Wisconsin People & Ideas – Fall 2021

Inside the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s

Art Preserve

Newport Poetry Trail • The Last Glacier • Writing Contest Winners

All Creatures Great and Small

Downton Abbey

Finding Your Roots

Nature

Now you can stream more of your favorite PBS shows including Masterpiece, Finding Your Roots, NOVA, Nature, Ken Burns and many more — online and in the PBS Video App with PBS Wisconsin Passport.

Learn how to sign up or activate your membership at pbswisconsin.org/passport.

WISCONSIN ACADEMY STAFF Jane Elder • Executive Director Jody Clowes • Director, James Watrous Gallery John Greenler • Director, Wisconsin Strategy Initiatives Jessica James • Program Coordinator, Wisconsin Strategy Initiatives Joe Lyons • Donor Relations Coordinator Matt Rezin • Building Manager & Outreach Coordinator Amanda E. Shilling • Director of Development Jason A. Smith • Associate Director and Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas Sallie Anna Steiner • Events & Communications Manager Nikita Werner • Administrative & Strategic Projects Coordinator Ann Wilson • Business Manager OFFICERS OF THE BOARD Tom Luljak • President Tina Abert • President-elect Patricia Brady • Immediate Past President Richard Donkle • Treasurer Roberta Filicky-Peneski • Secretary Steven A. Ackerman • Vice President of Sciences Malcolm Brett • Vice President of Arts L. Jane Hamblen • Vice President of Letters Andrew Richards • Foundation President STATEWIDE BOARD OF DIRECTORS Kimberly M. Blaeser, Burlington Frank D. Byrne, Monona Jane Elder, Madison Joe Heim, La Crosse B.J. Hollars, Eau Claire Catherine Gunther Kodat, Appleton Robert D. Mathieu, Madison Michael Morgan, Milwaukee Dipesh Navsaria, Madison Kevin Reilly, Verona Rafael Salas, Ripon Tim Size, Madison Thomas W. Still, Madison Chan Stroman, Madison OFFICERS OF THE ACADEMY FOUNDATION Foundation Founder: Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) Andrew Richards • Foundation President Freda Harris • Foundation Vice President Richard Donkle • Foundation Treasurer Arjun Sanga • Foundation Secretary FOUNDATION DIRECTORS Tina Abert Mark J. Bradley Patricia Brady Kristen E. Carreira Jane Elder Jack Kussmaul Tom Luljak

Editor’s Note You might have noticed something different about our cover. This will be the first issue in my thirteen years as editor of the magazine in which we don’t feature a real person on the cover. I thought that featuring a figurative sculpture—or imagined person, if you like—might be a fitting introduction to our cover story on the Art Preserve, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s new facility that houses the artistic works of environment builders, which can include whole rooms and even houses full of and made from art.

By showing a figurative sculpture on the cover, I thought I might give readers a moment to pause and consider the “people and ideas” of our name, collapse them into one iconic element that represents the vision of the late Ruth DeYoung Kohler and all of the artists, curators, and collaborators that came together to make the Art Preserve—the only museum of its kind—a reality.

Environment builders such as Phillips-based artist Fred Smith, whose sculpture is featured on the cover, often seek to remake their surroundings in a way that is aesthetically pleasing or provides an outlet for their creativity. Sometimes they feel compelled to do so by some unknown force, perhaps an idea so strong that they have no choice but to follow where it leads.

Too, there is another, perhaps more symbolic reason for including this figure on the cover. Because this will be my last issue of the magazine, I wanted to do something a little out of the ordinary, memorable even. By the time you read this, I will have left my position as the Academy’s associate director and editor of Wisconsin People & Ideas to join the PBS Wisconsin team as a project manager.

There is much I have changed about the magazine during my time as editor, precedents I have broken and new directions taken with the articles, stories, and artwork we have brought to you, our readers. I look forward to seeing the direction Christopher Chambers, the incoming interim editor, will take this fine publication. You are in good hands with Chris, who is editor of the Midwest Review and also happens to be our Academy Courses coordinator for creative writing. You can reach Chris with questions and words of welcome at cchambers@wisconsinacademy.org.

As for me, I will still be around, continuing to serve the people of Wisconsin as best I can.

Patrick Stutz Photography

WISCONSIN ACADEMY

OF SCIENCES, ARTS & LETTERS

Jason A. Smith, Editor

On the cover: A sculpture by Phillips-area artist Fred Smith in the collection of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s new Art Preserve in Sheboygan. Photo by Jeffery Machtig/John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

FALL 2021

1

CONTENTS 01 Editor’s Note 04 From the Director 05 Letters Alex Paniagua

06 Happenings Essay

08 A Walk into Someone’s Vision:

Ruth DeYoung Kohler’s Art Preserve

Mary Louise Schumacher

24

Profile

18 Doug Duren’s Good Turn Nickolas Butler

Destination

24 Poetry in the Dark-Sky Park Alex Paniagua

Essay

30 Looking for Mary Lou Williams Fabu Phillis Carter

Jason A. Smith

18

2

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

VOLUME 67 · NUMBER 4 FALL • 2021

Wisconsin People & Ideas (ISSN 15589633) is the quarterly magazine of the nonprofit Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Wisconsin Academy members receive an annual subscription to this magazine.

Since 1954, the Wisconsin Academy has published a magazine for people who are curious about our world and proud of Wisconsin ideas. Wisconsin People & Ideas features thoughtful stories about our people and culture, original creative writing and artwork, and informative articles about Wisconsin innovation. The magazine also hosts annual fiction and poetry contests that provide opportunity and encouragement for Wisconsin writers.

36

Bruce Crownover, Blackfoot Glacier, 2014. Reductive woodcut, 24 by 36 inches.

Copyright © 2021 by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.

All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Postage is paid in Madison, Wisconsin.

@ Watrous Gallery

36 The Last Glacier Jody Clowes

Fiction

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

46 “Honor Cord” • 1st-Place Contest Winner Allison Uselman

JASON A. SMITH editor JEAN LANG copy editor

Poetry

56 Poems • 1st- through 3rd-Place Contest Winners

CHARLOTTE FRASCONA cold reader

Jennifer Fandel, David Southward, and Paula Schulz

JODY CLOWES arts editor

Book Reviews

63 The Comfort of Monsters, by Willa C. Richards

HUSTON DESIGN design & layout

Reviewed by Frank L. Anderson

64 Godspeed, by Nickolas Butler Reviewed by Jill Stukenberg

facebook.com/WisconsinAcademy twitter.com/WASAL instagram.com/WatrousGallery

Ideas that move the world forward Join the Wisconsin Academy and help us create a brighter future inspired by Wisconsin people and ideas.

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/brighter to learn how.

Wisconsin Academy Offices 1922 University Avenue • Madison, WI 53726 ph 608-733-6633 • wisconsinacademy.org

FALL 2021

3

From the Director

When I was handed a key to the Academy office building in January of 2012, I had no idea it would be the beginning of a ten-year journey.

And what a journey it has been.

As this will be my last column in the magazine as executive director, I want to say thank you to every donor, member, sponsor, grant-making organization, partner organization, volunteer, and board member who has helped us build on the foundation (laid in 1870) of this wonderful organization. It has been my honor to continue this work to bring curious and creative people together to amplify powerful ideas in the sciences, arts, and letters—ideas that make Wisconsin better.

As someone who resists being put into neat categories, I have loved working on projects across the spectrum of the sciences, arts, and letters—and at the intersections between them. One day I can be talking about the poems of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate, the next about forest carbon sequestration, and the next about the accretive process of printmaking. As disparate as these subjects may seem, the ideas behind them are part of the great conversation of expression and knowledge that make our human experience richer, and our world more sustainable.

I have loved being able to collaborate with our gallery team on ways that art, through thoughtful curation, can help us see contemporary issues or navigate complex challenges, or to feel connected to someone’s experience in ways that words often fail to do. It has been an inspiration to read the works of poets and writers whose craft for the written word brings another form of expression that cultivates understanding and helps us experience our world in greater depth.

4

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

And, for someone who has labored to protect the living earth for most of my career, I am so grateful to have worked with some of the best minds in Wisconsin on thoughtful analysis of, and strategic guidance for, safeguarding fresh water and grappling with climate change and its impacts. I salute the generosity through which people from many fields of expertise have given their time, insight, and good will in the spirit of collaboration to find pathways for genuine progress.

Behind the scenes, of course, has been all the work that goes into running a functioning nonprofit, from board meetings and budgets to strategic plans and logic models, not to mention fundraising and maintaining a 1930s-era building. While all this work comes with the territory, it was made easier through the efforts of some of the smartest and most dedicated colleagues that an executive director could wish for (especially through some very challenging times). I want to thank them for their extraordinary service.

I hope that during my brief decade at the Academy, which stands on the shoulders of founders such as John Wesley Hoyt, Increase Lapham, and Thomas Crowder Chamberlin, I have carried their vision forward within the context of the times. I also hope that whoever succeeds me as executive director will do the same.

With deep appreciation.

Jane Elder, Executive Director

Letters

News for Members JANE ELDER TO RETIRE After ten years at the helm of the Wisconsin Academy, executive director Jane Elder will be retiring. Her last day will be December 1, 2021.

In preparation for her departure, the Academy Board has engaged a search firm to help identify a diverse pool of well-qualified candidates and to ensure the Academy is positioned for a bright future. We will send an update to all members when we have more details about the new executive director.

GIVE THE GIFT OF IDEAS Share your love of Wisconsin ideas with a Wisconsin Academy gift membership—which includes a year subscription to Wisconsin People & Ideas. Membership makes the perfect holiday gift. To purchase a gift membership, visit wisconsinacademy.org/membership today.

FICTION & POETRY CONTESTS OPEN SOON Our next Fiction & Poetry Contests will be accepting submissions January 15 to March 15, 2022. The contest is open to all Wisconsin residents and students age 18 and older. Contest winners in both the fiction and poetry categories receive awards of $500 to $100, publication in Wisconsin People & Ideas (read the 2021 prizewinning works in this issue), and a reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival. For more details, visit wisconsinacademy.org/contests.

JAMES WATROUS GALLERY NOW OPEN After being closed for eighteen months, the James Watrous Gallery in Overture Center for the Arts is once again open to the public with a retrospective exhibit of the work of printmaker Jack Damer. Note: all visitors to the Overture Center must present proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test along with a matching photo ID. Face masks are required throughout the building.

Letters I have entered the fiction contest that you have sponsored several times. When Jerry Apps was advertised as being a judge a while back, I thought I had a good chance of maybe placing. I know Jerry, and thought I had a story that he would like. But I didn’t win. And that got me thinking, Did Jerry actually see my story?

So I wrote you a letter and you were honest in saying, “We do have a preliminary screening process wherein I and another judge (both of us with years of literary experience) pare down the pile of submissions of 100 or so stories before they are passed along to the lead judge.”

I’m a story teller, not a literary writer. I don’t know if my story was pared down before Jerry Apps got to see it, but I do know that what you think is good and what Jerry Apps thinks is good are not the same. No two people can see a story the same way.

If a writer spends $20 to enter a contest, his or her entry should be seen by the advertised, final judge. I really like Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine. But, because of the way you conduct the writing contest, I cannot be part of it in the future.

John R. Mutter, Jr., Shawano

The Editor Responds: I see your perspective on the “objectivity” of the contest and your desire to have your writings seen by the lead judge. However, most of our lead judges—busy writers themselves—don’t have the time to read 100 stories (or in the case of the poetry contest 700 poems).

You’d be hard pressed to find a writing contest out there in which the lead judge reads every single submission themselves.

Our preliminary screeners—me being one of them—take seriously our role in finding the best works to forward on to final judging. However, being humans, we do carry our own prejudices and preconceived notions about what makes for a good story or poem. I understand your point about what you feel is misrepresentation on the part of the contest judging and of course respect your decision not to participate. In the meantime, keep on writing.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR We want to hear from our members. Please send feedback and comments about Academy programs and publications to editor@ wisconsinacademy.org.

FALL 2021

5

HAPPENINGS

6

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

t/Stages Photog ber am L TJ

One positive effect of the global COVID–19 pandemic has been a proliferation of creative projects that bring artists together in support of each other and the greater Wisconsin community overall. Once such endeavor is The Hope Project, initiated by Eau Claire author and educator B.J. Hollars. The Hope Project grew from Hollars’ own feelings of hopelessness in the face of the pandemic, which led to an online call for fellow Wisconsin writers to share the places and ways they found hope. To bring some form to the call, Hollars asked that participants submit poems or essays of no more than 500 words and take as inspiration for their titles the Emily Dickinson poem, “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”

Soon, Hollars’ inbox was flooded with writings from all over the state, the best 100 of which he has collected and put together in a new book titled, Hope Is the Thing: Wisconsinites on Perseverance in a Pandemic. Edited by Hollars and published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press in their effort to “record history as it is happening,” the collection is an extended mediation on coping and, yes, hoping, through mainly poems but also a few short essays by emerging and established writers throughout the state.

In curating this work, Hollars says that his “editorial philosophy centered on elevating and amplifying a range of voices to more fully capture this unprecedented moment. Collectively, this work is meant to serve as both snapshot and time capsule, documenting the many unexpected places where hope has resided in the midst of this health crisis and beyond.”

The writings, mainly composed during the early days of the pandemic, come from different regions of the state by people of varying age groups, professions, and ethnic and religious backgrounds. Some of the titles are deeply evocative—“Hope Is a Wildfire,”

by Dekila Chungyalpa—while others are playful—“Hope Is a Lost Peanut Floating Down the Kickapoo,” by Matt Cashion— and touching—“Hope Is a Dad Dance,” by Matthew Guenette. The book features works by familiar names, writers like Nickolas Butler and Jerry Apps and poets such as Kimberly Blaeser and Dasha Kelly Hamilton, and readers of this magazine will surely recognize other contributors from our pages: Heather Swan, Karen Loeb, Jenna Rindo, Curt Meine, Nicholas Gulig, Jennifer Fandel, and Fabu Phillis Carter (to name a few).

The new collection is available online from the Wisconsin Historical Society website and at the Wisconsin Historical Museum in Madison and Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee.

rap

hy

ANTH O LO GY

Dasha Kelly Hamilton

PO ETRY EXCHAN G E Wisconsin Poet Laureate Dasha Kelly Hamilton is launching a new statewide poetry exchange this fall titled A Line Meant as a way to humanize community conversations around incarceration and reentry.

Beginning in October 2021, Wisconsin residents are invited to participate in A Line Meant (ALM) by downloading writing idea prompts and upload instructions at wisconsinpoetlaureate.org or through the laureate’s Facebook page at facebook.com/WisPoLo. After generating a poem in response to the prompt and uploading it, participants will receive another in exchange. For incarcerated writers, a prompt list and curriculum will be provided to facility wardens and education directors. For both audiences of writers, a recorded series of writing workshops will be available. All Wisconsin residents are encouraged to participate in this statewide poetic dialogue, especially residents of prisons.

“One line of poetry can work like a spell. Without constraints or context, a single line can conjure a memory for one person and pull gospel from another,” says Dasha, who has been teaching and leading workshops in prisons since 2005. “For my project, poetry lines will connect the creativity of neighbors and humanity of strangers. Ultimately, A Line Meant aspires to fuel an arts-led coalition around the wellness and advocacy for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people.”

As the project moves forward, selected poems will be added to a monthly digital digest and small, printed chapbooks, the latter of which will be mailed to participants who do not have access to the Internet. At the end of the project, which concludes in May 2022, Dasha will select her favorites to be published in a collection alongside new works of hers generated in response to the project.

There are myriad opportunities for individuals to volunteer in support of the ALM project and corporations and nonprofits alike are invited to join the growing list of institutional partners such as the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, Wisconsin Community Services, CircaWorks, Department of Workforce Development, Wisconsin Writers Association, and Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets.

Bryce Richter/UW Communications

HAPPENINGS

Bassam Z. Shakhashiri

FELLOWS I N TH E N EWS University of Wisconsin–Madison chemistry professor and science educator Bassam Z. Shakhashiri (2005 Fellow) has retired. For more than 50 years, Shakhashiri has worked tirelessy to convey—often through the power of demonstration—the value of science to society and the absolute necessity of broad science literacy for understanding everything from human health to climate change.

Perhaps best known for his colorful and sometimes explosive public demonstration of chemical phenomena, “Once Upon a Christmas Cheery in the Lab of Shakhashiri,” Shakhashiri has addressed audiences in packed houses from Madison to Washington to Silicon Valley, and the program is a seasonal staple on PBS Wisconsin.

But his long-running annual program is just one achievement across a wide-ranging career in science education. Shakhashiri, who in 1953 at age 17 emigrated from Lebanon with his family, joined the UW–Madison chemistry faculty in 1970. In 1983, he founded the UW–Madison Institute for Chemical Education, only to leave the following year to serve as assistant director for science and engineering education at the National Science Foundation, a position he held for fourteen years.

Returning to UW–Madison, Shakhashiri set about establishing himself as a preeminent scholar in science education, giving over time more than 1,500 invited presentations in the United States and around the world. With collaborators, Shakhashiri authored a five-volume series of chemistry demonstration handbooks, published by the University of Wisconsin Press, which are widely used today. In 2002 he received the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology and in 2007 the National Science Board Public Service Award, for which the NSB noted Shakhashiri’s “extraordinary contributions to promote science literacy and cultivate the intellectual and emotional links between science and the arts for the public.”

Even in retirement, Shakhashiri will continue to champion science literacy and lead the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy, a program he established in 2002 that works to promote public literacy in science, mathematics, and technology, with the goal of attracting future generations to careers in science research and teaching well as in science communications and public service.

Oct. 21-24, 2021 In-Person and Virtual Events

WISCONSINBOOKFESTIVAL.ORG

#wibookfest HOSTED BY

SIGNATURE SPONSOR

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

SCAN FOR FULL SCHEDULE

FALL 2021

7

ESSAY

8

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

ESSAY

A Walk into Someone’s Vision: Ruth DeYoung Kohler’s Art Preserve

BY MARY LO U ISE SCH U MACH ER

F

or years I had hoped to write a profile of Ruth DeYoung Kohler, the woman who guided the

John Michael Kohler Arts Center to an international reputation for its care and exhibition of artists now known as “environment builders.” Kohler is one of the few arts leaders I’ve met in Wisconsin for whom the term visionary is not an overstatement.

Housed at the Art Preserve, Emery Blagdon’s The Healing Machine is a built environment composed of bent wire, copper, aluminum foil, minerals, old TV parts, and other found items.

Blagdon deliberately arranged the core components in combination with small, concentrically patterned paintings in a way that he believed could generate an electromagnetic energy with the power to heal wounds and cure diseases.

Rich Maciejewski/John Michael Kohler Arts Center

FALL 2021

9

ESSAY

Durston Saylor/John Michael Kohler Arts Center

© Milwaukee Journal Sentinel–USA TODAY NETWORK

I had convinced her at one point to meet me for monthly lunches about halfway between Sheboygan and Milwaukee, where I worked as the art critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. I drove to Port Washington for our get-togethers without expectations. Perhaps I would get to know her a little and earn her trust.

Kohler was late the first time we met, I remember, and sipped hot water with lemon because she wasn’t feeling well. When I asked about her life, Kohler diverted our conversation to the subject of her mother, who had the same name. Kohler became very animated when she talked about her namesake, a feminist and Sorbonne-educated journalist who penned The Story of Wisconsin Women, a 1948 catalog of women of influence.

My monthly lunches with Kohler didn’t last long. She would often reschedule or cancel, out of what I assumed was reticence. Still, for years I kept a thick file marked RUTH, where I squirreled away notes and bits of research, knowing how notable her place is in our state’s art history.

I had so many questions, but mostly this one: How did this hardto-know, complicated heiress from a family of plumbing magnates, who guided an off-the-beaten-path arts center to an international reputation for its groundbreaking work with underrecognized art forms, come to her singular perspective?

Our paths crossed over the years, and, in subsequent conversations with Kohler, I tended to avoid the personal. That is, until our final interview, just months before she died in November 2020.

She and I sat in a wood-paneled room in the old part of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, which, at one time, was the home of Kohler’s grandfather, the namesake of the center. A few miles from where we sat, the Art Preserve was nearing completion. Made possible by her unconventional ideas, ambition, and that notable name, the Art Preserve is a space Kohler had envisioned decades before it was built. Owned and operated by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the Art Preserve is the first museum in the United States to focus on artists known as “environment builders,” whose worldviews take physical and immersive form and who often turn entire homes and properties into works of art. It is a hybrid space, simultaneously an experimental museum open to the public, an unconventional storage facility, and a study center for art that is often lumped into categories that don’t quite fit or tell the whole story: outsider, self-taught, vernacular, or folk.

Kohler got to see the nearly completed Art Preserve and, before the COVID–19 pandemic, visited weekly to oversee the installation process. She passed away, at age 79, not long before its opening.

Sitting with Kohler in that wood-paneled room that day, I opened the catalogue for the Sublime Spaces & Visionary Worlds exhibition, arguably the most important show organized by the John Michael

Left top: Ruth DeYoung Kohler (center) examines a painting in Eugene von Bruenchenhein’s home after his death in 1983 with von Bruenchenhein’s widow, Marie, and Phil Martin of the Wisconsin Arts Board. Von Bruenchenhein’s chicken bone towers can be seen at left and one of his fantasy paintings in the foreground.

Left bottom: The front entrance to the Art Preserve was designed by the architects at Tres Birds to look like a forest.

10

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Rich Maciejewski/John Michael Kohler Arts Center

ESSAY

Kohler Arts Center. The 2007 exhibition showcased the Kohler’s collection of environments and was, in its way, a proof of concept for the Art Preserve.

In the catalogue chapter on the late Mary Nohl (1914–2001) is a photograph of the artist leaning against one of her handmade, sunny-faced figures that still populate the yard of the lakeside cottage where Nohl once lived in Fox Point, just north of Milwaukee.

As Kohler leaned over the catalogue, bright recognition fell over her face. These two women, both independent-minded and complicated, knew each other well. For more than 30 years, Kohler and the arts center strove to support Nohl’s reputation as an artist and rescue her Fox Point cottage, often called the “witch’s house” by locals. Bedecked with abstract forms and long wooden faces, turned toward one another as if in chatty confabs, the house was more than an oddity that looked, to teenagers, spooky in the moonlight. It was, as Kohler understood, an integrated work of art.

“The breadth of what she focused on, and the beauty of it, the strength of it …,” said Kohler, speaking of Nohl and paging through the catalogue, which documents decades of the art center’s pioneering study, preservation, and collecting of artist-made environments.

Then Kohler began weaving together narratives about Nohl with other histories. Stories of her mother, who died when Kohler was a girl, resurfaced again only to trail off. Kohler’s memory was misfiring. People close to her had prepared me for this. I waited for her to continue as we sat in the old part of a grand home that once belonged to her grandfather, a place she might have remembered spending time as a child.

The first floor is an exploration of why a place such as the Art Preserve exists in Wisconsin. Among the art environments featured are those created

by Carl Peterson of Minnesota (foreground) and Nick Engelbert (back, left) and Eugene von Bruenchenhein, both of Wisconsin.

FALL 2021

11

ESSAY

S

ituated on 38 acres of former farmland and fronted by a curtain of timbers, the Art Preserve is a place that lets you “walk into somebody’s vision,” says Leslie Umberger, curator of folk and selftaught art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Umberger was the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s senior curator of exhibitions and collections from 1998 to 2012 and the mind behind the groundbreaking Sublime Spaces & Visionary Worlds exhibition. As such, she played a significant role in the collection and study of the works of the environment builders now housed at the Art Preserve.

“The context and the layers and the organic processes of this type of art,” marvels Umberger, “it’s something you can’t really understand when you come to an artist through one or two, or even five, of their works.”

The John Michael Kohler Arts Center, in cooperation with the Kohler Foundation, a nonprofit known for rescuing art sites, has acquired and preserved more than 30 artists’ environments, including the trove of handmade tools, self-taught art, flea-market finds, and ethnographic artifacts collected by the late artist and teacher Ray Yoshida; the glitter-encrusted dentures, suits, and home of Mississippi artist Loy Bowlin (1909–1995) who, inspired by the Glen Campbell hit, called himself “The Original Rhinestone Cowboy”; and perhaps the masterpiece of the collection, Emery Blagdon’s Healing Machine, a small shack jammed with intricate, radiating constructions made of bent wire, copper, aluminum foil, minerals, old TV parts, and other oddments.

According to Laura Bickford, curator for the arts center and the preserve, other art institutions tend to be interested in the individual objects of these artists. Conversely, says Bickford, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center wants it all, including letters, journals, receipts, scraps of materials, tools, other ephemera, and even the architecture.

Over the years, the arts center had acquired about 25,000 objects related to artist environments that now have been taken out of storage and placed on view in the three-story Art Preserve, which is nestled into a hillside near the Sheboygan River. Michael Moore of Tres Birds, the Denver-based firm that designed the building, describes it as “hunkered down like a fox.”

The Kohler family would indeed go on to create an art empire, of sorts, with Ruth DeYoung Kohler at the helm.

12

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

The building is made from humble materials–whole timbers, river rock, and concrete, for instance—not unlike the organic materials favored by many of the artists whose work is housed inside.

There are no traditional museum labels to be found in the Art Preserve; the light is low, and objects are sometimes set right onto the floor or high onto difficult-to-see shelves, as they would be in a storage facility. The didactics, such as they are, tend to be more like prompts for open-ended wonderment than explainers. Why are these angels lying down? asks one label, providing a literal explanation of how carved wooden pieces are protected in a long-term storage setting while intimating something more poetic.

Bickford says that the Art Preserve, which promises to be an unconventional art destination, not unlike the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, eschews the kind of curatorial hand-holding to which many museumgoers are accustomed. Some visitors find the lack of guideposts and overall ambiguity somewhat bewildering, notes Amy Horst, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s associate director. But Horst says she hopes that visitors will, in the spirit of Ruth Kohler, “explore their own instincts.”

A

s a young woman, Ruth DeYoung Kohler spent swaths of her life away from Wisconsin, seeing art all over the world and living in Austria, Portugal, and other European countries. She went to Smith College, as did her mother, and studied art and art history. She pursued further studies at the University of Wisconsin– Madison and the University of Hamburg in Germany. Kohler spent a year teaching art in the public schools of Beloit before joining the faculty at the University of Alberta in Calgary, where she founded its printmaking program.

Kohler had been living the life of an artist in Spain when the modest arts center that would define her life was established in 1967 by the Sheboygan Arts Foundation. It was her father’s failing health that brought her home to Wisconsin and to a volunteer gig at the arts center that soon would evolve into a leadership role that kept her here. Some on the new art center’s board were not keen “to hire a woman or anyone with the last name of Kohler,” worried that the wealthy family would have undue influence, Kohler told The New York Times in 2009.

The Kohler family would indeed go on to create an art empire, of sorts, with Ruth DeYoung Kohler at the helm. In spite of that privilege, or perhaps because of it, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s mandate has always been an anti-elitist one: to show art that anyone can enjoy without specialized knowledge, from farmers to factory workers to first-graders, without dumbing down the art on view.

Kohler took over as director of John Michael Kohler Arts Center in 1972. The next year, the arts center staged one of the largest exhibitions of contemporary ceramics ever organized in the United States: The Plastic Earth, named for the pliable properties of clay.

Not long after that, Kohler began needling her brother Herbert V. Kohler Jr., who then ran the Kohler Company, to create what would become one of the world’s most idiosyncratic and esteemed artist residencies, the Arts/Industry program. Since 1974 the program has brought hundreds of artists to the factory floor of the Kohler Company, famous for its luxe plumbing fixtures. In the factory’s Pottery and Foundry, residents make art while exchanging ideas and

Jeffery Machtig/John Michael Kohler Arts Center

ESSAY

technical knowledge with company craftspeople. Resident artists also can learn about industrial scale processes and how to operate heavy equipment such as kilns, furnaces, and machine tools.

It was also in the early days of her directorship that Kohler made a pivotal excursion to see Fred Smith’s tavern in Phillips, Wisconsin.

Surrounded by over 200 larger-than-life concrete sculptures, including figures of Paul Bunyan and Abraham Lincoln, Smith’s “Up North” bar was a roadside spectacle of the highest order. A retired lumberjack and fiddler, Smith had embellished his concrete figures with inlaid glass from broken beer bottles, as well as stones, mirrors, marbles, and other reflective shards. Kohler worked with the Kohler Foundation, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and the National Endowment for the Arts to preserve the site, which is now a public gallery and park called the Wisconsin Concrete Park.

But it was when Kohler stepped inside a tiny West Allis home in 1983 that her understanding of environment builders changed forever. Thanks to a tip from a police officer friend of the artist

Works held in the Art Preserve by self-described “Freelance Artist—Poet and Sculptor—Innovator—Arrow maker and Plant man—Bone artifacts constructor—Photographer and Architect—Philosopher” Eugene von Bruenchenhein, include chair sculptures such as this, made from turkey and chicken bones and held together with adhesive and varnish.

FALL 2021

13

Rich Maciejewski/John Michael Kohler Arts Center

ESSAY

Above: The installation of sculptures by Nek Chand at the Art Preserve is suggestive of the way the artist layered his work at his Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India.

Jeffery Machtig/John Michael Kohler Arts Center

Left: While the collection of sculptures by Dr. Charles Smith, made of the artist’s secret mixture of cement and wood pulp, have yet to be fully installed at the Art Preserve, one wall holds a series of figures that reflect the dominant themes found in his work.

14

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

ESSAY

and, in turn, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Kohler visited the home of Eugene von Bruenchenhein (1910–1983), not long after he died.

She discovered a pocket-sized residence elaborately painted and overrun with sweetly erotic photographs of Eugene’s wife, Marie; liquidy apocalyptic paintings; clay crowns and censer pots for burning incense; and spindly sculptures delicately constructed from chicken bones.

“It was an originality that I hadn’t seen before,” recalled Kohler, who often described that initial visit to von Bruenchenhein’s as among the most important and astonishing moments of her life.

Von Bruenchenhein used materials he could readily find, including clay dug up near State Fair Park, paint brushes made of Marie’s hair, salvaged car paints, and, famously, the poultry parts.

“Each one, for me, has a voice that tells a slightly different story,” Kohler once said of the colorful thrones made of bones.

Kohler was enchanted by EVB, as he’s now known in the art world—quite well known in large part because the art center stepped in to preserve and champion his work. After several years of developing enlightened programs related to contemporary craft, Kohler and the curators who worked with her turned their attention more decidedly toward the work of environment builders.

W

alking through the doors of the Art Preserve and into the main hall, visitors can almost feel the origin story of how this museum came together. The first floor is rooted in Kohler and her curatorial team’s early work and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s dedication to artist-built environments in the Upper Midwest, especially those made by Smith, von Bruenchenhein, and Nohl.

At the entrance to the building, a functioning bar greets visitors, a hat tip to Smith, who created his concrete sculptures to connect with people and draw them in for a drink. His creations are conversation pieces for those seated at the preserve’s barstools, much as they were at Smith’s original tavern.

Von Bruenchenhein’s works are organized in a house-like tableau that evokes the artist’s basement, attic, and greenhouse spaces. The glow and clicking sound of a slide projector entice visitors toward an intimate room where portraits of the artist’s wife, in which she’s both muse and radiant queen, are projected into a cubby-sized space.

Part of the facade of Nohl’s cottage is here in the Art Preserve, too, along with her tools, organized much as she left them at the time of her death in 2001: vises, rolling pins, spools of wire, and hammers worn from a lifetime of use. Her paintings hang from racks and ceramics, wooden sculptures, jewelry, and delicate wire sculptures are displayed in glass cases. Through it all, Nohl’s unique iconography, inspired by her shoreline perch, is apparent. Yet Nohl’s spirit feels somehow missing from the space, which is dominated by a flat file cabinet. Her gathering of comfy chairs flecked with paint, bright patches of flooring, and a carved serpent zigzagging its way across her living room mantel remain at the original Fox Point site, where conservation and study are ongoing.

As one of the few known intact environments created by a woman, Nohl’s cottage, owned by the arts center since 2012, is artistically as well as historically significant, says Bickford. There’s perhaps an irony in this. Kohler, the daughter of a feminist, spent

There are many lessons to be learned from Kohler’s example, as illustrious a life as any of those heralded in her mother’s book about the remarkable women of our state. much of her life embracing the work of underrecognized artists, many of whom happened to be white men. In this sense, the arts center’s focus on environment builders (though not its whole program) shares some problematic similarities with the larger art world. There are explanations for the disparity, including the fact that women and artists of color have been historically less likely to own homes that can be turned into art sites, notes Bickford, though she suggests an art historical reckoning is warranted.

Other artists on view on the first floor, some of whom were influenced by regional customs and each other, include Levi Fisher Ames (1840–1923), who carved a wooden menagerie of mythic and real beasts; Nick Engelbert (1881–1962), whose concrete sculptures celebrated farm life; Ernest Hüpeden (1855–1911), an itinerant painter; and Albert Zahn (1864–1953), who carved birds, angels, and other flying creatures.

I

f the first floor of the Art Preserve explores the early history of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s focus on environment builders and what they do, the second upends misconceptions about these artists, such as that they tend to be from rural areas, reclusive, or untrained. Ray Yoshida (1930–2009) and Lenore Tawney (1907– 2007), for instance, were urbanites and part of the mainstream art world, though both collapsed the distance between their lives and their art-infused surroundings in ways that make them fit into the preserve’s mission.

Yoshida, the Chicago Imagist whose influential teaching career at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago spanned four decades, shuffled and reshuffled his collection of art and curiosities like a material in its own right. This was the rationale made by the arts center when it acquired Yoshida’s home collection in 2012, an unusual choice since most of the items in the collection were not made by him. Tight groupings of his kaleidoscopic collection, based on photographs of his apartment, are placed into a circular space at the Art Preserve.

Tawney’s loft studio is faithfully re-created, including glass shelves where smooth stones, shells, pottery, and wooden forms, inspiration for her gauzy textile works, are carefully aligned. Her dimensional textiles hang in the space, too, some rigorously woven, others slack and expressive, at times intimating the female form.

Infused with sunlight, the top floor of the Art Preserve is home to some of the most intact environments in the collection, including

FALL 2021

15

Jeffery Machtig/John Michael Kohler Arts Center

ESSAY

The Mary Nohl environment in the Art Preserve features a handful of her whimsical wooden carvings as well a low wall hung with the various tools and implements used to create her art.

the largest gathering of concrete figures by Nek Chand (1924–2015) outside his homeland of Chandigarh, India, and Blagdon’s Healing Machine.

A third environment, Charles Smith’s selfstyled African-American Heritage Museum + Black Veterans’ Archive, sits on metal shelves. Smith, one of two artists represented at the Art Preserve who are still alive, will arrange the collection himself when he feels comfortable enough to travel to Sheboygan.

The 81-year-old Smith delivers a free-form testimony when he speaks, which he prefers to do with the aid of his artworks, hundreds of hip-height figures that he’s been reworking, repainting, and rearranging for decades, first at a small house in Aurora, Illinois, and now at his home in Hammond, Louisiana. The hands of many of Smith’s roughhewn figures are raised high above their heads, reminiscent of the “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” protest chant or, for that matter, in what could be ecstatic, spiritual fervor.

Every time Smith rejiggers his artworks, he reconsiders and retells the unfolding history of race-related violence in the United States, weaving it together with his own life story, including his combat experiences in Vietnam and the racially motivated murder of his father when Smith was fourteen years old.

“Long before Black Lives Matter, Dr. Smith’s art was telling what’s the matter,” Smith told me in a telephone interview, appending his name with the title “Dr.” to claim the authority of lived experience and speaking of himself in the third person.

Smith especially loves talking to young people about history and believes no one can fully internalize the truth about the past without somehow seeing it first, which, he says, is what motivates him to make his sculptures. “Without a museum, as a culture and a people, you’re like a piece of paper rolling down the street without any destination,” he says. “A museum teaches you who you are.”

The kind of constant remaking that’s typical of environment builders like Smith is a point of inspiration at the Art Preserve, which will be in a similar state of flux, a place for artists, conservators, scholars, and staff to experiment with museum methodologies in real time. “His work isn’t fixed, ever,” says Bickford of Smith. “It always changes, and that is the point of it.”

I

’ll never forget when Ruth DeYoung Kohler took the stage at the Milwaukee Art Museum in the summer of 2014 to defend her controversial plan to move Nohl’s entire cottage from Fox Point to Sheboygan, part of a plan that would evolve and become the Art Preserve. The Ruth Kohler who showed up that night was nothing like the woman who sipped hot water and lemon, whom I regarded as shy. She faced her critics and made a daring if ultimately unsuc-

16

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

ESSAY

cessful case. In the end, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and its board were swayed to leave the house where it remains today beside Lake Michigan, the context and essential source of Nohl’s inspiration and materials.

Renowned glass artist Beth Lipman recalls how, if artists were in the room—or if their work was on the line—a more confident and fierce side of Kohler tended to surface. Lipman, who was the Arts/ Industry program coordinator from 2005 to 2009, says that Kohler had a palpable desire to be in the presence of artists, an observation confirmed by others in her orbit, including artists and colleagues.

As I think about Kohler and Nohl, two women who were similarly unconventional in their ideas, single-minded about their art-centric lives, and uniquely committed to a place, I wonder whether Kohler, like Nohl, has been misunderstood. I wonder, too, about the expectations that came with her name.

Kohler’s nieces described her as a Mary Poppins-like figure with a magical home, filled with natural light and long tables bristling with paints, sequins, fabrics, and all manner of texture. “It was freedom,” said Laura Kohler. “It was different for us to be private with her in her home.”

At the factory, she was frequently called “Ruthie,” though her older brother Herbert was known as “Mr. Kohler,” almost without exception, Lipman said. Was Ruth expected to become the “arts person” in the family?

During the years when, in the larger art world, conceptual artists stretched the definitions of art, asking whether artworks could be ideas or ordinary actions, and sidestepping commercialism in the process, Kohler and the arts center explored a similar set of concerns, if from a more unconventional vantage point. Their vision was simple and bold: A human life and all that is gathered around it can be a work of art.

Of course, Kohler was not solely responsible for this point of view. She often hired smart curators who were in a career-making phase of their lives. Kohler gave them resources and pushed them very hard, according to several people I spoke with. The success of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, which is realized in the Art Preserve, represents the work and ideas of many people over many years.

I talked with some of these people for this article and others, too.

Many revered Kohler. Some described her as difficult, irresolute in certain circumstances, and obfuscating in others.

But no one I talked with seemed to hold the whole picture of her life. Rachel Kohler, her niece, said Ruth and her two brothers always struggled to have healthy and lasting relationships, whether personal or professional. She assumes this was, at least in part, because they lost their mother when they were young. Ruth’s younger brother, Frederic, who grappled with schizophrenia, died in his 50s. “[Ruth and Herbert] are truly the same person at the end of the day—both stubborn, both pigheaded, both brilliant, both really creative,” Rachel said of her aunt and father. “They have this vision and they have this desire to create and to have impact, and they will make sure that happens irrespective of, you know, how many bodies are on the side of the road.”

The Art Preserve itself may get the last word on Kohler, thanks to the architects from Tres Birds. The light fixtures in the towering,

concrete stairway are inspired by “hobo symbols,” markings left behind by itinerant workers, that Kohler discovered and loved as a girl. One symbol, in honor of Kohler, means, “a kind woman lives here.”

In our final interview that day in the wood-paneled room of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, mindful that personal questions made Kohler uneasy, I changed the subject to something breezy, or so I thought: her lovely manicure. She dismissed my compliment and shoved her hands beneath the table. Another detail, tucked away.

However, when I asked her directly what it was like being a Kohler, she quickly said: It was hard. Her response had the force of truth. These were not words she needed to search for.

“I think there’s a part of her that we’ll never get to,” says Richard Balge, a longtime John Michael Kohler Arts Center board member.

Balge’s observation came during an interview I had with him before Kohler’s death, echoing what I’d learned from others as well. “She’s a complex, complex person. But she’s one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met.”

There are many lessons to be learned from Kohler’s example, as illustrious a life as any of those heralded in her mother’s book about the remarkable women of our state. The most essential, for me, are to trust one’s own eyes and mind, to find new language when it’s needed, and to not always accept the world—especially the art world—as it is presented to us.

With this kind of admiration in my mind, I asked Kohler a final question that day at the arts center. I asked her what she thought about the state of the world. We were in the early months of the COVID–19 pandemic then. She was worried, she said, that the role of the artist in society is not well understood or valued, that somehow her own efforts to champion artists had not been enough.

“If I could do it again, I would get involved more,” she said. “I would still proselytize for this organization forever, with my last breath.”

Mary Louise Schumacher is an independent journalist and critic. She is directing the first film about art critics in the U.S. called Out of the Picture. Schumacher recently wrote about the Art Preserve of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center for The New York Times and a profile of Adam Carr, collector of Milwaukee stories, for Milwaukee Magazine.

FALL 2021

17

Profile

18

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Profile

DOUG DUREN’S GOOD TURN

BY N I CKO LAS BUTLER

O

ne of the most influential conservationists working today in Wisconsin doesn’t keep

an office at any of the state’s fine colleges or universities, nor is he employed by the Department of Natural Resources or any other government body. Oftentimes, especially around deer hunting season, you can find Doug Duren deep in his family’s 400 acres of rolling hills, oak forests, prairie, and pastureland in the Driftless Area of the state.

Doug Duren regularly walks his 400 acres in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin to check on his myriad conservation projects.

Jason A. Smith

FALL 2021

19

All photos by Jason A. Smith

Profile

20

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Profile

Up a steep, rutted driveway is a ramshackle white farmhouse, not too far from Cazenovia, where Duren lives (“in the city,” as he is fond of saying). The fourth-generation farmhouse is where Duren holds irregular office hours, meeting with fellow farmers or members of local hunting groups, like the Caz Turkey Busters, to share how they can apply some of the land and wildlife conservation projects and programs he has underway across his sprawling outdoor laboratory.

On a map of his land, Duren points to the 60 acres of pasture he has set aside for raising environmentally responsible grass-fed beef. In one corner are the 100 acres of former farmland undergoing ecological restoration through a grant from the Conservation Reserve Program, administered by the USDA’s Farm Service Agency. On the other side of three long prairie strips are 240 wooded acres, of which 160 are sustainably managed thorugh the Managed Forest Law Program of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Duren’s passion for his land and zeal for sharing best practices have caught the attention of conservationists far beyond the Driftless as well. Nationally known sportsman Steven Rinella, an author and the mastermind behind the popular Meateater podcast, first came to visit Duren in 2009. Duren had heard Rinella on Wisconsin Public Radio years ago, talking about his 2006 book, The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine. Impressed with the young writer’s commitment to wild game conservation, Duren e-mailed Rinella and invited him to his family farm. After a week of walking the Driftless hills together, talking and hunting, the two became good friends.

As Rinella’s media empire grew beyond books on hunting and wild game to the Meateater TV show and podcast, Duren became a frequent guest, sharing his best land and game management practices (as well as corny jokes) with viewers and listeners.

“Doug has spent his life observing a few hundred acres of land with intense love and interest. But instead of withdrawing hermitlike into that familiar space, he has taken his learnings about his land and his people and actively searched out ways to apply them elsewhere in a helpful, constructive, and collaborative manner,” says Rinella. “I can promise you [that] anyone who spends a day with Doug Duren will view the Earth more tenderly and with greater reverence.”

Like Rinella, the people who gather around Duren’s flame will tell you that he is not just a conservationist of the first order, but a bon vivant, a raconteur, a historian, a musician, a Renaissance man as comfortable talking about Warren Zevon as he is about Aldo Leopold, as comfortable with his hands in a pile of caribou guts as he is reciting a passage from Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America.

And while listening to Duren talk is a bit like standing inside a conversational cyclone in which ideas, obscure cultural references, and hilarious asides bang against your brainpan from all angles, his spirit is positively infectious. Duren’s zeal for sharing what he knows and loves about these lands and the creatures who live here are drawing more and more conservationists every month to his farm near “Caz” to learn, share, and connect. With over 40,000 Instragram followers who share, comment on, and discuss his posts, Duren has an audience hungry for images of and observations about these lands from which he draws his passion and inspiration. Visitors to the farm, whether in person or online, learn about the spectrum of land and game conservation practices that Duren

has implemented across these 400 acres over the years, what works and what doesn’t, and how these practices can be scaled to meet the needs of others.

Moreover, Duren’s everyman approach to conservation makes him eminently accessible. “Having environmental advocates like Doug is immensely important in today’s world,” says Wisconsin DNR Forestry Team Leader Michael Finlay. “He can help break down barriers to conservation and management by speaking openly and honestly with others. Doug understands that forestry and forest management are sound conservation models, and that sound environmental stewardship goes hand in hand with managing your property. Doug can help motivate others to invest in their properties for the future, just as he has on his farm.”

One of Duren’s major investments over the past few years has been on deer herd management and advocating for more and better testing for Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), a highly infectious disease that causes a slow and painful death for the animals.

Duren’s great-great grandfather Wilhelm emigrated from Prussia in 1856 and came to the Driftless Area a few years later. He built a sawmill just outside of Cazenovia, which he operated along with his son, Joseph, one of eight children he had with wife, Anna Sybilla Katherine Hansen. In 1904, Joseph purchased the land that was to become the Duren farm for timber. The Depression hit Joseph Duren’s family hard, and his son, Rinold, would leave for days at a time to hunt deer in the Baraboo Hills to help feed the family. Yet the deer were hard to find.

By the 1930s, Duren says, the whitetail deer population in the region was down to just a handful, mainly due to overharvesting. It was a trend that continued in southern Wisconsin for decades, even as the population slowly increased in the heavily forested regions to the north.

“I don’t want to say that there were no deer in the area when I was a kid, but it was a big deal to see one,” recalls Duren.

By the mid-1960s, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources had established a series of modern deer management practices that restricted antlerless kills and utilized better monitoring and reporting. The herd seemed to stabilize until a series of extremely warm winters and a steep decline in pemit purchases during the late 2000s sent the deer population skyrocketing, even as CWD began to spread through the southern part of the state.

The Wisconsin DNR estimates that, with 56 out of 72 counties containing CWD-infected deer, around 7% of the state’s 1.8 million deer currently carry the disease.

For Duren, deer management is land management. Fast-multiplying herds can alter the ecology of forests, stripping them of native vegetation and eliminating niches for other wildlife. But he also has compassion for the animals. Duren is deadly serious about the spread of CWD and the impact it will have on deer and the future of the landscape. When talking about the disease, Duren frequently repeats a well-worn phrase: “If you don’t have it, you don’t want it.”

Today, Duren is using his various media platforms to raise money for proper deer carcass disposal by selling his popular (and utterly grassroots) line of merchandise—caps, sweatshirts, and stickers— that carry his favorite mantra: “It’s not ours, it’s just our turn.” At the crux of his simple philosophy are the axioms Duren will tell you are true to him: community, responsibility, stewardship, and friendship.

FALL 2021

21

Jason A. Smith

Profile

The Duren family farm, located just south of Cazenovia.

He is also the owner of Lone Oak Interests LLC, a small enterprise “specializing in site and land management consulting and contracting services throughout Wisconsin and the Driftless Area.”

Duren is seemingly indefatigable—a sixty-something who is finding his voice and place in the world more and more with every passing day. In this way, Duren is not only a role model for conservationists and environmentalists, he’s something of a role model for anyone entering the third act of their lives and looking for inspiration and energy.

According to Patrick Durkin, an award-winning outdoor writer based in Eau Claire, people like Duren weren’t all that unusual one or two generations ago. “When many of our fathers and mothers grew up on family farms, [they] inherited family farms, and passed along family farms, striving to preserve the land and water for the generations who followed. And if a farm kid wasn’t destined for that life, those parents encouraged the kid to pursue other talents far from home.” But, notes Durkin, whether they stay or leave, most farm kids “never lose their love of the land and its wildlife, and their affection for the people and communities who make rural Wisconsin their home.”

The poet Gary Snyder once wrote, One of the key problems in American society now is people’s lack of commitment to any given place—which is totally unnatural and outside of history. Neighborhoods are allowed to deteriorate, landscapes are allowed to be strip-mined, because there is nobody who will live there and take responsibility; they’ll just move on. The reconstruction of a people and of a life in the United States depends in part on people, neighborhood

22

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

by neighborhood, county by county, deciding to stick it out and make it work where they are, rather than flee.

Doug Duren has not fled. Like a solid, old burr oak, Duren has iron-strong roots that both draw sustainance from and hold together the landscape that allowed his family to flourish for over five generations. A true steward and friend of the land, Duren has created a blueprint, an example, for all Wisconsinites to follow.

Nickolas Butler is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Shotgun Lovesongs, The Hearts of Men, and Little Faith, and the story collection Beneath the Bonfire. Butler is the recipient of multiple literary prizes and commendations and has published articles, reviews, short stories, and poetry in publications such as Ploughshares, Narrative, and The New York Times Book Review. A graduate of UW–Madison and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Butler lives with his wife and two children on sixteen acres of land in rural Wisconsin. His most recent novel is Godspeed.

THE STUDIO GLASS MOVEMENT THE HYDE COLLECTION This exhibition features more than 100 works by thirty artists, including seminal works by early innovators and ambitious installations by contemporary artists.

OPENING PARTY Saturday, October 23 ON VIEW October 23, 2021–January 23, 2022 WEST BEND I WISCONSINART.ORG

Exhibition supported by

Thanks to the 60th Anniversary Year Sponsors: James and Karen Hyde | Thomas J. Rolfs Family Foundation | Prudence Pick Hway West Bend Mutual Insurance Company | Andrea and James Schloemer | Network Health Burke Properties | Katie Heil | Horicon Bank | Beth Ramsthal | Bob Ramsthal | RDK Foundation Douglas & Renee Sigwarth, Untitled (Watercolor Vase), Detail, 2009

Destination

24

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Destination

POETRY IN THE DARK-SKY PARK

BY ALEX PAN IAG UA

T

here’s a certain kind of serenity to be found at Newport Beach State Park, especially during

the off-season in late autumn, when the stone path and forest floor have curled up together under a blanket of leaves. It’s a time of year when the warmth of the afternoon sun is balanced by the breeze coming off of Lake Michigan.

The Newport Poetry Trail in Newport State Park on the lakeside tip of the Door County peninsula is a ¾-mile walking trail that showcases the works of local writers and Wisconsin poets.

Alex Paniagua

FALL 2021

25

All photos by Alex Paniagua

Destination

26

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Destination

Being a state park, Newport is the kind of place where you might expect to see an occasional signpost bearing a trail map or bit of nature lore. But on this trail, the signpost is different. Behind the thin film of plexiglass is a short poem. Not too far ahead, more waisthigh posts with poems appear, unexpected guides along a path that winds through dense forest and along yellow prairies. You have found the park’s Poetry Trail.

While the Newport Poetry Trail comprises only a small part of the 2,373-acre state park at the tip of the Door Peninsula near Ellison Bay, it inspires creative collaborations with musicians, nature lovers, and other members of the greater Door County community— all in the name of poetry. It’s a place that many visit regularly, and others happily find by chance.

The Poetry Trail came to be as the result of a few meaningful encounters and collaborations. In 2009, a retired neurosurgeon and poet named Phiroze “Phil” Hansotia made a visit with his wife, Marilyn, to the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail in Vermont. Inspired by what he saw on the Frost Trail, Hansotia decided to create his own. You can still find his first modest poetry trail nestled in the woods of the campus arboretum of the University of Wisconsin– Stevens Point at Marshfield, not far from Marshfield Clinic, where Hansotia worked as a neurologist from 1970 to 1996 after emigrating from India.

After his retirement, Hansotia and his wife moved to Ellison Bay in Door County, where he immediately began to look for opportunities to create another poetry trail. A chance meeting between Nancy Rafal, Hansotia’s friend and former treasurer of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and Newport Wilderness Society president Jack Travis provided one. One day, Travis mentioned to Rafal that several members of Door County’s Newport Wilderness Society wanted to incorporate poetry somewhere in Newport State Park and were trying to figure out the best way to do so.

“It all felt too perfect,” Rafal recalls. “I went to Phil, told him about their idea, and he was very happy to work on a poetry trail in Newport.”

Hansotia and Rafal, along with former Door County poet laureate Sharon Auberle and Newport State Park manager Michelle Hefty, came up with a plan to install stanchion posts along a 3/4-mile-long path of meadow and wooded bedrock. Each stanchion would display a poem from a revolving collection featuring Wisconsin’s many creative voices, from state and local poets laureate to Door County residents and students. About six years after establishing the trail in 2010, Rafal brought in another partner, the nonprofit literary center Write On, Door County, to help expand community participation.

Today, Write On helps to curate the trail, replacing the poems on a quarterly basis.

These poems at any given time reflect a deep collaboration between the trail partners and Door County theaters, community groups, musicians, and schoolchildren, as well as a wide variety of aspiring and accomplished writers. The trail has featured poems by elementary and middle school students working with Fish Creek’s Northern Sky Theater, poems inspired by the 2020 Door County Celebrate Water Initiative, and the works of local poets laureate like Auberle and Rafal, as well as statewide poets laureate such as Karla Huston and Margaret Rozga.

Phil Hansotia

Nancy Rafal

Although the majority of people visit the poetry trail during the prime tourist months of summer and early fall, others tend to enjoy the park in the winter. Jerod Santek, artistic director of Write On, Door County, believes that working with a wide range of groups during the entire year provides returning visitors with a very different experience from their last—and allows new visitors to encounter poetry in a totally different way.

“People who don’t normally have poetry in their lives might come across this trail by accident,” Santek says. “But they stop for a bit and realize that poetry isn’t this intimidating thing they were taught in high school—it’s an accessible art form that everyone can enjoy.”

One of the groups Santek regularly collaborates with is Midsummer’s Music, a performing arts group in Sister Bay that has been bringing chamber music to Door County audiences for more than three decades. Before each season, Midsummer’s Music provides Santek and the Write On, Door County team with recordings of the music they will be playing. The Write On team then shares the recordings with various poets, who in turn create a poem in response to the music.

“Each poet has shown us just how unique, creative, and intellectual they are with this process,” said Allyson Fleck, executive director, assistant artistic director, and violist for Midsummer’s Music. “Some poems are very long, others are just a short verse. It truly comes down to what the poet extracts from the music.”

The poets who write for this collaboration are invited to read their finished poems prior to the performance of the composition that inspired them. Afterwards, these poems are printed and displayed on the Poetry Trail.

Another collaborative event developed by Bailey’s Harbor poet Francha Barnard, called Write When the Moon is Full / Read When the Moon Is New, brings people together in the park to draw inspiration for their poems from the full moon’s rise over the lake.

Participants then submit their work to be placed along the trail in preparation for an afternoon reading of their poems just before the following new moon.

Barnard, a retired elementary school librarian from Sheboygan who moved to Door County in 2006, says that two books of poetry she enjoyed reading to children became the inspiration for the

FALL 2021

27

Destination

Looking for America I finished medical school in India and came to America— a gosling taking flight 50 years ago, to a tightly-knit hospital community, a retired couple and a grocer’s family, who taught me America’s values and traditions.

Wisconsin is middle-America.

Its cities, dairy farms, and orchards share a special character captured by its cold beer and delicious cheese.

Overseas visitors often wish to tour The Statue of Liberty, New York City, The Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore.

But that is not where America is.

Her roots lie in hope and opportunity for the dispossessed with ambition.

Caged birds that are free to fly in a land where isolation and scarcity co-exist with freedom.

America is a society that has committed all the wrongs seen elsewhere— but seeks to correct them—and eventually does.

Her energy, enterprise, ability to absorb all cultures, ethnic groups, and religions with resulting tension that derives from the new always jostling the old.

That’s what America is.

At its best it lifts its vision to the stars.

It’s a place where the ordinary person Is the object of planning and policy.

A nation of immigrants, each generation Has to relearn the meaning of being American.

America has always been a work in progress— an imperfect entity busy correcting itself.

Taken as a whole it does quite well.

That’s why we’re all here.

That’s the America I’ve found.

That’s my America.

Phil Hansotia

28

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

event: Owl Moon, by Jane Yolen, and When the Moon is Full: A Lunar Year, by Mary Azarian.

Barnard says that she really began to notice a growing interest in poetry throughout Door County around the time Write When the Moon is Full had its first event in 2018. According to Barnard, the event drew a sizable crowd because it did such a good job of highlighting the many writing styles of the community and the influence that nature has on creativity.

“There were people who came who had never written poetry before,” says Barnard. “They just heard it was happening and wanted to give it a try.”

Although the trail frequently showcases multiple poets at any given time, occasionally trail organizers feature the works of a single poet. This was the case for the poems of Phil Hansotia, which were displayed May through July 2021 as a celebration of his life, writing, and many contributions to the Door County community. Hansotia passed away in June 2020. A reading of his poetry was held at the head of the Poetry Trail on July 1, 2021. Hansotia’s widow Marilyn selected the opening poem, “Looking for America,” and read the piece to those in attendance, the last resounding verses lingering in the heat of the day: America has always been a work in progress— an imperfect entity busy correcting itself.

Taken as a whole it does quite well.

That’s why we’re all here.

That’s the America I’ve found.

That’s my America.

While the majority of the past year’s poetry events have been put on pause due to the COVID–19 pandemic, the Poetry Trail is seeing more and more visitors. According to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, between 2019 and 2020 Wisconsin State Parks in general have seen a 22% increase in visitors. As this number continues to rise, there’s a good chance that more people will experience the unique combination of poetry, community, and nature that the Newport Poetry Trail has to offer.

Alex Paniagua is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and creative editor focused on travel and profile stories. His articles on notable people and places have been featured in Wisconsin Banker, AQUA Magazine, and American Farriers Journal.

TURN YOUR CALLING INTO YOUR CAREER

Helpful and innovative faculty.

A beautiful campus with state-of-the-art facilities. Programs that challenge and inspire. Unlock your future at UW-La Crosse.

EMBARK ON YOUR PATH. WE’LL SHOW YOU THE WAY.

UWLAX.EDU

UWL-Science Ad.indd 1

6/18/21 8:32 AM

William P. Gottlieb/Library of Congress ID: Gottlieb.09231

Essay

30

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Essay

LOOKING FOR MARY LOU WILLIAMS

BY FABU PH I LLIS CARTER

A

s the child of a father who loved jazz, I thought I knew all of the women jazz artists. That is,

until I discovered Morning Glory: The Story of Mary Lou Williams, by Linda Dahl. It was 1999, and I was strolling through the Central Library in downtown Madison. I was almost out of the door when I saw a book with a beautiful, dark chocolate face on the cover that drew me to her.

Storied musician, composer, arranger, and bandleader Mary Louise Williams, circa 1946.

FALL 2021

31

Essay

I checked out the book and immediately called my dad. “I have a biography about a Black woman named Mary Lou Williams. She played jazz,” I said, hesitating for a moment. “You never told me about her.”

Dad replied, “Mary Lou, yeaaaa.” Translating his comment, I knew she had to be one of the great ones for my dad to give her a “yeaaaa.”

From there, I dove headfirst into the world of Mary Lou Williams through words and music. However, it wasn’t until years later, when I joined a group of eclectic, creative artists from Madison to celebrate her 100th birthday with the entire city, that I really felt like I had come to know “the First Lady of Jazz.”

D

ue to the history of racism against dark-skinned people in America, the contributions of African Americans are frequently overlooked, and their stories often ignored. This was the reality of jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams. Born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1910, a time when segregation between races was the law and women could not vote, Williams went on to become a leader in a music field dominated by men and in a country dominated by whites. She was a child prodigy who throughout her life played every genre of jazz and wrote for many of the jazz greats, leaving in her wake a long list of “firsts” as an African American jazz performer.

Anyone who claims to know jazz should know Mary Lou Williams.

But after reading her biography and immersing myself in her music, I wanted everyone, not just jazz afficionados, to know who Mary Lou Williams was, wanted her to be as well-known now as she was during her time (which was not that long ago). I reasoned that Williams’ career and music should be as famous as those of male jazz musicians like Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and even our own Madison bassist and Academy Fellow, Richard Davis. These were men she knew, performed with, and composed music for. In honoring Williams, I felt that I would be honoring all African American women artists who persevered, despite the double barriers of race and gender. It was with these ideas and energy that in 2010 I joined a small committee of people who came together in Madison to help re-introduce Williams to the world. This is the story of that journey.

To start the journey, though, we need to go back to 1976 when this brilliant composer, arranger, and pianist played her way into the hearts of jazz lovers in Madison. Mary Lou Williams was in the city for a performance at the University of Wisconsin–Madison at the invitation of Professor James Cheatham, Director of the Black Music Ensemble at the School of Music. Cheatham, a famous jazz trombonist and teacher, was known for bringing prominent Black artists such as Williams to campus to help infuse authentic jazz into the school’s instructional program. Over the course of three days, Williams shared the history of jazz with the UW–Madison community and performed at the Wisconsin Union Theater, showing her mastery of jazz styles, from Stride to Modern. One performance even included her masterwork, “Mary Lou’s Mass,” which was commissioned in 1970 by the Roman Catholic Church.

By the time Williams had arrived in Madison, her accomplishments were many: she was the first African American woman

32

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

to have a weekly radio show, Mary Lou Williams’s Piano Workshop; to start her own record company, Mary Records, and her own publishing company, Cecilia Music Company; and to manage her more than 350 compositions and 100 records. She was also the first African American woman to become a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), which recognized her growing fame as the First Lady of Jazz. She became internationally famous after a highly successful European tour in 1954, including an appearance in London where she broke the ban against American artists playing in England.

Upon returning to the U.S., Williams converted to Catholicism.

During this time she founded the Bel Canto Foundation to help addicted musicians and dedicated her life to her faith. But jazz wasn’t done with her, and in the 1960s and 1970s she returned to her craft, weaving together the vocabulary of jazz with elements of rhythm and blues, spirituals, and gospel music to create “Sacred Jazz,” a new genre pioneered by Williams that melded her strong faith with her equally strong musical talent. In 1964 she met Father Peter O’Brien, a Jesuit, who not only advised her as she composed the Catholic masses, but also became her friend and business manager, even as he continued his priestly assignments.

Her willingness to embrace new genres and modern approaches to the form led to a collaboration with avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor and a special two-piano concert at Carnegie Hall in 1977, which they titled Embraced. In 1978, she performed at the White House for President Jimmy Carter. By the end of her life in 1981 at 71, she was still playing shows and passing on her knowledge of jazz to students as an artist in residence at Duke University where she co-taught jazz classes with O’Brien from 1977 to 1981.

Williams left money in her will to start the Mary Lou Williams Foundation to continue her legacy of promoting jazz; Father O’Brien was subsequently appointed director. Yet she and her music somehow slipped into obscurity. Decades later, she was forgotten or totally unknown by most, in spite of the Mary Lou Williams Festival that the foundation began in 1996 as a way of reminding the American public about her devotion to music and her many accomplishments.

I

n 2010, the year of Mary Lou Williams’ 100th birthday, the foundation and other groups were encouraging centennial celebrations of William’s music and life across the United States. It seemed to me the perfect occasion for reviving the memory of Williams here in Wisconsin. I began asking for help and advice from local artist friends who might be interested in celebrating Mary Lou Williams and helping plan a one-day Centennial Celebration for all of Madison to enjoy.

My first call was to jazz pianist and educator Jane Reynolds, whom I had met in 2000 when we teamed up for an Isthmus Jazz Festival event honoring Williams through jazz and poetry. As Reynolds and I talked about others who might join our endeavor, Howard Landsman’s name came up. I didn’t know Landsman, a local fundraiser who had worked with nonprofits, and he didn’t know me. So I emailed him and asked if he would meet me for coffee to discuss a Mary Lou Williams celebration event. As we talked, I soon realized

Essay

that Landsman was a jazz buff—so much so that he took my idea for a one-day event and suggested we turn it into a year-long event with pieces and components I never could have imagined.

But, even before I started on the Centennial Celebration plans with Landsman, a similar idea was forming in the mind of local newspaper editor Jonathan Gramling of the Capitol City Hues.

Gramling had interviewed Father O’Brien during the same 2000 Isthmus Jazz Festival at which Reynolds and I performed. During that interview, Father O’Brien had invited Madison to honor Williams on the occasion of her upcoming centennial year—an invitation Gramling took to heart. Through Landsman, Gramling joined our growing group and became one of our contacts with Father O’Brien.

Father O’Brien’s involvement was critical to the Centennial Celebration’s success. He gave the committee access to Williams’ music and her archives at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. He also recruited Mary Lou Williams scholars and artists as presenters for a Centennial Celebration symposium, where O’Brien gave his own multi-media presentation, “The Recordings of Mary Lou Williams: A Fifty-Year Retrospective.” His involvement gave the committee the credibility it needed to raise funds for the outstanding series of Centennial Celebration programs.

Our planning committee soon became ten, all local volunteers from different races and occupations who came together to explore the idea of a Mary Lou Williams celebration. The six additional members besides Landsman, Reynolds, Gramling, and me were Steve Braunginn, Leotha Stanley, Larry Lundy, Bobbette Rose, Nancy Kendrick, and Betsy Stampe. Braunginn, a retired CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison and co-host of “Strictly Jazz Sounds” on WORT-FM, was in charge of publicity and promotions along with Gramling. A professional musician, composer, and educator, Leotha Stanley would be managing director of music. The music director at Mt. Zion Baptist Church, Stanley already had an established relationship with the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers and so could help secure Williams’ music. The late Larry Lundy was our treasurer and Madison Music Collective representative.

Both Reynolds and I were co-artistic directors. She was also co-host of “Strictly Jazz Sounds” on WORT–FM, and a long time educator and co-presenter of Mary Lou Williams Jazz and Poetry Programs in schools. Graphic designer Bobbette Rose’s role was also publicity and promotions, and Nancy Kendrick worked on program development. Lastly Betsy Stampe, a retired public defender and professional musician, served as an at-large member. My role was to be what I am: a poet.

In some ways ours was a magical group because, although most of us were strangers to each other, we became a cohesive committee that melded well together. We listened to and respected each other.

Each person had an assigned role, but we all turned to Landsman for the unique vision for a year full of activities centered on re-introducing Williams’ jazz.

We recruited several partner arts and education organizations to help with program development and delivery and, to get the festival off the ground, we donated money personally and helped raise

I had wanted to do for Mary Lou Williams what the poet Alice Walker had done for Zora Neale Hurston: help lift an incredible African American genius out of obscurity back into her rightful place in the art world.

money at fundraising events. We passed out informational flyers at different locations in Madison, such as farmers’ markets and the Juneteenth celebration. Committee meetings were rotated among homes, with most of them taking place at Howard Landsman and his wife Judy’s home. Landsman wrote the successful grants that funded the majority of our activities and was an inspirational guide for over a year that we spent together.

May 8, 2010, marked the actual 100th birthday of Mary Lou Williams, the date on which special Centennial Celebrations were held in communities around the U.S. In Wisconsin, our mid-sized, predominantly white city of Madison held perhaps the most robust of these celebrations, with 51 special programs, most with free admission, spanning the entire year, from February 2010 to January 2011. Together, these programs reached a diverse audience of over 8,000 people and, in so doing, increased awareness and appreciation of Williams and her jazz . Indeed, Madison’s celebration continues influencing the local jazz scene, helping to trigger a renaissance that is poised to resume after the COVID–19 pandemic.

The Centennial Celebration included a wide-ranging menu of performances of Williams’ music and an array of educational programs about her life, music, and legacy. These included three major concerts of Williams’ music, dance concerts, poetry readings, a scholarly symposium, and documentary films. It culminated in a major Mary Lou Williams Fall Festival Weekend on September 30 to October 3 and a “Mary Lou Williams Youth Explosion,” a concert featuring youth performances of Williams’ music and spoken word poetry inspired by her life and legacy.

In the months prior to the Fall Festival, jazz and spoken word ensemble groups put on five performances in area high schools.

These events were followed by a series of weekly workshops at several after-school community centers where students were guided in composing their own Williams-inspired poetry. Also, five high school jazz bands attended performance clinics put on by the UW Jazz Orchestra with the younger students learning advanced techniques before they themselves performed Williams’ music.

FALL 2021

33

Essay

T

Fabu Phillis Carter, professionally known as Fabu, began writing at the age of eleven and has continued to create poetry throughout her adult life. She was appointed Madison’s Poet Laureate in 2008 and served in that position until 2011. Fabu is the author of four books and an active public lecturer, workshop leader, poetry columnist, and storyteller. She is also a founding member of The Hibiscus Collective, a group of Madison women writers from multi-cultures.

Fabu holds a double Master’s degree from UW– Madison and a PhD in African Studies from the University of Nairobi, Kenya.

PHOTOS BY MARY ELLEN MATTHEWS

hrough the Centennial Celebration, I had wanted to do for Mary Lou Williams what the poet Alice Walker had done for Zora Neale Hurston: help lift an incredible African American genius out of obscurity back into her rightful place in the art world.

Our local Centennial Celebration did just that, placing Mary Lou Williams and her musical genius in the hearts and minds of thousands of people in the Madison area. Data we collected showed that Centennial Celebration attendees and participants increased their knowledge of Williams’ contributions, their familiarity with— and appreciation of—her music, and left with a desire to learn more about her. I could not have done all this alone, and it turns out I didn’t need to. I had the help of my friends on the committee and local funding organizations as well as schools and community groups.

In the end, what made the Centennial Celebration remarkable was that it accomplished all its objectives through the collaboration and leadership of a small group of volunteers, coming together to support jazz and help return Mary Lou Williams to her rightful place among the greats of the jazz canon.

In terms of the entire United States, there is still much work to be done to publicize the contributions of women artists in general.

But Madison’s Mary Lou Williams’ Centennial Celebration demonstrated that through collaboration and education the superb music of a legendary jazz artist like Mary Lou Williams can be introduced to the public in many venues and be well received in all. Madison should be proud of its role in honoring Williams’ genius during her lifetime and its continuing effort to acknowledge her important legacy.

SUBSCRIPTIONS ON SALE NOW

OVERTURE.ORG

34

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

CONGRATULATIONS

TO OUR 2021 FICTION & POETRY CONTEST WINNERS FICTION WINNERS

POETRY WINNERS

First Prize

Second Prize

Third Prize

First Prize

Second Prize

Third Prize

Allison Uselman Madison “Honor Cord”

Kim Suhr Wales “Everything Burns”

Yvette Viets Flaten Eau Claire “Protocol of Print”

Jennifer Fandel Madison “The Father”

David Southward Milwaukee “Saint Simone”

Paula Schulz Slinger “Let My Hands Too Bring the Day”

FICTION HONORABLE MENTIONS “Sometimes Creek,” Steve Fox • Hudson “The Stranger,” Elise Gregory • Ellsworth “Radio Silence,” Holly Hilliard • Madison “The Racoons of Devil’s Lake,” H.R. Larson • Omro “Dust to Dust,” Emily Mills • Madison “Friends Who Lie,” Carrie Rothburd • Madison

POETRY HONORABLE MENTIONS “Sometimes in Wisconsin,” Katie Chicquette • Appleton “Last Hay,” John Freiburger • Fitchburg “Liminal,” Kathryn Gahl • Appleton “In the Library,” Judith Harway • Shorewood “Moonshot: United States,” Dominic Holt • Monona “Stories,” Mark J. Knickelbine • Mount Horeb “And If,” John Pidgeon • Green Bay “Flying Home,” Moises Villavicencio Barras • Madison

MEET THE WINNERS Join us Thursday, October 28, at 7:00 pm for a special Wisconsin Book Festival reading with our 2021 contest winners at wisconsinacademy.org/2021reading

THANKS TO OUR 2019 CONTEST JUDGES Chris Fink (fiction) and Brenda Cárdenas (poetry), as well as to preliminary contest screener Jodi Vander Molen. All contest judging is done blindly and the winning submissions are selected through criteria established by individual judges.

CONTEST WINNERS RECEIVE CASH AND PRIZES of $500 to $100, publication in Wisconsin People & Ideas, and a reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival. First-place winners in both categories also receive a one-week writers’ residency at Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts in Mineral Point.

THANKS TO OUR 2021 CONTEST SPONSORS:

WISCONSIN

BOOK

F E S T I VA L

@ Watrous GALLERY

Todd Anderson, Tyndall Glacier, ROMO—The Last Glacier, 2017. Reductive jigsaw woodcut, 17¼ by 24 inches.

36

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

@ Watrous GALLERY

THE LAST GLACIER

BY J O DY CLOWES

I

t’s no secret that the world’s melting glaciers are contributing to rising global sea levels and warming oceans. But this massive glacial melt is also creating radical changes in surrounding landscapes, altering the composition of soil and plant life in ways that can lead to the collapse of entire habitats. As the glaciers disappear, our world is dramatically altered.

The Last Glacier project is a collaboration between three artists of international renown—printmakers Bruce Crownover and Todd Anderson and photographer Ian van Coller—who are dedicated to capturing the fading majesty of Earth’s remaining glaciers.

The three artists began their collaboration in 2010 as a way to respond to the rapidly retreating glaciers of Glacier National Park in Montana, where in 1850 there were 150 glaciers. Today the park holds only 25, and these are predicted to disappear by the end of the century.

Since 2010, the trio of artists have expanded their work to creatively document the impact of our steadily warming planet on glaciers through larger collaborations with scientists at glacial landscapes in Colorado and Alberta, Canada, as well as Iceland, Tanzania, and beyond.

Their process begins with observation and collection. The three spend a few weeks each summer hiking deep into the backcountry of a glacier to sketch, paint, and make photographs. Upon their return, the artists retreat to their respective studios to refine their images and translate them into large-scale woodcuts and digital prints. The drama, brilliant color, and sheer beauty of the finished work offer a stark reminder of what we are losing to the rapid, sweeping changes in Earth’s climate system.

The resulting images have an intense emotional charge that reflects the artists’ passion and commitment. Appropriately monumental in scale, they capture both grandeur and pathos, beauty and loss. In the words of essayist Nancy Mahoney, Todd Anderson and Bruce Crownover’s reductive woodcuts “are layered landscapes that go beyond realistic representations. Their prints portray a larger truth about the glacial texture, mass, subtle colorations, and antiquity, which cannot be captured in scientific prose.” In contrast, van Coller’s subtle, richly detailed photographs bring into sharp focus the texture and grandeur of these disappearing landscapes.

By engaging directly with climatologists and glaciologists, the artists ensure that their artwork and ancillary materials are grounded in accurate, up-to-date scientific information. They also work closely with writers and curators, sharing their work through exhibitions, limited-edition books, public talks, and a series of interconnected websites.

“We’re trying to bridge gaps and connect with as many folks [about this issue] as we can,” Anderson says.

FALL 2021

37

@ Watrous GALLERY

Todd Anderson, Salamander Glacier—The Last Glacier, 2014. Reductive woodcut, 15 by 30 inches.

TODD ANDERSON

Born in Rochester, Minnesota, Todd Anderson is a fine art collaborative printer. He received a BFA from UW–Madison and an MFA from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Today, Anderson is a professor of printmaking at Clemson University in South Carolina. His artwork has been acquired widely, including by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, the New York Public Library, Stanford and Yale universities, the U.S. Library of Congress, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Anderson’s artworks have been exhibited more than 125 times including at Art Basel Miami, the New York Affordable Print Fair, Scope London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Anderson resides in Clemson with his wife, two children, chickens, cat, and dog.

38

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

@ Watrous GALLERY

Todd Anderson, Jackson Glacier—The Last Glacier, 2013. Reductive jigsaw woodcut, 15 by 30 inches.

Todd Anderson, Blackfoot Glacier—The Last Glacier, 2014. Reductive jigsaw woodcut, 20 by 30 inches.

FALL 2021

39

@ Watrous GALLERY

Bruce Crownover, Rowe Glacier, 2017. Reductive woodcut, 18 by 24 inches.

BRUCE CROWNOVER

Born in 1961 in Southern California, Bruce Crownover earned his BFA from Utah State University and his MFA in printmaking from UW–Madison in 1989. From 1994 to 2018, Crownover was a master printer at Tandem Press. An expert in woodcarving, relief, and intaglio, Crownover is known for his wide range of printmaking techniques. He has become a notable printmaker and close collaborator with 92 nationally and internationally known artists and has taught over 350 students. He has been a guest lecturer in museums, colleges, and universities and, as of fall 2019, is a MacDowell Fellow.

His work can be seen in Wisconsin and around the country, including at the UW–Madison Memorial Library Special Collections, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Stanford University, the Library of Congress, and the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.

40

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

@ Watrous GALLERY

Above: Bruce Crownover, Taylor Glacier, 2017.

Reductive woodcut, 18 by 24 inches.

Right: Bruce Crownover, Tyndall Glacier, 2017.

Reductive woodcut, 18 by 24 inches.

FALL 2021

41

@ Watrous GALLERY

Ian van Coller, Chaney Glacier, Glacier National Park, 2013.

IAN VAN COLLER

Ian van Coller was born and raised in South Africa. In 1992, he moved to the United States, where he received a BFA from Arizona State University and an MFA from the University of New Mexico. Since 2006, Van Coller has been Professor of Photography at Montana State University in Bozeman, where he lives with his wife, two children, and two dogs. His work has been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally, and is included in over forty public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Getty Research Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the South African National Gallery. Van Coller is a 2018 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow as well as a Fellow of The Explorers Club.

42

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

@ Watrous GALLERY

Above: Ian van Coller, Walking on Grinnell Glacier, Glacier National Park, 2013.

Right: Ian van Coller, Chaney Glacier, Glacier National Park, 2013.

FALL 2021

43

@ Watrous GALLERY

Gem and Salamander Glaciers, Glacier National Park, 2012. Photo by Ian van Coller.

44

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

@ Watrous GALLERY

SEE TH E EXHI BITI O N On view at the James Watrous Gallery in Overture Center for the Arts 201 State Street • Madison

THE LAST GLACIER Todd Anderson Ian van Coller Bruce Crownover NOVEMBER 12, 2021– JANUARY 23, 2022 Artists’ reception on December 3, 6–8:00 pm Visit the Wisconsin Academy’s James Watrous Gallery to view a selection of large-scale reduction woodcuts and digital prints from The Last Glacier project, as well as exhibition copies of two limited-edition artists’ books: The Last Glacier and ROMO: The Last Glacier, both handbound by master bookbinder Rory Sparks. (“ROMO” is the governmental abbreviation for Rocky Mountain National Park.)

Thanks to Wisconsin Academy donors, members, and the following sponsors for their support of this exhibition:

FALL 2021

45

Fiction

Illustration by Allison Uselman

46

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Fiction

2021

HONOR CORD

BY ALLISO N USELMAN

I

t was not a hick town but rather a prairie town, one where there was often nothing for young people to

do but drive around and attempt to reckon with the vastness of the land. The prairies, for example, made Violet Wells feel small. The grasses were high and pale, the flowers ragged the way prairie plants must be in order to survive, the fires that occasionally swept across the land were brilliant and terrifying in their ability to destroy.

Read more award-winning fiction from Wisconsin writers at wisconsinacademy.org/fiction.

FALL 2021

47

Fiction

Standing on the side of the road, the car parked just behind her, Violet closed her eyes, listened to the rush of the wind in the grasses, and threw up.

“Jesus,” she imagined Buddy saying to her through the open passenger side window of the car, “What’s that about?”

She put her hands on her knees and spit onto the ground, watching the saliva sink into the grass. She breathed in once before turning to look at the car. The prairie was reflected in the back window and she imagined the sun was a fire burning through it. She had heard that prairie fires were not always bad, that they burned the matted-down and dead grasses and let the sun reach the soil again; they kept trees and shrubs from growing and taking over the grasses; they killed invasive species.

“Did you know wild fires are sometimes good?” she imagined saying to Buddy. “They refresh the land, or something like that.”

Violet imagined him looking cautiously between the vomit on the ground and herself. “I guess,” he would say.

“They also kill things. When there are fires that burn too long or too often, too many things die.”

Imaginary Buddy coughed and made a motion for her to get back into the car and drive.

She did, imagining on the road as they drove the same lines of fire burning that she imagined on her ceiling at night. Paths of fire across the paint, blown across the prairie by the wind. They always burned clear until morning, something burning all throughout the next day and the next. There were no cities, no highways, no people on her ceiling. There was only prairie.

Buddy would not understand this—imaginary or not. She could see him slapping his knees, saying, “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s why you heaved back there.”

Violet clicked her teeth together. Her mouth tasted like old orange candy and her throat felt hot. She felt dizzy.

Out in the grass the cicadas chirped and the sun began setting, all pink in the sky.

I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.

She shook her head, trying to get the image of Carolyn Brommer walking through the parking lot on graduation night out of her brain.

••• By the time she was back in town the dizzy feeling had left and was replaced by the sort of calm that comes at night in the summer. She drove past Wayne’s, the OPEN sign glowing in the window, kids on the bench outside licking ice-cream cones.

“What do you think she’s going to do?” Violet asked imaginary Buddy. “Carolyn, I mean.”

“About what?” Buddy said. Even in Violet’s imagination, he was oblivious.

“About what happened.”

Imaginary Buddy shook his head. “You don’t even know that anything did happen to her.

You saw her walking. That’s it.”

Violet clenched the wheel as she braked. The light had not yet fully turned red but she stopped anyway at the yellow. “Something happened,” she said out loud. “I just know it.”

She rounded the next corner and went the back way around the high school. In the summer it was humid and the sun beat down on the wrought iron fence surrounding the athletic fields. In June, July, August, the fence’s metallic sheen burned, and in the winter it seemed cold enough to freeze your skin. It was on the back part of the fence, the part pressed up against the woods that separated the high school grounds from Wayne’s, where Violet got the scar on the back of her thigh. Long and white, the scar was a thin reminder of the afternoon she and Buddy had climbed the fence as a short cut to the park behind the school.

“I don’t want to walk all the way to the gate,” Buddy had said. So they hopped the fence.

48

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Fiction

Violet had slipped and the fence had caught the back of her leg. Buddy carried her all the way home, forgetting all about the park or the rest of the afternoon, and she had gotten stitches.

“You were very brave,” Mrs. Wells told her daughter. And Mr. Wells clapped Buddy on the back and thanked him.

She lifted one leg and then the other as she drove, unsticking her skin from the leather seat of the car. She rarely thought about her scar any more, except for when she was unsticking her skin from leather seats or plastic chairs or metal piers. Then, she imagined her leg lifting away and the scar remaining on whatever surface from which she had just detached herself; she wanted to pick the scar up and hold it in her hand like a caterpillar.

Imaginary Buddy read her mind and shivered.

I

t happened on graduation night after the ceremony was over.

At first it hadn’t bothered her—it never even occurred to her that something was odd about seeing Carolyn Brommer walking across the parking lot in the dark, shoes in one hand, graduation gown wadded into a ball in the other. Violet herself was doing the same thing, walking home. In the back of the lot, by the tennis courts and the field that lead to the small strip of woods, Assistant Coach Michael’s truck was parked; it was silver and shiny even in the dark, and it had stood out rather well as it was the only vehicle in the lot.

She hadn’t thought too much of it at the time and instead nodded her head and said hello to Carolyn. But Carolyn had just kept walking. The lights in the school were on, but then they were always on. They burned all night long all year long, an outrageous energy bill racked up in an attempt to protect the CH RIS FI N K building from vandalism and prowlers.

“Honor Cord” is such a poignant and It was later that night, after she lay down in bed and pulled the top sheet up mysterious story, I started again from to her chin, that a tightening feeling in Violet’s chest arose. She thought she the beginning the moment I had finished. had seen a bruise on Carolyn’s upper arm but when she played the scene back The imaginative young protagonist of this in her mind she could not be sure. Was it a shadow cast by the school, a trick story lives in a cauldron of ambiguous of the light? She watched the prairies burn on the ceiling until she fell asleep. images and stories. Everything happening When Carolyn pulled her aside outside Wayne’s a week later, Violet looked in Violet Wells’ small town seems imbued for the bruise. with the weight of significance. “Honor “I wanted to say hi,” Carolyn said. “After graduation, in the parking lot, I Cord” honors and reveals the startling was so tired. I had to get home. I came by to say hi now.” complexity of life, and its author skillfully Violet nodded and ran her fingers over the brick on the outside of the ice entwines the reader in her character’s cream shop. Carolyn was wearing a pale-yellow t-shirt whose sleeves came delicate intuition. high enough for Violet to see a red and purple mark on her upper arm.

“Hi,” Violet said.

The two stood in silence for a moment; Carolyn hitched her purse up on to her shoulder.

“Did you have a nice time at the ceremony?” Carolyn said. Her voice seemed to waver.

“Fine, it was fine. The speeches were nice.” A car on the street honked and both girls turned. “You should have come with Buddy and me,” Violet said, and then regretted it. They were not really friends, she and Carolyn. “We walked around the lake, he brought some beers.”

“That sounds nice.”

“It was.” An image of the silver truck in the parking lot flashed across Violet’s mind.

Suddenly, brave, she asked what Carolyn had been doing at the school.

J U D G E’S N OTE

FALL 2021

49

Fiction

Carolyn looked towards the road and then looked back. “What were you doing there?” she said, forcing a laugh.

The girls smiled at one another, a father and two children pushed through the door to Wayne’s.

“I have to get home to dinner,” said Carolyn, and left. It was 3:45 pm, but Violet did not say anything about it.

P

oor Ellen Smith. How was she found? Shot through the heart lyin’ dead on the ground.

So I poisoned that dear little girl on the banks below.

Met her on the mountain, there I took her life. Met her on the mountain, stabbed her with my knife.

Song lyrics in the American folk song book Violet’s mother had bought for a dollar at Goodwill.

Violet had walked past this song book—placed on top of the piano in the front room— nearly a thousand times, paying no attention to the stories inside for most of her life, to what they were really about. The songs in fact were based on real stories, stories passed down from generation to generation. Alterations had been made to the dates and names and details of the original stories, and there were fragments of truth that were lost to history now. But ultimately Violet knew that the stories were true. And they were all the same story.

Boy meets girl; boy kills girl.

In mid-July Violet decided she was tired of sad stories and put the song book inside the piano bench where she couldn’t see it anymore. “Goodbye!” she said, closing the lid.

That night, she drove around the town with the windows down, observing.

The air was cooling as the sun set, and she rested her arm on the open window of the car. There wasn’t anything good playing on the radio, so she turned the music off and listened to the whooshing sound the air made as she flew through it.

••• She thought of graduation night, how by the time the sun came up all the excitement of the ceremony had worn off. Buddy had pulled the tassel off his cap and spun it around on his finger, whooping and shouting into the night.

She had covered his mouth with her hand and when he licked her palm she shrieked and the porch lights on the house across the street flicked on. The two of them had run down the street, the lake glowing a deep blue, and she felt as if the sun would never come up and her mother and father would wait patiently forever for her to come home. When she went to sleep that morning, the sun rising bright and orange on the horizon, she left her gown in a heap on the floor. Her stomach hurt from the warm beers they had drunk and she felt bad about not coming home sooner.

“Poor Ellen Smith,” she said, staring at the ceiling.

Up on the bluffs you could see for miles, could see the trees and the lake and the buildings and all the little parking lots that dotted the town. Violet did not know if you could see up on the bluffs from any of those places. It had never occurred to her to look.

I

t’s an idyllic day today. Isn’t it idyllic?” Buddy said. They were up on the bluffs looking down at the lake below. “Idyllic” had been an ACT word, a joke, a word Violet could not imagine herself ever actually using.

Buddy pointed down to the kayakers and the fishing boats. “Do you think they can see us up here?” he said.

Up on the bluffs you could see for miles, could see the trees and the lake and the buildings and all the little parking lots that dotted the town. Violet did not know if you could see up on the bluffs from any of those places. It had never occurred to her to look.

“No,” she said. “The bluffs are too tall.”

50

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Fiction

It only took a moment for her to find the high school and its parking lot.

From so far away she could not see it in any real detail. The school looked like a beige brick with an expanse of green on one side and blacktop on the other.

Violet knew suddenly what she wanted to do, and she imagined being brave enough to speak it.

“I want to break into the school,” she would say, if she were brave enough. “I want to go into the assistant coach’s office. I have to see if there is evidence.”

Buddy would blink his big, dumb eyes—knowing to what she was referring—and nod. He would look like Scout Finch in the movie of To Kill a Mockingbird, when she first sees and knows Boo Radley, hiding behind the door.

“I’m in,” he would say, and would kick his legs out in the grass.

O

ne Saturday morning when they were nine, Violet stepped on a broken bottle on Buddy’s front porch. A shard of glass stuck into the sole of her foot, and Buddy crept up to his mother’s room and took a pair of tweezers from her vanity. They sat on the back porch, her foot in his hand, while he examined the wound in the mid-morning sun. She squirmed when he poked at it with his fingernail, and the robins in the trees around them chirped.

“You have to hold still,” he said, and to keep her from yanking her foot away he cupped his hands around it and pressed. His hands were cool, and after a minute of sitting like this, staring up at the mottled and molding ceiling of the back porch, he dug the tweezers into her foot and pulled the glass out. It bled and after Buddy slipped the glass into his pocket, leaving the tweezers on the floor, there were little drops of Violet’s blood on the indoor-outdoor carpet.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to just dig it out like that,” she said.

Buddy scuffed his bare foot against the floor. “How else could you get it out?”

••• This memory played over in her mind as she walked to Buddy’s house late in the summer.

Buddy’s mother was on the back porch in her bathrobe, her feet up on a glass patio table, when Violet arrived. On the walk there, she passed a group of kids by the donation drop-off box, lighting cigarettes and putting them out against the bin. Only one girl was smoking; she had to have been older than the rest, she was so tall and bored looking. Violet guessed she was sixteen, and she watched as the girl alternated between smoking and sucking on a red lollipop.

The walk was short but it was humid and the air felt thick and wet. When Violet appeared behind the house, Buddy’s mother hardly moved, only turned her head to see what was invading her periphery.

She said hello, tightened her bathrobe.

Violet swatted at a mosquito on her arm.

“Buddy’s not here. He’s at the lake—some basketball thing.”

There were no basketball courts at the lake, and Violet told her so.

“I don’t know what he’s doing. He never tells me where he is. Never tells me what he’s doing, just does it.”

Violet shrugged.

“You don’t do that. You always tell your parents where you’re off to, always make sure someone knows where you are.”

Violet shrugged again and scanned the floor, searching for what she had really come for.

While Buddy’s mother was investigating a chip in her nail polish, Violet found it, the spot of blood on the carpeting. She felt grounded and real—though she never did not feel real, but sometimes felt more real than other times and could not explain it—and told Buddy’s mother that he probably didn’t know what he was going to the lake for, just went because his friends were going.

FALL 2021

51

Fiction

“You’re his friend. Why don’t you go down and recreate?”

“I told my mother I’d be here.”

“Exactly,” his mother said, though Violet was no longer listening, was focused on the blood on the carpet.

On the glass patio table was a ceramic mug with ladybugs painted across it. Carved into the bottom, Violet knew, was the name Laura. She had once asked Buddy’s mother who made the mug, who Laura was, and she had shrugged. “I bought it at the Goodwill.”

Violet blinked at the mug and the image of Carolyn walking across the parking lot in the dark blinked back.

“Jesus,” she said aloud, and Buddy’s mother coughed.

S

o she had made an imaginary pact with Buddy to break into the school. As the summer progressed and the days got hotter and the air more sticky, she concocted the plan of how it would go.

In the evening, when the sun was freshly set and the cicadas were humming in the trees, they would climb over the fence by the woods and set out across the field. They would walk confidently and stop to say hello to whoever they passed, as if this night were just like any night.

How they would get into the building was not important. She knew that they would walk down the foreign language hall and then turn into the science hall, avoiding windows whenever they could. They would walk silently for what would feel like a long time before she would stop and catch Buddy by the sleeve of his t-shirt, jerking him back.

“Wait,” she would say, peering in through the glass window on the door to the geography room.

Sophomore year they learned about the formation of the Great Lakes, how thousands of years ago glaciers had covered the Midwest, compressing the land beneath them so deeply that when the glaciers melted, they filled the basins they had created. The lake beds were now rising as they were no longer compressed. The pressure was taking fifteen thousand years to release. In that time Lake Superior had risen eighteen hundred feet.

That’s what Mr. Wenton said anyway.

Violet had asked in class what that meant for the lakes. “One day they won’t be there anymore? Is that what you’re saying?” She had visualized the Edmund Fitzgerald rising out of the water, the bodies of the crew preserved perfectly in the ice water. She had wondered if they would be buried.

Mr. Wenton had smiled without his teeth, trying not to laugh, and said, “Not for thousands of years. They’ll be more or less the same for the rest of your life.”

“More or less the same for the rest of your life” had not cut it for Violet. She wanted “completely the same for the rest of your life.”

Buddy would have sighed at the detour to the geography room. “What are we doing? I thought we were going to the gym.”

“Not the gym,” Violet would say. “The athletic offices.”

Buddy would kick at the linoleum, leaving little streaks of tread from his shoes, and say, “Well this isn’t either of those,” and Violet would squint her eyes against the brightness of the fluorescent lights on the ceiling.

When they reached the athletic offices, Violet would be suddenly afraid to touch the doorknob of Assistant Coach Michael’s office door.

“What do you think you’re going to find?” Buddy would say, “And what are you going to do if you do find something?”

Violet would not respond, would just open the door and step inside.

The athletic offices all looked the same, clean not in a tidy way but more so in the way that all athletic spaces are clean—meaning empty, plain, disinfected. On the desk was a

52

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Fiction

computer, a small daily calendar, and a mug with a stash of pens of wildly varying quality.

Behind the desk was a filing cabinet that was filled with a lifetime’s worth of fitness reports and weigh-ins. The only object in the room with a personal sense about it was a photograph of two men, one young and one old, tacked to the wall with a metal push-pin. The faces of the men looked so common, so much like anyone, that the photograph seemed almost fake.

Violet knew all this because she had once been asked in the middle of gym class to retrieve the fitness files from the assistant coach’s office. They had been watching a film about eating disorders, about a girl with bulimia who threw up into empty peanut butter jars and hid them in her closet until her mother found out; the mother screamed whenever she found another jar but also would not stop pulling sweaters off of shelves or dresses off of hangers.

Violet had volunteered to get the fitness files, and thus knew where everything was, where the fitness files for the general students ended and those of the student athletes began. She could walk in and point at the specific cabinet, the specific drawer, where they met. She had studied the files in depth in lieu of going back to finish watching the rest of the film.

With Buddy, she would step inside and he would follow, neither of them touching anything. They would stand just inside the doorway and scan the room in silence.

Violet would see it first, the yellow honor cord balled up on the floor like a secret peanut butter jar.

She would pull the cord out from under the desk with her foot. Buddy would blink his big dumb eyes and then look away, and she would wind the cord around her fist.

So she had made an imaginary pact with Buddy to break into the school. As the summer progressed and the days got hotter and the air more sticky, she concocted the plan of how it would go.

C

arolyn Brommer.

Violet had never been able to figure her out. She was not catty, was not stupid, was not geeky. She was not loud or funny or shy. She just was. Once Violet had seen her running laps around the football field after football practice had ended, a single pair of cleats left sitting on the bench on the sidelines. Carolyn passed the cleats over and over and over as she ran until Assistant Coach Michael, tall and young and dark haired, came out to collect them.

All Carolyn did when he came over to the bench was point, and all the assistant coach did was pick the shoes up and nod his head.

Violet thought this interaction summed Carolyn up very nicely, though she didn’t know exactly what it said about her, if anything.

S

he began planning how the conversation about the honor cord would go with Carolyn.

She would see Carolyn walking by Wayne’s and would call out to her.

Carolyn would turn around and wait for Violet to catch up to her.

“I think this is yours.” Violet would hold the cord out, messily looped around her fingers, and Carolyn would look blankly back at her.

“That’s not mine,” she would say.

“I found it in the athletic office. In the assistant coach’s office.”

Carolyn, with her dull blonde hair and her penchant for solitude, would have suggested that it belonged to one of the athletes, that they had maybe stopped by after the ceremony to say goodbye to the place where they had spent so much time. How Violet had gotten into the office would not be questioned by Carolyn, and why the student athletes would be particularly fond of the place they went to be disciplined by their coach would not be questioned by Violet.

Violet would be left holding the cord, would throw it into the lake the next time she was there and would watch it sink down and down and down into the blue-green water.

No, try again, Violet thought. Take it from the top.

FALL 2021

53

Fiction

She played the scene over again, stopped before saying where she found the cord, and sighed.

What she would say next was this: “You know, if something happened, I can help you.”

“What are you talking about? If what happened?”

Violet would choose her next words very carefully, and then she would say softly, so no one else could hear, “If Assistant Coach Michael did something to you, there are things we can do, people we can tell.”

Carolyn would take a step back. “We? Who is ‘we’? Me and you?”

Violet would nod.

Carolyn would get a look in her eye that Violet had never seen before—one of fear and distrust, but also one of anger.

“I barely know you,” she would say, and neither of the girls would know what to do with this heavy fact.

I

n late August it rained for four days straight, the rainfall totaling over seventeen inches.

The river leading to the lake overflowed, and ducks swam over grass on what had until a few days prior been the shore. Run-off from the fertilizer factory made its way into the water. The sun couldn’t shine through the clouds. The combination of these three seemingly independent occurrences made the conditions right for an algae bloom.

And the algae bloomed.

It settled over the lake and turned the water bright teal. Tiny green dots spread across the surface and fish jumped to get oxygen. A dead duck washed up on shore.

“It looks so pretty,” Violet said.

She and Buddy were standing on the shore of the lake where the water had receded. The ground was still wet, still spongy under their feet. It did not occur to either of them that the poison water had not gone away; it had sunk into the dirt and roots of the grass. As far as they were concerned, the algae was only in the lake, inside the perfectly formed boundaries the water had receded back inside of.

“It’s deadly,” Buddy said, as if they did not both already know this very well.

Down the shoreline a group of children stood on the rocks in their bathing suits. They were daring one another to jump into the water, and, whenever anyone got close to doing so, they all screamed with laughter.

The algae was not particularly thick in this area of the water, but it was still there, permeating the entire lake. Violet worried for the children on the rocks and hoped they would not swim. The moment she looked away, she heard a splash and more laughter filled with screaming.

“Come on,” she said, and motioned for Buddy to follow her to the moss-covered rocks where they usually sat.

The rocks had been put along the shoreline to dam the marshes and keep the lake contained many, many years ago, before even her grandmother’s time. It was difficult for Violet to imagine that far into the past, the same way it was difficult to imagine so far into the future that the Great Lakes were the depth of a puddle.

The sun was bright and it made Violet’s eyes water. When Buddy turned around to look at her, tears were welling up around her lower eye-lids. He squinted at her.

“What’s wrong? Are you crying?”

“Sun’s too bright.”

He took his baseball cap off and reached precariously across the jagged rocks between them, the hand he used for support slipping as he did so. Violet leaned forward just enough for him to set the hat onto her head. It was partially lopsided, but she didn’t adjust it.

She wished she knew where it all was leading, what it all was supposed to mean. She wondered if it did indeed mean anything—the cigarettes being lit and put out against the donation bin; the children swimming in the algae bloom; the fires burning across the prairie.

54

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Fiction

“That better?” Buddy said, and she began to cry.

“What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

Violet shrugged, thinking suddenly of the mug with the name Laura carved into the bottom. She didn’t think that she could even begin to explain what she was crying for, so instead she scratched at her eye as though a bug had flown into it. Buddy looked at her expectantly.

“I can’t stop thinking about prairie fires, and handmade objects at the Goodwill, and dogs sent to outer space to die alone.”

Buddy was silent.

The cicadas were not buzzing yet but would be soon. Among the trees the robins chirped and hopped around on the soggy ground. She wondered if the rain had drowned the worms, if the robins would be able to find any, if birds even ate worms at all.

“Can I do anything?” Buddy said eventually.

“I don’t know,” Violet said. “Can you?”

He sighed, as if to say “Probably not, no,” and Violet looked away.

She wished she knew where it all was leading, what it all was supposed to mean.

She wondered if it did indeed mean anything—the cigarettes being lit and put out against the donation bin; the children swimming in the algae bloom; the fires burning across the prairie. Carolyn Brommer walking with her shoes in her hand on graduation night. She wondered if any of these things even warranted notice or if she were simply making something out of nothing. It worried her, the fact that she did not know and the fact that she did not know what was worse: to be making something out of nothing or to be right.

Over by the rocks all but one of the children were now swimming in the algae. The only one not in the water was a girl with her knees pulled up to her chin, perched on the rock closest to shore. Her hair was short, not even down to her jawline, and her shoulder blades stuck out bony and sharp from beneath her swimsuit straps. Each time one of the children screeched, she seemed to pull herself in tighter and tighter, her shoulder blades sticking out like knives. The rest of her was all soft, Violet noticed, round. Violet had, suddenly, the inclination to hold the girl in the palm of her hand the way she wanted to hold the scar on her thigh. Something not to be studied, but something to be loved.

Allison Uselman was born, raised, and currently lives in Madison. She attended Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she graduated in 2019 with a degree in English and with a studio art minor. In her free time, Uselman draws, bikes, watches M*A*S*H reruns, and snuggles her dog, George. She hopes to one day attend art school somewhere near the ocean, where she can continue drawing baby animals, wildflowers, and pouty self-portraits.

FALL 2021

55

Poetry

Award Winning Poetry from our 2021 Poetry Contest

The Father Your dead father dogs you like the white mutt that roams along the fishing holes and walks the edge of gravel roads, sometimes

2021

at a trot, most times slow, but with purpose, muscle and sinew protecting old bones. The father in silence with pipe clenched between his teeth made a fog of every place he inhabited.

What did he understand of you, late arrived child, when he hoped the burdens of fatherhood were done?

The white dog looks deep within you, his eyes the blue of your father’s favorite Rapala.

You take his poles, his tackle box pulled shut with an old belt and sit at the shore. You cast and try to think past what you harbor in you—the strange alchemy of love and duty, and the anger that rises from it, thick as the dog’s hackles when it senses something hidden in the lake’s fog.

Jennifer Fandel

56

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Poetry

Proper Burial When we turn the earth in our yard for garden, the last tenant’s burials emerge as bones.

Let us say some words for every creature that breathed its last, for the rabbits, birds, and squirrels, for the dog and the stray cat that came for mice and rest, when the dog was gone and the baby possum that once stewed in the scent of dirt and sleep, the insects cometh, and the moles that shrugged off the little life left in them, removed from their steely traps.

My grandmother refused to be buried in the Catholic cemetery because of a gopher problem and laid her money down for a municipal plot. Digging up bones picked clean, I understand.

Last spring, arctic air swept

Jennifer Fandel’s poetry is forthcoming or has been published in The American Journal of Poetry, Ginger, Measure, The Baltimore Review, and RHINO, as well as a number of anthologies including, Hope Is the Thing: Wisconsinites on Perseverance in a Pandemic.

Her other published work includes book reviews and nonfiction books for children and young adults. She teaches poetry at Oakhill Correctional Institution through the Wisconsin Prison Humanities Project and tutors students in writing at Oakhill through the Odyssey Beyond Bars college program.

the plains and a foot of snow fell after the robins had arrived, the worms shrinking below the refrozen soil.

My husband found a robin lying in the snow and thought he felt the heart still beating, the bird’s dark eye frozen open.

He carried the robin inside, lay its body in a shoebox under a scrap of wool, as if a bed tucked into.

Jennifer Fandel

FALL 2021

57

Poetry

Saint Simone She starved herself thinking about grace.

How difficult it was to be nothing but flesh: prickly, contrarious, pretending to get by

2021

on cigarettes and headaches.

As a student, she witnessed the heedless velocity of factories; of campaigns preparing to turn people into things. She called this force. Like any woman who has loved a man, she understood God’s absence— the harrowing way loss can intensify passion. Denying herself the comforts of church or sect, she believed only in challenge: staring into the black waves of oblivion until they shimmered.

David Southward

58

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Poetry

Notes Toward a Queer Physics quantum bits: the either/and/or particles of being instantly transmitted across space— attraction’s valences revealed only when observed LGBTQIA+ encryptions too deep to hack: the anywhere between M and F, the Mother Father God please quit asking what I am other than estranged

David Southward teaches in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His publications include Bachelor’s Buttons (Kelsay Books, 2020) and Apocrypha, a sonnet sequence based on the Gospels (Wipf & Stock, 2018). Southward is a two-time winner of the Lorine Niedecker Prize and was selected by Mark Doty for the Muse Prize from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. In 2019 his poem “Mary’s Visit” received the Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry. Southward resides in Milwaukee with his husband, Geoff.

and stranded, your splintered lover eternally seeking/avoiding entanglement

David Southward

FALL 2021

59

Poetry

Let My Hands Too Bring the Day The red edge of morning, like a razor, slits the dark. No more excuses. Today I will be sharpened. I will be more myself as I would be. No espaliered intent—centered, leaning into each moment the way a ladder leans toward the window of a burning house; I claim the ascent, push ahead. I’m the water in the hose,

2021

I am mercy, the chase of flame, but also red heat eating oxygen and growing stronger.

I write my life high as smoke repeating its open roll. I write my name, cite all my yesterdays, old bones and battle scars. Let my open heart meet injustice with equal force, let kindness rattle, shake me in life’s cup and pour me out as urban produce, Ai Weiwei’s blankets, leadfree water, room for refugees, Head Start, health care. For the homeless—a meal, a bed, lasting warmth. For everyone: sidewalk art.

Paula Schulz

Paula Schulz has taught grades pre-K through college. She has been involved in many ekphrastic projects and lives and writes in Slinger with her husband, Greg.

60

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Poetry

Elegy for Home Beginning phrase from “Digging” by Seamus Heaney

To the age of hands and animals laying open the fields, is as far back as I know my family. From a language that is my heritage, from a language I cannot read is the marriage record in our family Heilige Schrift.

When I hold it in my hands I hold generations of ancestors. Once their fingerprints pressed whorls of a topographic map into these pages. Contour lines of my life shaping me in ways I don’t understand.

If I could see those lines now, would they show me the rise and fall of family acreage, the depth of home-stead rivers, the depth of a farmer’s strength?

Would I like these people, hold hands with them like kindergarteners crossing a street?

II Let there be gemütlichkeit, beer and sausages.

Let there be music to polka me home, because that is where I am going. Out one barn door and into previous generations’ tillable land and horse collars. Field boots straight from van Gogh’s brush, strange music of the umlaut filling steamer trunks.

Where were you all your lives and did you ever imagine me, ever think that your Bible-page history would reach into a world like this one with GPS-guided tractors?

III Always, always at the margins—sorrow for a way of life gone, for people I will never know, for the everyday absence in me.

But also for the land holding a history of those who came before us, whose arrowheads worked their way from earth like bones.

All these families and none, none of us living from these loved fields anymore.

Paula Schulz

FALL 2021

61

Poetry

J U D G E’S N OTES UW hot MP o/Pete A m

lan d

BREN DA CÁRD ENAS

The Father

“The Father” is exceptional in its marriage of content and form. I admire how the author threads the figure of the dog through the entire poem, turning it into an extended metaphor for the deceased (and once-reticent) father’s foremost presence in the speaker’s mind, which is “dogged” by complicated feelings. Couplets mirror the dog and speaker, father and child, and the merging of dog and father. I also appreciate the vivid imagery throughout, especially the haunting image at the poem’s end. Such captivating similes and images, precise diction, and enjambment kept me eagerly plunging into each new line as I journeyed through the poem.

Saint Simone

I admire poems that teach me something or that encourage me to learn.

In “Saint Simone,” the economy of language and smart lineation are also admirable: the way, for example, that the line break after “nothing” invites ambiguity, or the way the line break after “God’s absence” underscores that lack. I am also especially struck by the poem’s last three stanzas—the power in the image of Saint Simone. It’s an ending that shimmers, that reverberates in the reader’s mind.

Let My Hands Too Bring the Day

The forcefulness of this poem’s opening image immediately pulled me in, and I quickly embraced the speaker’s fervor to live fully, mercifully, and ethically.

This feeling was intensified by the central metaphor of fire and the poem’s accumulating energy. In its final capacious breath, the speaker becomes a cornucopia of precious gifts for those who need them most—and for all of us.

62

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Book Review

The Comfort of Monsters

by Willa C. Richards Harper, 400 pages, $27.99 Reviewed by Frank Anderson

In her debut novel, The Comfort of Monsters, Willa C. Richards has doubled down on the systemic dysfunctionality of Milwaukee once alluded to by best-selling author Peter Straub. In his dark and experimental 1990 story, “A Short Guide to the City,” Straub provides a visitor’s guide to an unnamed but recognizable city on Lake Michigan where a serial murderer called “the Viaduct Killer” is at large.

Straub’s city is factory-dominated, working-class, strictly bordered, and contentious—a living, breathing character in all but human form. Straub wrote of his native town, “The city’s characteristic mode is denial. For this reason, an odd fabulousness permeates every quarter of the city, a receptiveness to fable, to the unrecorded.”

In Willa Richard’s novel it is still the early 1990s in Milwaukee, but instead of the Viaduct Killer, real-life serial killer and cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer, dominates the headlines while two working class sisters, Dee and Peg McBride, navigate young adult life in the city.

Peg is a poet. Early in the novel, in a meet-cute moment with a soon-to-be boyfriend, she name-check’s Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker as being her favorite. The boy responds by quoting Niedecker. Like Niedecker, Peg lives on the lower fringes, working a string of dead-end jobs to support her writing. Her sister Dee is an art major at a local college, a talented painter with an innate ability to attract the attention of the opposite sex.

One day, Dee vanishes without a trace. Peg takes over the reins of investigating her sister’s disappearance from an indifferent and short-handed Milwaukee police department. Dee is just another name on the city’s growing list of missing persons. Milwaukee’s media outlets, law enforcement, and city officials spend their time basking in the lurid glow of the Jeffrey Dahmer case. At the same time, the frustrating mantra, No body, no crime, permeates the novel. In describing how Peg’s childhood illusions about her city and her own cloudy nostalgia are altered by her sister’s disappearance, Richard’s prose shines, The city became strange and ugly to me. After I had looked at the city on the maps, the place took on an odd, unfamiliar persona in which every shape carried some previously unforeseen potential for danger: the jaggedness of the shoreline along Lake Michigan, the crooked rectangles of the neighborhoods, the tannic rivers bleeding their way through the city to the swamps in the

suburbs, the highways built up like militaristic border walls between rich and poor.

Thirty years after Dee’s disappearance, in a final, desperate move to find a measure of closure for her dying mother and some sense of relief for her weary but clear-eyed older brother, Peg and her family enlist a celebrity psychic. Here’s where the story’s narrative kicks into overdrive.

On the surface, The Comfort of Monsters could be a ready-for-Hollywood thriller with all the requisite ingredients—sex, drugs, bad boyfriends, good cops and bad ones—all wrapped up with elements of the supernatural and a cinematic feel. But little ambiguities, false memories, feelings of shame, and the author’s unerring eye for familial details and the sights, sounds, and smells of 1991 Milwaukee bring us something quite different.

This is a new literature, and Willa C. Richards has cast a wide and ambitious net over a much-neglected city and its people. As both the city and our protagonist struggle to move on from dark and pained pasts, one is reminded of the greater movement of recent history and the stark difference between the pre-COVID–19 world and the present day. If she chooses (and goes where Straub never fully went), Richards could be to Milwaukee what Dickens was to London.

Frank L. Anderson is a writer, director, stop motion animator, painter, and musician. He has created visuals for Turner Classic Movies, backed up country music legends on pedal steel guitar, and was a session musician at Smart Studios in Madison. Anderson taught animation at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and sequential art at Lawrence University. He is the creator and author of wisconsinology.com and is currently working with The September Club in Los Angeles as a project developer.

FALL 2021

63

Book Review

Godspeed

by Nickolas Butler G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 352 pages, $27.00 Reviewed by Jill Stukenberg

Author Nickolas Butler’s Godspeed is a runaway heartstopper, a thriller by a writer with considerable literary chops. From the start of his latest novel, Butler sets the twin horses of ambition and morality galloping, pulling the reader in opposite directions. With Butler at the reins, we are left gaping at the twists, near misses, and the brutal-yet-beautiful outcome.

Hailing from the Eau Claire area, Butler regularly features Wisconsin landscapes and local craft beers in his novels, including Shotgun Lovesongs, The Hearts of Men, and Little Faith, and his short story collection Beneath the Bonfire. Even though Godspeed takes place in Wyoming, Butler’s fans will recognize the central dilemma of working-class men trying to make their way in a changing America. The plot revolves around three young builders— Cole, Bart, and Teddy—who land the opportunity of a lifetime: if they can complete an ambitious construction project in the beautiful and remote terrain of Jackson Hole, they will earn lifechanging bonuses and establish their fledgling company in a hot real estate market. However, the three builders must complete the project within a dangerously short deadline. The stakes rise as the young trio discovers why other builders have turned down this deal offered by their wealthy and exacting client, Gretchen, a high-powered attorney and the visionary behind the $20 million mountainside home.

Butler’s novels are marked by his generous and yet clear-sighted interest in human nature, often reflected in characters capable of doing both good and evil. In this novel, the three builders are lifelong friends, regular guys. Their dreams are not lofty; respectively, they want to own their own home, take a place in Jackson society, and find a small slice of the life of ease they see around them.

Butler’s special insight is to connect the ways in which the builders’ dreams and determinations fuel but also unravel them, including a depiction of drug addiction that invites readers to consider the many darknesses into which one might slide.

Gretchen, the powerful client behind the project that fuels Butler’s story, also provides a point of view that reminds us that the wealthy, sometimes easy to demonize, have their own demons—and can earn a reader’s love. (Wait until you see why she orders, but does not eat, a rare steak each day for her lunch.)

Butler’s prose moves like a rushing river, and the beauty of this novel—with its scenery and its tragedy—unfolds like a night sky in the west. We Wisconsin readers will return from its windswept peaks to recognize ourselves, our own Jackson Holes right here, and the friendships that can be the last tethers to one’s own humanity.

Jill Stukenberg is an Associate Professor of English at UW–Stevens Point at Wausau who grew up in Sturgeon Bay. Stukenberg is the winner of the 2021 Big Moose Prize from Black Lawrence Press, which is publishing her first novel in September 2022.

Read additional reviews of new and interesting books by Wisconsin authors at wisconsinacademy.org/reviews.

64

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

MAPPED OUT A new podcast about gerrymandering in Wisconsin tle

Go

Bu

rh a

N

m

St .

WPR REPORTS

E

rS

E

gt o

in

W as h

.

St W

Jo hn

E

e Av

n

.

sin

so

nA ve

Jo hn

m rh a Go

St

W

r ste eb W

St

.

so

n

St

.

t.

N

on isc W

Find it at wpr.org/mappedout or wherever you get your podcasts

M

y ne

ai

n

St

ck Pi

.

N E

St .

SW

Nonprofit Org. U.S. POSTAGE

P A I D

1922 University Ave Madison, WI 53726

MADISON, WI Permit No. 1564