Wisconsin People & Ideas – Summer 2023

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WISCONSIN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, ARTS & LETTERS

WISCONSIN ACADEMY STAFF

Ursa Anderson • Exhibitions and Outreach Coordinator

Selena Baker • James Watrous Gallery Intern

Lizzie Baugh • Development Intern

Madison Buening • External Relations Coordinator

Christopher Chambers • Interim Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas

Jody Clowes • Director, James Watrous Gallery

Lizzie Condon • Director of Science and Climate Programs

Lulu Fregoso • Climate & Energy Intern

Jessica James • Climate & Energy Program Manager

Anna Krawczyk • Communications Intern

Erika Monroe-Kane • Executive Director

Matt Rezin • Operations Manager

Zack Robins • Director of Development

Madeline Schultz • Climate & Energy Intern

Yong Cheng Yang (Yong Cha) • Visitor Services Associate, James Watrous Gallery

ACADEMY BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Chan Stroman • President

Roberta Filicky-Peneski • President-Elect

Tom Luljak • Immediate Past President

Richard Donkle • Treasurer

Thomas W. Still • Secretary

Amy Horst • Vice President of Arts

Robert D. Mathieu • Vice President of Sciences

Kimberly Blaeser • Vice President of Letters

Mark Bradley • Foundation President

Steve Ackerman, Madison

Ruben Anthony, Madison

Lillian Brown, Ripon

Frank D. Byrne, Monona

Jay Handy, Madison

BJ Hollars, Eau Claire

Michael Morgan, Milwaukee

Kevin Reilly, Verona

Brent Smith, La Crosse

ACADEMY FOUNDATION

Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) • Foundation Founder

Mark Bradley • Foundation President

Kristen Carreira • Foundation Vice-President

Richard Donkle • Foundation Treasurer

Arjun Sanga • Foundation Secretary

Betty Custer

Roberta Filicky-Peneski

Jack Kussmaul

Tom Luljak

Andrew Richards

Chan Stroman

Steve Wildeck

Editor’s Note

Summertime, according to Gershwin, the living is easy, and summer in Wisconsin is indeed a golden time, a brief season that evokes leisure, cold beer, boats, lakes, and beaches, all of which we touch on in this, our summer issue. Our cover story celebrates the current spotlight on Native American art and artists nationally and internationally, and how Native artists with connections to Wisconsin are playing a major role in this long overdue recognition. The Wisconsin Table features a fresh take on brewing beer in Waukesha County that’s also a look back at the history of brewing culture in the state. We have stories about sand and beaches on Lake Michigan, and about boats and boat building on Lake Superior. You will also find, as always, new poems, and another fine short story from our annual writing contest.

This has been a year of change and upheaval for me. There have been two deaths in the family in recent months, one of which was a relief and one that I’m still grieving. Our twenty-year-old son unexpectedly moved home for the summer. Enough said about that. And in the midst of production on this issue, we adopted a collie puppy and I was offered a full-time job, both welcome and exciting events that will require change and adjustment. After the publication of this, my sixth issue as interim editor, I will be joining Beloit College, another renowned Wisconsin institution, and one even older than the Academy, where I will serve as editor of Beloit College Magazine Wisconsin People & Ideas was my introduction to the Academy, and it is the heart and soul of the organization. It has been a pleasure and an honor to take the helm of the magazine during this time of ongoing transition, and as excited as I am to join Beloit College, I will miss my colleagues at the Academy and being part of the team that produces this remarkable magazine for you, our valued members. I hope that you all enjoy the summer, and this issue of the magazine. Thank you for reading, and for being a part of our community. I hope that our paths will cross again on down the road.

Laura Camille Tuley

On the cover: John Hitchcock and Tom Jones, 2023. Credit: Mariah Moneda

Fiction

42 Snow Door

Janice Wilberg

Poetry

48 Poetry from Wisconsin Poets

Lailah Dainin Shima, Elisabeth Harrahy, Nick Sengstock, Alexandria Delcourt

Book Reviews

52 Sometimes Creek by Steve Fox

Reviewed by Anthony Bukoski

53 How a Civilization Begins by Richard Vargas

Reviewed by Oscar Mireles

54 Gauntlet in the Gulf ed. by Claude Clayton Smith

Reviewed by Eva B. McManus

55 Culture Work ed. by Marcus Cederström and Tim Frandy

Reviewed by Kaitlyn Berle

Climate & Energy Spotlight

56 The Wisconsin Farmers Union: Empowering Farmers and Building Community

Jessica James

Ideas that move the world forward

Wisconsin People & Ideas 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 the world and proud of Wisconsin ideas. Wisconsin People & Ideas features thoughtful stories about the state’s 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.

Copyright © 2023 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.

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

CHRISTOPHER CHAMBERS interim editor

JEAN LANG copy editor

CHARLOTTE FRASCONA cold reader

JODY CLOWES arts editor

HUSTON DESIGN design & layout

ISSN 1558-9633

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Jesse Brookstein

From the Director

A key focus of mine over the past year has been outreach and relationship building across Wisconsin. As I have been meeting people around the state, I have had many conversations about what matters to them and what they value in the Academy. I repeatedly hear concerns about the divisiveness and distrust between people with different perspectives and the “us vs. them” dynamic—applied to both individuals and institutions.

Reports from recent polls, particularly those by Gallup and Pew, reveal that Americans are increasingly distrustful of executive and legislative government as well as once-trusted institutions such as the courts, news media, and universities. In a trend that is decades long, the fiery partisan rhetoric of recent years has taken a toll and continues to erode trust.

Wisconsin has become known for division. Yet research shows that we have much in common and share many values. Wisconsinites often find common ground on controversial issues. People in our state and across the country are not pleased about the increase in distrust, in vitriol, in division. What I find particularly hopeful is that people do believe in each other, in collaboration, and in the possibility of improvement.

This is where the Academy comes in.

The Academy provides the space that so many want—one that is respectful, where difference is honored, where common ground and understanding can be found. Through Academy programming and coalitions, we encourage a community of curious minds, creative exploration, and scientific examination.

I invite you to join others from across the state, whether in person or online, to engage and connect in meaningful ways. Meet other nature enthusiasts and science explorers through this summer’s Science Talks series, Time Traveling Through Wisconsin’s Geology, featuring renowned geologists and outdoors experts in discussion about the incredible geologic features of our state. Visit the James Watrous Gallery webpage to get to know the Wisconsin artists selected for gallery exhibitions in coming years. Look for details on the upcoming Climate & Energy Agriculture and Rural Resilience Summit taking place in the Eau Claire area. Join us for the Wisconsin Book Festival this fall, with readings by Wisconsin People & Ideas contest winners, whose works were selected from hundreds of submissions from across the state.

The more we connect and the more we experience each other, the greater our empathy, understanding, and trust. I’m grateful to you for being a part of the Academy and helping welcome others. Onward.

Erika Monroe-Kane, Executive Director

Sharon Vanorny

News for Members

JAMES WATROUS GALLERY

Staff are busy preparing an exhibition schedule for the next four years, focused on artists and curators awarded solo shows and curatorial projects in the recent open call. Jurors Portia Cobb, Anwar Floyd-Pruitt, Yvette Pino, Rae Senarighi, and Leslie Walfish reviewed the applications in three rounds, and final selections were announced in late May. A full list of awardees can be found at wisconsinacademy. org/2023-call-artists-curators.

CLIMATE & ENERGY INITIATIVE

The Climate Fast Forward conference on October 17, 2022, at Monona Terrace in Madison was a big success, bringing together people from across the state to take stock of the progress Wisconsin has made towards mitigating and adapting to climate change since the 2019 conference, and to work together to take action on climate change.

FICTION AND POETRY CONTESTS

Finalists for our annual Fiction and Poetry Contests have been sent to the 2023 judges— Debra Monroe for fiction and Nikki Wallschlaeger for poetry. The winners, who will be announced later this summer, will receive cash prizes and publication in Wisconsin People & Ideas. Next year’s contest for Wisconsin writers opens January 15, 2024.

JOIN THE FULL CIRCLE SOCIETY

The Full Circle Society helps to create a better world inspired by Wisconsin ideas. Consider joining this group of amazing people in making an important investment for future generations. By adding the Wisconsin Academy to your will or estate plan, or by another type of planned gift, you become a member of the Full Circle Society and may be able to reduce your family’s future tax burdens. Contact Zack Robbins, zrobbins@wisconsinacademy.org

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

We truly want to hear from you. Let us know what you think. Send your feedback and comments about Wisconsin People & Ideas and other Academy programs to cchambers@wisconsinacademy.org.

Errata

In the last issue, Self-Made Woman by Denise Chanterelle DuBois was incorrectly noted as a publication of The Wisconsin State Historical Press; the book was published by UW Press and is distributed by The Wisconsin State Historical Press. In the same article, Ted Rulseh’s book is about inland lakes, not the Great Lakes.

In @ Watrous Gallery, two photographs of accordion books did not include credits for the works depicted. Those credits are:

Top image

Roy De Forest, A Journey to the Far Canine Range and the Unexplored Territory Beyond Terrier Pass, Bedford Arts, 1988.

Bottom Image

(Back)

Aram Saroyan, TOP, Primary Information, 1965/2021. (Front)

Hartmut Andryczuk, Elektronikengel, Redfoxpress, 2003.

author events

Fall Celebration Oct. 19–22, 2023 and programs year-round

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2023 Fiction and Poetry Contest Results

Congratulations to this year’s writing contest finalists, and thank you to all of the Wisconsin writers who entered the contest. The overall quality of the submissions was exceptional this year. The winners will be announced later this summer and will appear in upcoming issues of Wisconsin People & Ideas.

FICTION FINALISTS

“Simeon and the Bad Kid” by Margaret Benbow, Madison

“Music Appreciation for the Dead” by Matt Cashion, La Crosse

“The Goddess of Illicit Choices” by Susanna Daniel, Madison

“The Odds Against Something” by Kathryn Gahl, Brookfield,

“Zugunruhe” by Holly Hilliard, Madison

“Wrong Number” by C. Kubasta, Mineral Point

“Life Sucks” by Tyler Marchant, Stevens Point

“Not Drowning, But Waving” by John Mulvihill, New Glarus

“The Right Decision” by Joseph Rein, River Falls

“Into that Good Night” by Richard Zaborowske, Appleton

POETRY FINALISTS

“This is Not a Villanelle” by Emily Bowles, Appleton

“Mercury Goes Right Through You” by Steven Espada Dawson, Madison

“I Hate People Who Cut in Line But” by Marnie Dresser, Spring Green

“A Deterioration in Talks” by Adam Fell, Madison

“if I have an addiction to water, know it’s hereditary” by Taylor Kirby, Madison

“everywhere else is Cleveland” by Samantha Link, Milwaukee

“Climate Passover” by K. E. McCoy, Madison

“The Secret to Success Sells Tomatoes at the Farmer’s Market” by Matti Powers, Madison

“My Boy” by Sakkara Athene Richards, Middleton

“some taverns use shotguns for door handles” by Kimberly Lynn Sailor, Mount Horub

“Ambiguous Loss” by Kelly R. Samuels, La Crosse

“My Son Standing Near a Glass of Water” by Sheryl Slocum, Milwaukee

“Ache Index” by William Stobb, Onalaska

“Our Young Men” by Guy Thorvaldsen, Madison

“Husband’s Depressive Distance” by Katherine Yets, St. Francis

BASIN SHORT FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERES IN STEVENS POINT

A new short film festival will showcase Wisconsin-focused filmmakers and their work, while promoting engagement with local creative organizations and screening spaces. The first annual Basin Short Film Festival will primarily feature short films (30 minutes or fewer) and independent cinema that fosters critical discussion and community connection and celebrates the spirit of independent film, providing a welcoming space for filmmakers and audience members alike.

According to Garrett Katerzynske, Project Manager for Create Portage County, the festival sponsor, selected films will be screened at locations around downtown Stevens Point, with a couple of screenings in nearby Amherst. Screenings will take place in locations that range from historic theaters, breweries, and local creative centers, to a renovated convent chapel and a newly constructed distillery.

Entries will be evaluated by a diverse mix of regional media professionals and professors. Prizes will be awarded by category for: Experimental, Animation, Documentary, Music Video, Performance & Installation, and Still Rendering (films made in 48 hours or fewer). To be eligible, films must be shot primarily on location in Wisconsin, and/or one or more of the project’s principal creative personnel (e.g. director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, lead actor, etc.) must be born in Wisconsin, a current or former Wisconsin resident for one or more years, or an alumnus or current student at a school located in Wisconsin.

The new film festival is part of Create Portage County’s efforts to promote creativity in a ten-county region in north-central Wisconsin they’re calling The Basin, that is the Upper Wisconsin River Basin that connects the communities of Adams, Forest, Juneau, Langlade, Lincoln, Marathon, Oneida, Portage, Vilas, and Wood Counties. “We encourage any work or artist with a connection to Wisconsin to submit work produced in any year,” says Katerzynske. “Given that this is the first year of the fest and we are focusing exclusively on Wisconsin filmmakers and work, there's a greater chance for talent from across the state to screen, gain exposure, and get awarded.” The organizers expect to receive around 50 submissions and aim to screen the majority of them. The extended deadline for submissions to the film festival is July 31.

Dense Jans

Jesse Brookstein

Rob Novak pours a glass of his Altbier at the Old World Wisconsin Brewhouse.

OLD SCHOOL BREWING: TAPPING THE PAST

BY JESSE BROOKSTEIN

Youdon’t have to be a beverage industry expert to know beer is big business, and you don’t have to be a historian to know Wisconsin is home to one of the country’s proudest beer brewing cultures. And while Wisconsin is often associated with legendary German names like Blatz, Schlitz, Pabst, and Fauerbach, it’s said that Milwaukee’s first brewery was actually started in 1840 by Welsh settlers. From Kenosha to Hudson, La Crosse to Rhinelander, and all throughout our great state, settlers of French, Polish, Swiss, English, Belgian, French, and Scandinavian descent were brewing beer across the Wisconsin landscape throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Top left: Similar to Belgian coolships, this copper vessel helps cool the wort prior to fermentation. Top right: Rob Novak boils water used to rehydrate oak vessels. Above right: Old-world scales topped with copper pots used to weigh grain. Above Left: Open-top fermenters with copper pots to hold ice that cools active fermentation.

All photos: Jesse Brookstein

Sadly, much of that diverse, ethnic brewing culture was wiped out by world wars, Prohibition, and the corporate consolidation of breweries. History and generational customs gave way to standardized flavors buoyed by glitzy advertising. As is so often the case with trades and traditions, the lessons that had been passed down from parents to children and owners to employees soon ended up as distant memories or lost to the winds of time. The modern craft beer movement is in part a repudiation of this corporate consolidation and also a desire to return to brewing as a local enterprise.

Brewing history enthusiasts are also working to keep the old traditions alive for future generations, with a new feature developed at Old World Wisconsin. In 2015, with the help of a team of volunteers from Milwaukee’s Museum of Beer & Brewing, Old World Wisconsin began crafting historically accurate German-inspired ales for thirsty visitors.

As these initial brewing demonstrations began gaining traction, so did the idea that the operation should move indoors to provide brewers, volunteers, and guests alike with a shelter that could better showcase these time-honored brewing practices while also protecting visitors from the unpredictable weather that can make its way through the beautiful tract of land Old World Wisconsin calls home.

Beermaking typically follows a few key steps that begin with malting (soaking grains such as raw wheat or barley in water). As the grains begin to germinate, enzymes are activated that convert stored starches into fermentable sugars. The germination is ultimately cut short and the grain is dried through kilning, which is where many of the malt’s caramelly or roasty flavors are derived. The malt, now in the hands of a brewer, is then milled, mixed with water in a mash tun (a large pot), and heated to about 150F till it forms an oatmeal-like consistency called mash. Within the pot, the malt’s starches once again begin an enzymatic process that creates a sugary liquid called wort. The wort is then transferred from the mash tun into a kettle, where hops and additional brewing spices may be added. This boiling process also sterilizes the product, making it safe for consumption. Following the boil, the wort is cooled down and transferred to a fermenter, where it’s introduced to an ale or lager yeast. The yeast will then feed on the sugary wort, producing alcohol, CO2, and the final product we know as beer.

After years of discussion, planning, and fundraising, Old World Wisconsin finally opened the doors to its Brewing Experience last summer, with Brewing Experience Coordinator Rob Novak shepherding in the brewing method of our ancestors.

Located just outside downtown Eagle, on the edge of the Kettle Moraine State Forest, Old World Wisconsin is the nation’s largest open air museum. Operated by the Wisconsin Historical Society, it features 600 acres of woodlands and over 60 restored historic buildings organized as villages and farms depicting life in Wisconsin from the mid-1800s to early 1900s.

The walk up to the 1,760 square foot Brewing Experience brewhouse immediately sets the mood for what is to come. The newly built brewhouse of wood and brick stands alongside two towering chimneys, but what is most impressive lies within. Anyone who has visited a modern brewery is familiar with stainless steel tanks and equipment, racks of barrels stacked about, and a general sense that, yes, you are in a modern American brewery. To tour the OWW Brewing Experience, however, is to enter a wholly different kind of scene.

A look around the room reveals that a great deal of research has gone into the Brewing Experience, that Rob Novak and his team of volunteers take great pride in honoring those who brewed before us. To the left of the side-by-side fireplaces, you notice two old world scales topped with copper pots used to weigh grain; a large oak cask that holds the bulk of Rob’s brewing water; oak serving vessels that act like kegs in the most basic manner possible and a rectangular copper pan about six inches deep—similar to pans called coolships that are commonly found in Belgium—used to cool the boiled wort. There are also open-top fermentors with copper pots capable of holding enough ice to cool down an active fermentation. Add in a bucolic stack of firewood and a handsome service bar, and you have all the ingredients for a unique and altogether inspiring Wisconsin brewing experience.

I spot Rob Novak across the main room, carrying a long pole with a metal bucket and heading towards the back of the brewhouse, a cloud of steam following him and soon blurring him from sight in the smaller quarters. A Wisconsin native who spent years in the beer industry in San Diego and Milwaukee, Rob brings years of front- and- back-of-house experience to his role. Couple that background with his passion for beer history, and you have the right man for this job.

I am drawn to the rolling snap of the fire and a rack holding a pot full of water. I assume Rob’s boiling wort, the sugary malt water that eventually comingles with hops and yeast to become what we know as beer. But I discover he’s actually boiling water to rehydrate one of the oak mash tuns or barrels. He fills the barrel with boiling water and lets it sit for several hours to absorb water and to reveal any leaks that need attention. It’s all part of preparation for OWW’s 2023 brewing season.

The Brewing Experience will run until September 24 this year, after which Rob will enter an equally busy off-season. He uses this time to source ingredients from local maltsters and hop farms, promote the program and solicit donations, and meet with area breweries to compare notes and look for opportunities to collaborate. As a writer himself, Rob also used the winter months last year to write an article about the dynamic history of women in Wisconsin brewing.

As the wind whips through the brewhouse’s opposing barn doors and we huddle around the low-burning fire for warmth, Rob reminds me that during their busy season the temperature often climbs into the 80s and even the 90s, heightened by these brewing fires. The heat affects their daily planning and overall yeast activity. Ale yeasts thrive between 60-78°F and lager yeasts between 46-58 °F. Therefore, the brewers must rely solely on yeasts that can stand warm conditions.

Having previously focused largely on German ales, Rob and the team have recently begun expanding their brewing portfolio to include beers of the many aforementioned nationalities that have called Wisconsin home over the past couple centuries. Rob is working on ten different recipes this year, ranging from Belgian saisons and Bière de Gardes, to British pale ales and IPAs, to American cream ales and Scandinavian beers with a now wellknown Kviek yeast that can ferment above 90°F without adversely affecting the flavor and quality of the final product. And it doesn’t end there. Rob is working on a beer inspired by Lithuanian communities that settled in Southeastern Wisconsin in the 1930s. Having

scoured that area for information, Rob says “Lithuanian homebrewing has an interesting subculture, kind of like Scandinavian, and you’ll see pictures of huts with people brewing these beers. Some are raw beer that has never been boiled. Some use hops. Some do things like bread mashing to start your starch-to-sugar conversion process.”

On the agricultural front, Rob is working with local suppliers and farmers to procure heirloom corn, wild rice, and spruce tips, all in keeping with historical brewers who used the regional resources that were available. Old World Wisconsin is also home to roughly 40 poles supporting a variety of hop vines including East Kent Golding, Fuggle, and Cluster, as well as the famed Noble hop varieties of Hallertauer Mittelfrüh, Saaz, Spalt, and Tettnang. Farmhouse brewers typically used whatever was available, in terms of the grains and hops they put into the kettle, and often repurposed farming equipment for the brewing.

There were limitations as to what farmers in the 1800s could procure and accomplish with their ingredients and equipment. Consider that they did not have indoor plumbing or electricity. In these circumstances, in a natural setting, often exposed to the elements, creating a beer of good quality was a challenge. In fact, Rob tells me the initial idea for the Brewing Experience included plans for a deep lagering cave and the harvesting and storage of lake ice to keep the beer and surrounding cellar cool through summer, as the Miller Brewing Company’s famed lager caves did in Milwaukee. Rob credits the old-time brewers who endured these daily conditions: “It’s a lot of work. A lot of work. And it never stopped. But everything back then was a lot of work.”

Luckily for Rob, his team, and the loyal legions of history buffs and beer geeks who descend upon Old World Wisconsin, the equipment at the Brewing Experience has been custom crafted to invoke a rustic feeling while still allowing for consistent batches and quality products. The five-gallon copper kettle Rob uses was crafted by Caldwell Mountain Copper in Fincastle, Virginia. The company had previously created a 15-gallon version of the kettle for the Beer & Brewing crew years before. Beer & Brewing volunteers have donated wort chillers, vats, esoteric tools, and hundreds of years of combined brewing experience, which Rob knows is priceless.

In addition to collaborating with these amazing volunteers, Rob is also thrilled to work with nearby breweries to craft traditional OWW Brewing Experience-inspired recipes on far larger and more refined systems. One such partner is Duesterbeck's Brewing Company, a beautiful farm-brewing enterprise located in Elkhorn. Not only did Duesterbeck’s offer Rob the chance to work with an actual farmer-owned brewery, it also allowed him to scale up his recipe for a farmhouse ale—with orange peel, grains of paradise, black peppercorn, and ginger—from 5 gallons to 620 gallons. And where the Brewing Experience can only offer samples of their beer, Rob and his team are able to sell their collaboration beers to folks who want to support the program and enjoy a cold malt beverage as they walk the Old World grounds.

As much as Rob loves the creativity that comes from working with like-minded brewers, he’s been looking forward to opening his the OWW doors this season. The 10 am – 4 pm brewing schedule is the same every day that OWW is open. As would be the case on any professional brew day, Rob and his team mill the grain; mash, boil, and cool the wort; and transfer the sugary solution into fermenters.

Old World Wisconsin is growing their own hops, from East Kent Golding, Fuggle, and Cluster, to Hallertauer Mittelfrüh, Saaz, Spalt, and Tettnang.

Rob Novak’s recipe book and his jottings from the day.

Jesse Brookstein

And again, much like any professional brewers, they spend a great deal of time prepping and cleaning, though Rob does acknowledge the distinct OWW difference: “All of Old World is fairly rustic,” Rob says. “As you can see in the fireplace, for example, it’s not going to be a pristine brewing environment like if you went to New Glarus [Brewing Company] where everything is absolutely spick and span,” he adds, referencing Wisconsin’s best-known craft brewery and one that has inspired Rob throughout his brewing career.

For folks who can’t stick around for the entire six-hour brewing process, Rob and his team host daily tours that offer an in-depth 20-minute walk through the process. And for those really in a hurry, the Brewing Experience also features a looped video highlighting the entire process in about three-and-a-half minutes. Beginning in June, Rob will be firing up the brewhouse every Wednesday through Sunday. And while no reservations are needed to enjoy the brewing experience, guests will need to grab a ticket online or on-site, just as they would to experience the myriad other adventures Old World Wisconsin has to offer. Visitors over the age of 21 can sample or buy these historic beers. Samples are poured from the bottle or out of their beautiful wooden casks, and the beers are for sale, such as their collaboration brew with Duesterbeck’s, in cans or bottles.

Old World Wisconsin elicits thoughts of earlier times, and the entire grounds and experience feel incredibly authentic and purposefully curated. The OWW brewhouse is no exception, as the Brewing Experience provides and accurate and enjoyable historic journey into Wisconsin’s past. At first glance, one would think only two fires burn daily within the Brewing Experience’s brewhouse, but after a day spent with Rob Novak, it’s abundantly clear a third fire burns within Old World Wisconsin’s head brewer as well. “My goal is to create a state repository of Wisconsin beer knowledge and history,” Rob says, “beer history in general, and institutional history that keeps us in touch with Wisconsin brewers.”

It's hard not to feel inspired by someone who can tend to a fire, rehydrate casks, sample a house-made altbier, and showcase numerous custom-crafted pieces of brewing equipment. All the while, Rob waxes poetic about everything from obscure Wisconsin beer history to our shared admiration for the farmhouse breweries and professional brewers who kept these beautiful traditions alive, often through simple conversation or hand-written notes. All of this has allowed Rob Novak to brew beer just as they used to back in the day. Cheers to that!

Altbier Recipe

Fermenting at cool ale temperatures develops the clean and smooth, yet rich malt character of this German-style beer.

Type: Ale

Style: Altbier

Batch Size: 5 gallons

Recipe Type: All grain

INGREDIENTS

5.5 lbs Pilsen Malt

3 lbs Kilned Munich Malt

4 oz Roasted Chocolate Malt

1.5 oz Hallertau Hops (6% AA) Boil 90 min

1 oz Saaz Hops (4% AA) Boil 30 min

1 vial WLP036 Dusseldorf Alt Yeast

Mash at 148ºF for 90 minutes

Original Gravity: 1.046

Final Gravity: 1.008

ABV: 5%

IBU: 47

Color: 20 SRM

Recipe courtesy of Briess Malt & Ingredients, Chilton, Wisconsin.

Jesse Brookstein spent two decades in the beer business, and his love of beer history may equal his love of the beverage itself. His book, A Perfect Pair: The History of Landjaeger in Green County, Wisconsin, shines a spotlight on the fermented & smoked sausage snack. He is a product of Clinton, New York, and currently resides in Madison.

Tom Jones, Daniel Prescott, beadwork on archival digital photograph.

BEYOND FEATHERS AND BEADS: RECOGNITION FOR CONTEMPORARY INDIGENOUS ARTISTS

BY ALEXANDRIA DELCOURT

Though historically it has been difficult for contemporary Native American artists to find acceptance and inclusion within the often exclusionary world of the fine arts, Wisconsin artists are playing a prominent role in changing that. Emily Arthur, Tom Jones, John Hitchcock, Dakota Mace, and Sky Hopinka are five of many contemporary indigenous artists whose work is being created in or informed by their personal experience of life in Wisconsin. Their insights on the contemporary indigenous art scene demonstrate the changing artistic landscape locally and across the continent.

For many people, the idea of Indigenous American art conjures up images of beads and feathers, buckskins and teepees. Wendy Red Star’s traveling exhibit titled Apsáalooke: Children of the Large-Beaked Bird, which was recently showcased in the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and at the Milwaukee Museum of Art, presents an array of what we might call items of stereotypical Native American representation—cultural artifacts and photographs of Native people in traditional regalia—that have been added to, changed, written over, or otherwise amended to provide a different view of contemporary Native America.

Consider an archival photograph from the 1880s of Déaxitchish/ Pretty Eagle, a chief of the Crow Nation from 1886 to 1903, written over with red ink, text reading, “My body sold to a collector for $500.00 and kept for 72 years at the American Museum of Natural History,” and “Brass ring,” with an arrow pointing to his finger. Or a contemporary photo of the artist in powwow regalia against the backdrop of a painted landscape of plastic bows and arrows, toy buffalo skulls, and cardboard cutouts of deer. The works in Wendy Red Star’s exhibit invite the observer to consider how photographs and the histories they evoke differ from the perspective of the indigenous subjects and from the perspective of the photographer or historian.

Hanging near Red Star’s work in her Madison exhibit was a photograph by long-time UW–Madison professor, Tom Jones. In it, a young woman in a dark blue dress with colorful beads draped around her neck and a feather on the back of her head looks into the distance, a bright smile on her face. The photograph, adorned with shells, glass beads, and rhinestones, is part of a group show called Home which considers the idea of home—the memories, emotional, familial, and cultural ties, and the losses that makes up one’s home. The collection asks the question, how does our home intersect with our identities as individuals and peoples?

Emily Arthur, a UW–Madison professor and printmaker of Eastern Cherokee descent, also examines the concept of home in her work. In her artist’s statement, she explains that her practice “is informed by a concern for the environment, displacement, exile, and the return home from dislocation and separation. I seek the unbroken relationship between modern culture and ancient lands which uses tradition and story to make sense of the enduring quest to understand our changing experience of home.” Her work uses different modes of printmaking to layer images from nature—birds, plants, trees, reflections, insects, etc.—to give voice to the land and living world. The process of layering allows her to interrogate the ways in which our human lives and histories have interacted with the lives and histories of nature. She writes, “I see nature as a living force, rather than as the backdrop for human events. Displacement, loss, and a concern for the environment are a result of my personal experience.”

The idea of home has been frequently explored in the work of indigenous artists. As long as there have been people, there have been artists, storytellers, historians, craftsman, and musicians telling our stories and asking us to examine ourselves. The notion of home in an indigenous context, however, is layered upon a history of colonialism and violence. Though indigenous art is powerful, unique, and important, it has not always been well received or included in galleries, museums, exhibits, private collections, and national conversations—until recently.

Though indigenous art is powerful, unique, and important, it has not always been included in galleries, museums, private collections, and national conversations—until recently.

When asked in an interview with PBS in January about the recent increase in national recognition of indigenous artists, Candice Hopkins, Executive Director of Forge Project, a Native-led collective that focuses on furthering indigenous arts and justice, stated, “People are recognizing that one of the missing narratives in American art history is actually the narrative of the development of Native art, and the influence Native art has had even on how we understand this country, how we understand the formation of this country.” The many contemporary Native artists working and creating art today, have struggled to be recognized in large and prestigious spaces. She notes that the recent increase in the recognition of these artists isn’t a sudden change, but part of a larger movement that started in the ‘60s. It was never the lack of quality work coming out of indigenous communities that was the issue. Rather, she says, it was the lack of allies in the institutions.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2020, painter and member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai nations, Jaune Quickto-See Smith, comments, “Because of popular myth-making, Native Americans are seen as vanished. It helps assuage the government’s guilt about an undocumented genocide, as well as stealing the whole country…It’s like we don’t exist, except in the movies or as mascots for sports teams.” This cultural erasure is one that complicates the theme of ‘home’ even further.

Just weeks before that interview, Smith’s painting titled I See Red: Target became the first painting by a Native American artist in history to be purchased by the National Gallery of Art in Washington D. C. Then 2022 saw the launch of the first ever long-term installation of historical and contemporary Native American art at the Met in New York City, just months before the Met announced the appointment of Dr. Patricia Marroquin Norby, a member of the Purépecha tribe and a UW–Madison alum, as its first ever Associate Curator of Native American Art.

So what is behind this recent recognition of contemporary indigenous art and artists in the mainstream art world? Is it simply, as Hopkins asserts, new allies in powerful spaces? Or is there something about this contemporary cultural moment that aligns with indigenous stories, ideas, and questions? And how is this shift showing up in the artistic landscape of Wisconsin?

The answers are complicated. There is a long history of interest in Native art among private collectors around the world. And there have been advocates of indigenous art making their way into the institutional art world for a long time. One such person is Nancy Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache), professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies at UCLA, and a former UW–Madison faculty member. Her exhibitions have been featured at the Venice Biennial, one of the most prestigious and largest art exhibitions in the world.

John Hitchcock and Tom Jones in Hitchcock’s studio.

Mariah Moneda

Dakota Mace, NáhookǪs BikǪʼ I, 2022. Chemigram, glass beads and abalone shells, 11” x 14” (each print).

Tom Jones, Bella Falcon, beadwork on archival digital photograph.

The Venice Biennial, showcasing international contemporary visual art, is the original exhibition of its kind, around which other Biennial shows (such as the Whitney Biennial) were modeled. UW–Madison alum, Dyani Whitehawk (Sičá ŋǧ u Lakota), an abstract artist and curator whose work features traditional techniques and materials such as porcupine quills, beadwork, and painting, was featured in the Whitney Biennial in New York City in 2022.

To get his take on the shifting landscape of contemporary indigenous art, I sat down with John Hitchcock, a politically motivated printmaker, member of the Comanche Nation, and UW–Madison Professor of Art. John and I recently participated as Artist-in-Residence and Poet-in-Residence, respectively, at the Climate Fast Forward conference on climate change hosted by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, so I was familiar with his work. In the din of a downtown Madison coffee shop, I began our conversation by simply asking, “Are Native artists suddenly getting more attention?”

“Yes, but it isn’t the first time this has happened. It seems like there is a renewed interest in Indian art every fifteen or twenty years. Right now, a lot of people are focused on politics. We’ve had recent social movements like the George Floyd protests, the Water Protectors in Standing Rock, and people focused on climate change and environmental issues. Those kinds of topics have always been explored in Indian art because of how much they overlap with colonialism. The colonial mindset is all about controlling the land and controlling people. It reminds me a lot of the 1970’s, with the Red Power movement and Alcatraz and the politics of that time.”

His words echoed the assertion by Candice Hopkins that what we are seeing is part of long cultural conversations and social movements centering around the issues of indigenous rights, oppression, and sovereignty. The political and social changes of our era are a continuation of the 1960’s and 70’s, particularly the Civil Rights Movement. Besides flared bottom pants and flowery dresses, the two eras share post-wartime economic turmoil, political division, and generational change leading to an increase in visible personal testimony by people who have experienced oppression, discrimination, and erasure. During the 1970’s when public schools were still attempting to desegregate, the United States saw a major surge of interest in the development of diversity studies, race and ethnic studies programs, and women’s studies programs in universities all over the country.

This era also saw the founding of the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the product of Native leadership, and a place where many indigenous artists have been educated since, as well as a movement towards “pan-Indian” identity, in which Indigenous people began identifying collectively as Native Americans, gaining political power, solidarity, and the sense of a larger community than they had when separated by tribal affiliation.

The timeline of this is significant: the students of art, and other creative disciplines during the 1970’s and 1980’s, have been teaching and mentoring young contemporary artists in recent decades. Thus, the expression of pan-Indian identity has persisted in much of indigenous cultural expression in the last several decades. Even though pan-Indianism is a concept from which contemporary indigenous communities have largely moved on, it has had long-lasting effects in shaping Indigenous art.

So what has changed? Why, after decades of advocacy and activism, this increased visibility of Native artists now? The answer is as complex as the arts themselves and depends upon whom you ask, though in my conversations with Native artists who are current or former Wisconsin residents, some common threads appeared.

Dakota Mace, Diné (Navajo), received her BFA in photography from the Institute for American Indian Arts, and her MA and MFA in photography and textile design from UW–Madison. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores Diné beliefs, stories, histories, and language, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is an MFA Mentor at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the photographer for the Helen Louise Allen Textile Center and the Center of Design and Material Culture. She has translated western scientific literature into Diné Bizaad through visual storytelling, used art to explore the landscape as a way of examining her community’s histories and stories, and utilized weaving techniques to investigate the relationships between the western colonial world/art and its perception of Diné art and culture.

Dakota explains, “For so long we were excluded from the mainstream, and especially the mainstream art world…Because so often our identity is always seen as static or monolithic, I think now social media is really pushing [us] into a totally different realm where people are really engaging with the different representations of community and ideas of what it means to be indigenous in 2022. She goes on to say that social media have

Sky Hopinka

played a role in allowing non-Native people to see a more multifaceted view of indigenous communities that reflects the great diversity that exists there. For so long, the only representation that people outside of indigenous communities saw was from history texts or museums, which are outdated and easily exploited. Social media allow people from all walks of life to choose their own representation, which has increased visibility for a lot of different issues and communities.

Dakota is currently working on a project that recontextualizes photos of her family and ancestors in a way that more accurately depicts the context and imagery seen within them. Her work will be featured in an upcoming exhibit titled ‘Trust Me’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art from August to November of 2023. Of her recent work, she says, “It's a project that focuses on Diné historical trauma and my own relationship to my homelands. It stems from my own interest in bringing awareness to indigenous history through the arts, but it’s also informed by my own community and my own family. It looks at the site of Bosque Redondo in New Mexico as the final stop on the Long Walk for the Diné, which was already a painful removal of my ancestors from their home. It was that place where my ancestors faced extreme hardship and were unable to return home from, but the only photographs that exist within that period really erase our identity and really romanticize our pain.”

Sky Hopinka, a Ho-Chunk and Luiseño artist and filmmaker whose family is from Wisconsin, earned his MFA in film, video, animation, and new genres from UW–Milwaukee. His work has

been shown at the Sundance, Toronto International, Ann Arbor, Courtisane, Punto de Vista, and New York Film Festivals. He has been awarded fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, Sundance Art, Art Matters, Guggenheim, and Forge Project, and was awarded a 2022 MacArthur Genius Grant, among other accolades.

Sky’s thoughts on the changing landscape of indigenous arts align with John Hitchcock’s. “Natives have been [taking] more agency in their work and how they’re represented…You can see a coalescing of native-led resistance movements and also more visibility [outside of] arts or film…which helped build something like Standing Rock.” He notes also that the general increase in visibility for marginalized peoples in the mainstream, which could be the result of advocacy and activist efforts as well as social media and other content platforms, has contributed to a surge in interest in indigenous artists and filmmakers.

Sky’s films examine his personal experiences and cultural stories, myths, and histories through the use of abstract imagery and experimental media. “I try to ask questions like, ‘What does the oral tradition look like when it’s depicted in a film that can’t be changed or edited once it is complete?’”

I asked him what effects he thought the use of abstract forms, opacity, or other experimental techniques has on his subject matter.

“I’m making films that speak to an audience that’s very specific, one that will know certain things that a larger audience won’t,” Sky says. “But at the same time, I’m speaking to them from my own experience, from my family, from my viewpoint. It’s subjective.

Sky Hopinka, I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become, 2016. HD video, stereo, color, 17 minutes.

Mariah Moneda

Tom Jones and John Hitchcock, masked in Hitchcock’s studio.

I want that subjectivity to be felt and it’s often felt, through the abstract images, through the sounds, or by using poetic elements behind it.”

This subjectivity, like Dakota Mace’s recontextualization of her family’s photos and histories, has to do with the reclamation of public understanding of indigenous identity and experience, a shift away from stereotype, generalization, and universality into the specific, personal, and subjective. Doing this work, forcing the public to face its false assumptions and stereotypes, can be a painful process.

“When we teach art and artistic design, it’s always through the lens of the western canon, Dakota Mace noted. “But sometimes people don’t understand the more inherent complexities of where [appropriated] inspirations came from. It is important to look at how taking those things from those communities affected the way that our ingenuity changed and has been pushed and challenged in terms of survival.” To not do so risks allowing the public’s understanding of the indigenous experience to slip back into stereotype.

John Hitchcock echoes this point. “People will look at Indian art and say, ‘that’s not Indian enough.’ Any (Indian) art that is modern or contemporary is seen as inauthentic, because it doesn’t fit what they think of as the ‘Indian aesthetic’ that they are familiar with.” The truth is that authenticity is a myth. There were no glass beads before Europeans came here. The motifs and techniques that we associate with regional Indian identity, floral patterns found on powwow regalia, for instance, are often the result of cultural mixing, modern innovation, and pan-Indian representation. They are adaptations. As John puts it, “There is no ‘real’ Indian. That adaptability is not inauthenticity. It’s survival.”

In contemporary arts movements, from visual arts to film, music, and literature, artists have made an effort to stop translating their personal experiences for broad audiences. There is far less interpreting and explaining of artistic work to ensure that those audiences understand. Instead, we are seeing a movement towards a form of expression of an artist’s self for people in their own communities, or those who have had similar experiences. While it might be tempting to say that this is moving away from inclusivity, it seems to be having the opposite effect: it is finding the universal in the specific. It is, as John Hitchcock says, about survival.

Survival, perhaps, is a big part of the answer to the question, “why now?” Native artist’s intentional use of subjectivity, coupled with growing awareness of the experiences and identities of marginalized people by mainstream audiences, evolves out of the long conversation and history of Native activism that began in the 1960s, and has created an environment where those “allies in powerful institutions” seem to be prepared, finally, to take work by Native artists more seriously.

I asked John how that idea of survival shows up in his own work. He began by recounting memories of sitting by his grandmother’s knee as a child while she was beading. “She was obsessed with images of roses,” he said. “Even from a young age, she was handing me scraps of paper and telling me to go outside and draw what I saw. She taught me how to draw a rose pattern, which she used a lot in her own work. It was unusual because that motif is one that is usually used more by tribes in the Great Lakes region, not so much

in Oklahoma where I grew up. I didn’t realize until later that her exposure to that motif was something she picked up in boarding school. The painted dots that I use in my work are there to represent beadwork that I saw my grandmother making.”

This, reminded me of Dakota Mace explaining how material like beadwork and photographs that outsiders might view as “traditional” often don’t actually represent the histories they seem to. The personal experience and its relationship to home, homelands, ancestors, and the movements of people are infinitely variable and impossible to accurately represent with generalizations.

Near the end of our conversation, Sky talked about his relationship to the idea of home, and, in particular, his family’s home in Wisconsin, which plays a part in shaping his work.

“In my twenties, in the early 2000’s, I was heavily involved in language revitalization, and that was important for me,” he said. “Especially in comparison to when I was growing up in the 1990s when we didn’t have access to those kinds of things. It’s an important resource for people to help them understand what it means to be from a place…In my work, I ask questions about what it means to have a homeland. My dad left Wisconsin in his twenties, and I’m left questioning what it means to return to a place I’ve never been before…Those kinds of questions permeate my work. I ask them in different ways in different projects, but I circle back to this idea of home and homelands.”

Tom Jones, Emily Arthur, John Hitchcock, Dakota Mace, and Sky Hopinka are five of many contemporary indigenous artists whose work is informed by their personal experience of life in Wisconsin. It is clear that Wisconsin artists are playing a central role in the increased inclusion of Native contemporary art within the larger art world.

Alexandria Delcourt (Abenaki and Filipino) is a writer, editor, educator, and storyteller. Her work focuses on travel, generational trauma, and colonialism, and has appeared in Narrative, Poetry Quarterly , Cream City Review , Aster(ix) , Profane Journal , Kalyani Magazine , and many others. She lives in Madison with her husband, daughter, and two cats.

Josh Swan in front of his sawmill outside Bayfield.

Courtesy of Josh Swan

JOSH SWAN

SOUTH SHORE BOAT BUILDER

BY LISA LUDWIGSEN

Highon a rise outside of Washburn, with Lake Superior sparkling in the distance, sits the workshop where Wisconsin native Josh Swan builds and restores wooden boats. The bright and spacious building he constructed, along with his nearby house, sits on the 50-acre property he shares with his young family. The shop smells of freshly hewn wood and is stocked with dusty books, manuals, charts, family photos, and lumber waiting to be transformed into a custom boat. Across a field is the sawmill he uses to mill lumber for his own projects and lumber he ships to places near and far. The setting is classic, unspoiled, wooded northern Wisconsin. Swan is energetic and excited about his craft, even after more than twenty years in business.

In an essay he wrote about his profession, Swan explains the relevance of boatbuilding in Wisconsin. “Centered on the royal blue background of the Wisconsin state flag is a golden seal divided into four sections. A plowshare in the upper left represents agriculture. In the upper right, a shovel and pickaxe, tools of labor celebrating the lead mining that fueled much of Wisconsin’s early European migration. In the lower right, a classic kedge-style anchor, honoring Great Lakes shipping. Finally, the lower left-hand corner bears a well-muscled arm holding what looks like a hammer. That hammer is a caulking mallet, a very specialized boatbuilding tool used to drive oakum and cotton into the seams of a wooden-planked hull to make it watertight.”

Oakum was traditionally made of reused fibers such as old rope or hemp dipped in tar to provide insulation in construction and gaskets in plumbing. Teasing apart the used fibers, particularly those coated in tar, was tedious, painful work, often performed by prisoners or low-level laborers whose fingers would split and bleed in the process. Oakum fiber is especially useful in wooden boat construction because, when packed between planks with pitch or tar, it provides a flexible water seal as planks swell and shrink over time. Oakum is still in use today.

That caulking mallet lauds the centuries-old tradition of building and using wooden boats to ply the rivers of Wisconsin and the waters of the Great Lakes. From wood-framed Native American canoes, to near shore small craft, from barges and fishing tugs to much larger schooners and tall ships, the boat building industry was, and remains, essential in the development and economy of the Great Lakes region. Hulls of sturdy old fishing boats from the 19th and 20th century can still be seen dotting the landscape in waterfront

towns, a testament to the history of the region and to their durability. The nearby town of Bayfield, on the Apostle Islands National Seashore, has incorporated old hand-built boats into a city park and one even adorns the front yard of the Bayfield Heritage Museum.

Today, the building and re-fitting of large boats, yachts, and ships continues in Wisconsin ports such as Marinette, Green Bay, Sturgeon Bay, Manitowoc, and Superior. But such vessels typically are built of steel and other non-wood materials. By contrast, any given day a visitor to Josh Swan’s workshop might find a beloved family rowboat from Isle Royale in mid-restoration, or the beginning design of a commissioned project to recreate a boat from decades ago. Outside sits a 20-foot sailboat in mid-construction. It turns out that nostalgia figures into a large portion of Swan’s business. Clearly, wooden boats represent, for some, a visceral memory or a romanticized notion of a time gone by. Whatever the individual pull, the appeal of wooden boats is enduring.

That nostalgic affection and mystique extend to Swan himself, as he works to fill a steady stream of orders from across the region, around the country, from Canada and beyond. He also mills and ships boat lumber as an adjunct to his boat-building business model.

Swan’s career wasn’t a predictable choice, given that he did not grow up on or near the water, though he did go lake fishing with his father “in a beat-up aluminum boat that we patched with duct tape.” He now uses that boat from his childhood to take his own two kids fishing. He explains, “I always had an interest in woodworking and thought learning how to build wooden boats would teach me relevant and transferable skills to a career in woodworking.” After high school in Eau Claire, he moved to Newport, Rhode Island, to study and work at the International Yacht Restoration School

Initial drawing and carved model.

(IYRS). “When I got there, I was an anomaly,” he says. “Everyone at the school came there by way of sailing, or crewing on a sailboat, or wanting to crew on a boat. They shared the common romance with tall ships or were big time sailors.”

Surprisingly, as another influence, he credits music. “I guess I can attribute some of my interest in boats to listening to Stan Rogers, a Nova Scotian maritime folk singer, when I was in high school, but that’s about it. Somehow, I was able to connect these weird dots to end up at the school.” Once enrolled at the IYRS, “the rules, skills, and results of traditional wooden boat construction captivated me, and my professional focus has remained on wooden boats ever since.”

While many careers meander over time or take sharp unexpected turns, Swan’s path has been fairly linear, building on his unique blend of skill, craft, art, education, and experience. He’s fortunate to have found mentors and opportunities that met his interests and passions. After the IYRS, Swan spent two seasons as Boatbuilder-in-Residence at the renowned Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, New York, and then spent a winter working with Jack McGreivey at McGreivey’s Canoe Shop in Cato, New York. He spent time as Artisan-in-Residence at the UW–Madison Department of Art, working with students to build a traditional inshore boat called a Maine Coast Peapod. Through a grant from the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, he spent six weeks at the Hardanger Fartoyvernsenter, a waterfront boatyard museum in Hardanger, Norway, focused on keeping alive the relationship between a village and its place on the water. It’s fair to say that Josh Swan knows boats—large boats, small boats, even bark and canvas canoes.

Wooden boats have an enduring allure that captivates many people. Small wooden boats are relatively simple in design, and yet are also sophisticated crafts with a long history. They need to stay afloat through various conditions and over time, and they need to meet the practical needs of transporting people and goods. The oldest known boat is the Pesse canoe, a carved-out pine log found in the Netherlands that dates to around 7500 BC. A similar 28-foot pine dugout canoe estimated to be 1,000 years old was recently discovered in North Carolina, and in 2021 and 2022, two Ho-Chunk Nation white oak dugout canoes, aged 1,200 and 3,000 years old, were discovered partially submerged in the lakebed of Lake Monona. These similar vessels were created thousands of miles apart out of need and available material.

Indigenous people created lightweight, durable vessels using basic tools, and Native American canoes made of bark or skin hold a mystique all their own. When Europeans arrived in North America in the 16th century, they discovered indigenous people deftly navigating waterways that their bulky wooden rowboats could not. Eastern North American tribes crafted bark or animal hide canoes stretched over a frame of moldable wood. Impressive examples of form and artistry, the boats were lightweight, durable, and highly functional. Those designs inspired the large bark canoes European traders used to explore the waterways of North America. The Bayfield Heritage Museum has on display an authentic Anishinaabe bark canoe constructed by Marvin Defoe of the Red Cliff Anishinaabe. Made of birch, cedar, spruce roots, and pine pitch, the canoe is impressive in its mix of art and function.

Alaskan Inupiat and others constructed boats from seal skins, and people of the Pacific coast bound together multiple tight bundles of spongy, hollow wetland tule reeds to make canoes

Josh Swan

Custom boat under construction.

The shop smells of freshly hewn wood and is stocked with dusty books, manuals, charts, family photos, and lumber waiting to be transformed into a custom boat.

All photos courtesy of Josh Swan

Clockwise from top left: Josh Swan at his sawmill; Newly-milled tamarack knees for boat framing; Tools in workshop; Completed custom boat ready for launch; Swan lofting a boat on the workshop floor.

capable of traversing great distances. The need and available materials begat the vessel.

Materials are important in boat-building, and so is craftsmanship. “Jack McGreivey was an interesting old guy who had the grace and patience to let me work in his canoe shop. One aspect of his process that left an impression on me was that when he repaired or rebuilt canoes, he didn’t conceal his work. Though his craftsmanship was excellent, he didn’t mask the patch or new wood with chemicals or techniques to make it blend in. I’ve always appreciated that by leaving those details visible, they tell the story of the boat.”

After two decades, Swan speaks of becoming more discerning with his time and energy, but he still emanates a contagious enthusiasm for his craft, creating something new based on those age-old concepts. A typical project, and a recent favorite of his, is the reconstruction of a skiff (a shallow, round-bottomed boat with pointed bow and square stern) that a retired Wisconsin fire chief used when he was a lifeguard on Lake Michigan in the 1970s. The man searched unsuccessfully for a model to restore before hiring Swan to recreate it from scratch. He sent Swan basic measurements of length, width, and depth in the middle. “He reached out to me with those measurements and sent a set of faded photos of an original boat. I then designed and built the boat for him,” said Swan. “What’s cool about this boat is that I harvested all the cedar out of Bayfield County, and milled all the wood in the boat.”

Swan’s design process is decidedly traditional. There is no computer-aided designing in his workshop. It is all done by hand. After designing a boat on paper, he lays out or “lofts” the boat to scale on the floor. Lofting is a drafting technique used to map out curved lines in the building of airplanes and ships. Watching him do this while he narrates the process, you can see his love of this work.

One of Swan’s favorite books is The Survival of the Bark Canoe by John McPhee, a short but compelling account of a 150-mile journey through the Maine woods the author took in the mid 1970s with a bark canoe builder named Henri Vaillancourt. Passages describing Vaillancourt’s purposeful focus and knowledge while sourcing trees for his birch bark canoes likely have influenced Swan’s desire to harvest and mill lumber for both his own projects and his business.

“When I worked at the Adirondack Museum, we would visit small sawmills nearby to purchase lumber for our boat projects,” says Swan. “Something about those sawmills and the people who operated them really grabbed me. It made a big impression.” He adds, “I realized that I have a true affinity for being outside, and that the primary side of the boat building process appeals to my love of good hard labor. Being physically tired at the end of the day is important for my mental and emotional health.” When he returned to southern Wisconsin, he viewed the forests from a new perspective. “One day I needed lumber for a project, and suddenly my milling business began…Now that I’ve been doing it awhile, a growing part of me wishes I didn’t see each tree as a commodity first. While I recognize the intrinsic value in the beauty that surrounds me, my mind reflexively spots boat parts when I look at a tree—a transom knee for a rowboat in a curving oak branch, planking stock in the clear stem of a tall White Pine. And with every tree I cut down, I know I am leaving a footprint. I am quick to remember that any place I may walk with my saw and gear, I will always be stepping in the footprints of woodland giants.” The idea that a forest is a living breathing entity isn’t lost on Swan. He works with friends in forest

management who guide him in balancing lumber harvest with the forest’s wellbeing.

Today Swan’s milling business is primarily for boat lumber, because that’s what he knows and what he does, but he’s also happy to help with milling for neighbors or other builders. “I sent a pallet of white cedar to an architect in California whose client was looking for wood with a lot of character. That lumber wasn’t appropriate for a boat but was perfect for a home interior project.” He continued, “People ask me all the time, ‘what’s the best boat building wood?’ My response is usually ‘whatever is local’, which can mean lots of different things. Wisconsin has a ton of great boat building lumber.”

Swan estimates there are a dozen or so professional wooden boat builders in Wisconsin, with a variety of specialties. There is plenty of work restoring classic mahogany runabouts, like Chris Craft or Century boats. “Though they’re beautiful boats, the fine detail work in those restorations is not what I enjoy doing,” admits Swan.

In an age of digital marketing, social media, and search engine optimization, Swan enjoys an almost analogue business model. “Yet,” he says, “when people ask about the most useful tool in the shop, my answer is ‘the internet.’” Most of his business comes from word of mouth or through his website. Orders for lumber, especially from Canadian customers, come through online searches. At any given time, he has eight to ten projects lined up, in addition to his milling work, but his business isn’t designed to scale up. “It works because of the scale of it,” he says. “I want qualitative development rather than geometric growth.”

Swan’s greatest challenge in his one-man operation is time management. “I’m continually trying to figure out how to work smarter while budgeting time for my family and all the rest. I also want to make sure that I can keep doing this work as I get older. After twenty years, I can feel the importance of taking care of myself.”

About his 1,000-yard commute from home to work, Swan wrote in his essay, “It is here that I remind myself that the eighteen-year-old me would be so excited to know the forty-year-old me is still walking through a bit of woods to my wooden boat shop and sawmill.”

As he goes about his work, he returns to that simple caulking mallet on the Wisconsin flag, integrating his relationship to those early boat builders, the wild origin of the lumber used to make those boats. “I try my best to make real the beautiful myth of Wisconsin.” The wooden boats he designs, builds, and restores are a testament to his success and to his place in the tradition of wooden boats in our state.

Lisa Ludwigsen lives in Northern California and Bayfield, Wisconsin, where her great grandparents immigrated from Norway to fish commercially on Lake Superior in the early 20th century. For over 25 years, her focus has been on food, farms, and families, as a small-scale farmer, environmental educator, business owner, and writer.

Examples of beach glass.

EXPLORING THE WANDERING DUNES OF LAKE MICHIGAN

BY HANNAH WAGIE

Myattraction to nature has gotten stronger as I have gotten older. Trained in the lab as a chemist, I have slowly emerged from that carefully controlled environment, drawn to wilder places with more variables, like the well-worn paths in Kohler-Andrae State Park, south of Sheboygan on Lake Michigan’s western shore, where I seek solitude. Yet I realize that I am not really alone there, because under my feet, the path itself journeys with me. Sand is under, around, and on top of me.

Technically, sand is defined as loose, granular rock fragments that are 0.05 to 2.0 millimeters in diameter. Any fragments smaller are silt or clay; larger ones are gravel or cobbles. Sand can be of any mineral composition: fragments of coral, or garnet, or pure quartz, for example. Sand grains can be rough and angular, or uniformly rounded, or of mixed shapes.

The sand found in the Wisconsin dunes that I’m walking, and especially in the high dunes of Michigan’s western shore, is composed largely of silicon dioxide (SiO2). It is a molecule that is rather boring and chemically unremarkable at first glance. Yet its inert and non-polar individual SiO 2 units are exactly what make them so useful when they are melted into glass. Flasks and beakers in medical, biology, and chemistry labs are made of glass because the material rarely interferes with the processes, tests, and analyses conducted inside of them.

Silicon dioxide is, in fact, a social creature, mostly sticking to what it knows and occasionally fraternizing with more exotic guests. In a group, it is more familiarly called silica. A grain of sand consists of many SiO 2 units holding hands with other identical units. If these friendships are allowed to form slowly, a neat network is formed. The straight, stiff geometry of a single molecule bends and aligns with another SiO 2 molecule to form a pyramid shape, which, in turn, bonds with another and another and another until an extended lattice forms. This is the careful process of making a crystal. A crystal made of silica is known as quartz, and the hints of sparkle you see on ideal white sand beaches owe their dazzle to tiny gems of quartz.

As a Midwesterner, I take long walks on the beach, but they don’t typically include a bikini, an ocean sunset, or white sand beaches. Rather these walks mean shoes tossed aside and pant legs rolled up to let Lake Michigan’s frigid water lap at my feet. Sand dunes rise rather unexpectedly in Kohler-Andrae State Park, part of the mix

of rocky ledges, clay bluffs, and dunes that form Lake Michigan’s Wisconsin shoreline. The sudden glimpse of Lake Michigan during a country drive through eastern Wisconsin is a surprise that never fails to delight my young children and me. A couple of summers ago, some scrubby areas of the dunes were stable enough to host common milkweed plants along with the monarch caterpillars they attract. My seven-year-old daughter and I had been hunting for them all summer and pointed them out to each other with joyful shouts.

Those monarch migrants found their stopover at a place that itself migrates season after season. Sand dunes travel, moving at the whim of driving winds and waves. Waves throw sand grains onto the beach, and wind picks up the dry grains and carries them along. On the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, which receives the full-on effect of prevailing westerly winds, the sand dunes reach dramatic heights as they steadily creep east. The state of Michigan has the largest accumulation of freshwater coastal dunes in the world. “Walking dunes,” such as those in Silver Lake, Michigan, are areas where the landscape can change dramatically during stormy weather, causing tsunamis of both water and sand. Permanent construction in these zones is extremely risky. Amazing views from bluffs still tempt lake-loving residents into foolishness: a house built on such an unstable foundation can go the way of the proverbial sandcastle overnight.

Much of this sand was created during the last Ice Age by glaciers pushing south out of Canada scraping and crushing bedrock, such as quartz-rich granite, into fine fragments. This debris was carried into Glacial Lake Michigan where it was further broken, abraded, and chemically weathered over thousands of years. As the lake level rose and fell with the waxing and waning of the glacier, quartz sand was sorted by wave action and deposited on the beach to be picked up by the wind, a force that continues today to sift and sort the grains. While the wind leaves heavier fragments on the beach, it

Author’s children on the Lake Michigan shore in summer.

carries silt and clay dust far inland, and deposits sand-size grains in near shore dunes. Over a long time, repeated winnowing produces the kind of dunes seen in Michigan that are almost entirely fine silica sand of uniform size, a valuable resource.

The seemingly endless deposits of this silicon-dioxide mineral on Lake Michigan’s western shore have resulted in a booming sand mining industry, whose economic value rivals those states with ocean coastlines. The state of Michigan began regulating sand dune mining in 1994, and dozens of sand quarry sites have closed since then.

What kind of career options does a grain of sand have? Hailing from such a pure source as lake dunes, those sparkling, fine-sized grains are prime candidates for making glass, which is primarily silicon dioxide that has been melted out of an orderly crystalline form into a mixed-up tangle known as an amorphous form. Once removed from the beach and processed into window glass, this disorderly arrangement of silica has a new relationship with the sun. Its polished surface still reflects the sun’s rays, and it appears to remain transparent like a quartz crystal, but this is true only as far as the human eye can see. Amorphous glass does not transmit the near ultraviolet rays that penetrate our skin. In other words, I can sit on top of the sand watching the lake as I get a tan, but viewing the same serene scene behind that sand—in its form as a window— dramatically attenuates those tanning effects.

Humans are not the only organisms that harvest silica for their own uses. Although the friction from glaciers, waves, and currents are largely responsible for the production of silica pebbles and sand from bedrock, there is evidence that cyanobacteria mine silicon dioxide from volcanic rock. This mining happens molecule by molecule, rather than in large chunks. The biogenic process is many times faster than waiting for sand to simply dissolve, which surprisingly does occur, though extremely slowly. In situ, pits and channels in lava flows (which have a high composition of silica) contain traces of nucleic acids, a tell-tale sign that something biological is happening. These microscopic miners may be after the iron and manganese trapped in the sand. The cyanobacteria “micro-miners” grab these essential nutrients for themselves and cast off the silicon dioxide molecules as waste. The silica enters the water as wild, unconstrained silicic acid. This material, it turns out, is scavenged and used by yet other types of microbes.

This took me by surprise. In biochemistry, the elements carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and phosphorus comprise most atoms in living organisms. Carbon in particular is considered the terrestrial marker of life. Silicon (Si), which sits directly below carbon (C) on the periodic table in Group IV, is decidedly inorganic (even though a powerhouse in industry and technology). But as I take a closer look at microscopic photographs of sand, I find that silicon does in fact weave itself quite beautifully into life on Planet Earth. I expected to see jagged grains of silica in many colors mixed in with tiny shells and exoskeleton fragments (typically made of calcium carbonate from zooplankton, snails, and clams). However, I marveled at the sight of symmetrical sunbursts and intricate webs made entirely of glass.

These gems are the spicules (spines) and skeletons of sponges and of diatoms, a type of algae. These tiny armor trappings are made of opal, a form of silica that incorporates water molecules into its structure. Rather than constructing an opaque, white calci-

um-based shell like much of microscopic marine life, diatoms build a house of glass that weathers better than much softer calcium compounds. Diatoms create cell walls with lacey patterns that form a cage around themselves. What results is a variety of three-dimensional shapes from disks to rods to rounded triangles that are reminiscent of the gears in my childhood Spirograph set. The diatoms leave a beautiful boneyard in the Great Lakes sand between my toes, one that I wish I could collect and display.

The ancient, enigmatic agate, a gemstone that can be found on the shores of the Great Lakes, is also the result of dissolved silica. The colorful bands of agate nodules are crystalline deposits of silica that have found a home in pea- to baseball-sized empty cavities within volcanic rock. These cavities are formed by bubbles of sulfur gas during an initial lava flow. Layer by layer, dissolved silica deposits and builds up on the inside of the bubbles, bringing along metals picked up on its journey. Lake Superior’s western beaches are littered with rusty red agates, if you know where to look. The rich iron content of Superior provides the reddish pigment along with

Hannah Wagie

Lake Michigan shoreline.

highlights of yellow, brown, and orange that are iron’s various oxide forms. This process requires no mediation by lifeforms. Rather, agate formation is a work of art crafted secretly inside dead rock, although it seems like a sentient creation with no purpose other than to delight. Our great freshwater sea slowly sculpts these gems in a mysterious way that has never been reproduced in a lab and then nonchalantly breaks up the encasing rock and tosses the agates ashore for some lucky treasure hunter. I have learned to tune my vision to the subtle glow that is characteristic of the microcrystalline silica of agates on a sunny beach.

The rules about collecting anything from a natural area vary from place to place (municipal beaches are generally more amenable to rockhounds than state or national parks or nature preserves). However, collecting beach glass (or “sea glass”) is usually allowed and even encouraged. Although beach glass often appears to be colorful pebbles in the sand, it is actually fragments of glass from industrially produced bottles, decanters, and other packaging that made its way into the water through shipwrecks, meandering landfill waste, and intentional dumping. Entering the lake as broken

shards, the castoff glass is buffed and abraded by waves and currents in the lake until it emerges after months and years, smooth and frosted. Beach glass still retains the striking man-made colors created by adding metals, similar to the naturally created agates: cobalt for blue, chromium for green, manganese for purple. Industrial cities around the Great Lakes have rich deposits of beach glass, including coveted glass marbles (ironically, marbles were made of agate in ancient times). Beach glass is now collected and marketed as material for crafts and jewelry. The sand provides raw material to make colored glass, humans thoughtlessly return the glass from whence it came, and the lake spits out the trash as treasure.

Visiting my land-locked beaches these last few years has been complicated. Increasing precipitation over the Great Lakes watershed over the past decade significantly raised water levels in 2020 and 2021 in all of the Great Lakes. The shore erosion that followed has implications all over the region. My beach exploration is now confined to a narrow strip. One of my favorite Lake Michigan spots, Port Washington, experienced a major landslide from the reddish clay bluff facing its North Beach in 2022, which prompted the city to close the beach. The cycle of waves sweeping sand away from the beach into the water, and the re-deposit farther along the shore of sand from those same waves or from the adjacent bluffs, is a natural, ongoing process called littoral transport. Human activity, like sand mining and the development of harbors, can speed up the loss part of the cycle. Beach nourishment is an active remediation used by the DNR to complete the gain part of the cycle. It is an intervention that delivers sand and silt dredged from the bottom of the lake to an eroded part of the coastline to try to restore what was lost.

After gaping at the fallen earth from the top of the bluff overlooking North Beach, my children and I visit the much busier South Beach to find relief on a sweltering summer day. My children are old enough now to dig in the sand and hunt for rocks and fossils on their own while I take in the solitude of the beach a little farther down the shoreline. My daughter makes an acute observation: “No one has ever looked at these rocks before! The waves push new ones onto the beach all of the time!” She intuitively understands that the beach constantly comes and goes. Cyclical migration has happened throughout the history of the Great Lakes but seems to be rather one-sided lately. I wonder, as the beach wanders through this century, how much will be left for them to explore.

Hannah E. Wagie earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at UW–Milwaukee in 2015. She is interested in making science accessible in the classroom and through creative nonfiction. She is currently an assistant professor at Wisconsin Lutheran College in Wauwatosa.

An agate from the shore of Lake Superior.

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Grantchester

America’s Test Kitchen America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston

Nature

Jim Escalante

Sylvie Rosenthal, Hands (remainders + entanglements), 1 of 5 assembled and carved hands, 2001/2023. Laminated pine, plywood, dowels, screws, paint, 27” x 29” x 13”

MEND THE WORK OF REPAIR

AUGUST 18 – NOVEMBER 5, 2023

BY JODY CLOWES

There is so much in the wider world that needs repair right now. It can feel impossible to respond in a meaningful way or identify the tools and skills that might make a difference. We tend to place our hopes in big, outside solutions, like a new administration, a radical new technology, or even a new planet. But small, local efforts really do spark change, and taking a situation in hand builds agency, confidence, and power. Whether it’s fixing a wheelchair, restoring a wetland, mending pants or mending a heart, the quiet work of repair sends out ripples of hope. It’s a reminder that most often, the way forward means taking one small step at a time.

This exhibition at the James Watrous Gallery features textile works by Heidi Parkes and sculpture by Glenn Williams, Siara Berry, Sylvie Rosenthal, and Jaymee Harvey Willms, artists whose work touches on diverse aspects of mending and repair. Parkes’ wonderfully idiosyncratic hand-sewn quilts are often imbued with the work of emotional or physical healing. She also offers mending for family, friends, and clients, using bold, expressive stitches that transform well-worn clothing into wearable works of art. Williams’ poignant Prosthetic series explores the complexity and the limitations of assistive devices which, while transformative for users, can also present their own challenges. His architectural works reflect the seemingly intractable challenge of housing insecurity with admirable economy, quietly underlining both the injustice and the obvious solution for the unhoused.

Siara Berry also offers a critique of American housing systems, incorporating real estate signs and welcome mats to raise questions about access, affordability, and other barriers to home ownership. Her sculptures of brooms, mops, and dustpans address messy household situations with a more personal lens. With multiple handles and forms or materials that frustrate their function, they conjure both the effort it takes to resolve an unsettled domesticity and the need to work together to repair old conflicts.

Sylvie Rosenthal is grappling with a sculpture of huge wooden hands she made years ago that recently came back to her studio. Its commission was severely complicated by an old, unhealthy relationship, and getting it back unearthed a tangle of feelings. Rather than bury the piece in deep storage, Rosenthal has embraced the opportunity to refurbish and reclaim it. This act of physical and emotional mending is a natural adjunct to her practice: she also teaches classes in repairing and altering old furniture. For Jaymee Willms, a personal tragedy led her to shift from painting to sculpture, breaking and reworking found objects in a conscious project of mending her family’s experience. Willms’ mended lamps are lopsided melanges of bric-a-brac laced with scars, yet they have a peculiar grace; and they work, shining light on the possibility of renewal and repair.

I hope this exhibition will inspire you to think about the repairs you might make in your own lives and communities, one stitch or one step at a time.

GLENN WILLIAMS Milwaukee

Glenn Williams received his M.F.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a specialization in Sculpture. In his work he explores various social constructs and their impact on our perceived realities. He deconstructs, reconstructs, and sometimes simply reflects various accepted mores to expose how they shape our understanding of the world around us and influence our interactions on a social, political, and environmental level. Williams’ work has been exhibited in numerous invitational and juried exhibitions throughout the United States, such as Franconia Sculpture Park, Lynden Sculpture Garden, and the Indianapolis Art Center. Currently, Williams is an Associate Professor of Art and Area Head of the Sculpture Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Glenn Williams, Prosthetic I, 2016. Plaster, wood, painted steel.

Siara Berry is a sculptor working in a wide-array of mediums; ranging from woodworking to soil, concrete to found objects. In 2015, Berry graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute holding a degree in Sculpture and Creative Writing and has since been working and living in Milwaukee, WI. Berry is the recipient of the 2022 Career Advancement Grant awarded by the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design and in 2023 was awarded the Mary Nohl Fellowship as an Emerging Artist. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Midwest, including Women Made Gallery in Chicago, IL, the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, WI, Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, OH as well as various Milwaukee-based galleries. In addition to her art practice, Berry serves as the Arts/Industry Program Director for the John Michael Kohler Art Center.

Siara Berry, U/s, 2017. Bristles, ash, steel, 72 x 36 x 8 in.

SIARA BERRY Milwaukee

HEIDI PARKES

Milwaukee

Heidi Parkes’ wonderfully idiosyncratic hand-sewn quilts are often imbued with the work of emotional or physical healing. She also offers mending for family, friends, and clients, using bold, expressive stitches that transform well-worn clothing into wearable works of art.

Sylvie Rosenthal started building at age six at an experimental design museum where she made circuses, catapults, rockets, and robots. She received a BFA from RIT’s School for American Crafts in Woodworking, built two houses from the ground up with her mentor, Doug Sigler, in western North Carolina, and received a MFA in sculpture from the UW–Madison. She owns and operates Lower Astronomy Studios, a design, sculpture, and woodworking studio in Madison. Sylvie teaches woodworking and design thinking in many settings, such as university and college programs, craft school workshops, to children in the studio, and virtually. She recently finished her service on the board of trustees and is still an active supporter of CERF+, the Artists’ Safety Net, which helps artists build strong and resilient careers.

Sylvie Rosenthal, Hands (remainders + entanglements), 1 of 5 assembled and carved hands, 2001/2023. Laminated pine, plywood, dowels, screws, paint, 27” x 29” x 13”

Milo Weiler

SNOW DOOR

BY JANICE WILBERG

Hersis the last vehicle in the funeral home parking lot. Carol makes sure of that before she straps the brass urn with her husband’s ashes into the passenger seat of their pickup truck and sets off for their summer house on Lake Superior. She wants no conversation with anyone about where she is going. It is unwise, she knows that. January near the lake is treacherous— spectacularly bright sunny days suddenly extinguished by driving snow and whiteouts, hidden ice patches on the roads, and drifts pushed by the wind coming out of the northwest from Canada. Jerry would have a fit about her setting out late in the afternoon to drive three hundred miles but she yearns for time alone in the car, just the road, the solitude, not having to talk to anybody. Every condolence offered at the funeral made her tired and feeling worse. She’s had enough sympathy to last a lifetime.

The crying starts before she even gets out of town. Not sobs, just long streams of tears, and gasps every few minutes. The funeral had pressed the numbness right out of her. With no one around, no one to console her, she can finally relax into the crying she’s postponed for days.

The last fifty miles takes two hours of driving in a single lane, headlights on the drifted tracks of cars that had passed before. Snowmobiles, their headlights glowing in the snowy dark, pass on either shoulder of the road, jumbling her sense of what is right or left, on the road or off. A snowplow bears down behind her, its headlights so near that she fears its driver doesn’t see her truck. He passes, throwing up blinding sheets of snow. Carol considers pulling over to the side, but she doesn’t know where the side is. She wipes the sweat off her upper lip and tightens her grip on the wheel. She glances at the urn, I’m doin’ okay, Jerry. Don’t worry. But she knows that’s a lie. She’s afraid of the snow, the road, being alone.

Finally, she reaches the quarter-mile-long driveway leading to the summerhouse and stops to assess the situation. She sees a couple of two- or three-foot drifts but most of the driveway is clear, one blessing of that intense wind off the lake. What do you think, Jer? Should I just gun it or wimp out and walk in? He’d worry about running into the ditch and nobody left in town to tow them out. She decides it’s too far to walk, especially carrying Jerry’s urn.

She flips on the 4-wheel drive and steps on the gas. It makes for a wild ride—the dark, the drifts, and going faster than she would have on a nice summer day. But she makes it to the house. She leaves the truck lights on so she can see to unlock the door which sticks like it always has. She puts her shoulder into it as Jerry did and the door pops open. She runs back to the truck to turn off the headlights and get the urn.

The door opens into the house’s lower level where there are two bedrooms and a utility room. Up the stairs is the kitchen, a living room with a fireplace, a bedroom, and stairs to a loft where she and Jerry slept. The house was built by a local carpenter who’d sketched out the floor plan on a yellow legal pad and stapled it to a contract which the three of them signed. He had a vision for the house and they trusted him. It was a beautiful place.

She goes up the stairs, switching on lights as she goes, stopping at the thermostat to dial up the heat, and then heading to the floor-to-ceiling windows. Carol puts her hands on the cold glass and looks into the darkness. She sees the outlines of huge ice mounds on the shore and the slim moonlight reflecting off the ice chunks floating on the waves of Lake Superior. Tomorrow, she will make her way down there with the urn and scatter Jerry’s ashes. This is what he’d wanted although he never thought she’d bring him up here in winter. Summer would have been better, smarter, he would’ve said. Winter is just too risky.

The house, warm and lit, is the haven she knew it would be. This living room, this kitchen, this place where they’d played Irish music on the old CD player and watched freighters with their stem to stern lights passing by miles out on the lake, this is their beloved place. I was right to come, Jer. It’s perfect. But it isn’t perfect. She is on an errand and alone.

She considers building a fire, but it is late and the wood is outside covered with snow. That can wait until tomorrow, a way to warm up after the scattering, maybe with a toddy or hot buttered rum, she forgets what they have in the cupboard. She goes to the kitchen for a glass of water and to look out at the neighbor’s house a quarter mile down the beach. The neighbors are gone, everyone on the lakeshore is gone, but that is okay. She will do what she came to do and go home. It will be fine. When Carol turns on the tap to fill her glass, she sees dishes in the sink—a bowl and a spoon, traces of tomato soup on both, still damp enough to be wiped off by a fingertip.

She freezes, afraid to breathe. Someone has been in the house. She spins around and opens the refrigerator. There is a Styrofoam take-out box and a half-full bottle of Mountain Dew on the middle shelf along with a container of blueberry yogurt and a piece of chocolate cake on a paper plate. Jesus. Who’s been here? How did they get in? What if they’re still here?

She eases the refrigerator door shut and creeps silently back with her hands held up in front of her as if the appliance itself had become radioactive. Her eyes widen to take in every corner of the room. She feels behind her for the drawer with all the kitchen utensils, spatulas, and wire whisks. She finds the hammer Jerry kept there so he wouldn’t have to go out to the tool chest in the truck every time a nail needed pounding.

With the hammer in her hand, she breathes in tiny jerks, her head and shoulders shaking. Get control of yourself. Breathe quietly. There are no police in town, only the sheriff an hour

away. She decides to tiptoe out of the house before confronting whoever is there, and drive into town to call the sheriff from the gas station. She grabs the truck keys from the counter and inches toward the stairs to the back door.

“Who’s there?” A woman’s voice comes from the bedroom, just a few steps away. No. A girl’s voice, softly whiny like a teenager not wanting to get up for school. Carrying the hammer with both hands, Carol nudges the door open with her foot.

The girl sits up in bed and yelps, “Who are you?”

Only her face is visible. She wears a red parka with the hood pulled tight and tied under her chin. She is lying under a stack of blankets and sleeping bags gathered from all the rooms of the house.

“Who are you?” shouts Carol. “What are you doing in our house?”

The girl’s voice shakes. “I’m Ruthie B., well, Ruth Binski, actually. I’ve been staying here since Christmastime. I’ve been real careful. I haven’t broken anything. Are you mad?”

“Of course I’m mad. You’re trespassing. How did you get in?”

“The porch door was unlocked.” Ruthie B. pulls her knees to her chest and wraps an old brown sleeping bag around her shoulders. Her eyes are pale blue, washed out, and wide open.

“Is anyone else here?” Carol looks over her shoulder.

“No. Just me. There’s nobody else here. Can you put the hammer down?”

“You have to leave. Right now. Get up.” Carol drops the hammer on the bedside table and moves toward Ruthie B.

“It’s dark out! And it’s really cold. I’ll go in the morning. Okay?” Ruthie B. scrunches herself into the corner and clutches the blankets like a life vest.

“Oh no. Don’t hide. You’re getting up and out of here this minute.” Carol’s voice sounds strange to her, mean and fearsome. She grabs the girl’s arm and pulls her off the bed, the blankets fall in a heap on the floor. The girl is fully dressed in jeans and a hoodie beneath the parka.

“Put your boots on and hurry up.”

It isn’t hard to drag the girl down the stairs. She must not weigh more than 90 pounds and she barely struggles. She has all the resistance of a student being taken by the arm to the principal’s office, protesting but coming along, making that noise kids make when they know they have no choice. She strikes Carol as a kid with experience being thrown out of places.

Carol unlocks and opens the back door.

“The wind’s died down. It’s only a mile to town. Go to the gas station. Tell them your troubles.”

Ruthie B. gives Carol one last pleading look.

“Go!” Carol shoves Ruthie B. out the door, slams it shut, and turns the lock. She yanks the curtains closed to keep out the draft. Her heart hammers in her chest. Oh Jerry, I just threw a kid out in the middle of the night in the freezing cold. She thinks he would’ve done the same, but she isn’t sure. Nothing like this had ever happened before.

JUDGE’S NOTES

AMY QUAN BARRY

Carol braves the winter elements to bring her recently deceased husband’s ashes to their lakeside cottage only to discover an unexpected visitor in the house. In this story of thresholds, one woman learns how practicing vulnerability ultimately makes us strong.

Carol rummages in the cupboard to find the four-pack of six-ounce bottles of white wine that Jerry’s cousins left last summer. She puts all four bottles in her pocket and throws the cardboard carrier in the trash where she sees candy bar wrappers and tampons wrapped in toilet paper. Why the hell didn’t she use the trashcan in the bathroom? She gets undressed, puts on long underwear, and gets into bed. She drinks the little bottles of wine, one after the other. She feels sick and thinks about throwing up but falls asleep instead.

Carol wakes early the next morning, moving the curtain in the loft window to see the sun’s light just beginning to spread over the pines lining the driveway. No more snow. That is good, but her head throbs. She desperately wants a hot cup of coffee but after rummaging in the cupboard last night, she knows there is no coffee in the house. She will have to go to town. Maybe get donuts. A donut and a hot cup of coffee will be good to have. And maybe more wine for later.

She pulls on her jeans and a heavy turtleneck, laces up her boots, finds her parka and keys, and goes downstairs. She flings open the curtains covering the back door. On the concrete stoop, the girl is curled in a ball and leaning against the glass. Carol unlocks the door and pulls it open. The cold air clears her aching head.

“For heaven’s sake, girl, what are you doing here?” Carol’s voice is a combination of anger and remorse. Oh my God, Jerry, this girl spent the whole damn night out here!

Ruthie B. raises her head from her crossed arms. She is as folded in on herself, as tightly gathered, as a human being could be. Last night’s snow clings to her mittens and the ruff of her parka.

“I was afraid to go to the gas station.”

“You were afraid to go to the gas station, but you weren’t afraid to sit outside in the snow all night?”

Ruthie B. unfolds herself and stands up, shivering so hard she seems to be rattling.

Carol walks her into the house and up the stairs. With each step, Carol bites her lip a little harder. What a mess. This kid. Jerry in his urn on the kitchen counter. No coffee. She gently pushes Ruthie B. to the couch and goes to fetch the blankets from the bedroom, thick with girl smell. She spreads the blankets over Ruthie B. and goes to the kitchen to put the kettle on the stove. There’s only peach tea in the cupboard. It will have to do.

“My name’s Carol. I’m making you some tea.” She wants to sit down and put her head in her hands.

“What’s in the vase, Carol?”

“You mean the urn? That’s my husband. His ashes. I came up here to scatter his ashes.” Carol turns to look out the window. It wouldn’t do for her to be tearing up in front of her little house guest.

“What happened? How come he’s dead?”

Carol pours hot water into two mugs, each with a peach teabag. She carries both mugs over to the couch and hands one to Ruthie B.

“He got sick and then he died. There’s more to it than that, but that’s pretty much it. The more important question right now is why are you living in our house?”

Ruthie B. shrugs and jams her hands into the pockets of her hoodie. “I was in a foster home and when I turned 18 they told me to get out. So I just started walking. I figured there would be some abandoned cabins or something up here. This is where I ended up.”

Carol perches on the edge of her chair, her eyes narrow. She sighs.

They sit in silence, drinking their peach tea, staring out the window at Lake Superior. Big chunks of ice float on the waves. The small herd of deer that live on the ridge come tiptoeing past the porch. The effect is hypnotic. Soon, Carol can hear Ruthie B.’s breathing slow and knows she has drifted off. She pulls the blankets up to Ruthie B.’s chin. I’m tucking in our little squatter. Jerry would flip out.

A scratching sound snaps Carol out of her own nap. Something at the back door? A bear? A wolf? Maybe a dog, but it sounds bigger than a dog. She ducks into the bedroom to grab the hammer and heads for the stairs. Her toe catches on the edge of a throw rug and she buckles. She reaches for the banister but can’t grab hold. She cascades down the stairs as if they were encased in ice, sliding and colliding until she reaches the bottom and hits the wall. Pain shoots right through her. Her back, her head, her ankle. She wonders if it’s broken.

She considers crawling up the stairs. She needs to get ice for her ankle. But she can’t maneuver herself to stand.

“Ruthie B.! I need help!”

“What? Where are you?”

Ruthie B. appears at the top of the stairs, blankets flowing around her like a queen’s robe.

“I need help getting up the stairs. I need to ice my ankle. I may have broken it.”

With the light behind her, Ruthie B. looks almost translucent, other worldly. She pauses, and then disappears. Carol sinks into herself. She’s not going to help me.

But Ruthie B. comes back. “I just had to get rid of all those blankets.”

It takes a long time to hop up the stairs on one foot even with one arm around Ruthie B.’s shoulders. It hurts to hop, everything hurts.

“We don’t have to hurry. We’ll just go stair by stair.” Ruthie B. makes sure Carol’s foot is positioned right to take the next step. Carol can smell the many nights of sleep on her. The girl needs a hot shower, a good scrubbing, and some of that green apple shampoo. Now, it is Ruthie B.’s turn to make the tea.

“I can’t believe this. I came up here to scatter Jerry’s ashes. And now everything is a mess. My ankle. You being here. Now, what do I do?” Carol settles into the old blue chair, the one she always sat in when Jerry was alive, opposite him in his chair reading old issues of The New York Times.

“I’ll help you with the ashes. We can tape up your ankle and then do the ashes. It’ll be okay. We got up the stairs okay together.” Ruthie B. sits with her hands folded in her lap, quiet but on the edge of her seat. They wait until the next morning to scatter the ashes. The snow and wind have picked up again so they stand on the deck instead of braving the beach. It is quiet. Carol struggles to remove the lid of the urn, pulling on it until Ruthie B. reaches over and turns the lid. Inside the thick plastic bag that holds the ashes is folded in a neat square. Carol holds the urn with both hands and Ruthie B. opens the bag.

“Is it time?” Ruthie B. asks.

“Yeah. It’s time.” Carol moves to the railing and turns the urn upside down and empties Jerry’s ashes on to the snow and sand below. The ashes settle in a heap and then blow away in the whistling wind. This is what she wanted, why she drove so far in the dead of winter, to bring Jerry back to their beloved place.

From the deck, Carol can see faint tracks in the snow from the night before. They look like those of a large dog, maybe a wolf, searching for something, maybe scouting the ridge’s deer herd. The tracks fade off into the stand of trees to the far side of the house. She isn’t afraid of the wolf. She might have been a year ago, she might have been afraid of coming up here in the winter, but she is a different person now. The scariest thing has already happened. Jerry is gone.

Carol replaces the lid on the urn and hops across the deck to the sliding door. Inside, she puts the urn on the kitchen table, unzips her jacket and sits in Jerry’s captain’s chair.

“I’ll go now.” Ruthie B. is bundled up, her backpack hoisted on her shoulders. She studies the floor for a moment. “I’m sorry I broke into your house. Well, I didn’t really break in. But you know.”

Carol shakes her head. I can’t believe I’m about to say this. She puts her aching foot on a kitchen chair. “You don’t have to go.”

Ruthie B. stares at her.

“You can stay.”

“You want me to stay here?” Ruthie B. hooks her thumbs under the straps of her backpack and sways back and forth, ready to leave.

“Yeah. I do. We both need some time. I need to stay off this ankle for a few days and you need to make a plan.”

Ruthie B. cocks her head as if she hasn’t heard right. She looks at Carol, waiting, and when no words come, she pulls off her backpack and puts it on the blue chair.

Carol points to the window. “There was a wolf out there last night. Go take a look. You can still see his tracks.” The wolf means something to Carol but she isn’t sure what. She knows she is glad to be in a place where there is a wolf and not be afraid. That seems enough for now.

Janice Wilberg is a retired community planning consultant who advocates for older adults and people who are homeless. Her essays have been published in The New York Times and Newsweek , and she is the 2019 Wisconsin Writers Association Jade Ring winner for humor. She lives with her husband and two retired sled dogs in Milwaukee.

Poetry

Survival Skills for the Anthropocene

Listen. Even now, as ice cracks, a chickadee sings its spring song.

Speak only true names. Redwing blackbird. Orb-weaver eggs. Dragon cladonia.

When you want to clarify what you meant to say, say thank you.

Squelch your feet in mud. Let its scent of shale overtake you, as wind

skims a mottled sycamore sprawled on Lake Wingra’s thawing shore.

Inside, wordless, wash the dishes Feed the hungry, not the ghosts.

Lailah Dainin Shima is an aspiring death doula, a Zen buddhist priest and mother who writes and walks among the lakes of Madison. Her poetry has appeared in CALYX , Terrain , and Gwarlingo , and in The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy. She is in the MFA program in poetry at Pacific University.

Lailah Dainin Shima

Shiny Lures

She lifts two buckets from his truck before he can tell her what to do. The clank and weight of skimmers, rods and spinning reels, plastic tackle boxes full of lures that once fascinated, now weigh her down, pull her shoulders toward the ground. He grabs the auger, heads onto the ice. She looks to the barren, alpine landscape, the horizonless sky, drowning in gunmetal gray. He beckons from a distance, leads the way, and she follows, her numb feet seeking traction on patches of snow that shift to the call of the fickle wind. Far from shore, he rigs a rod with translucent line, his favorite chartreuse, soft-bodied jig that hides the hook, the lead sinker, while she lies flat on her belly, peers into the hole she drilled, scooping slush with bare, blue fingers. He yells something, but his words are ferried away by another gust and when she looks up, she can no longer see him through swirls of dust, the biting air. She raises her hood over her ears, suspends her face over the window to the world below lit in diffuse sunglow, where Kokanee salmon dance among the weeds and leopard frogs slumber safe in the deep. She imagines herself as an eel, slick with no feet or hands, slipping into the still water, to slither away and burrow in the shimmering sands.

Elisabeth Harrahy

Elisabeth Harrahy 's work has appeared in  Paterson Literary Review, Zone 3, I-70 Review, Constellations, The Cafe Review, Passengers Journal, Blue Heron Review, Ghost City Review , and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She is an associate professor of biology at UW–Whitewater.

This Is First Son | Second Son

This is firecracker fuse out, of the mouth of a mostly-dead fish, scooped from the bait bin where our grandpa would keep a few— fireworks in the hands of too young boys with too much time and not enough teaching.

This is balled fist bust in face of younger brother for little more than frustration, pull back the moment when the fist gives way to blood against snow and a hollowing wind through the gut.

This is knowing eyebrow raised in recognition of palm through the drywall during the week spent weening out the New Year.

This is stood staring over the sparkings of a lemon-lemon-yellow lighter, a blaze of rage roaring behind our irises choosing anger over the world.

This is watching ourselves make the same mistakes as we are undone in the hands of the men who made us.

Nick Sengstock

Nick Sengstock is a born-and-bred Madison poet inspired by the breath of the Beats and the sweetness of sound.

Keep On

I saw you sitting on the roof that night, the stars having descended From their dusty perches to hang Like old dreams from your shirt pocket.

I watched you for a long time, afraid Of the ghosts sitting to your side. It has always been that way for me, A hereditary fear speckled with debris, Centuries of minerals, river clay, bones.

The war never ended here, you said. Merely hid itself in the violent heat, disguised the earth as a tangle of roads, concrete and black wires, crumbling fences, beige and soot, candy and gasoline. A burning house. A forced slumber. The death rattle of any final winter.

Later, we got back into the van and you told me about a dream where you were riding atop a speeding bus, how your hands, frozen and dew-soaked, played against the valley wind, gripped the metal luggage racks tight around sharp curves.

You’ve ached for that freedom ever since, searched for it outside of truck stops, behind grimy outhouses and laundromats, under rusted trucks and unwashed plates, rotted red porches fallen away from their houses, crusts of old bread, cracked windows, a once-pristine wrought iron bench, a long odyssey, your magnum opus, a desiccated pilgrimage you always seem to survive.

Alexandria Delcourt (Abenaki and Filipino) is a writer, editor, educator, and storyteller. Her work focuses on travel, generational trauma, and colonialism, and has appeared in Narrative, Poetry Quarterly , Cream City Review , Aster(ix) , Profane Journal , Kalyani Magazine , and many others. She lives in Madison with her husband, daughter, and two cats.

Alexandria Delcourt

Sometimes Creek

by Steve Fox

Cornerstone Press, 234 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Anthony Bukoski

In “Exile,” the first story in Steve Fox’s debut collection, the author prepares us for the narrative, linguistic, and grammatical surprises to come. An adolescent encounters a homeless man who offers him a drink from a paper bag. “You are a polite boy from Wisconsin. You should excuse yourself, now. And bid unto the man with one boot a pleasant evening. (Italics mine.) But your feet refuse to move…An awareness engulfs you. This small act of walking down the street has unfolded into a huge decision that you will look back upon…” The archaic diction comes out of nowhere. Most often in these stories, such risks pay off, as when Fox employs different dialects, repeats phrases three or four times in a story, or experiments with time and the seasons.

The characters in these seventeen stories—Arthur Penske in “Exile,” Pip, the young woman in “Unresolved,” to name two—are easily consumed, engulfed, by loss, love, desire, beauty, loneliness, wonder. The protagonist of “Then It Would Be Raining” confesses that a “sense of tidal loss engulfs me.” Often, the swallowing up becomes so great that characters shelter beneath the earth, going down to their root cellars and basements. Earl Fekete in “The Butcher’s Ghost” dies in a basement storeroom. In one piece, a man buries something in order to hold on to a part of what he’d lost in Vietnam.

Most of the stories occur in a town built on limestone. Here, bats carry their human protector skyward. Caterpillars, imaged as “promiscuous” and “furry” in one story, march along branches in another. “Pulsating throngs of ants” dig in the earth or make a Wheel of Dharma following the outline where the neighbor lady has poured syrup and molasses. In “Randy Koenig’s Very Large Mouse,” a rodent, speaking in “an Upper-Midwestern accent,” tells the human narrator how mice “shuttle between basements all up and down

this ridge. It’s all limestone…Infinite little cracks, passageways, channels…” The subconscious world underlies the conscious world and, one might say, devours it.

I couldn’t put these stories down. Unsettling though some of them are, others, such as “Orange Tree Dog” and “Sometimes Creek,” are wistful and delicate. Anything can happen in Fox’s universe. In this odd world, children can be transformed into yard statues (“Yard Marys”), or a school can be named The University of Wisconsin-Noisy Creek and have associated with it a medical center.

All of this—the underground places, the mice, the ants—ends quietly in the moving title story when a heartbroken child, Claire, becomes non-verbal, like her friend across the street.

I’m not sure I’d live in Noisy Creek, but it is an adventure to visit there in Fox’s impressive debut.

Anthony Bukoski, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, lives outside Superior, Wisconsin. In 2021, the University of Wisconsin Press published his short story collection, The Blondes of Wisconsin

How A Civilization Begins by Richard

Vargas

Mouthfeel Press, 134 pages, $16

Reviewed by Oscar Mireles

I have edited three anthologies of Latino poetry and fiction featuring almost a hundred Wisconsin poets and writers, including Martín Espada, Ruth Behar, and former Milwaukee Poet Laureate Brenda Cardenas. I would add to that distinguished roster Richard Vargas, who moved to the state in early 2020. He apparently used his days in pandemic isolation writing new poetry and compiling it with earlier, unpublished work into How a Civilization Begins, his fourth collection of poetry. This collection is the work of a mature writer, one who has had a variety of jobs and experiences growing up in Southern California, and living in Rockford, Illinois, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and for the past few years in Madison. Vargas writes from the “everyman” perspective about subjects that relate with ease to the person on the street. His imagery and language reflect respect and appreciation for his readers without sacrificing a sense of poetics. His working-class sensibility shows in the poem “i am still waiting in line,” in which the speaker waits in line for one of the few cashiers on duty:

…i am still waiting while at the far end of the row of vacant conveyor belts and silent cash registers the self-checkout is packed people in a hurry their time is so priceless they rush to give it away

Not only does Vargas have an eye for minute detail, he also has a keen sense of humor. In the poem “outside the box,” the speaker, after a fruitless job search following his graduation from a creative writing program, finds himself “reading poetry at birthday parties”:

…the first time i found myself tied up and hanging from a tree limb swaying back and forth as someone jerked me up and down while blindfolded adults swung a louisville slugger in my direction me spouting off haikus

that rained down on the cursing drunks like bite size Snickers and Milky Ways

Vargas’ poems shine a light on social injustice, reminding us we are all connected regardless of the barriers keeping us apart, whether they be an invisible line in the dirt or the languages we speak. The poem “labor of love,” describes a scene at a processing center in New Mexico for families seeking asylum in the U. S.:

…the older kids are kicking soccer balls outside with some of my fellow volunteers the little ones stay inside sit in the roped off area just for them busy with crayons, coloring books, and toys a safe place where they return to being children with their universal need to play

This collection of poetry draws the reader into a world of stories to share, places to visit, and memories that have been almost forgotten. How A Civilization Begins puts Richard Vargas on the map among the other established Latino poets in Wisconsin today.

Oscar Mireles was the Poet Laureate of Madison from 2016 to 2020. He is the editor of three anthologies titled I Didn’t Know There Were Latinos in Wisconsin. He has been the Executive Director of Omega School for almost three decades and has assisted thousands of young adults achieve a GED/HSED Diploma.

Gauntlet in the Gulf: The 1925 Marine Log & Mexican Prison Journal of William F. Lorenz, MD

Edited by Claude Clayton Smith

Shanti Arts, 160 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Eva B. McManus

In 1925, a restless Dr. William Lorenz, noted Wisconsin psychiatrist, foregoes usual snowbird activities during January to crew on The Ruth, a commercial fishing smack sailing from Pensacola for red snapper. Unfortunately, Lorenz’s working vacation ends in a shipwreck 60 miles off the Yucatan Peninsula in an area known for its snapper-rich waters—and its notorious line of shoals. Mexican authorities arrest the stranded crew for spying, smuggling, and gun running. They are jailed in filthy quarters, then prison until the U.S. intervenes.

Ninety-eight years later, Lorenz’s journal appears in print as Gauntlet in the Gulf: The 1925 Marine Log & Mexican Prison Journal of William F. Lorenz, MD. The diary was edited by Claude Clayton Smith whose detailed forward traces how the project evolved from discussions with his friend, Lorenz’s grandson, “Bill III.” Smith, a Madison-based author, explains his editing process and provides a mini-biography of Dr. Lorenz, including photographs of family, boats the doctor built, and records of achievements and awards. The book tells several stories, not only the shipwreck-related experiences. For context on why the crew was arrested, Smith summarizes the strained Mexican-U.S. relations at that time, and includes Mexican newspaper coverage from shipwreck to repatriation.

On board The Ruth, Lorenz records the progress of his days, both as observer and participant in fishing chores. According to Bill III, his grandfather always felt at ease with working men, which is demonstrated when he takes his turn on watch, at the wheel, and with chores such as oiling the canvas aprons worn when fishing. The crew on board The Ruth, ten experienced fishermen, were all in their fifties and sixties hailing from such places as Pensacola, Nova Scotia, and Finland. Lorenz quickly learns their “deep reverence for the natural,” and describes one man greeting the rising moon as an old friend. Spelled after his early morning turn at the wheel, the psychiatrist muses about how soothing it is, “To lie on the cabin deck and watch the clouds

& moon made drowsy by these rhythmic sounds and the soft warm wind.” His jottings disclose daily patterns of calm attention to work and conversations mostly about fishing. Old salt Munroe spouts aphorisms, such as, “A full moon never sees a setting sun,” and shares witty tales and sea adventures.

From the diary entries, it’s clear Lorenz recognizes these men as a “rapidly disappearing type.” Young men were no longer being drawn to the fishing life, and insurance companies would no longer fully insure independently owned boats. These shifts would eventually set the course for expanding corporate ownership of fishing fleets.

The book cover shows an elegant smack in full sail and an autographed picture of the crew. These and other photos of the fishermen at work capture a particular moment in history. Thanks to William Lorenz’s journal and photographs, and to Claude Clayton Smith’s research and presentation of archival materials, Gauntlet in the Gulf ties us to an even broader historic moment—while also being a fascinating read.

Eva B. McManus , PhD, is a retired English professor from Ohio Northern University where she taught for 32 years. Although her main focus is Shakespeare and drama, she also taught composition and other literature classes. Originally from Virginia, she lives in Bowling Green, Ohio with her husband.

Culture Work: Folklore for the Public Good Marcus Cederström and Tim Frandy, eds.

UW Press, 440 pages, $44.95

Reviewed by Kaitlyn Berle

This collection of essays, compiled and edited by folklorists and UW–Madison Scandinavian Studies/Folklore Program alums

Marcus Cederström and Tim Frandy, guides readers through the principles, processes, and products of public folklore and humanities initiatives. While not all contributors are Wisconsinites, a majority of them draw on personal and professional experience with Upper Midwestern communities, cultures, and traditions; the Upper Midwest’s folklife infrastructure and cultural landscape shine in this collection. Accounts of a continually evolving fish sandwich festival in Bay Port, Michigan; reflections on the transmission of curling traditions and social customs from the perspective of a folklorist-curler; profiles of the nation’s most exceptional and celebrated traditional artists and the legacy of National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship program; and a variety of thought-provoking tales of traditional artists, community documentarians, and archival collections personify the wide-ranging work of public folklorists and cultural workers.

Organized around six themes, Culture Work is filled with stories of individuals, communities, and cultural workers dedicated to sustaining the traditional songs, stories, material culture, and knowledge of the region, and insights into how those expressions cultivate and enhance community. As this collection illustrates, culture work extends beyond documenting, amplifying, and contextualizing tradition, and often addresses environmental and economic conditions that enable communities to thrive.

As the editors note in their introduction, the Wisconsin Idea looms large in their work and throughout the book. In addition to being rooted in this principle of community service, culture work for the public good is community-driven, guided by a deep understanding of people and place, and involves what several contributors refer to as the “reverse Wisconsin Idea.” Just as knowledge flows from the university into communities across the state, it streams from students, community members, and collaborators into the university and other institutions, and culture work thrives on this exchange of knowledge.

The breadth of communities, traditions, and cultural workers represented in the book is by no means comprehensive. Culture Work offers a glimpse into the development and reverberations of collaborative public folklore and humanities projects. The collection also highlights our state’s robust network of cultural institutions, including grassroots community spaces like the Oulu Cultural and Heritage Center in Iron River, UW–Madison’s Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, Oral History Program, and the Wisconsin Music Archives at the Mills Music Library, museums like the Cedarburg Cultural Center, and such state fixtures as the Historical Society and the Wisconsin Arts Board.

Readers can also glean a bit about the institutions making up the nation’s public folklife framework and the opportunities and complexities associated with working within such institutions at a local, state, and national level.

Although the book has an academic orientation, Culture Work will be an engaging read for anyone interested in the power that lies within the practices of sustaining, reimagining, or creating new cultural traditions.

Kaitlyn Berle is a Midwestern folklorist based in Madison. She joined the Wisconsin Arts Board in 2016, where she directs the state’s Folk and Traditional Arts Program. She lives on the city’s north side with her husband and one-year-old daughter.

THE WISCONSIN FARMERS UNION EMPOWERING FARMERS AND BUILDING COMMUNITY

BY JESSICA JAMES

Founded in a time of political upheaval and amid the Great Depression, Wisconsin Farmers Union (WFU) was chartered in 1930 by farmers who recognized they were stronger together. This member-driven organization continues to serve farmers and allies across political divides and to annually determine policy issues. WFU members span the full spectrum of farming. Ranging from “conventional farmers to organic and rural to urban, Wisconsin Farmers Union members find community in an organization that empowers them to have a voice in the issues that affect them,” says WFU Director of Communications Danielle

Endvick.

With 27 chapters, WFU’s reach across the state is vast. Through field days, film screenings, potlucks, and other events, these chapters bring concerns from farm kitchen tables to WFU’s annual convention, which draws farmers from across the state to deliberate issues and set the agenda for WFU’s work throughout the upcoming year. Wisconsin Farmers Union’s was founded to set and advocate for policy to improve life on family farms and in their communities, and hundreds of farmers now carry on that tradition at convention each year.

Endvick notes that while the union was ahead of its time in crafting farmer-led conservation even when she first signed on nearly a decade ago, the organization has continued to strengthen the farmer’s role in addressing climate change and water quality. She explains that while there are still some skeptics, many members recognize changes in the climate—from water shortages out West,

to historic flooding, to extreme temperatures—and the narrative surrounding climate change in rural Wisconsin has started to shift. Farmers Union’s policies acknowledge that “a bold proposal to transform our society is needed to address the effects of climate change, to ensure food security, a healthy landscape, climate mitigation, and to attain a prosperous rural American through a strong family farm system of agriculture.”

One step in that direction is the strengthening of regional food systems to reduce transportation inefficiencies in the food system, and one program the Farmers Union program is doing just that while addressing food security. The Wisconsin Local Food Directory, part of the new Local Food Purchase Assistance program, was developed in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when many shelves were empty and people struggled to get fresh produce. The program aims to strengthen local and regional food systems, support Wisconsin farmers, and distribute locally-sourced nutritious foods to underserved communities. Launching this summer, the public online directory, features a map of local farms, helping bridge the gap between farmers and consumers, while also making it easier for hunger relief organizations to access local food. Consumers will be able to go online and learn more about individual farms through their listings. Through this program, WFU hopes to form connections between Wisconsinites and their local farmers.

Through WFU, farmers and family farm supporters continue to act as stewards of these lands, strengthening local food systems, and helping guide policy decisions for future generations.

Polk-Burnett Farmers Union

Members of the Polk-Burnett Farmers Union at a “Chewing the Cud” on-farm chapter meeting, one of a series organized to talk about rural issues and connect as a community.

Jessica James is the Academy’s Climate & Energy Program Manager. She joined the Academy in the fall of 2020 after graduating from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities with a BS in Environmental Sciences. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, running, and learning new things in the Northwoods.

Find your summer story.

Join us at Write On, Door County for writing and reading events for all ages.

Everyone has a story to tell. Whatever your skill level, whatever your genre, we can help you uncover yours. Writers and readers alike can enjoy author readings and conversations.

While you’re here, explore our Writer’s Walk — 59 acres of trails that are the quiet spirit of Write On, Door County.

Check out our online Events Calendar to find a season full of writing fun and inspiration!

Writing on the Door: Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction

Registration open! Separate sessions August 7, 8, 9 Select your genre — your all-day intensive class includes consultations between each participant and instructor.

Register online now for our featured Autumn event:

Washington Island Literary Festival

September 21-23

Five award-winning authors share their writing and stories over three days of workshops, author panels, readings, and more at historic and picturesque locations around the island.

Become a member, donate, and fi nd classes and events at writeondoorcounty.org

920.868.1457

You’ll find a world of words online at

writeondoorcounty.org

Bo om photo ©The Kubala Washatko Architects, Inc.

1922 University Ave

Madison, WI 53726

Academy Courses are designed to bring people together for lifelong learning and personal enrichment. Our expert instructors cultivate an intimate atmosphere for learning and discussion for creative people at all levels of experience.

MEMOIR WRITING: GETTING STARTED

Instructor: Marja Mills

Tuesdays September 19 -November 7 6:00-8:00 pm Virtual

Whether you hope to publish a memoir, chronicle periods of your life or record family stories, this supportive workshop focuses on how to write about your experiences with clarity and style, specificity and substance. New York Times bestselling memoirist Marja Mills will offer tips on finding your focus and getting started and share excerpts from a variety of memoirs and personal essays, offer tips on organizing your material, and discuss ways to write compelling passages about people and places.

TOTAL ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE DRAWING WORKSHOP

Instructor: Colin Matthes

Thursdays November 2 -30 (not Thanksgiving) 6:00-8:00 pm Virtual

Drawing is a way of thinking. Like writing, drawing clarifies. It deepens our understanding. Join artist Colin Matthes for a drawing workshop, where he’ll demonstrate drawing as a tool to visualize and share knowledge. This four session workshop is aimed at lifetime learners and offers a fun, low-pressure environment in which to use drawing to research, remember, communicate, figure things out, and to make your own instructional drawings!