passion flower vines—as well as some species of this butterfly group—highly unpalatable. The substances found in the highly diversified Passifloraceae offer scientists opportunities for discovery of novel enzyme actions and biomedical compounds.

The danaine butterflies, which include the familiar monarch and queen butterflies found chiefly in North America, attain

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

13

f e ll o w s f o r u m

a high level of diversity in the American and African tropics where they lay eggs exclusively on plants in the pantropical milkweed-dogbane family. The caterpillars of these “milkweed butterflies,” as the group is called, feed on these plants, sequestering in the process the highly noxious cardiac glycosides.

As with other butterflies mentioned earlier, these poisonous substances are passed on through the butterfly’s life cycle into the adult stage, rendering the insects distasteful to their natural enemies. Cardiac glycosides and their synthetically produced mimics have been used to study the effects of toxins on the mechanisms of heart muscle contraction in laboratory mice.

The dazzling blue-winged morphoes, among the rainforest’s biggest, showiest butterflies, are unfortunately known to many of us from the use of their pressed wings in coffee table tops, serving trays, and bric-a-brac. Morphoes caterpillars feed on certain species of legume trees and woody vines. The seeds of these plants contain suites of potent freestanding amino acids that repel insect attack. Quite possibly the leaves also contain the same or similar insecticidal substances, preventing all but coevolved insects (such as morphoes caterpillars) from feeding on them. One of the amino acid anti-feedants in the seeds is L-dopa (L-3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine), which has been effectively used in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, and which has also spurred research on how “dummy” neurotransmitters function between synapses in brain cells.

Potent naturally-occurring toxins or repellants in many tropical forest plants is evidence that these substances, which have little or nothing to do with the plant’s nutrition, have developed in response to evolutionary grazing pressures from caterpillars and other plant-feeding insects. Butterfly and moth grazing pressure, in particular, has been the sine qua non ecological force promoting the tremendous evolutionary diversification of plant life found in these biologically-rich habitats. Under constant pressure from caterpillars, plants evolve new counter defenses and even evolve new species that are less prone to insect attack. Tropical plants’ genetic versatility, promoted and maintained by a riotous smorgasbord of specialized breeding systems, drives this evolutionary experimentation—spinning off new, naturally-occurring pharmaceuticals in the process.

Deploying basic techniques of organic chemistry and biochemical synthesis, scientists specializing in natural products have extracted from leaves, stems, fruits, and other living tissues of rainforest plants their unique chemical attractants

and repellents, and have chemically characterized them for many applications. Without nature’s diversified, ingenious chemistry suggesting new paths of scientific exploration in medicine, agriculture, and industry, the search for new commercial and experimental compounds would be much less productive.

For example, the flavors and fragrance industry has benefitted immensely from the creativity of tropical nature, not so much in the antagonistic, competitive arena of combat between insects and plants, but in the cooperative interfaces of pollination and mammalian and bird dissemination of fruit and seeds.

Floral fragrances arising from diverse recipes in the pollinating flowers of rainforest plants draw in pollen-gathering insects and nectar-seeking birds, bees, and, of course, butterflies and moths.

The attractive flavors of fruits ensure the dispersal of seeds by animal life. Much of the flavors and fragrances now synthesized in the industrial laboratory for the food and cosmetic industries started out with the “formulas” of natural plant compounds.

And only the surface has been scratched. We know about the ecological chemistry of only 10% or less of the world’s fastshrinking tropical floras. Since, collectively, scientific studies of tropical plants and the creatures interacting with them have revealed more than 10,000 unusual natural products, we know there must be much, much more to study and understand of similar substances in these forests. They hold great long-term promise for cutting-edge scientific discoveries in biomedical research, specialty enzymes, and agro-ecology. So much so that the National Cancer Institute recently commissioned a long-term study of plant species containing possible anti-tumor substances with a focus on tropical floras.

But time is running out for the rainforests and their butterflies due to tropical deforestation that continues at an alarming rate. Originally, 6 million square miles of tropical rainforest existed worldwide. Today, as a result of deforestation, only 2.4 million square miles remain.

Can we afford to witness their continued destruction and the loss of—among other things—new pharmacological knowledge of great benefit to humankind? The strategies and justifications for preserving the world’s quickly disappearing rainforests and other fragile habitats must include an argument for protecting their promise of new pharmaceutical knowledge, which might be directly translated into applications that improve human health. While this is certainly not the only reason for saving rainforests, it is a very real and provocative one. Z

Time is running out for the

rainforests and their butterflies.

Originally, 6 million square miles of tropical rainforest

existed worldwide. Today, as

a result of deforestation, only

2.4 million square miles remain.

14

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

C O NV E N T ION A L

DI gI TAL

L Ar gE F Or mAT

W Eb E NA b LE D s O L uT I O N s

F uL F I L L mE N T

offering customers an unlimited array of customized print communication solutions m AI L I Ng

Park Printing Solutions supports the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.

5 5 0 E a st Ve ro n a Aven u e Ve ro n a , WI 5 3 5 9 3 T O L L - F RE E L O CAL FAX

8 6 6 ❙ 84 5 ❙ 6 5 0 5

608 ❙ 845 ❙ 6505

6 0 8 ❙ 8 4 5 ❙ 80 1 1

p a r k p r i n t i n g . com

w i s c o n s i n t abl e

Farm-to-Table Philosophy Fomenting a Food Revolution at Driftless CafĂŠ in Viroqua

B Y A n n a l e ig h W e t z e l P h o t os by D a n Howa r d

W

hile dining at American Bounty, the Culinary Institute of America’s flagship restaurant in New York City, Chef Luke Zahm was surprised to see three dishes

on the menu made with ingredients grown in his hometown of La Farge, Wisconsin.

16

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

w i s c o n s i n t abl e

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

17

w i s c o n s i n t abl e

After a decade of creating delicious, sustainable cuisine in the kitchens of Chicago and Madison, Zahm realized he wanted to be part of the agricultural and culinary revolution happening in Southwestern Wisconsin.

Zahm has always believed in using fresh products in his cooking. After working as a chef at Epic Systems in Verona and incorporating locally grown produce from a CSA (community supported agriculture) program into his daily menus, Zahm began to build personal relationships with small-scale growers. The ensuing friendships and time spent visiting area farms helped him understand how “farming with virtue and value can make a huge difference” in the lives of both producers and consumers.

Driftless Café sits on a side street in the heart of Viroqua, a town of 4,400 near La Farge in Vernon County. Named “the town that beat Wal-Mart” by Smithsonian magazine in 1992, Viroqua has a history of putting support for local businesses ahead of chains. Located in the unglaciated hills and valleys of the Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, Vernon County boasts over 180 certified organic farms, the highest concentration in the United States.

In 2013, Zahm and his wife Ruthie took ownership of Driftless Café and began applying their version of a farm-to-table philosophy that works to incorporate seasonal ingredients

18

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

while minimizing the distance between the farm and the diner’s plate.

“I tell them to grow what they want to grow, what they want to cultivate, love to do, and I’ll buy it from them,” Zahm says, noting how the café’s menu—which is posted daily to Facebook—frequently changes to reflect the best of seasonal produce from the Driftless Area.

It’s a philosophy that subverts the traditional adherence to consistency and repetition found in most restaurants, but Zahm says that his model better supports local farms and the community at large while ensuring the highest-quality ingredients. Featuring what’s fresh off the farm means Ridgeland Harvest Sweet Corn Soup one day, and St. Brigid’s Chicken with Levi Miller Sweet Potatoes and Second Cloud on the Left Italian Heirloom Chard the next. By supporting local farms, Zahm says that he—and, by extension, everyone—helps to “create a more viable place for people to live, work, play, and raise families.”

Zahm is “the real deal,” according to St. Brigid’s Meadows farm owner Vince Hundt. “When it comes to restaurants, Luke and the Driftless go the extra mile to use and celebrate local ingredients.” Hundt, who since 1989 has raised pasture-fed, organic beef as well as organic chicken and eggs, says Zahm’s commitment to locally sourced ingredi-

w i s c o n s i n t abl e

“I tell them to grow what they want to grow, what they want to cultivate, love to do, and I’ll buy it from them,” Zahm says, noting how the café’s menu— which is posted daily to Facebook—frequently changes to reflect the best of seasonal produce from the Driftless Area.

featured recipe

Driftless Café

Semolina Gnocchi Ingredients:

ents keeps “food money close to home, [which supports] a healthy rural farm economy.”

According to Zahm, Wisconsin’s distinctive food culture and heritage is worth preserving. He works to foster excitement about everything Wisconsin’s Driftless Area has to offer in the way of natural food, and mentors local kids through apprenticeships at the café and events such as the Vernon County Farm to School Program’s annual Harvest Challenge, a cooking competition that pairs students with local chefs. Viroqua’s team took first-place in 2014, a feat Zahm hopes will instill in students an appreciation for this region’s strengths. “It was so gratifying to those kids, kind of coming to their own identity with this place.”

Zahm and his team at Driftless Café see the coming of a food revolution for both rural and urban Wisconsin, and they are happy to be a part of it. “This isn’t a fad. This isn’t something that’s going away,” says Zahm, ticking off the ways in which the farm-to-table philosophy benefits both the local land and people of all ages, including the youth he mentors. “When the kids leave this place and when they go out into the world, they feel like they’re from someplace special,” he says. Z

6 tablespoons Westby Coop Creamery butter 3 cups Organic Valley whole milk 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg 1 white pepper 1 cup Great River Milling semolina flour 1/2 cup freshly grated Sartori Sarvecchio Parmesan cheese 5 farm-fresh eggs Instructions: 1. Bring the milk to a gentle simmer and whisk in the semolina flour. Add salt, nutmeg and pepper.

2. Whisk out all lumps, remove from heat, and allow mixture to cool slightly. Add butter, Sarvecchio Parmesan and, finally, 5 eggs. Whisk together and remove from pot. Allow to cool in refrigerator for at least 2 hours. Scoop 2 oz balls of dough and press them flat (like a hockey puck) into little cakes.

3. Heat sauté pan over medium heat and add enough cooking oil to coat the pan. Add semolina cakes and sear until golden on one side. Flip and repeat. Place pan with seared cakes into 350 degree oven and bake for 8 minutes.

4. Remove from pan and top with caramelized onion, shredded cheese, or serve plain.

Serves 4

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

19

essay

Of Connection and Renewal The Historic Apple Trees of the Badger Army Ammunition Plant

20

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

essay

Essay B y C u r t M e i n e P h o t os by J i l l M e t coff

A

t times it feels as if we are exploring Mayan ruins in the forests of Yucatán, or searching deep in the jungles of Cambodia for unknown temple chambers of Angkor Wat. We sweat and stumble and hack our way through

thickets of autumn olive and barberry, prickly ash, and Eurasian honeysuckle.

Our location, however, is not particularly romantic. We’re just a mile or two from busy US Highway 12, on the lands of the old Badger Army Ammunition Plant in Sauk County, Wisconsin. And the object of our expedition is not so exotic. We’re looking for old apple trees.

The apples trees are easiest to find in the spring, around Mother’s Day, when their bright white blossoms stand out like hailstones against newly green grass. Some are isolated, standing sentinel in open old fields or along abandoned roads. Many, however, are engulfed by dense shrubs and trees. We trip over branches and untangle ourselves from bramble thorns until we finally arrive at the stout trunk of an apple tree—or, often, multiple trunks. Many trees have fallen or split over the decades, but their life-sap continues to flow stubbornly through new sprouts and leaders. These are tough characters.

Members of the Badger Apple Corps (of which I am one) record each tree’s location, attach a numbered aluminum tag, and tie a

strip of bright orange ribbon to an outer twig to make it easier to eyeball after everything else in the landscape has fully leafed out. We will want to come back during the growing season, and then in the late summer and fall to see what fruits these trees will offer. No one knows what we’ll discover.

Well, a few people may know. There are agricultural researchers who have noted the trees over the years, and retired workers from the Badger Plant who once collected the apples (and occasionally made cider). Some of the local residents, now in their 80s and 90s, on whose family farms these trees once grew might even recall what kinds of apples were planted here so many years ago.

The Sauk Prairie once stretched across 14,000 acres between the Wisconsin River and the Baraboo Hills. Bounded on the east by the terminal moraine of the last glacier and on the

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

21

essay

west by ancient sandstone bluffs, the prairie stood at the eastern gateway to Wisconsin’s Driftless Area. The glaciers, prairie vegetation, and intervening millennia provided a precious gift: rich soil. The Ho-Chunk and Sauk-Fox people thrived here until they lost their land through migration, treaties, and removal.

With the arrival of settlers from the eastern states and Europe starting in the 1830s, the Sauk Prairie became home to several hundred prosperous farmsteads. As the land was plowed and tilled, the prairie itself was all but lost.

But a new community was gained. Sauk County became a lively center for apple propagation and cultivation. It even had its own local version of Johnny Appleseed: one A.G. Tuttle of Baraboo. “It is now 34 years since I commenced as an orchardist in Wisconsin,” reported Tuttle in 1887. “I have experimented with over one hundred varieties. … We are going to bring our apples up where they will stand as high as any eastern apple. I am here to speak for the great growing apple interest of Wisconsin.”

Tuttle did not add an exclamation point to his claim, but he might have.

By the late-1800s, farmers had dotted Wisconsin’s landscape with favorite varieties, and progressive horticulture was building a foundation for specialized fruit growers across the state. Within a few years, flourishing commercial apple growing centers would emerge around Gays Mills in Wisconsin’s southwest Driftless Area, near Sturgeon Bay in Door County, and in the Bayfield region in the north.

As far as the cultivation of apples, the farms of Sauk Prairie may not have been remarkable in their time. Like rural landscapes across Wisconsin, many of its farms would have had a few trees for home use, and a few may have supported small orchards to provide fruit for local markets. However, over the decades as our agricultural priorities changed, apple trees were neglected, became overgrown, and eventually died out. Varieties disappeared. Orchards were converted to cropland and pasture or fell to residential or urban development.

Unlike other Wisconsin landscape, however, Sauk Prairie was to experience a unique fate. In the 1940s, the lands of the 22

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

essay

upper prairie were placed in the service of the United States Army. When it was constructed at the beginning of World War II, the Badger Ordnance Works (as it was originally known) was the largest munitions plant in the world, occupying some 10,000 acres. It was later reduced to 7,350 acres, located on the former prairie, adjacent oak savannas, and the south slope of the Baraboo Hills.

To build the Badger plant, the federal government acquired more than eighty farms in the months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It took only a few more months for a major industrial facility—1640 buildings in all—to arise on the prairie and for the plant to go into operation, producing smokeless gunpowder for the war effort. The plant produced munitions for the duration of the war, was reactivated during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, and remained on stand-by throughout the Cold War. When the Badger Army Ammunition Plant was decommissioned in 1997, a new chapter in the history of this land began. Citizens of Sauk County and others interested in the future of this area wrestled with the contentious question of the land’s future. A diverse committee, consisting of representatives from local, state, federal, and tribal governments, as well as schools, businesses, and nonprofit organizations, was charged with finding a way to bring competing interests together. After an intense period of debate, discussion, and negotiation, the committee issued the “Badger Reuse Plan.” The plan, agreed to in March 2001, outlined a community-driven vision for devoting this storied landscape to ecological restoration, conservation agriculture, education and research, and recreation.

Over the last decade the Badger lands have been transferred to three primary landowners: the U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center (part of the Department of Agriculture), the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and the Ho-Chunk Nation.

While environmental cleanup of contaminated soil and groundwater by the U.S. Army is still ongoing, all but a few of the dilapidated buildings and their contents were safely removed. Today, the land is open in a way it has not been in W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

23

essay

decades. Visitors have increasing opportunities to explore this place of history, reflection, and restoration. Volunteers work to revive and expand the precious remnants of the Sauk Prairie, to hold in check the invasive shrubs, to monitor the site’s abundant grassland and savanna birds, to document the unique history of the site … and to find and mark apple trees.

After two field seasons, Badger Apple Corps volunteers organized by the Sauk Prairie Conservation Alliance have located and marked some 180 trees—mostly apples, some pears—on the former Badger Army Ammunition Plant lands. Somehow these survivors have endured the radical transformations of the landscape. Along 24

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

with scattered patches of day lilies and an occasional lilac bush or Norway spruce, the apple trees are among the few living connections to the displaced farming community of Sauk Prairie. As reminders of the lives lived here and the history made here, they add a further layer of interest and connection to a landscape already rich in geologic features, biological diversity, and cultural meaning. And as the trees are cared for again, they are contributing to a new chapter in the story of the Sauk Prairie.

Initial surveys by the Badger Apple Corps show that the trees occur throughout the former plant property, but are concentrated in areas where several old orchards were sited. These are places where the army’s production lines were set further apart, where the land was a little less flat and even. Over I D E A S

the decades, army workers and Dairy Forage Research Center employees occasionally pruned some trees, but most have long since gone feral. The deer population of the plant has certainly given them great attention.

Many of the trees are true veterans that were cultivated prior to the building of the plant, and that may represent interesting heirloom varieties. Others are more recent volunteers, the result perhaps of a plant worker’s discarded apple core. Some trees have fared well and are remarkably resistant to cedarrust and other apple maladies. Others are barely holding on, hollowed out trunks with living leaves and fruits restricted to a single stalwart limb.

While the expected questions—What varieties are they? Are any of them rare?— are always on the minds of Badger Apple

essay

Corps volunteers, there is much we still don’t know about these apples.

To learn more, we’ve enlisted Dan Bussey, one of the nation’s leading heirloom apple experts. Bussey is the orchard manager at Seed Savers in Decorah, Iowa, and owner of a farm near Edgerton, Wisconsin. Bussey has studied the history of apples in North America for more than three decades and had long wanted to visit the remnants of the Badger Plant’s old farmsteads. “I’d long been aware of the size of this huge property,” he says, “and now we have begun to learn about what we have here.”

For Dan, apple identification combines adventure, mystery, science, and history.

“I try to figure out how old the tree was; where was it grown; what the typical market apples of that time were. Learning the little variations that the local nurs-

eries of the area may have had also helps.

Little by little, you can start to figure it out.”

Given the Badger Plant’s legacy of contaminated soil and water, Badger Apple Corps members and others interested in these trees also have questions about the safety of the apples. It turns out that relatively little attention has been given to the potential uptake of contaminants in fruit and nut trees. What research has been done suggests that they rank at the low end of potential risk (as compared, for example, to leafy greens and annual vegetables).

What is a concern is also an opportunity. Kate Braun, a Master’s student in landscape architecture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is focusing on the Badger Plant apples for her thesis work.

Part of her research involves analysis of

possible contaminants in fruit harvested from the former munitions plant site, the results of which could be used for urban agriculture and brown-field rehabilitation projects around the globe.

Braun notes that the permaculture movement, which builds sustainable agroecosystems by bringing together traditional knowledge and contemporary scientific understanding, is drawing increased attention to the use of fruit trees and other woody perennial plants in both suburban and urban settings.For instance, urban “food forests” comprised of a large fruit or nut tree canopy with and an understory of berry bushes and herbs below are welcoming foragers in cities from London to Toronto to Los Angeles. Braun is betting the apple trees of the Badger Plant, survivors in a once industrialized landscape, will yield

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

25

essay

helpful lessons for the future of sustainable agriculture.

Braun’s work will also help us to better address questions involving the protection and preservation of the trees. Ultimately, the responsibility and opportunity for stewardship rests with Badger’s new landowners. All have expressed interest in the results of the Badger Apple Corps fieldwork. They also recognize the potential for innovative approaches to conserving the trees as part of the continuing renewal of the Badger landscape and realization of the vision of the 2001 “Badger Reuse Plan.”

While we have focused on the practical considerations for these trees, we have found increasing public curiosity about them. As interest in craft brewing of hard cider and apple brandies has grown, the search for older and rare apple cultivars has intensified. Local brewers often ask us if any of the apples 26

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

are known cider apples—which are typically not supermarket-pretty and conventionally tasty—and if they are available for sampling and experimentation.

The best we can tell them is: stay tuned.

The interest of heirloom preservationists, landscape architects, craft cider brewers, and others suggests something else hanging from the fruit-heavy branches of Badger’s apple trees: concern for the variety of life on our planet. Over the last century, the diversity of cultivated apples has diminished dramatically. Seed Savers orchard manager Dan Bussey has compiled the astonishing numbers: of the 17,000 (and counting) named apple varieties that once were found across North America, some 70% have been lost, presumably forever. Of the remaining I D E A S

varieties, several thousand are grown in limited places and amounts by a devoted band of heirloom apple enthusiasts. Only a couple dozen apples are grown for the commercial market, and a small handful of these dominate the supermarket shelves.

Compared to our ancestors, we are “apple-poor.” It is hard for us even to imagine the variety of flavors, textures, colors, sizes, shapes, and adaptations that they knew and grew. This, of course, reflects trends in the loss of agricultural biodiversity generally. Especially since World War II, as agricultural systems have intensified, the genetic diversity of the world’s cultivated fruits and grains, vegetables, livestock breeds, beneficial microbes, and pollinators has eroded.

In a world with a warming climate whose future will require greater adaptation and resilience in our food systems,

essay

conserving that remaining diversity is of paramount concern. That is the mission of Seeds Savers (among other non-profit organizations, businesses, and agencies).

And, in our small corner of Wisconsin, it is the goal of the Badger Apple Corps The Badger Plant trees have hung on through episodes of eviction, land conversion, wartime production, land abandonment, and political wrangling.

Once one has scrambled like a running back on hands and knees to get through thick brush to a blooming tree, one develops an eye for apple trees everywhere in the Wisconsin landscape—and an appreciation of old orchards that apple keepers have maintained. By highlighting the story of apples, the Badger Apple Corps can contribute to the growing appreciation of relict trees that still stand along fence lines and in “back forties” throughout our landscape.

The apple trees of the former Badger Army Ammunitions Plant also remind us of what we have sacrificed, and what we can yet reclaim. As the living memory of World War II fades, so does awareness of its disruption of Wisconsin lives and landscapes. In 1942 more than eighty Wisconsin families evacuated beloved farmsteads to serve the patriotic cause.

Just as thousands of Wisconsinites served and died in World War II, thousands of workers—from local communities, from the Ho-Chunk Nation, from all across the state—worked in former farm fields transformed into a vast weapons factory.

The infrastructure of that factory has now been dismantled, recycled, sold for scrap, entombed in landfills. The land is transforming again, to serve a restorative vision—yet facing an uncertain future.

The deep-rooted trees remain, persist, and insist on bearing their fruit. As I

write, the apples are blushing yellow and deepening red. Deer await their annual windfall. So do we. We gather up not only apples, but data, memories, stories. We bite into fall-crisped apples and renew our connection to the past and our hope for the future. Z

Postscript: Work to research, identify, and steward Badger’s historic apple trees has been carried out by the Sauk Prairie Conservation Alliance (saukprairievision.org) and the Badger History Group (badgerordnancehistory.org), in partnership with the Badger landowners. These groups welcome questions about and support for this ongoing project and other activities related to the history and future of the Badger lands.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

27

initiatives report

Adding Light to the Heat Talking to Your Uncle about Climate Change

Photo credit: Brian Blakely

B Y M e r e di t h K e l l e r

Above: Warmer temperatures as well as more severe and frequent rain storms can lead to expanded mosquito range and populations.

W

e all know that words have power. But there is an equal amount of power in the absence of words. Take for instance the recent example of Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) ban on using certain scientific terms in all official emails,

reports, or other communications.

“We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,’” said Christopher Byrd, a former attorney with the DEP’s Office of General Counsel.

“That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel.”

For a lowland state with 1,350 miles of coastline, the omission of terms essential to the study of ocean rise was a puzzling one to say the least.

This last April in Wisconsin, a similar phenomenon happened when the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands passed a resolution banning its employees from talking about climate change while on the job. Comprised of a three-member board and ten staff members, the Board

28

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

of Commissioners of Public Lands distributes investment revenue to support school libraries and makes loans to local governments for public projects. Part of the funding it currently receives is from timber production on lands granted to the state by the federal government over a decade ago.

“Engaging in global warming or climate change work … [is] not a part of our sole mission, which is to make money for our beneficiaries,” said board member and Wisconsin state treasurer Matt Adamczyk in defense of the resolution. Board member and state attorney general Brad Schimel agreed, adding in a statement that “it would be irresponsible for me to vote to prospectively permit government employees to engage in political activity while at work.”

initiatives report

While these conspicuous omissions might not seem like a big deal, such macro-level policies trickle down to our own kitchen tables. For my part, I’ve reached an unspoken détente with my extended family not to bring up certain politically charged subjects over Thanksgiving dinner.

Climate change or global warming is among these subjects my extended family avoids so as to ensure civility and familial harmony.

But how did the phrase climate change—a name for a scientific theory supported by 97% of the global scientific community—accrue enough of a political charge to warrant deletion from the kitchen table or a state office? Given that climate change will affect—or already has affected—every person on the planet, its status as “taboo” in conversation is not only ironic, it’s dangerous.

So how do we talk about this hugely important issue with, let’s say, an uncle who is skeptical about the dangers of climate change?

When you find yourself in one of these conversations, first think about where the other person is coming from, including their interests and their knowledge on the issue.

Consider the advice of Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, when it comes to talking about climate change: “The American public does not speak with a single voice on this issue.”

This goes for our friends and family as well.

Many see climate change as a distant problem for future generations or people living in faraway places. In short: A problem for someone else. Your uncle might say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why should I care?” Or “We have time.” Or he might be overwhelmed with the weight of global climate change and unable to see his role in addressing it. “What can I do?” he’ll say with a shrug before moving along to the next topic of conversation.

Even though 2014 was the warmest year on record globally (coming on the tail-end of the warmest decade), and 97% of scientists agree that this rise in temperatures is primarily due to an increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere caused by human activity, it usually doesn’t help to pummel your uncle with these facts. A better place to begin your conversation is to connect the concept of a changing climate to things your uncle can see in his own backyard.

For instance, ask him, How are the mosquitos this year? In the upper Midwest, we can count on them every year, and populations will rise and fall with rainfall, and local weather.

However, over time, climate change is also increasing the range of these insects and other pests, forcing us to resort more frequently to fashionable head nets (see photo on page 28) and use more and more powerful repellents. Both tick and mosquito populations are on the rise in the Midwest— along with cases of insect-borne diseases such as Lyme disease and West Nile virus.

With a changing climate, comes a surge in extreme weather: heat waves and periods of drought alternating with seasons of intense rainfall. These extreme weather events

threaten the well being of vulnerable populations such as the elderly, the sick, and young children, as well as residents of floodplains and coasts. The surge in heat waves over the last four decades is especially dangerous. According to Climate Wisconsin, “extreme heat kills more people in the state than all other weather disasters (e.g., tornadoes, floods, blizzards) combined.”

Your uncle might counter, “Well, isn’t variability in weather normal?” While this is true, the recent level of variability and intensity of heat waves, storms, droughts, and other events are evidence of disrupted climate patterns.

Keep in mind, too, that weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere “behaves” over relatively long periods of time—years, decades, and centuries. The last few decades have shown us that there is a dramatic change in our global climate defined by a continuous trend of warmer temperatures and more extreme weather.

I have found that framing most any issue in the context of how it will affect human health or quality of life—say, an angler’s ability to fish his or her favorite stream—is almost always successful in bringing people together in conversation.

As we point out our 2014 report Climate Forward: A New Roadmap for Wisconsin’s Climate & Energy Future, “many of the habitats that we think of as Wisconsin are already changing, and so will the life they can support.”

This includes brook trout and brown trout. Wisconsin is blessed with over 10,000 miles of classified trout streams.

As the state’s average air temperature increases, so does the temperature of its waters. As a cold-water fish, trout are uniquely sensitive to these changes; recent scientific

ABOUT THIS PROGRAM

Wisconsin Academy Initiatives Meredith Keller is director of the Wisconsin Academy Initiatives Program, which convenes Wisconsin leaders from an array of fields for deliberation, analysis, and distillation to identify strategies and solutions for a sustainable world.

Our two current Initiatives focus on: Waters of Wisconsin: Safeguarding Wisconsin’s fresh water ecosystems and water supply.

Climate & Energy: Addressing climate change and diversifying energy choices.

Initiatives are the Wisconsin Academy’s expression of the Wisconsin Idea, and a reflection of a 145-year commitment to “gathering, sharing, and acting upon knowledge in sciences, arts, and letters for the betterment of the people of Wisconsin.”

Learn more about how this work serves our people, lands, and waters at wisconsinacademy.org/initiatives.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

29

initiatives report

models from the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts show that a five-degree Fahrenheit increase in water temperature could eliminate 95% of Wisconsin’s brown trout population. You could ask your uncle to imagine the effect this would have on Wisconsin’s multi-billion-dollar tourism industry, let alone its vibrant fly-fishing culture.

Climate change threatens Wisconsin’s iconic waters in other ways. Intense rainstorm events bring a surge in phosphorus and other nutrient run-off into bodies of water, fueling the growth of harmful algae. For instance, one third of the nutrient runoff flowing into all of Lake Michigan comes from the Fox River, which flows directly into Green Bay. The nutrient-driven algal blooms are damaging to Green Bay’s entire ecosystem, creating a “dead zone” of oxygen-deprived water that suffocates fish and other aquatic life. While the causes of Green Bay’s dead zone are many, climate change is a contributing factor that can’t be ignored.

We are already seeing the effects of climate change here in Wisconsin, which makes one wonder what kind of Wisconsin the next generations will have. Will there be trout to fish?

Will we be able to save an ailing Green Bay? Scientists predict a 40% drop in snow cover across Northern Wisconsin over the next fifty years. Will there be an annual Birkebeiner? Will there be any place to snowmobile? Will the ice be thick enough for ice fishing? Will we even recognize our state as the “Wisconsin” we know and love today?

Many of these climate change impacts I mention are related to the energy choices we make everyday. We need to talk more about climate change and help others see themselves in clean energy solutions, and how these solutions benefit all of us—both locally and globally.

Wisconsin and the United States can lead in the research and development of clean energy technologies that would not only be safer for the climate, but for our health and economy as well. When talking with your family and friends about climate change, focus on these “co-benefits” of emission reduction and energy innovation. Energy efficiency saves money and produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions, which is a boon to public health. Remember, change creates opportunity, but that opportunity comes with the responsibility to pursue options that will benefit and sustain the people of Wisconsin, our environment, and our economy in a global context.

There is something each of us can do to be part of the larger solution to climate change: Bring it up. Bring it up until Mom asks you to let it go. Or don’t let it go. Do this not because you want to best your uncle in that annual battle of wits during the family reunion (although that might be a perk), but because this is an issue that affects everyone, everywhere.

We need to have this discussion. And sometimes the best place to start is at home. Z

CONNECT: Initiatives Tools You Can Use Today more than ever we need constructive conversation about the future of our freshwater resources and changing climate.

Through our Wisconsin Initiatives, the Wisconsin Academy hopes to provide citizens with resources and tools to help preserve and protect the waters and lands we love.

Communicating About Water: A Wisconsin Toolkit Our Waters of Wisconsin Leadership Network and Academy staff designed this toolkit to equip citizens with the skills necessary to facilitate effective conversations about water in their communities.

Completed in 2014, the toolkit has been used by neighborhood and grassroots organizations, nonprofits, environmental and natural resource educators, UW Extension agents, business leaders, policy experts, and others working to reach wider audiences on the importance of water quality. The easy-to-use toolkit includes an introduction on strategic communications, addresses current narratives on water in Wisconsin, and offers a guide for effective message development. Free for use by the public, the Academy’s Communicating About Water: Wisconsin Toolkit is available for download at wisconsinacademy.org/WOWtoolkit.

30

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Climate Forward Report & Web Portal In 2014 Wisconsin Academy published Climate Forward: A New Roadmap for Wisconsin’s Climate & Energy Future, a report that provides a practical vision for how we can build on Wisconsin values and our citizens’ ingenuity to shape a future that is good for our environment and our economy. In order to increase public access, in 2015 used core content from the report to develop an interactive web portal that offers additional resources for businesses, policy-makers, municipal and local governments, and community leaders who wish to learn more about Wisconsin’s potential for a clean energy future. You can access the Wisconsin Academy’s Climate Forward Web Portal and download printable PDF copies of the report at wisconsinacademy.org/climateforward.

AL BIRNSTILL

initiatives report

CIRQUE MECHANICS: PEDAL PUNK

VIENNA BOYS’ CHOIR: CHRISTMAS IN VIENNA

PETE SEEGER: THE STORM KING

SAT, NOV 14, 8 PM SUN, NOV 15, 3 PM | $35+ Steampunk on wheels

FRI, NOV 27, 7 PM | $15+ Celebrate the holiday season

SAT, JAN 23, 8 PM | $35+ A multimedia tribute

OV E R T U R E C E N T E R .O R G | 6 0 8 . 2 5 8 . 4 1 4 1

arts& minds ISTHMUS OF MADISON

Smart, original, timely content covering news, politics, arts, music, food, sports, shopping — and more — all integral to life in the capital region. We emphasize journalistic excellence and high quality design, along with a sharply honed instinct for local happenings, and the best events calendar in town.

ALL YOURS, ALWAYS FREE

Isthmus u 100 State Street u Suite 301 u Madison Wisconsin 53703 u 608.251.5627 web

Isthmus.com u facebook IsthmusMadison u twitter @isthmus

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

31

pr o f i l e

Ellen Moore and the Ground of Being B y M i r iam Ha l l

O

ver soup lunch in Hackberry’s Restaurant, upstairs from the bustling La Crosse food cooperative, Ellen Moore darts her vibrant eyes from one loving student to another.

Ten of us have gathered for an afternoon of conversation and lunch with the retired

dance instructor. This is my first time meeting her, though I have been a student of hers for years in the sense that I take the classes she established forty years ago.

About these photos: Taken by Kim Keyes, these black and white photos of Ellen Moore (above) and her final Movement Improvisation class in 2005 made their way into a short film by former students Marina Kelly and Jim Mathews called Taking a Bow. All photos are reprinted by permission of Kim Keyes.

32

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

pr o f i l e

From 1976 until 2005, Moore taught modern dance through the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Continuing Studies. Her improvisational dance class, open to those who first studied modern technique with her, was a place for those (like me) who fell away but wanted to return to dance in a gentle, welcoming atmosphere as adults. The participants always were, and still are, for the most part not dance majors on a track to become professionals. Some aren’t necessarily accustomed to dance at all. Yet they all share a loyalty to and love for Moore and her method of instruction.

During our conversation it becomes clear that the 90-year-old Moore has a fascination with movement, and a desire to express herself through the medium like no one I have ever met. As Moore describes tap dance classes from child-

hood—“They weren’t my favorite thing, but still kind of fun”—her legs start to move of their own accord. “My feet still remember one of the steps we used to do that was my favorite.” She winks at me and sips her soup, the table jiggling slightly under our hands as her feet move upon the floor.

“I danced as a kid, as soon as I could walk,” Moore says. “My father had a good beat, but he was a two-step dancer. My mom was a … ballroom dancer in the local theater in our small town. So undoubtedly I got some of her genes.”

In addition to dance, Moore was very interested in science early on. As a child, she spent hours with the chicken her mother was attempting to prepare for dinner, fascinated by the interconnected bones, flesh, and muscle.

Today anyone can find modern—or any kinds of dance, really—performed on tele-

vision shows like So You Think You Can Dance or on the Internet. This all started in the 1930s, when Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers hit the golden screen. The joy in their open expression and freedom really inspired young Moore.

“After that I danced on the furniture a lot, whether music was playing or not. I took ballet, I took acrobatics, and I took tap. They put me in toe shoes and I said ‘No way. This hurts! Why would I do this?’

And they gave up on me very quickly, thank goodness.”

In “giving up” on Moore, her ballet teachers and even her mother validated something that she and much of her family already knew: Moore was going to choose her own way.

“I found the modern dance teacher in college boring. I dropped it and joined the choir instead,” says Moore noting how the angular and expressive move-

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

33

pr o f i l e

ments of modern dance—arms held just so, legs held just so—seemed awkward and contrived. She did go on to take some dance classes during her undergraduate studies at Wellesley College, but gravitated toward a major in Zoology.

Yet her fascination with movement lingered even after she received her degree and moved to New York City. “As soon as I got [there], I went to the first modern dance studio that was anywhere near where I was living. It happened to be Martha Graham’s school. It was a glove that fit.”

She threw herself into the modern dance movement, studying with many modern dance greats, including José Limón, Doris Humphrey, and Martha Graham. It is from Graham that Moore was first introduced to the importance of grounding oneself as a dancer, working with a modern dance structure called

34

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

“ground primitive,” in which dancers start from, and end on, the ground. In between, dancers work with gestures that are both a part of modern dance vocabulary and structure, while also taking inspiration from the earth and intuition.

As she refined her craft, Moore began to consider what a future in modern dance would hold for her. “I didn’t want to be a professional dancer. I knew I wanted to have a family. I was very clear that I wanted that. I came from Iowa. We have families.”

The next best option was to teach dance, preferably in a college situation, though that was still a rare offering. Based on a conversation she had with another dancer, Moore came to Madison in 1949 in search of a kind of dance that differed from what she learned during her time with the East Coast modernists.

I D E A S

“My friend told me [about] this strange dance teacher at UW–Madison who didn’t teach dance like anybody else. That was Margaret H’Doubler. So, I went over to Lathrop Hall and sat in on a lecture of hers, and then I talked to her in the hall. …

She said ‘I think you’re in the right place!

This is made for you.’ And she was right.”

Many would say H’Doubler approach was strange, but it was the kind of strange that Moore craved. The first thing they did in class was to lie on the ground blindfolded and crawl around according to H’Doubler’s instructions: We’ll begin on the floor, relieve the body of the pull of gravity and explore movement in a basic way. We’ll rediscover the body’s structural limitations and possibilities; we’ll attend to movement sensation. We’ll create movement out of our knowledge of body structure,

pr o f i l e

no imitation. We’ll study movement as movement first. We may never arrive at dance, but we’ll make an honest beginning.

Margaret H’Doubler taught the very first modern dance class at UW–Madison in 1926. Over the next ten years, she refined her carefully structured class, using the basis of the body’s relationship to the ground to help students connect their own movement to experiences rather than using typical visual reference points.

“We had to be really clear about having a kinesthetic sense and she didn’t want us to see anything, just follow directions through feeling,” recalls Moore. “So we were very clear on the fact that this is sidewards, down, up—something tells us this without using eyes—our proprioceptive and kinesthetic senses, our muscle fibers and joints.”

H’Doubler used a skeleton in every class to explain the mechanics of dance.

She was insistent about the importance of physics and biology to being a great dancer.

“Long before the phrase body-mind was invented, H’Doubler had invented a process that integrated body, mind, and psyche,” muses Moore. “She regularly reminded us of the ‘integrity’ of our organisms. Summarizing at the end of class, as was her habit, she often diagrammed this whole picture with a few deft strokes [on a chalkboard]: the willowy lines of the voluntary nervous system, the lima bean brain at the top and floating next to it an enlivened face.”

Admittedly, the class seemed pretty weird to Moore, not at all the kind of thing she had done with Graham. Yet Moore loved it. H’Doubler’s philosophy of an integrated body, mind, and psyche satis-

fied Moore’s physical and intellectual curiosity.

Under H’Doubler’s tutelage, Moore graduated with a Masters in Education and Dance from UW–Madison in 1951. She taught at Michigan State for a while, before being invited back to UW– Madison to teach in the dance department H’Doubler had established the year before Moore was born. Moore had an idea that she could become a professor, teach dance, and raise her family.

However, Moore quickly realized that this dream wasn’t going to come true. She struggled with balancing the demands of academe and family. “I did not write a book, and therefore did not get tenure, because I was raising three small children,” Moore says bluntly, punctuating the assertion with a shrug.

Her situation in the 1960s is still a common one for many female academics.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

35

pr o f i l e

For Moore, this ending at the UW–Madison was actually a wonderful beginning: it allowed her to grow the dance philosophy she cultivated during her studies with H’Doubler and also support the domestic life she so craved.

Where both H’Doubler and Moore relied on gravity and the body’s physical relationship to the ground to support dance movements, and used an implicit and explicit knowledge of physics and biology as a base for their teaching, Moore explored improvisation and joy in a way unprecedented by her teachers.

A contemporary at UW–Madison named Arthur Leath encouraged Moore in this exploration of improvisation and joy.

Originally a botanist, Leath (known to friends as A. A.) later in his career studied an unorthodox form of improvisational dance. Leath also taught Creative Behavior, a philosophy that incorporates all parts of the self as a foundation for creativity. Because of Leath, Moore 36

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

threaded elements of Creative Behavior into her classes, asking her students to look at movement as a way of expressing feelings and respecting the self.

To Moore, movement is less about form and precision than honesty, and she encourages students to take credit for their creative expressions. In this way, Moore sees the whole teaching situation as less hierarchical than her teachers did, the class being less about a teacher imparting lessons and more about the interactive, co-learning experience of humans together in a dance.

Moore would always make time for conversation and feedback to shape the next class. She often drew from the elements, the seasons, and political climate for a particular class lesson, and worked with a wide range of jazz, classical, and modern pop records.

Moore went on to teach thirty years through UW Extension (now UW–Madison Continuing Studies), able to find a workI D E A S

home balance that both satisfied her desire to parent and allowed her to fully express H’Doubler and Graham’s teachings on the importance of grounding oneself—physically, but also emotionally—in dance as a way of being.

“We all get to experience [a sense of ground] when the garden begins to come up in the spring. When I am down on my knees planting my impatiens, I feel like I am home again,” says Moore.

Today, Moore’s motion is much more limited, her aging ankles restricting her range. But each day, she and her dog Joe take a walk around the block. “I breathe now when I walk the dog around the block. I notice when I am working at it, … and then I let the movement happen rather than making it happen.” Even when it comes to breathing, the most basic physical action of being, Moore remains aware of how effort and selfconsciousness can limit the possibilities of expression and living.

pr o f i l e

She describes everything as starting from the ground—all of our basic gestures, and our life itself. We start from earth, from the elements, and return to the earth in death. When asked why we start dance class on the ground, Moore has a simple and profound response that reflects the fundamentals of her teachings. Of course, it is about life as much as dancing: [Because] it helps us find that stable, strong, powerful place. We talked about going down, going up, [relating to both] earth and sky—we see it in Native American culture, all kinds of respect for the ground. We see it everywhere. In Buddhism, they sit on the ground to start? Why not? Why would we start anything standing up?

The body gets strength and energy from sitting on the ground.

Today, Marina Kelly continues the tradition of Moore’s improvisational course

under the name Creating Dance through Structured Improvisation, using Moore’s philosophy of grounding: starting on the ground, in silence, slowly adding a wide range of music with a few gentle suggestions for movement. She weaves in the weather, bringing in leaves or branches, laying out supplies for drawing along with dancing.

Ten years after Moore stopped teaching in Madison, many students still tend to think of the class as hers. Kelly doesn’t mind. “There will never be another Ellen Moore,” says Kelly. “She is a true original and I can only say that I have been the lucky recipient of her teaching and guidance and that I do my part to keep the spirit of her teachings alive.”

Kelly found Ellen’s classes early in her twenties, and they were hugely influential in her own creative development and work as an arts administrator. Today she can still remember lying on the floor, hearing Moore’s voice as she offered up

ideas for exploration of movement. “The language she used was so important in communicating the philosophy of the class,” notes Kelly, “with gentle instructions like, Notice if you’re willing to move your body towards standing or Might you consider rolling towards the middle of the room.”

Closing out our day with Moore in La Crosse, we are seated in Moore’s living room with her old black and white dog Joe and a handful of her students. Both long-term students and current participants in Kelly’s iteration of the class share their fondest memories. “Ellen created a community of dance,” is a refrain heard again and again from the group.

But one student in particular summed up Moore’s essential quality in a brief yet powerful statement: “You weren’t just teaching us movement, you were teaching us a way of moving through life.” Z

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

37

GALLERIA

Looking back to look Forward 75 Years of the Wisconsin Regional Arts Program 1940–2015

by H e l e n K l e b e sad e l

In terms of American Democracy, the arts are for everyone. They are not reserved for the wealthy, or for the well-endowed museum, the gallery, or the ever-subsidized regional professional theater. As America emerges into a different understanding of her strength, it becomes clear that her strength is in the people and the places where people live. The people, if shown the way, can create art in and of themselves.

—Robert E. Gard, from The Arts in the Small Community: A National Plan (1966) The Wisconsin Regional Art Program (WRAP) has been changing lives since 1940. With the celebration of WRAP’s 75th anniversary in 2015 we have the opportunity to reflect upon how a program designed to serve Wisconsin’s non-professional artists during the Depression continues to serve a vital need in our state today.

Founded in 1936 by the UW–Madison College of Agriculture, the Regional Arts Program began as an innovative experiment to use the arts to expand the cultural growth and knowledge of rural Wisconsin. Drawing on Progressive values of egalitarianism and education for all, rural sociologist John Rector Barton and

Dean of the College of Agriculture Chris L. Christensen developed the Regional Art Program with service to Wisconsin’s rural communities in mind. The two envisioned an expanded role for the college that went beyond bringing technical skills to farmers and into more arts and cultural opportunities for Wisconsinites living in and around rural communities. Inspired by the Danish Folk School movement that linked cultural and arts education for rural people to the development of Scandinavia’s emerging democracies, Barton and Christensen hoped the Regional Art Program would serve a similar unmet need for broad-based humanities education here in Wisconsin.

All images reprinted courtesy of the Wisconsin Regional Art Program, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

38

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

GALLERIA

Joan Arend (Kirkbush), Wisconsin Farm Auction, 1945. Oil on canvas.

Iris Furman Tellefson, Feeding Time, c. 1942. Oil on canvas.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

39

GALLERIA

The 1930s were full of hardship for rural populations in Wisconsin. Most farms lacked electricity, and World War II had not yet pulled the nation out of the Great Depression. Parents and children alike put in hard work and long hours only to barely get by. Industrialization was sweeping the globe, yet in Wisconsin there was a cultural and economic chasm between urban and rural areas that only grew during the ensuing decade.

Isolation and a nose-to-the-grindstone ethos meant little to no access to the arts for most rural communities. During the 1930s and 1940s most country schools were small, one-room affairs with a single teacher responsible for covering every subject. Instruction in art appreciation or the visual arts was viewed as frivolous or deemed an unworthy pursuit by overburdened educators and administrators. As a result of these and other contributing factors, few children growing up in rural Wisconsin before the 1950s were given a systematic, sustained art education.

This began to change in 1936 when well-known Regionalist painter John Steuart Curry was hired to be the first artist-inresidence in the UW–Madison School of Agriculture. In a bold vision for rural arts education, Barton and Christensen installed Curry at the university as a resource for the people of the state.

However, as the first artist-in-residence at an American university, there was no specific organized plan for Curry to follow. But his belief that “the artist must paint the thing that is most alive to him” was enough to move Curry in the right direction. He began offering art presentations and generally making himself available to anyone who wished to see him. Embracing the Wisconsin Idea, Curry spent much of the next few years visiting the countryside and encouraging self-taught artists to draw upon their own lives for subject matter.

Inspired by the 1939 American Country Life Conference exhibition of professional artists addressing rural themes, Dean Christensen, Professor Barton, and others encouraged Curry to pursue an exhibition of original artworks by Wisconsin rural artists who had not been formally trained. A three-month effort connected Curry to amateur artists across the state and resulted in the curated selection of artists from 17 counties for the first WRAP exhibition of Wisconsin artists in 1940. For those original thirty artists whose work was hung on the walls of the UW–Madison Memorial Union, the exhibition had lasting significance and was a source of deep encouragement of their creative expression.

From these early efforts grew an ongoing outreach network of locally sponsored art workshops and exhibits, with Curry bringing supportive critique to artists and selecting participants for an annual state exhibition out of which some works would be purchased for WRAP’s permanent collection.

On occasion Curry would discover artists on his own, like fourteen-year-old Lois Ireland (Waunakee) who was exhibiting her work in a local eatery he frequented. People would also bring talented individuals to his attention, like Clarence Boyce Monegar (also known as Red Arrow), a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation from Shawano County. Monegar’s drawings composed during a brief stint in the county jail so impressed a local court official that he paroled him and personally drove him to Curry’s studio. After a short period of study with Curry to learn lithog40

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

raphy and refine his craft, Monegar began making and selling art, launching a life-long art career. Today Monegar’s drawings and prints are highly collectable.

These early works—many of which are still in WRAP’s permanent collection—demonstrate how a piece of art can be a history lesson, an historical record, a preservation of culture, and an autobiography all in one. The works remaining in the collection today document events and experiences that provide us with a richer understanding of Wisconsin history while underscoring the vital importance of rural life in our state.

Then, as today, the annual WRAP exhibition most benefitted the self-taught and artists with limited formal training. The prospect of sharing their works with a statewide audience was exciting to these unknown artists, and the number taking part in the annual Rural Art Show grew rapidly: between 1940 and 1947 the roster of exhibitors swelled from 30 to 105 artists from across the state. What is now the annual State Day Conference and awards ceremony started as the Rural Art Luncheon, an occasion for celebration and mutual encouragement but also a cherished interlude from lives spent in the field or at a wood-fired kitchen stove.

After his too early death, Curry was succeeded by the painter Aaron Bohrod as the next artist-in-residence at UW–Madison in 1948. (I was one of the rural children whose future art making was influenced by this program when students from my rural school toured his studio, saw his amazing work, and met the artist). A Midwestern artist like Curry, Bohrod became well known during World War II as an artist-correspondent for Life magazine. Bohrod continued Curry’s tradition of outreach to Wisconsin artists, discovering and encouraging such artists as wood turner Harry Nohr. Nohr developed the hobby of wood–turning while working as postmaster in Mineral Point.

Exceptionally beautiful and creative, Nohr’s hand-crafted wood bowls earned national and international recognition and were included in a Smithsonian touring exhibit.

Bohrod worked well with rural artists and the Rural Arts Program continued to flourish with the addition of James Schwalbach to the College of Agriculture’s Department of Rural Sociology staff in 1945. Harnessing the power of radio to deliver art instruction to hundreds of classrooms and rural schools, Schwalbach was the driving force behind “Let’s Draw,” a series on the Wisconsin University School of the Air. Airing until 1973, Schwalbach’s series was instrumental in bringing public art instruction to elementary classrooms across the state.

Over the years, many Wisconsin communities developed local or regional art shows and organizations with the assistance of Rural Art Program staff. By 1954 some rural artists were ready to go beyond the loose organization of regional and state exhibitions. Several long-time exhibitors proposed the formation of the Wisconsin Rural Artists’ Association (WRAA), which was committed to encouraging non-professional artists, especially those involved with WRAP. WRAA went on to become an active force in developing art activities throughout the state. Rural Art Program staff members John Barton and Jim Schwalbach and artist-in-residence Aaron Bohrod served in an advisory capacity to WRAA, providing important links between artists and helping organize meetings and workshops.

The association developed and published a quarterly newsletter

GALLERIA

Arthur Johnson, Peaceful Valley, 1944. Oil on canvas.

Working on farms and as a truck driver, Arthur Johnson found art training where he could from traveling teachers and correspondence courses. He sold his first oil painting for fifty cents in 1912 and entered his first painting in a WRAP exhibition in 1941. Working from the Monroe area, his local reputation grew. Johnson showed and sold his art regularly in the 1940s. Several of his works were purchased for the WRAP Permanent Collection.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

41

GALLERIA

Lois Ireland, Morning Glory, 1948. Oil on canvas, 30â…? x 35Âź inches.

Waunakee artist Lois Ireland exhibited 23 paintings through the Rural Arts Program between 1943 and 1948, starting when she was just 14 years old. She studied art but abandoned her career to focus on family. She again picked up her brushes in the 1970s. Now 86 and living in Minneapolis, Ireland is still making art and her work was featured in a recent solo exhibition, Lois Ireland: Wisconsin Pastorale, at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

42

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

GALLERIA

called Contour Notes in which members exchanged news of local art events and shared tips and techniques. Even though WRAA changed its name to the Wisconsin Regional Artists’ Association during the 1960s, it remains today an active statewide organization in support of Wisconsin’s rural artists.

The concept of an agricultural college developing an arts- and culture-based outreach program seems daring today, especially at a time when massive cuts to the arts and public education are commonplace. Yet the success of the Rural Art Program is an enduring example of how educational innovation can transcend the cultural differences and politics of the moment. The program had its modest beginnings in 1936, a year when jobs and hard cash were scarce, and began cultivating promising, as-yet-undeveloped talent across the state during an economic downturn.

WRAP flourished in underserved and remote areas of the state precisely because rural residents felt cut off from the cultural and academic institutions found in the cities.

Then as now art offered a reason to come together and share in an experience. But the program also provided a window to a brighter future, stimulating creativity among amateur artists in small towns and on remote farms across the state as well as nurturing professional careers through educational workshops, awards programs, and local and state group exhibitions.

The energy and enthusiasm of Curry’s successor, Aaron Bohrod, and subsequent WRAP directors James Schwalbach, Ken Kuemmerlein, and Leslee Nelson, along with the ongoing support of the Wisconsin Regional Artists Association, have for 75 years ensured that WRAP exhibitions and workshops continue to be cornerstone activities for nonprofessional artists throughout the state.

WRAP’s administrative location has bounced around during this time from the School of Agriculture, to UW Extension, to the UW– Madison Division of Continuing Studies, which is now its home.

For years UW–Madison subsidized this vision for the Wisconsin Idea manifested in the visual arts across the state. With recent and ongoing cuts to the University of Wisconsin System budget, WRAP is increasingly reliant upon participant fees and fundraising to support its programming and administrative costs.

Today, the organization receives countless volunteer hours from WRAA members and the 25 exhibition coordinators, art organizations, and venues across the state that co-sponsor WRAP exhibitions and educational workshops. Collectively there are as many as 900 entries of two- and three-dimensional art in any media appearing in local WRAP exhibitions, which lead up to the annual WRAP State Exhibition and State Day Conference. This annual event includes a two-month exhibition of twenty awardwinning WRAP artworks and concludes with a much-anticipated conference, luncheon, and awards ceremony, during which $4,000 is provided to artists whose work is selected by a professional artist juror.

Through the years, thousands of Wisconsin artists have participated in WRAP, which had expanded to include urban areas by the 1960s. With the ongoing reductions in support for arts education in our schools the need is almost as great now as it was when the program started to provide arts-based growth opportunities for students and adults alike.

While many WRAP participants are interested in personal growth and transformation through the arts, a few work excep-

Walter Thorp, Covey of Quails, c. 1941. Crayon and pencil.

Ambrose G. Ammel, Widgeon and Gadwall, c. 1948. Oil painting.

Clarence Boyce Monegar, The Watering Hole, c. 1942. Watercolor.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

43

GALLERIA

tionally hard at building local community engagement through the arts groups and organizations that support their hometown WRAP workshops and exhibitions.

Some participants who may have had their first experiences of public recognition in WRAP exhibitions have gone on to develop professional reputations and careers. Most notable among early WRAP participants are Harry Nohr, Lois Ireland Zwettler, Clarence Boyce Monegar, and Almond resident Joan Arend.

Today the trend continues with mature artists exploring personal engagement through the arts and the possibility of a second career. At the same time, younger artists such as Robert Jinkins from Rewey are honing their exhibition skills and experiences through WRAP on their way to graduate school and a career in the visual arts. Still others, content to consider themselves amateur artists, participate in the Wisconsin Regional Art Program because they are true believers in creative growth for its own sake and love the community of life-long learners they find here. Some older participants, for example, who were forced to put their art aside to make a living or raise a family, today credit WRAP with giving the arts back to them in their retirement years. While they may not be professionals in the sense of making their living in the arts, the art they make often reaches professional level in technique and content.

These artists—like their WRAP predecessors for the last 75 years—create art that reflects cultural and community values, beliefs and identities. This incredible art chronicles their own lives and experiences over time and helps us see, understand, and remember how our many individual experiences add up to a shared Wisconsin history. Z

Above: Robert Jinkins, Transplant, 2015. Mixed media acrylic.

Left: Victoria Bein, Too Many Cars for a Cat, 2015.

Pastel and carbon pencil.

44

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

GALLERIA

Ching Kung, Fall Ashes, 2014. Oil on board.

Ching Kung is the Vilas Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics at UW– Madison and a member of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Kung has drawn and painted for more than forty years, and his work has won several awards including the 2012 Ada Biddick Award and 2014 Joseph E. Burk Award of WRAP’s State Exhibit.

Edgerton’s Victoria Bein creates drawings and paintings on paper primarily using pastel, carbon pencil, charcoal and gouache. Bein says that by “blending abstract and representational elements, I attempt to order the emotional chaos of the moment” in works like her Too Many Cars for a Cat.

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

fall

2 0 1 5

45

GALLERIA

Annette Knapstein, Bubble, 2015. Archival pigmented print.

Barbara Kettner, Bailing in August, 2015. Watercolor on paper.

46

fall

2 0 1 5

W isconsin

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

read WI

Old Helena Cemetery, Spring Green Photo credit: Jason A. Smith

READ WISCONSIN In case you haven’t heard, the Wisconsin Book Festival and Wisconsin Science Festival are being held in tandem this October 22–25, which leaves many of us with difficult decisions as to what to attend during the four days of programming.

Because I am terrible at making decisions (and becuase this is Read Wisconsin), I've decided to provide a handy guide to a few of the outstanding literary events at the intersection of the sciences, arts, and/or letters, beginning with a Thursday (10/22) morning discussion with Peter Annin, author of Water Tension and the Great Lakes Compact. For anyone concerned about the future of our Great Lakes in an era of climate change, Annin's book delves into the history of political maneuvers and water diversion schemes that have proposed sending Great Lakes water just about everywhere.

Our fiction and poetry contest showcase event on Friday (10/23) night promises to inspire and entertain. Come and hear incredible works by emerging writers—Nikki Kallio, Erica Kanesaka Kalnay, and Kathryn Gahl—and poets—Lisa Vihos, Sean Avery, and Kathleen Dale—from across our state. Stick around afterward for a beer (on me!) and stimulating discussion with our contest winners.

The Council for Wisconsin Writers, another organization that works to showcase emerging talent from our state, is hosting a reading at noon on Saturday (10/24) that features the winners of some of their most prestigious annual awards: children’s author Bridget Birdsall, essayist Catherine Jagoe, and poet Cathryn Cofell.

Wisconsin Poet Laureate (and 2016 poetry contest judge) Kimberly Blaeser’s afternoon talk on Picto-Poems explores her nature photography and poetry, and the ways in which the merging of the two explores intersecting ideas of Native place, nature, preservation, and spiritual sustenance Eau Claire author (and 2016 fiction contest judge) B.J. Hollars takes on the limits of truth with a Saturday (10/24) late-afternoon reading from Dispatches from the Drownings, a hybrid text about drownings in the Eau Claire River complete with facts, lies, and a wide range of blurring in between (and some creepy photos, too).

Of course, all of these wonderful events and many more— including talks, readings, and presentations by other stellar Wisconsin writers—can be found at wisconsinbookfestival.org.

—Jason A. Smith

TURN THE PAGE TO READ THE SECOND PLACE PRIZE-WINNING SHORT STORY FROM OUR 2015 FICTION CONTEST!

W i s c o n s i n

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

f all

2 0 1 5

47

read WI

2

Fiction CONTEST WINNER

Wisconsin People & Ideas

2015 Fiction Contest

Duck, Duck, Goose

By Erica Kanesaka Kalnay

W

hen the children drew pictures of our school, it always looked as if they were drawing a jail. They would start with a big rectangle, and then fill it with countless little squares until the windows started to overlap.

Then they would draw a bigger rectangle around the perimeter, so the chain link fence became a magic force field, perpendicular to the ground. It perfectly enclosed our school, cutting down under the imaginary daisies and up into the waxy blue clouds.

The children didn’t know any better. To them, every school was just like our retired Milwaukee Public Schools building at 62nd and Congress. The bus would drop them off every morning in their too-big backpacks, and it was always a new beginning, as if yesterday had never occurred.

From my post at the bottom of stairwell six, I watched them descend into

48

f all

2 0 1 5

W i s c o n s i n

P E O P L E

&

the basement that housed our kindergarten wing. They precariously clutched a grimy rail on one side and a sibling’s hand on the other, stepping twice on each stair in the clunky snow boots that got donated every winter. Every morning, all but the bravest grinned and adverted their eyes as I greeted them, as if they were surprised I remembered their names. Then their siblings would help them unzip their jackets and hang them in the lockers designed for middle school students, on hooks they couldn’t reach.

The children would hold their breath and pause in the doorway, hugging their red folders, just for that moment fully aware I D E A S

of what it meant to pass through that threshold.

For the holidays, the art teacher had the children trace their hands on green construction paper and glue them together to make evergreens. They made a mess with the Elmer’s squeeze bottles and glitter shakers, and I marched them upstairs to the bathroom in single file with their sparkling fingers outstretched. The music teacher taught them to sing “Silent Night” with sign language, and even though I disagreed with the religiosity, I couldn’t help but think they sounded like little angels. We were a charter school, mostly Hmong, half Christian and half Shaman.

read WI Most of the teachers were Christian, and Santa Claus was tacked to the bulletin boards every winter, but no one put up a fight. “Sleep in heavenly peeea-ce,” the children sang. Some of them still barely knew English, but they knew that word.

We all said the “PeaceBuilders’ Pledge” after breakfast. It echoed down the cold halls: I am a PeaceBuilder.

I pledge: to praise people to give up put downs, to seek wise people, to notice and speak up about hurts I have caused, to right wrongs, to help others...

I will build peace at home, at school, and in my community each day.

When I tested them on it, some of the children would proudly finish, “And inmyumunity each day.” I tried to teach them what community meant, but never found the right words.

Soon I realized that maybe I didn’t know myself.

One of our sixth graders was jumped on his way from the building to the buses by some teenagers we called “the neighborhood kids.” Our Hmong culture teacher, a slim, reticent man, had run after them, calling, “Please, stop!”

“Teacher, a bad guy go down there, and he take my TV,” one girl told me, as we passed another teacher’s display of Santa Claus going down a chimney.

• • • It was the last Friday before Christmas, my third year of teaching, the year of Sandy Hook. Our playground, just an expanse of blacktop with the basketball hoops ripped out, had turned into a sheet of ice surrounded by a ring of hardened snow.

We normally had outdoor recess unless it was fifteen degrees or below. “Go play,” I would tell the children. They would tug at the giant knot of jump ropes, always hoping to untangle one, but it never worked.

Then they would run to the far reaches of the blacktop and poke the ice with their ungloved fingers until one of them would

decide to throw a chunk and watch it shatter, and I had to blow the whistle. If I saw a group of them gathered, it usually meant someone had scraped a knee, and I would use the walkie talkie to call the office. “You look like a police,” they said.

Once they were huddled around a dead sparrow that must have fallen, immaculate, from the air. Once I saw a group of them stamping all over a snow bank. “We are making sticky rice,” they said.

But that Friday, Mrs. Vang, the head secretary, came over the loudspeaker.

“Please excuse for this interruption,” she said. “We have indoor recess.” Mrs. Vang always said it like that, “Please excuse for this interruption,” and no one wanted to correct her. It became something familiar.

Mrs. Vang had been through the war in Laos and was like a grandmother to all the children, although she had the luminous skin of someone much younger, and it didn’t seem quite possible. She knew all 700 children by name, along with the story of each family, whose father worked nightshift and whose uncle lived in Thailand and who went to daycare after dismissal and who was a picky eater. On particularly cold days, she cooked for the entire staff. She made industrial-sized batches of nqaij qaib hau xyaw tshuaj, chicken porridge with herbs, and when summer came, she would make nab vam, a dessert of iced coconut milk with rainbow layers of tapioca.

I took the children to the small gym, where I tried to teach them to play “Duck, Duck, Goose.” Some of them couldn’t figure out when to stop and would keep looping around the circle as we shouted, “Sit down, stop!” My shyest student, Eli, was too bashful to run when tagged, but we still made sure he got a turn to be “goose,” because that was fair.

Eli was not only the shyest, but the smallest, so tiny his mom had to fold his waistband over and sew it there, because they didn’t make uniforms in his size.

On the first day of school, the other children had asked me, “What is a baby doing at school?” They were just curious, and once I explained to them that people come in different sizes, they always made a special effort to include him. Still, Eli only talked in private. “Teacher,” he would whisper during snack time, “My mommy’s taking me to Chuck E. Cheese tomorrow.” Eli only raised his voice above W i s c o n s i n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Erica Kanesaka Kalnay lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she writes fiction and studies Victorian literature and childhood. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her second-place prize story, “Duck, Duck, Goose,” is based on some of her experiences teaching in Milwaukee, and is dedicated to the city’s students and educators.

JUDGE’S NOTES

By Nickolas Butler: “Duck, Duck, Goose” attempts to deal with so many societal issues our culture is grappling with today: violence, school shootings, poverty, education. Finely written and concise, this story is the product of an author who demonstrates an intimate understanding of our urban schools and children. There is much to admire in this little gem.

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

f all

2 0 1 5

49

read WI that whisper during fire drills, when he would start screaming and run to me with outstretched arms, while all the other children stampeded onto their squares, excited to do something different, excited they knew the procedure. “I don’t want a fire,” he would say, no matter how many times I tried to explain the word drill.

“There’s no fire,” I said. “We’re just pretending.”

At our school, none of the teachers ever had time to go online, so none of us heard the news during the day. After the children were checked off on their buses, we had a Christmas party with a sock exchange. I got a pair of red and silver striped socks and put some cookies and peppermint bark in a napkin for later.

Someone had a hand bubbler, a twisting stem of thin glass with bulbs on each end. When we cupped the bottom part in our hands, the red liquid inside would rise and fall depending on the person’s temperature. We laughed, trying to figure out whose hands were the coldest.

I was driving past a McDonald’s on Fond du Lac when I heard about Sandy Hook. I became suddenly very aware of the fact that I was crying and turned the radio off.

Whatever I did, it would be wrong. I ate all the cookies and peppermint bark and felt my skin crawl with the sugar.

That weekend, I went to my friend Melissa’s Christmas pageant. Melissa and I had met in the hospital. She was the only one who understood when I got caught hiding food in my pockets, and then I gained weight, and she didn’t. She looked impossibly thin in all black. Her anorexia had started at age eleven, and, after that, she never grew any taller. She looked like a child standing among the adult choir.

The priest gave a moving sermon I don’t remember. The children were beautiful, of course.

“It’s terrible,” Melissa said to me afterwards. “What do you think? You’re a teacher.” Melissa was never able to keep a job or finish a semester of school. Her eyes looked like they would swallow her face.

• • • Before dawn in Milwaukee, you could tell you were in a bad neighborhood, because there would be fewer streetlights. On foggy mornings, once I crossed Holton, it was 50

f all

2 0 1 5

W i s c o n s i n

P E O P L E

&

like passing into a dark cloud. Often police cars would park along Locust, flashing in silence, casting the street in a shade of red. I would stop at Starbucks and order a passion tea that I sipped through a straw as I walked up to the building.

On Monday, the principal, Mrs. Moua, stood before the entrance, fiddling with something.

“Make sure you close the doors behind you,” she said.

I said, “Oh yes, that’s very important.”

At the end of the day, I had not become a better teacher. We had another meeting in the library. We were all wearing our

I was driving past a McDonald’s on Fond du Lac when I heard about Sandy Hook. I became suddenly very aware of the fact that I was crying and turned the radio off.

Christmas socks. A third-grade teacher raised her hand and said she had taped a piece of black paper next to her door, so it would be ready to cover the little window, just to be safe. Everyone agreed that was very important. Mrs. Moua told us about Code Blue. If a suspicious person entered the building, Mrs. Vang would go on the loudspeaker and say, “The crow is out.”

That meant we had to lock our doors, but we should go on teaching. If the situation escalated, she would come on again and say, “The crow is flying,” and then we would have to make the children duck and cover.

The next day, before the loudspeaker came on, we were sitting in a circle playing a game with a cardboard box.

“This box can be anything you want it to be.”

“It’s a rocket.”

“It’s a robot.”

“It’s a Transformer.”

“It’s a tower for Rapunzel.”

“It’s a boat.”

Eli didn’t want a turn, as usual. He looked like a small creature, ready to flee.

The loudspeaker crackled. “Please excuse for this interruption,” said Mrs. Vang. “The crow is out.”

I D E A S

“Okay, now we’re going to practice what we have to do if a bad person comes into our school,” I said. “This is very important. It keeps us safe.”

I showed them how to duck and cover.

“We cannot be silly,” I said. “This is not a game.”

I thought of the picture I saw on the Internet, the one where it looks like they’re playing “Follow the Leader.”

“Please excuse for this interruption,” said Mrs. Vang. “The crow is flying.”

The children fell over one another, and chairs toppled over, as they squirmed into their positions under the tables.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to turn off the lights now. But you don’t have to be scared. This is just pretend, remember.”

I couldn’t tell who had started to giggle.

“This is not a game,” I said.

Then there was silence. Just Eli crying from somewhere.

I had forgotten to tape the paper and saw Mrs. Moua’s face flash past the window. She jiggled the doorknob, testing the lock. Eli wailed.

My eyes began to adjust to the dark, and the outlines of the classroom started to come into focus, the rows of labeled bins in their cubbies—pattern blocks, linking cubes, Play-Doh, Legos—and pencil boxes positioned over their nametags. The ABC books in alphabetical order. The carpet with a square marked off for each child.

On the first day of school, I had told each of them, “Look, this is your name. This is where you get to sit. This is your special spot.” From under the tables, still out of view, some of the children were starting to giggle again. “This is not a game,” I said. I yelled it, and it worked.

“You just want everything to be beautiful,” Mrs. Moua had told me during an evaluation, and of course, it was wrong to want that. A child would always cry, or sneeze, or pee, or vomit, and you had to deal with it. A child would have arms covered in bedbug bites, or a jacket with a broken zipper, and you had to deal with that, too.

But inside the classroom I had thought I could make my own rules. I always wanted perfection. The pencils go here. The markers go here. The scissors go here.

The glue sticks go here. The crayons go here. The paper goes here. Let’s pretend now. The children go here. Z

New & RECENT Releases

September 2015 Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

by David Maraniss Simon & Schuster Waiting

by Kevin Henkes Greenwillow Books Wisconsin Agriculture: A History

by Jerry Apps (Academy Fellow) Wisconsin Historical Society Press For Dear Life: Poems

by Ronald Wallace (Academy Fellow) University of Pittsburgh Press On Fourth Lake: A Social History of Lake Mendota

by Donald P. Sanford Commodore's Press Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods

by John Gurda (Academy Fellow) Historic Milwaukee Inc.

OCTOBER 2015 Future Perfect

by Jen Larsen HarperTeen Dickey Chapelle Under Fire: Photographs by the First American Female War Correspondent Killed in Action

by John Garofolo Wisconsin Historical Society Press

NOVEMBER 2015 From the Mouths of Dogs: What Our Pets Teach Us about Life, Death, and Being Human

by B.J. Hollars University of Nebraska Press Editor's Pick: Through these essays, author and UW–Eau Claire creative writing professor B.J. Hollars reveals as much about our pets he does about the humans who share their lives.

Educating Milwaukee: How One City’s History of Segregation and Struggle Shaped Its Schools

by James K. Nelsen Wisconsin Historical Society Press Did we miss something? E-mail the editor at jsmith@wisconsinacademy.org with new and recent titles by Wisconsin authors to read and review.

read WI

{ Book Reviews }

The Man Who Painted the Universe: The Story of a Planetarium in the Heart of the North Woods

by Ron Legro and Avi Lank Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 160 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Shelby Anderson One of the charms of visiting the North Woods of Wisconsin is stumbling upon the occasional quirky attraction. Turn down a side road, and you might discover a park full of concretebased sculpture or a wooden Muskie the size of a semi.

The Kovac Planetarium in tiny Monico is one of those hidden Wisconsin treasures and the focus of a new book by Ron Legro and Avi Lank. Legro and Lank are experienced writers and editors from Milwaukee, and their book, The Man Who Painted the Universe: The Story of a Planetarium in the Heart of the North Woods, reflects their skill as both storytellers and chroniclers of how one man’s dream became reality.

Legro and Lank’s slim volume tells the story of Frank Kovac Jr. and his quixotic quest to build a planetarium on his North Woods property. Growing up in Chicago, Kovac fell in love with the cosmos when his mom took him to the Adler Planetarium. As a boy, he read every book on astronomy at his local library and eventually repurposed his parents’ backyard tool shed into a small observatory. Through these endeavors young Kovac pursued his passion, but Legro and Lank note they were really just practice for what he would later attempt. “A newer, bigger plan was forming in his mind, one based on his love of astronomy and all the dreams he’d already realized.

Someday, he thought. Someday.”

Against this backdrop, Legro and Lank paint the portrait of an optimistic, determined man who, above all else, wants to share his love for and knowledge of the cosmos.

At the age of 19, when most young men are pursuing girls or saving money for a car, Kovac spent his savings on remote patch of property near Monico, Wisconsin (just off of Highway 8 between Rhinelander and Crandon).

“It was almost like something was tugging at me,” Kovac says in the book.

“I could see something, and I could envision this before it even existed.”

Kovac worked jobs in Illinois and northern Michigan, eventually landing a career in the Air Force where his mechanical skills and creativity served him well. When he finally moved to rural Monico, he had the ability and determination to pursue his dream project: a mechanically rotating globe planetarium in which visitors could sit and see wonders of the night sky.

Kovac toiled on his property for about a decade and spent almost $200,000 of his own money in pursuit of his dream planetarium. His first version didn’t survive the Wisconsin winter. While his second attempt was more sturdy,

continue

W i s c o n s i n

reading

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

f all

2 0 1 5

51

read WI NEW

Wisconsin poetry

Honorable Mention Poems from our 2015 Poetry Contest

Neighbors

I felt as if I knew him. I felt as if he knew me.

—Young soldier, upon hearing about FDR’s death

We all listen to Franklin’s fireside chats, straight from the White House to Our House, though we have no fireplace to sit beside.

My mother, wrapped in a chenille robe at the kitchen table, takes in those airwave assurances, though she knows nothing of Hyde Park, nothing of Dutchess County or New York.

Still, she believes she knows the Roosevelts— those kindly faces and neighborly manners; that down-home decency you see in country folk.

And there is something else she shares with FDR— the ravages of polio. From twelve on, she has lived her life on a shriveled leg and malformed foot; she can imagine the trials of running a country from a wheelchair—ordeal by the seat of one’s pants.

America’s problems are huge, says our president, but the world’s are even bigger. And when a friend needs help, as does England, we’ll be there, ready to lend a garden hose to a neighbor whose house has caught on fire. That hose becomes weaponry and our ships face the deadly threat of U-boats in the Atlantic. Nothing to do but see it through, says Mother, who sees three brothers off to Normandy, buys her first pair of slacks for a factory shift, keeps herself radio-tuned for the duration.

I’ve just turned eleven when the citizenry loses a neighbor.

I watch Mother turn up the Philco, dab at tears, sink into a chair at the Formica table. Truman takes over, says, I feel like the moon, the stars and all the planets have fallen on me. They’ve fallen on our house, too.

—Jeri McCormick, Madison

52

f all

2 0 1 5

W i s c o n s i n

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Homeless in August The new bed rests where the old one was, but he will not set paw on its new-smelling softness; instead, sticks his nose under the old rug wadded for trash, sighs for what still smells like home.

Moved to the bleached Alzheimer’s unit, your mother, bereft of smell and direction, pleads, “I just want to go home.”

And again, over and over again, “Let me go home. Please.

Please, take me back home.”

Home was my big sister, how easy we were together, laughing, wrestling, dabbing our sweaty wrists and necks with “Evening in Paris.”

One night she complained of headache, then took two days to die from polio.

So far this seems to be a kinder August.

The locusts sing a less threatening song.

After years of commutes, you are home.

Red, fragrant flowers blossom from our walls.

With luck, their scent will stay, while comfort, like August, will come, will go.

—Kathleen Dale, Milwaukee

read WI

{ Book Reviews }

Annunciation When I got to her earthen room, I thought, Oh God, no. Not this one.

Too young, too fragile, for this wordmade-flesh deal you’ve got brewing.

I was still a vapor having my doubts, when I saw her look up from her book and stare at a tree outside her window.

Something brought a tear to her eye, which she wiped dutifully away, then smiled. Maybe she was thinking of a shepherd boy she liked or what was for supper. (Even in my etheric state, I could smell something tasty bubbling in her mother’s kitchen.)

Then, the look on her face told me we had the right girl for the job.

All I had to do was materialize and tell her the story.

—Lisa Vihos, Sheboygan

Legro and Lank recount one incident where the 4,000 pound, 22-foot-diameter planetarium “globe, dangling from the remaining, uppermost strap, became unstable, rocking back and forth until it began sliding off the ring toward the floor. Underneath the globe, Frank ran to the center and crouched as it fell around him.”

Other unforeseen setbacks and challenges make for entertaining reading, but, overall, the reader is impressed by Kovac’s determination.

The final step of the project was perhaps one of the biggest challenges in building the planetarium. In a beautiful combination of art and science, Kovac spent five months—from January to May of 2003—painting the night sky as it is seen above northern Wisconsin onto the interior surface of the globe.

Remarkably, note Legro and Lank, Kovac often painted from memory, taking breaks to go outside and peer up at the night sky to check his work.

Professional astronomers who have visited the Kovac Planetarium remark on its accuracy. To this day, Frank will climb a ladder and touch up his night sky with dabs of luminous paint; adding and taking away stars, or adjusting their brightness, to reflect new astronomical discoveries.

The Kovac Planetarium, which today welcomes thousands of visitors each year, is a testament to one man’s determination. Amateur astronomers and lovers of the weird and wonderful will appreciate Legro and Lank’s thorough research and interviews with Kovac’s family, friends, and neighbors as they pursue the mechanism that drives his passion. The Man Who Painted the Universe: The Story of a Planetarium in the Heart of the North Woods includes photographs chronicling the construction process of the planetarium, which are helpful and interesting visual aids. Like the Kovac Planetarium itself, Legro and Lank combine science and art and create a piece of work everyone can enjoy and appreciate.

The Jesus Cow

by Michael Perry Harper, 304 pages, $24.99

Reviewed by Elizabeth Wyckoff Few contemporary writers are able to capture the essence of small-town Wisconsin as meticulously or as relentlessly as Michael Perry. His bestselling memoirs—Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time; Truck: A Love Story; and Visiting Tom: A Man, A Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace, among others—along with his weekly “Roughneck Grace” column in the Wisconsin State Journal, have earned him a sizable and devoted fan base in the state and beyond.

Yet, before I even read the first page of The Jesus Cow, Perry’s first foray into literary fiction for adults, I found myself wondering if

continue

W i s c o n s i n

reading

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

f all

2 0 1 5

53

read WI

A Few Miles Outside Warroad, Several Weeks Before the Fall Mothers make excuses, hardly doe-eyed but entirely well-meaning.

Their daughters aren’t wayward. Simply, they misplace their senses of direction or heighten their prospects of efficiency.

Their daughters run errands, stop road-side to look at the name, dead before their births, carved on a white cross.

The dead letters are illegible or maybe never pressed deeper into the the juniper plywood than a ballpoint pen to a crossword puzzle at the back of obituary notices. Their daughters go to the certain river through the common chokecherry thicket, step, lift their long cotton skirts not carefully enough over barbed wire, rusted orange, at the old property line. Comfort to these daughters— a clearing and the thought of something delicate from the glacial age warming under a noon sun, or a high wind rustling like rush hour traffic they’d heard on worn VHS tapes—they are curious to the woods.

Nothing frightens or forces them. Mothers do the best they can, shaking off the sugar of a notion, goddamn, didn’t they almost have it all?

The husbands, soft crows feet at corners of their quiet eyes, the ambitious sons with their long drives back to forested counties from big cities, the fingers perfectly calloused for guitar strings, darkrooms, harvest machinery. The good sets of pots and pans. The good sewing machines, the strong radio signals and loud speakers, the twenty-nine acres with steady crops and summer gardens of just enough for the whole year through if jarred properly. Hunters make shots.

Not wanting for mistakes or visions, they are steady gunmen who would know St Hubert’s prayer if it weren’t for science.

All season, they see plenty of good family people drag dark weight of their secrets to the brook. Scopes raise at soft whispers of leaves under some feet, crosshairs put daughters, not deer, almost in dangerous snow globes.

Hunters accidentally guard happily torn dress-hems, dirt carelessly brushed across foreheads by slim fingers that clayed together a knee-high Arcadia so many weeks in the making. Tomorrow, catastrophe levels what is loved. Tonight—skin softens as mud coils down the kitchen drain, skirts brighten with mismatched mending, fables become plans, become night-long fires kept glowing from thin pages of passages made innate years ago. Curtains welcome in moonlight. All is well.

—Christine Holm, Oconomowoc

54

f all

2 0 1 5

W i s c o n s i n

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

read WI

{ Book Reviews }

What Remains Where the author’s formulations challenge the reader’s credulity, I have quoted the German original in the notes. Seeing is believing.

—Ralph Manheim, translator Mein Kampf

There’s something to the feel of ash, it’s silkiness of residue, from which one cannot easily wash.

Not unlike some sibilant hush whose loose affect slides over you, there’s something to the feel of ash more real than any maddening dash from childhood terrors peeking through, the touch from which one cannot wash.

How lighter than the least eyelash, how paler than the palest hue, this something of the sense of ash.

As insubstantial as a wish, the ashes rise beyond the flue, from which one cannot hope to wash.

To wish it were pure balderdash is characteristic but untrue: there’s something to the feel of ash from which one cannot ever wash.

—John Pidgeon, Green Bay

his superb grasp of rural Midwest idiosyncrasy would translate into fiction.

While not as heart-rending as much of his nonfiction, The Jesus Cow still contains his signature mélange of careful character studies, riotous oneliners, and goofy, good-natured fun.

The novel opens on Christmas Eve as Harley Jackson wanders into his barn to discover a newborn Holstein calf with the unmistakable likeness of Jesus Christ depicted on its flank. Harley, a 42-year-old bachelor who considers “low overhead” the secret to happiness, takes one look at the calf and says: “Well, that’s trouble.” Of course, this isn’t Harley’s only bit of trouble. He’s trying to keep his deceased father’s farmland from being completely gobbled up by Klute Sorensen—the overly confident, Hummerdriving, motivational audiobook-listening owner of Clover Blossom Estates.

Harley’s also falling in love with Mindy Johnson, a self-assured new woman in town who drives a beefy F-250 pickup truck and wears a particular pair of boots, “sturdy wafflestompers with some scuff on them,” that make his heart skip a beat.

Though the calf could solve Harley’s financial woes (“Get a lawyer—and start printin’ T-shirts,” his friend Billy Tripp advises), Harley initially aims to keep the calf hidden from the rest of the world. He knows that his honest, hard-working parents wouldn’t have approved of him turning this miracle into a profit. But when his mailwoman catches sight of the calf wandering outside the barn, she snaps some pictures and posts them to the Internet.

Within hours, the photos have gone viral, #JesusCow is trending, and Harley’s life has suddenly assumed a great deal of new overhead.

Perry’s debut boasts a brilliant cast of characters, with each townsperson quirkier and more complicated than the next. From Carolyn Sawchuck (a failed academic with a motor oil recycling problem) to Maggie Jankowski (a Catholic widow who runs a car-crushing business) to Billy Tripp (a decorated combat veteran who lives “surrounded by stacks of books and an innumerable census of cats in a single-wide trailer”), every character is multilayered.

Even despicable Klute Sorensen is lonely enough to elicit sympathy, when he’s not spouting hokey business aphorisms.

Fans of Perry’s nonfiction will take pleasure in spotting the aspects of The Jesus Cow that bear a strong resemblance to details from his own life.

The fictional town of Swivel (population: 562), marked by its four-legged water tower and social hub of a gas station, makes a nearly perfect standin for Perry’s hometown of New Auburn (or, as he affectionately calls it, “Nobbern”). Harley takes after his creator, too. He volunteers for the local fire department, loves Loretta Lynn, and reminisces about high school kisses in the back of a basketball bus. Perry knows his small Wisconsin town inside and out, from Main Street to the outlying farms, and the material works just as well for novel fodder as it does in his personal essays.

With its silly premise and lighthearted tone, The Jesus Cow doesn’t contain much more than a surface-level amount of pathos. But while Perry’s novel doesn’t resonate the way his nonfiction does, lacking the poignancy that comes from his portrayals of real people and real life, it’s still an immensely pleasurable read: offbeat, absorbing, and laugh-out-loud funny. Z

W i s c o n s i n

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

f all

2 0 1 5

55

read WI Some People Some people have been leaving too soon.

Hooked

Their library books still due, the gas and electric bill waiting in the bills to pay slot.

Some did not even finish breakfast, get to eat any of the packed picnic lunch.

During ordinary days they started with waking up and loving, kissing hello, touching a shoulder to to say goodbye for the day, after harsh words and a disagreement before making up.

The boat motor still warmed up, the laundry folded, no chance to call back.

We are a porous people Leaving spaces where we were Empty spot on the couch under the reading lamp no lap for kitty cat to curl We are a here and then gone people Pausing a while some lingering Some brief tiny hands Bigger hands moving in water turned to air Puff puff breaths ease and rhythm Returning and leaving Do we rock and wail or cling or go easy seekers and finders and oh no how did I end up here or do we turn to smell and feel instead and recognize home and curl up nose under tail finally resting and thinning out until we are more air than matter essentially you —Molly Murphy, Madison

56

f all

2 0 1 5

W i s c o n s i n

P E O P L E

&

I D E A S

Driving my flatbed over Nebraska back roads where marsh land opens up like an ironed seam.

Driving to Merton’s fishing hole beyond the aster and bottle-brush where we once spent afternoons reeling in trout.

I can still see your calloused hands lines angled deep, wide as the nets we swooped to capture shoes, cartons, the occasional fish.

Our tattered net as holey as your Royals baseball cap fifty years it spent backwards on your head.

I was a fan of everything the sturgeon, crappies, pike meal worms we speared on treble hooks long wait for a bob, the drive back down to Wally’s A and P when enough was enough.

Sitting on the lean-to-porch cracking an RC cola watching the flatbeds rattle across the rutted roads.

—Sharon Foley, Whitefish Bay

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

C o m i n g

t h i s

F a l l

WISCONSIN ACADEMY TALKS wisconsin academy of sciences, arts & letters

Still the Geography of Hope Thursday, October 22, 7:00 pm Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center, 1 John Nolen Drive, Madison

This year’s Jordahl Public Lands Lecture features Timothy Egan, an acclaimed writer and veteran chronicler of the West whose interests range wide across the American landscape and American history. Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, a popular columnist for the New York Times, and a National Book Awardwinning author. The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters is proud to be a partner with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW–Madison for the fourth annual talk honoring the late conservationist—and Wisconsin Academy Fellow—Harold “Bud” Jordahl. Free and open to the public. No registration required.

Wisconsin People & Ideas 2015 Fiction and Poetry Contest Readings at the Wisconsin Book Festival Friday, October 23, 5:30–7:00 pm A Room of One’s Own, 315 West Gorham Street, Madison

Every year Wisconsin People & Ideas hosts fiction and poetry contests that garner hundreds of submissions from across the state. Join us at the 2015 Wisconsin Book Festival for a reading featuring the best emerging writers from our state: the Wisconsin People & Ideas 2015 Fiction and Poetry Contest winners. Fiction readers include: Nikki Kallio (Hortonville), Erica Kanesaka Kalnay (Madison), and Kathryn Gahl (Appleton). Poetry readers include Lisa Vihos (Sheboygan), Sean Avery (Madison), and Kathleen Dale (Milwaukee). Free and open to the public.

JAMES WATROUS GALLERY wisconsin academy of sciences, arts & letters

Sandra Byers: The Nature of Things Rina Yoon: Between In and Yeon On view November 6–December 27, 2015 Opening reception with gallery talks on Saturday, November 7, from 5:30–7:30 pm

Sandra Byers (Rock Springs) works in porcelain, creating tiny sculptures that echo natural forms and textures. They bring to mind the sort of treasures one might pocket on a weekend hike: shells and bones, nuts and mushrooms, flower buds and feathers. Current work by Rina Yoon (Milwaukee) is a meditation on the relationship of fate and will in our lives. Her EarthBody print series images have a primal, almost fetal quality, and her coiled paper and video works crouch and bend, unfurling like seedlings or rolling like leaves in the wind. This exhibition and related events are free and open to the public.

Left: Sandra Byers, Winged, 2013. Porcelain, (h) 3.5 x (w) 2.25 x (d) 1.88 inches.

Right: Rina Yoon, Earthbody 27, 2012. Photo polymer gravure, 34 x 22 inches.

Visit www.wisconsinacademy.org for more details